Hawthorn (24 page)

“And what about Nathan,” I asked. “Has anyone seen Nathan?”

Everyone looked uncomfortable. Finally Omar answered. “No one has seen him since Victoria Station. I'm afraid he might be too far gone in the shadows to help.”

“I don't believe that,” I said. “I know that if I could talk to him he'd be all right.”

“Perhaps,” Miss Corey said quietly. “But for now it's best you stay with Helen.”

“And what will I do?” I complained. “I can't sit around Paris shopping while the world is falling apart.”

Lillian and Vi exchanged a look. “We don't think you'll be sitting around Paris much longer. If van Drood is waiting for the German army to march on Belgium he's likely to make a move soon. When he does, the best thing you can do is stay with him.”

“We'll be keeping an eye on the hotel,” Raven said. “If Drood moves you, we'll follow.”

“As will we,” Omar said, nodding at Kid Marvel. “If we need to get a message to you we'll send a lumignon.”

I glanced skeptically at Gigi, wondering how reliable a courier she would be. Still I was glad that my friends would be close. I didn't feel so alone anymore.

As if reading my thoughts, Omar stood and held out his arms, encompassing us all in the orbit of his magnetic gaze. “We are facing a time of great turmoil and danger. I fear that
even if we succeed in keeping van Drood from opening the third vessel, the world as we know it is heading for a dreadful cataclysm, one that we will only weather if we join together. I see a great darkness enveloping the world. Let us attempt to be the light in that darkness.”

As he spoke I noticed that it had grown dark in the grove. I felt a chill, both from Omar's words and from the realization of how late it had gotten.

“I have to get back,” I told Raven. “If van Drood notices I'm missing he might hurt Helen.”

“I'll go with you as far as the Tuileries,” he said.

I said my hurried good-byes to my friends—old and new—and stepped through the green doorway. Marie still sat on her bench, patiently knitting socks. “For the soldiers,” she murmured as I ran by. “It will be cold where they're going.”

IN THE SQUARE
in front of Notre Dame a crowd had gathered around the statue of Charlemagne. They were passing a bottle around and singing “La Marseillaise.
”

“Austria-Hungary has declared war on Serbia!” I heard someone shout. “It will be us next.”

Bonfires had been lit along the Seine. I gaped at the sight of a burning man on one of them

“It's only an effigy,” Raven said, gripping my arm to steer me through the crowds. “Of the kaiser, I think.”

The peaceful atmosphere of the Tuileries had been completely altered. Marching bands played in front of the Louvre. The little boys who had been launching their toy ships on the basin now raced around with sticks in their hands pretending they were sabers. Even the old men looked more animated, and I heard one reassuring his elderly female companion, “Don't worry, our boys will be home before the leaves fall.” Just a few hours ago I had been frustrated by the complacency of the French people, but now I was frightened by their fervor and excitement.

“They seem
glad
about the prospect of war,” I said.

“I don't blame them,” Raven surprised me by saying. “I
know I'm tired of sitting around doing nothing while waiting for Drood to make his next move.”

“But we could all be killed,” I cried.

Raven grabbed me around the waist and pulled me to him. All around us men and women were holding each other, knowing they might soon be parted. “Then we'd better make this night count,” he whispered in my ear. And then, before I knew what he was doing, he launched us from the ground into the sky.

“Are you crazy?” I cried. “What if someone saw us?” But when I looked down I saw that no one in the crowd was paying us the least bit of attention, so I spread my own wings. They felt stiff and clumsy after weeks of not flying, but then it felt marvelous to stretch them out and feel the wind moving over my feathers. We sailed over the Tuileries and the Hotel le Meurice, where I saw van Drood leaving through the front door and getting into a long dark limousine.

“He'll be busy tonight,” Raven said. “He won't notice that you're gone. Helen will be all right.”

I could have argued, but instead I followed him, swooping over the rooftops of Paris. The late evening light still glimmered in the west, reflecting in glass windows, turning the clay chimney pots on the roofs a deep red and the west-facing stone walls the color of honey against the cool blue gray of the steeply sloping rooftops.

“It all looks so different from up here!” I cried as we sailed over the ornate crenellated rooftop of the opera house. “Like a different world.”

“It's our world,” Raven said, swooping around a golden statue
of a winged man holding a torch in one hand and a broken chain in the other. “See, he's broken his chains. He's a Darkling freed from the bounds of the curse.”

“He's the
Génie de la Liberté
,” I said in a schoolmistressy voice that sounded a little bit like Miss Sharp's. “And he's meant to commemorate the Revolution of 1830.”

“He's meant to stand for freedom—look.” He pointed to a man standing at an easel in a garret window. He was painting the crowds in the street, capturing the blur of faces around a bonfire and the sparks rising into the sky like fireworks. At another window a woman sat writing in a notebook, her face reflected in the glass like a pale companion to her solitude. In another three men passed around a bottle of wine, arguing and laughing.

“Poets, painters, philosophers . . . in Paris they all live near the sky.”

We soared over the dome of Sacré Coeur on the top of Montmartre and looped back down toward the spire of Notre Dame. Everywhere people were out in the streets and in the squares, singing and drinking around bonfires. I could feel the fear and excitement rising with the smoke—and something else: a deep love for their city. Paris must be protected. The life that flourished here in the gardens and cafes, in the rooftop garrets and classrooms of the Sorbonne, must be preserved. Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité! I felt their zeal stirring in me as we flew back over the Place de la Concorde and across the Seine, which shone with the reflection of the lights on the bridges and the bonfires along the quays. As the last light drained from the sky, a million lights kindled in the City of Light and I
remembered what Omar had said.
We must be the light in the darkness.

We soared over the Pantheon, where Voltaire and Rousseau were buried, and over the crowded streets in the Quartier Latin, where packs of students shouted and sang. We finally came to rest on a rooftop overlooking the Jardin des Plantes on a balcony bound by a curved iron railing and cloaked from the street by a hanging curtain of ivy and ferns.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“A painter's rooftop studio,” Raven answered, lighting a hanging Turkish lamp. “He's away sketching in Morocco. I've been camping out here. We can't all have a suite at the Meurice.”

The open-air studio was covered by a wrought-iron awning, from which hung gold-stitched silk shawls. Thick Oriental rugs covered the floor. Silk pillows and tufted hassocks surrounded a brass tray holding a samovar, gilt-edged teacups, and a glass hookah. It all reminded me of one of the harems in Monsieur Delacroix's paintings.

“I like this better,” I said. “It reminds me of your nest in the Blythe Wood. Only instead of tea . . .” I opened a basket and found a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, cheese, and fruit.

“Are you hungry?” Raven asked. “I've been going to the market at Les Halles and there's an excellent bakery on the Rue des Écoles. Have you been to the Sorbonne? I went to a lecture last week on the philosophy of time . . .”

Raven chattered on as he poured wine into the gilt-edged glasses and fixed me a plate of bread and cheese and fruit. He seemed nervous. Was it because he was afraid of what van Drood was up to? Or of the coming war? But then I looked around the snug studio—at the sketches of naked models
pinned to the walls, the soft pillows and rich throws, the screen of ivy shielding us from the world, and realized he was nervous because we were alone together in his lodgings. We'd been alone together before but this was different—because
we
were different. When I'd met Raven after my lost time in Faerie I'd felt as if he'd grown up faster than me. Now I saw that there wasn't so much difference between us. I'd grown up, too, in the last few weeks.

“. . . Paris really is a city of ideas,” he was saying now. “There are statues of philosophers, scientists, and artists on every street corner, book stalls lining the Seine, people talking about ideas in the cafes—”

“You've seen a different Paris than I have,” I said, catching his gesticulating hand in midair, “but I feel it, too. Would you like to live here . . . after . . . I mean, if we succeed in stopping van Drood?”

He looked up at me, his face shining in the lamplight. “Yes! That's just what I want. But only if you would come with me. Do you think . . . ? Could you . . . live like this?”

“In a garret in Paris? With you? Yes, I can't think of anything I'd like more.” I touched his face and he grasped my hand and pressed his lips to my palm. Their warmth set something fluttering inside me that stirred the hanging ivy and the billowing shawls.

Then he was beside me, his arms around me, his lips on mine. He pressed me down into the silk cushions and I caught a scent of some exotic perfume in the air—night-blooming jasmine and mimosa and Eastern spices from the market-
places in the teeming streets below us. I pressed back against him, my heart leaping so hard in my chest I thought it would burst through my ribcage, only it met his heartbeat instead. I pressed my hand on his chest, not to push him away, but he drew his head back to look at me, his eyes locked on mine, his face glowing gold as if the bonfires on the streets had spread to this rooftop.

And they had. My wings had unfurled and caught fire, lighting up the bower, bearing us both aloft. The beating of our wings had lifted us up. We were suspended in the air—and suspended in time—the air between us quivering.
If only this moment could last forever
, I thought, but then we drew together at the same moment, lips to lips, breast to breast, and we sank back to earth together.

Time
didn't
stop, but for a little while it seemed to slow down. Each touch, each kiss, each glance seemed to expand. When with trembling fingers he unbuttoned my blouse—the same one I'd bought at Madame Callot's—each button felt like the toll of a bell that resonated deep in my bones. A bell echoed by the treble bell in my head, the bell that signaled my love for him. His hands moved over my bare skin like the wind over sand, shifting the very shape of me. I
was
changing, becoming someone bold enough to unbutton his shirt, to explore the landscape of his flesh—the long, smooth planes of his chest muscles, the secret dark hollows of his throat, the sea-washed shore behind his left ear. But no matter how far I strayed, his eyes always brought me back to the moment. They steadied me, even when my heart raced faster and my breath came in short
gasps and I realized we'd come to a precipice together, that we were standing on the edge of the dark unknown and it was already too late to step back even if we'd wanted to.

But I didn't want to. I didn't mind falling with him. I didn't mind the dark with him—not the dark in me or the dark in him—as long as we were together. Only when we plunged into the abyss together did I remember I had wings—wings of fire to light up the dark. We lit up the dark together, sparks flying into the night like all the bonfires of Paris exploding midair, the bells in my head ringing so madly they set all the bells of Paris ringing.

Later, lying under the silk and cashmere throws, looking out at the night sky, Raven asked me what I was thinking about.

“Something Helen asked me last fall,” I answered. “She asked if I ever wanted a spell to stop time. I was thinking that I'd like one right now so that this night would never end.”

Raven drew me closer—although we were pretty close already—against his bare chest and pressed his lips to my forehead. “If I could choose one night in which to dwell forever this would be the night,” he murmured, his breath tickling my ear. “But remember I
did
stop time once and it was . . .
cold
. According to the physicists at the Sorbonne, it's the flow of time and the friction of us moving through it that keeps us warm—and keeps us alive.”

He kissed me to demonstrate the laws of physics and I found I couldn't argue with him. Still when I next looked at the sky and saw that it had changed from deep violet to lavender edged with rose I felt a sinking in my heart. We dressed and
flew in silence over the Latin Quarter, where the street cleaners were sweeping away the detritus of last night's crowds and the bakers were going to work to bake the daily bread. War might be coming but the Parisians would still come out for their baguettes and croissants and their morning cafés au lait.

As we crossed the Seine I caught a glimpse of sleek dark shapes swimming downstream. The selkies were swimming toward the sea. As we flew over Notre Dame one of the gargoyles appeared to wink at us—or it might have been a trick of the rising sun.

We landed on the roof of the Meurice to say our good-byes. “I hate leaving you here,” Raven said angrily.

“I know.” I stroked his unruly hair back from his face. Limned by the rising sun he looked as if he were edged by fire. “But I can't leave Helen alone with him. And we'll all be going to the same place. I'll know you're close, and once we defeat van Drood—”

Raven pulled me to him. “We'll be together. We'll come back here to Paris—”

“And live in a rooftop garret and survive on bread and cheese—”

“And each other,” he finished, kissing me fiercely. Afraid that if I didn't go now I never would, I tore myself away and launched myself off the roof. I looked back over my shoulder and saw him standing on the rooftop, wings edged with the glow of the rising sun, looking like one of the statues that stand guard over the city. Then I ducked down to the fourth-floor balcony to our suite.

Helen was standing at the window, fully dressed, wringing her hands. “Thank the Bells, I thought you'd never come back. Where have you been?”

“I met with our friends,” I said. “Lillian and Vi, Dolores and Gus, Raven and Marlin—”

“You saw Marlin?” she asked, plucking nervously at her veil. “Is he all right?”

“Yes, he's fine. Worried about you—”

“And Nathan? Was Nathan there?”

“No,” I had to admit. “No one knows where he is. But the picture isn't entirely bleak . . .” I began to tell her our plans but she held up a hand to stop me.

“Don't tell me. I can't guarantee that I won't tell van Drood if he asks.”