Hawthorn (7 page)

We walked the rest of the way in silence, Marlin leading the way, alert for trouble. Helen kept her head down, her face closed and thoughtful. I would have liked to ask what had happened between them, but I couldn't very well with him right there. I could guess, though, that it had something to do with what had happened with Nathan in Europe. Had she come back sure that she loved Nathan not Marlin? But then why had she been sniping at Nathan every chance she got and acting so miserable?

Then again, I was in love and I hadn't been acting so happy either. Maybe love didn't lead to all that much happiness in the end.

I'd arrived at this gloomy thought just as we reached an obstacle—a thorny tangle that blocked the path. “We'll have to go over,” I said to Marlin. “We can fly and one of us can carry Helen—or we can all climb,” I amended at a sharp look from Helen.

“We won't be going over. This is it—this is the door to Faerie.”

“
This?
” Helen asked, peering into the thicket. “But there's no door here, just thorn bushes.”

“I told you it was grown over,” Marlin replied. “If you crouch down you can see a glimmer of fairy dust through the hawthorns.”

I crouched down and peered into the thicket. There was a small opening near the ground but it looked more like a rabbit burrow than a door to a magical realm.

“We can't possibly crawl through there,” Helen said, bending over me. “We'll ruin our clothes.”

Marlin laughed. “Have you seen yourself in a mirror lately?
You look like something a boggle dragged through the marsh. But I can make the opening a bit bigger for you.”

I heard a flutter of wings and the thorn thicket began to glow. The tangled branches crept back, making a hole just big enough to crawl through. “I think we can get through, Helen,” I said, turning to look over my shoulder.

Helen was standing looking up at Marlin, her face bathed in the glow of his wings, her eyes shining. “I'm sorry . . .” she began, but he placed a finger on her lips.

“You can make it up to me,” he said, “if you send a message back to my fool younger self. Tell him not to be an idiot. Tell him not to give you up without a fight.”

Helen opened her mouth to say something but Marlin silenced her with a kiss. I turned away to give them privacy, my own eyes stinging as though the thorns had pierced them as I crawled blindly through the hole in the thicket.

WHEN I'D BEEN
to Faerie before it had been a beautiful place of green lawns, wildflowers, and lavender skies. The place I found myself in now didn't look anything like that. I emerged from the thicket onto a bare, windswept rocky plain under a bruise-colored sky.
A darkling plain
, I thought, remembering Miss Sharp's poem,
swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight.

This plain was swept with grit and the keening cry of the wind whistling through scorched trees and rocky outcrops that looked like they'd been built as forts to withstand an invasion—and failed.

“What happened here?” Helen asked, coming to stand beside me.

“It looks like it was sacked. I didn't think Faerie could be invaded. Shadow creatures can't get in here.”

“
Something
got in here and wrecked the place. Do you think anyone's still here?”

I looked doubtfully at the barren heaps of rocks. “I don't know. We should look for survivors.” I was thinking of my mother and our teachers Miles Malmsbury and Euphorbia Frost.

“What if whatever destroyed this place is still here?” Helen
asked. “Maybe we should just use Raven's watch to go back. If we can stop van Drood from finding the third vessel maybe this won't happen.”

What Helen said made sense—
and
it was what I wanted to do. Raven had written that he was waiting for me. I wasn't quite sure what that meant—how could you wait in a moment in time?
Where
exactly was he waiting?—but I knew that every fiber of my being ached to go to him. But as I lifted up his watch I heard a wail coming from the stand of burnt trees at the edge of the plain. I took a step in that direction but Helen put a hand on my arm to restrain me. “We don't know what it is, Ava. I think we should leave—”

Another wail came from the woods—a long drawn-out cry that reminded me of the sounds that the old Italian and Greek women on the Lower East Side would make at funerals and wakes. Only I recognized this voice. I shook off Helen's arm and strode over the rocks to the woods. As I came closer I made out figures among the trees: willowy white women, their arms raised and swaying like windswept branches, their long loose hair floating like leaves tossed in a gale. One of the women had long red hair and green eyes.

“Mother!” I cried, running now. Her head snapped around at the sound of my voice. It
was
my mother. She had survived, even if she looked thinner than when I'd seen her last and her clothes were torn and covered with soot. Her green eyes were huge in her starved face—and frightened. Could she be frightened of me?

But she was running toward me, not away. She met me on the edge of the woods and grabbed me by both arms and held
me at arm's length although I struggled to embrace her. “Avie, dearling, you mustn't come closer!”

“But why, Mother, aren't you glad to see me?”

Her eyes widened and filled with tears, but her grip didn't waver. “I've hoped and prayed that you survived the Great War, but you won't survive long here, dearling. There's a contagion that is taking us all.” She looked back over her shoulder at the swaying women. One at the center was moving less and less. She was covered with soot from head to foot; even her hair and skin were the color of ash.

“What happened here?” I asked. “I thought the shadows couldn't cross over into Faerie.”

“So did we. But once van Drood opened the third vessel, the hope-eaters pressed in on us here in Faerie. The darkness spread like a mold or a virus, killing the grass and the flowers, the trees . . . and then the fay. First the smaller delicate ones—the lampsprites and boggles—but then even the trows and goblins. They all fell to the contagion. Only those of us who were human were immune—and the changelings—but now even the changelings have succumbed.”

She turned her head back to look over her shoulder. The woman in the center had stopped swaying. She was arrested in a posture of supplication, her soot-covered arms raised to the sky, darkening and hardening as I watched until she was indistinguishable from the trees surrounding her—

Which weren't trees.

They were changelings frozen into the stunted, twisted shapes of blasted trees. I looked back at my mother and saw with horror that the same soot streaked her arms and stained
the hollows beneath her eyes. “Come with me,” I said. “I have a watch that will take us back to a time before all this happened. Come with me.”

She shook her head. “Even if I could pass back into your world I wouldn't take the chance of spreading this contagion. But if you can go back . . .” She smiled, the movement spreading fine cracks in her brittle skin. “Perhaps you can change the course of events and keep the creeping shadow out of Faerie. He's waiting for you there, isn't he?”

“Yes, Raven is waiting for me. He left me the watch.”

“Then you'll be all right. Go back to him now, dearling, before it's too late.”

“We'll make this right, Mother, I promise.”

She lifted her hand to stroke my face. “I know that if anyone can it will be you—and your friends.” She looked over my shoulder to where Helen had come to stand behind me. “But promise me one thing, dearling.”

“Anything, Mother,” I cried, my tears blurring her face.

“Don't make the mistake I made. Hold on to the ones you love. If you can't change our fates—take the ones you love and run as far as you can.”

Helen led me away from my mother, my eyes so blurred with tears I stumbled over the rough ground. I remembered how hard it had been to leave her once before in Faerie but it was a hundred times worse leaving her in this desolate place.

“We will make this right,” Helen said firmly. “We will stop van Drood before he can spread his foulness everywhere.”

I nodded, too overcome to talk, and took the watch out of my pocket. It was ticking faster, as if it were an animal whose heart was racing in this awful place—or as if it were running down. What if the foul soot was clogging the mechanism? Even a magic watch might not run forever. What if we were too late?

My hand trembling, I held up the watch and depressed the stem.

The ticking stopped. My heart stopped with it. Everything stopped. The keening wind, Helen's breath, time itself. Raven had found what Helen had asked for: a spell to stop time. But what if it kept us here—and now—for all eternity, trapped in this ruined place?

Then the watch began to move. The gold wings spun clockwise, then counterclockwise, then lifted up from the watch face. Gears and cogs whirled inside, reshaping the watch into something else. I watched in amazement as before my eyes the watch changed into a mechanical bird with gold wings that rose into the brightening air. I heard Helen gasp. The drear gray air of ruined Faerie had turned into a shimmering iridescent rainbow, like the skin of a soap bubble expanding in the sun and then—

Bursting!

The shock of the explosion knocked us off our feet. I barely had time to grab Helen's hand and then we were flying backward, speeding through time as if we'd been shot out of a cannon. Surely no one could survive this. Poor Raven. He had tried his best. I hoped he never knew that he'd blown us to bits.

We hit the ground so hard my teeth clicked together and I bit my tongue. I could feel my bones rattling—but at least I still
had
bones. I opened my eyes and saw Helen's face, her blonde hair wild, her blue eyes wide as saucers—but alive! And she was pointing to something, her mouth working to form a word.

I snapped my head in the direction she pointed. A marble statue stood on the top of a hill above us. It looked like a statue of Atlas holding up the world, arms straining against a terrible weight, neck tendons standing out, legs braced. Only this Atlas had wings stretched out holding back invisible walls. Had Raven left this statue here to hold the door for us? I struggled to my feet, my legs weak as a newly hatched chick's, pulling Helen up with me, without taking my eyes off the statue. Blue veins stood out in the marble just as if they carried blood. The face was carved so finely I could make out the shadow of eyelashes on downturned eyes and the tracks of tears on the face and beads of sweat standing out on the forehead. The marble was so smooth I couldn't help but reach my hand out and lay it on the bare straining chest . . .

Where a heart beat.

“Raven!”

The eyelids flickered, scattering the white dust that held them down, lips parted, cracking the silt of time that lay over him, trying to form a word.

“Guh.”

“He telling us to go through,” Helen said. “He can't let the door close until we're on the other side. We can squeeze through under his wings.”

Just barely. When Raven had held the door for me once before, he had been standing. He may have started out standing this time but the pressure of holding open the door had
brought him down to his knees. It was crushing him. How long had he been here? Hadn't he brought us back to the moment when he opened the door? I didn't have time to figure it all out. Only when we were through the door would he be able to let go. I pushed Helen through the gap under his left wing—the right one was nearly crushed to the ground—and then crawled through after her, wriggling flat on my belly.

As soon as I was through I turned over and faced Raven. On this side of the door his back was covered with the green dust of pine pollen. He might have been a tree stump, the remnant of a once great oak slowly disintegrating back into the forest floor. I wrapped my arms around his back and pressed my face against his neck, my lips to his ear.

“You can let go,” I said. “I'm here now.”

He shuddered, a convulsion so violent I thought he might break apart as he fell backward into my arms. I held on to him as tightly as I could, unfurling my wings and wrapping them around him, repeating over and over again, “I'm here now, I'm here now,” as he shook and shook. Helen sat nearby, her arms wrapped around her knees.

“Run to Blythewood and get help. Tell them to send to Ravencliffe for Wren.” If anyone could heal Raven it would be his mother, Wren, who had tended to his wounds after he'd been tortured by van Drood.

Helen looked at me so wide-eyed I thought she'd lost her senses traveling back through time, but then she asked, “Are you sure we're back in our own time? Why does Raven look like he's been holding the door for a hundred years?”

I looked around the woods, which were green and full of
birdsong. “I think we've come back to a time before the airships destroyed the woods—”

Before I could finish we heard bells ringing—the bells of Blythewood—all six of them! Helen's face brightened. “I'll go get help!” she said, getting shakily to her feet, but then her voice changed. “Um . . . Ava, I think we'd better take Raven with us and get out of here as fast as we can.”

“Why?” I looked up and saw that she was looking up at the treetops, which were bristling with spiky black shapes. Shadow crows perched on every branch, their hard bright eyes fixed on us.

“I . . . think . . . Helen's . . . right.” Raven bit out each word as if his throat had turned to stone. He was struggling to his feet, his arm clamped around my waist. I tightened my grip on him and rose slowly. The crows cocked their heads in the identical angle, but they made no move to fly at us. Helen came to Raven's other side and slid her arm around his waist, taking on his weight even though I could tell by her limp that her leg must be bothering her. Together we began walking toward the sound of the bells. Above us the crows fluttered from branch to branch, keeping up with our slow progress but not attacking us.

“Watching,” Raven said to my unvoiced question. “Since you went . . . always . . . watching.”

“For the way into the vessel,” Helen whispered. The crows cawed as if they had heard and understood her.

“I think we'd better wait until we're inside before we talk about that,” I said.