Hawthorn (6 page)

“Mr. Ward told us about something called hope-eaters.” Helen said.

“Mr. Ward?” Gillie asked.

“I think his real name is Aelfweard,” I told Gillie.

At the sound of the name Gillie's eyes glowed a bright green. “One of the ancient guardians of the vessel! Where did ye lasses come upon him?”

Helen and looked at each other and I proceeded to tell Gillie how we had been led by a lampsprite through a tunnel in the earth to the inside of the broken vessel where Aelfweard—or Mr. Ward as Helen insisted on still calling him—lived among the roots.

“One of the vessels right here in the Blythe Wood! Well, I'm no' terrible surprised after all. I told the Dame years before that the vessels would be near a door to Faerie so the wee folk could watch over it, so why not here? It explains why the shadows were lurking about before ye went missing.”

“That's what Mr. Ward told us,” Helen said. “He said the
shadows were trying to get inside the vessel so they could find clues to where the other vessels were.”

“Clues?” Gillie asked, stroking his grizzled chin.

“Pictures of where they are. Look.” Helen took her notebook out of her pocket. “I drew one. Unfortunately the other one was ruined—” She stopped as she noticed the look on Gillie's face. “Do you recognize it?” she asked.

“Aye, I think so, only it's been so long since I've seen these hills.” He was tracing the line of the mountains with his blunt fingertips, his eyes turning a soft mossy green. The air inside the hut had turned warmer and softer, too, like a summer day after rain, and there was a scent of heather in the air. As I looked back down at the lines Helen had drawn, they suddenly looked familiar to me, too.

“That picture we saw downstairs of Hawthorn Hall,” I said, getting to my feet. “I think the mountains in the background looked just like that. We can check—”

“Um, that won't be necessary,” Helen said, slipping the photograph from her pocket. “I took it for, er, a keepsake.”

“But why . . .” I began, but then I looked down at the picture of Hawthorn boys and saw Nathan in the middle of the back row and understood.
Something
had happened between Nathan and Helen last summer.

Gillie poked the photograph with his finger. “Aye, the mountains about Hawthorn. I know them like the back o' my hand. I came from there—there was a door to Faerie tucked away in those hills.”

“There must be a vessel there,” I said. “If van Drood found it . . .”

“He either let out the shadows in it or found the way to the last vessel,” Gillie said, his eyes burning now like coals. “If only we could have stopped him.”

“Maybe we still can,” Helen said, looking up at me.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“We came into the future because we went through Faerie. If we went back to Faerie . . .”

“It doesna work like that,” Gillie said. “If you went back into Faerie there's no telling when you'd come out.”

“Gillie's right,” I said sadly. “The one time I went to Faerie and came out in our own time it was because Raven held the door open for us. But even then we could only come out at the same time, not years before.”

“But that
is
our time!” Helen cried. “This isn't our time. We weren't meant to be here. None of this was meant to be—Nathan dead, Daisy vanished, my mother and your grandmother bombed to death, the human race enslaved in van Drood's factories, Miss Sharp burned, Gillie here living off squirrels! This can't be how things were meant to turn out.” Helen stood up and stamped her foot, her cheeks flushed pink in the lamplight, blue eyes blazing. “I simply refuse to believe that this is the way things are meant to be.”

I thought of the conversation that Helen and I had been having in the woods before we came upon the trow, when the worst fate seemed to be that I wouldn't get to go to college. How quickly I'd trade that future for this one. “It's all very well to rail against our fates, Helen, but that doesn't get us back. It's not like a clock we can set to a certain time.”

Gillie's eyes lit up like a magnesium flashbulb. “Maybe
that's
what he meant,” he said enigmatically, springing to his feet. “Come on!”

Without waiting for us he scampered down the ladder. Helen, starting after him, glanced back over her shoulder at me. “Are you coming? Or are you going to stay here and brood over your past mistakes? Or maybe you don't want to go back and have to choose between Raven and Vassar?”

“How did you—”

“Know you had a row with Raven? Please, Ava, you're as transparent as a water glass. You were brooding last week like a molting hen. Whatever it was, I'm sure you can patch it up when we get back.”

She turned to climb down the ladder and I followed her, thinking that unless I could get back to the week before we fell down that hole I wasn't so sure I could patch anything up.

Gillie was waiting for us at the bottom of the stairs. Although he hadn't brought a lantern, he was surrounded by a greenish glow that I hadn't noticed before. Perhaps in the absence of human company Gillie was reverting further back to his elfin nature. As we followed him down the hall I pictured him leading lost children through the woods and marshes. In a hundred years perhaps that's all Gillie would be—a green bog-light leading children home—if there were any homes left and the whole world wasn't made into van Drood's factory.

At the door to the library, Gillie took out a key from a long chain linked to his waistcoat button and unlocked the door. I hesitated on the threshold, not sure that I wanted to see what had become of the library. This was the room in Blythewood I had always felt safest in, with Miss Sharp tending the fire
and making us all tea, Miss Corey poring over her books, Mr. Bellows balancing his teacup on his kneecap and regaling us with his stories, Nathan slouched by the fire, Daisy marshaling her notes and keeping us on task—how could I bear this room without them all here?

But the room was so altered I need not have feared the intrusion of those memories. It looked like a war room. A huge board with a map of the United States covered the table in front of the fireplace. Another with a map of Europe stood against the shelves. Crates of canned goods and ammunition stood on the shelves that had once held volumes of poetry. For a moment I heard Miss Sharp's voice reciting a poem about two lovers on a beach.

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night—

But it was as if the words were spoken by the Miss Sharp who had driven an ambulance in the war only to be scarred in a terrible fire and come home to defend her homeland.

“Now where did I put it?” Gillie was muttering as he dug through the crates, tossing miscellaneous items hither and thither—a can of peaches, a metal canteen, a box of nails. “I wanted to make sure it was safe. He said you might come back and I was to be sure to give it to you.”

“He?” I asked as Gillie tossed a pack of cards out of a crate. “Who . . .” But my voice stuck in my throat when Gillie retrieved a red leather jeweler's box from a crate. “Ah, here it is!”

I knew that box. It was the one Raven had taken out of his pocket the last night I saw him. He had knelt on one knee and held it out to me. My first thought had been, “Oh, it's too big to hold a ring, he can't be asking me to marry him.” I'd felt a twinge of disappointment, but when he opened it and there
was
a ring inside I'd felt . . .
scared
. Scared of how much I wanted to say yes—but also scared at what it would mean to marry a Darkling. Would I be giving up my human life? My friends? My future?

“It's just,” I had blurted out, “I thought I might go to college.”

“You could still go to college,” he said. “I wouldn't mind.”

“But I don't think Vassar allows married students.”

“So what you're saying is you're ashamed of me.”

“What?” I'd been too dumbfounded to know what to say—and then he had snapped closed the jeweler's box and snapped open his wings to fly off.

And here was the box again. Had he left it with Gillie to remind me of what I'd lost?

I took the box from Gillie, not sure I could bear to look at the ring Raven had picked out for me—a moonstone surrounded by tiny diamonds—but when I opened the box I found that there wasn't a ring inside. There was a pocket watch and a note written in Raven's hand.

Dear Ava,

Perhaps this will be a little more to your liking than a ring. It's set to our time and will take you back if you go through Faerie again. Just press the stem when you are ready to come back. I will be waiting for you.

“WHAT DOES HE
mean,
more to your liking than a ring
?” Helen, reading over my shoulder, demanded. “Did Raven ask you to marry him?
”

“None of your business!” I snapped, stuffing the note in my pocket. I took the watch out of the box and opened it.

It wasn't an ordinary watch. Instead of hands, two wings spread out from the center. Instead of numbers, two gold rings circled the face, one engraved with the phases of the moon, the other with symbols I thought I recognized as Darkling numerals. Both rings could be moved. I touched a finger to one of the rings, but Helen cried out.

“Don't move it! He said in the note that it's set to our time.”

I stared at the moon—a waning crescent—and the Darkling numeral at the top of the watch. If it was set to a time, it wasn't one I recognized, but then the Darklings had a different calendar.

“He was clever with clocks,” I said wistfully. “He was always tinkering with them. That's why he went to apprentice with Mr. Humphreys, and he did fix the clocks at Violet House. But a clock that could bring us through Faerie back to our own time—”

“Damned clever!” Gillie cried. “He told me he'd found a way to make things right again and bring you back. I thought he might have gone daft. He was half mad when you went missing—storming into the Dame's office, demanding she send everybody out to search for you, blaming me for sending you out in search of the trow, blaming himself for some spat you'd had—”

“Did he say anything about the watch?” I asked, ignoring Helen's curious stare.

“He said that a Darkling was able to stop time in Faerie when he held the doors open with this wings so there might be a way to lead someone back through Faerie to a particular time. If only that person had a special watch—then he said something else, but . . .” He shook his head and looked away. “It's a long time ago and I can't say I remember exactly what. I do remember that he muttered something in Latin.” Gillie looked down at the watch, which I held cradled in my hands as if it were a newly hatched chick. It was ticking faintly and slowly. “Aye, that's it.” He tapped the face of the watch gently.

I peered down at the watch face. Inscribed in gold between the wings was a Latin motto.
Tempus fugit.

Time flies.

Gillie wanted us to wait until morning to go back because the woods were dangerous at night, but I couldn't bear to wait another second. The words Raven had inscribed on the watch had lit a fire in my belly. Time
was
flying. Each tick of the watch, made all the more maddening because there were no
hands moving, moved me further away from Raven.

Helen was anxious to go as well. As we walked across the lawn to the woods she kept up a steady chatter to me and Gillie. “The sooner we go, the sooner we can put things to rights. We'll find the unbroken vessel before van Drood does and we'll stop this awful war. Nathan won't die in a beastly muddy battlefield, nor Mr. Bellows, nor any of those handsome boys at Hawthorn Hall. My mother . . .” Her voice wobbled. “My mother will
not
be destitute and she and Ava's grandmother will
not
be killed by bombs falling from the sky. Miss Corey and Miss Sharp will live long happy lives together and we'll visit them at Violet House every Sunday for tea and Daisy and Mr. Appleby will be wed and Cam will fly planes for fun not to drop bombs on people. The world will not be turned into some awful grimy factory and Blythewood
will
be restored. You'll see, Gillie, we'll put everything back the way it should be.”

At the edge of the woods Gillie turned to face Helen. “If anyone can put things to rights it's you, Miss Helen, but I'm afraid I won't see it. This is my world now and if ye change things it will be as though it never was. I'm glad I've gotten to see your face again, and yours, Miss Ava.” He turned to me, his eyes burning like twin beacons in the light. “I'll leave you here, lasses. These woods no longer belong to me.” He looked at the blasted trees. “But I'll be watching over you no' the less.”

I threw my arms around Gillie and hugged him tight, then turned toward the woods, stumbling blindly while Helen said her good-bye. When I opened my eyes, the woods were blurred and two green spots bobbed in the darkness as if Gillie's eyes had been burned into mine—or as if he really was still with us,
leading us home. I knew that home wasn't behind us in the ruins of Blythewood. It lay through these dark and wasted woods and smoke-filled air and who knew how many other dangers.

For all Helen's optimistic list of how we were going to set things right, I knew it wouldn't be as easy as that. We didn't even know if Raven's watch would work or if we'd be able to find Faerie. The woods felt barren and empty—all the magic drained out of them. What if the door to Faerie was gone, blasted by the shadow crows and their infernal machines?

I remembered Raven once saying that as the world grew more crowded there might not be any room left for Darklings. Maybe the shadow machines and van Drood's factories had wiped out the last traces of magic from the world. Even Gillie had seemed to be fading. And if there was no magic left we wouldn't be able to find our way to Faerie and this was all there would ever be—a ruined world without magic.

“Ava?” Helen said, slipping her hand in mine. “Are we almost there? I'm feeling . . . so very tired.”

I turned to look at Helen, but I could barely see her in the dark. Her face seemed to blend in with the shadows.

I moved closer and touched her face. Her skin felt gritty. I wiped at the grit and a white streak appeared on Helen's cheek. She was coated with some kind of ash or soot. I looked up and saw that black silt was falling from the burnt trees.

“Ech!” Helen coughed. “It's all over us. I can feel it in my mouth and lungs.”

Now that she mentioned it, I could taste the soot in my mouth as well. It tasted like ash and rotten meat—the way the trow's breath had smelled. Bile rose up in my throat and I
doubled over, retching the foul black gunk onto the ground. I heard Helen choking beside me, then I felt her hands smoothing my hair away from my face and patting my back.

“Ugh, what do you think it is?” she asked when we both could breathe again.

“I don't know—some kind of residue from the
tenebrae
, I think. Maybe it's another way that the shadows have of getting inside us. We have to get into Faerie before it infects us, but I don't know how to find it.”

I turned around in a circle. The bare trees loomed out of the smoke like gaunt skeletons. One of the photographs from Mr. Bellows' corkboard flashed in my mind—a terrain of ruined trees rising out of the smoke, bodies twisted in the mud, gunfire lighting up the sky in lurid blasts . . .

As if the image had summoned them, the sky opened up above us. Sulfurous yellow light scythed through the skeletal trees, and the ground shook under our feet.

“The zeppelin!” Helen hissed, grabbing my hand. “It's come back!”

We ran from the searchlights strafing the ground, but there was no place to hide. All the underbrush had been burned away. The blasted trees offered no shelter. I could hear the zeppelin right behind us, the hum of its engines rattling my teeth, scraping inside my brain. The searchlights skittered beside us. I felt one touch my brow and for a terrible second my mind went completely blank. It was as if I had been erased. Then Helen pulled me out of its path and my mind stuttered back up like a rusty machine just in time for me to see that the light was stretching toward Helen.

I grabbed Helen and unfurled my wings, mantling them over us just as the light reached us. I had no idea if my wings would protect us from the scouring light. I could feel the heat and smell my feathers singeing, but we were still alive. But for how long? How long would my wings keep out the burning rays? How long would our minds be our own? If we were going to be turned into mindless drones I'd rather be dead.

Then suddenly the heat was gone. I felt cool air on the outside of my wings.

“I think it's gone,” Helen whispered.

“It could be a trap,” I said, parting my wings a fraction and peering through the gap between singed feathers. A Darkling was standing over us, his wings mantled over his head. He was backlit against the glare of the retreating ship, so I couldn't make out his face—but Helen recognized him right away.

“Marlin?” she said, getting slowly to her feet. “Is that you?”

He lowered his wings and stepped forward. His face was older, lined and scarred, a white streak in his reddish-brown hair, but when he smiled he looked like the same boy who would do somersaults off the Shawangunk ridge. “Helen! Ava! I thought it must be you when I saw the color of those feathers. But I hardly dared hope—it's been over ten years!”

“We went through Faerie!” Helen cried, and then in a rush, “Oh Marlin, I'm so sorry. If I'd known I wouldn't see you for so long I'd have never been so awful to you!”

I stared at Helen. So I
hadn't
been the only one to fight with her boyfriend that week.

“You weren't awful, just truthful. I only took it so badly because my feelings were hurt. I felt terrible when you went
missing. We all did.” He turned to me. “I thought Raven would go out of his mind. He blamed himself.”

“But it wasn't his fault!”

“You couldn't tell him that. He said that if you hadn't argued he would have been with you the day you went missing. It was my fault, too. If I hadn't been sulking I'd have been keeping an eye on you. We knew something was going on in the woods. The
tenebrae
had been gathering for weeks, taking over whatever creatures they could—trows, boggles, even lampsprites—searching the woods for something.”

“For the broken vessel,” Helen whispered. “We found it that day.” Quickly, Helen told Marlin what we had learned from Mr. Ward. He listened intently, his face grave. Watching him, I could see all the pain he had witnessed over these last ten years reflected in the heavy stance of his body, the lines etched in his face, and the gravity in his eyes. Although I'd caught a glimpse of the carefree boy he'd once been, that boy was gone. When Helen was done he nodded gravely.

“We suspected that the shadows found the third vessel in the summer of fourteen. We'd seen human wars before, but never one like this one. Humans burrowed into the ground killing each other in the mud and blood. I ferried souls from the trenches and touched the memories of those young men—so much fear and sickness and the everlasting waste of life.” He shuddered. “I couldn't stand by and just watch. Many of us fought beside the men in the trenches, many Darklings died. Gus . . .”

“Pythagoras?” I asked, remembering the shy bookish Darkling. “He fought in the war?”

Marlin chuckled. “Gus became quite the explosives expert. He and your friend Dolores blew up many a bridge and munitions factory. They were both killed in the battle of New York. So were Buzz and Heron and Sirena.”

“And Raven?” I asked.

Marlin shook his head. “Raven vanished before the war. He said he knew where you had gone and that he thought he had a way to get you back. But to tell the truth, he'd gone a bit crazy after you disappeared. He spent hours at Violet House talking to Uncle Taddie, tinkering with clocks. When he disappeared—well, I was afraid he might have taken his own life.”

“Raven would never do that!” I said. “He left this for me.” I took the watch out of my pocket and showed it to Marlin. “He left a note saying that if I went back to Faerie it could bring me back to our time.”

Marlin looked at the watch skeptically at first and then with a creeping flash of hope. “And if you did get back—”

“We'd set everything to rights,” Helen said. “We'd find the unbroken vessel before van Drood and stop the war.”

Marlin smiled at Helen. He lifted his hand and tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear. “I hate to let you go again, but if you could do that . . . well, it would be worth even
that
sacrifice. I would do anything to change these last ten years. When I think of what a witless fool I was . . .” He made a disgusted sound and shook himself. “Well, there's no hope for that. I'd better get you two to Faerie and be quick about it. The door's been getting smaller and harder to find, choked up with this infernal soot. Master Quill thinks it will soon close for good. Let's hope it hasn't yet.”