Ravencliffe (Blythewood series) (22 page)

I stood up, fully restored now, and Falco let his wings fall away from me. I turned to face the three Elders. Wren’s face was soft with compassion, but Gos looked like he wanted to spring across the table and throttle Falco and me. Merlinus’s face was stony and impassive. “How could you send him away from my mother when his only crime was loving her?” I cried.

I heard a rustle above me and saw Raven inch closer to me so that I was between him and Falco. I had a feeling that this was not the way one was supposed to address the Elders, but I didn’t care. They had deprived my mother of the man she loved. They had deprived me of my father throughout my childhood.

“You’re just a bunch of dried-up old crows,” I fumed, “jealous of other people’s happiness.”

“He broke the law,” Gos spat at me.

“It’s a stupid law!” I cried. Someone hissed above me. Gos braced his arms on the tabletop, his tendons straining, his wings flexing behind him. “Why shouldn’t a Darkling and a human love one another? Merope and Aderyn did—”

“And cursed us to an eternity of banishment,” Gos hissed. “We can never return to Faerie. Do you know what it’s like to ferry the souls of humans to their afterworld and the souls of the fay to theirs, but never have our own rest? When we die we dissolve into dust. And all because a Darkling loved a
human
.” He spit the word out of his mouth as if it tasted bad.

“No,” I said, recalling what had bothered me before about the story of Merope and Aderyn. “You weren’t cursed because they loved each other; it was because a shadow crow pierced Aderyn’s chest. A bit of shadow entered his soul.”

“The darkness that entered his soul was his love for a human woman!” Gos snapped back at me.

“Why do you hate humans so much?” I asked.

“We don’t hate them,” Merlinus said with a stony glare at Gos. “We are charged with their care. If we allow ourselves to fall in love with them, we risk infecting them with our curse. Your mother, for instance, would not have been allowed into the mortal’s afterworld because of her love for a Darkling. Falco broke the laws to bring her to Faerie. And you, fledgling—” He gave me a sad look. “You are now subject to the Darklings’ curse. You won’t be allowed in your own afterworld or Faerie.”

“I’ve already been to Faerie, thank you very much,” I snipped back at him.

I hadn’t thought those marmoreal features could register surprise, but they did now. “You have?” he said. “How did you get in and come back in your own time without a Darkling to hold the door for you?”

Too late I realized my temper had implicated Raven. Before I could think how to answer, Wren spoke.

“What’s important is that she was able to pass through the door at all. It might mean a weakening of the curse.”

“She hadn’t fledged yet,” Gos said. “And even if she can cross over, it only means a half-bloodling can. What good does that do the rest of us?”

A chorus of hoots, accompanied by rustling, came from the upper tiers. Apparently Gos had his following. Encouraged by this response, Gos went on. “And why should we expect any help from her? She’s part of the accursed Order that lives to exterminate us. How do we know that her being here now isn’t part of a plot to infiltrate our ranks and then lead their Hunt to us? They might be on their way now.”

The rustling above our heads grew to a roar, the hooting low and ominous. At the same time Raven and Falco extended their wings over my head as if they expected an attack from above. For the first time I felt frightened. Not just of what might happen to me, but of what might happen to Raven for bringing me here. I realized now what he had risked by being with me. But when he spoke he did not seem frightened; he sounded angry.

“How dare you suspect wrong of Ava? She has risked her life—her very soul—to find the book that will end our curse.”

“Then where is it?” Gos demanded, getting to his feet and flexing his wings behind him. “All this talk of a precious book, but I personally searched the prisoner when he was taken and he had no book on him.”

I glanced at Falco. Had he lost the book? Perhaps he had only hidden it somewhere. His lips curled back slowly, more a snarl than a smile.

“I was prepared for a search more thorough than any you would perform,” he said coldly. “And so I hid the book here.”

He flexed his wings to their widest span—nearly fifteen feet across, wider than I knew wings could stretch. At first I thought he was threatening Gos, but then I looked closer and saw what Falco meant. Stitched to his wings, in between each feather, were pages. Each page was covered with a tiny runic script and beautiful gem-colored illuminations that gave Falco’s wings the gloss of a peacock’s tail.
A Darkness of Angels
—the book my mother had spent her life looking for—was stitched into my father’s wings.

24

A CLUSTER OF
Darklings flocked around Falco, edging me away and hiding him from my sight. I could see why a flock of Darklings was called a
darkness
. Together they formed a clot of darkness that hid everything else from sight. After what seemed like a long time, the darkness thinned, leaving one gray-haired old Darkling examining Falco’s wings with a magnifying glass.

“What do you think, Master Quill?” Merlinus asked the gray-haired Darkling.

As Master Quill raised his head I saw that his long gray hair and beard were braided with feathers. He plucked out a long goose feather that had been sharpened into a quill and used it to point to the pages stitched into Falco’s wings.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” he said. “He hasn’t just attached the pages to his wings, he’s stitched in every word and picture. His own feathers have bonded to the pages. I don’t believe we could separate the pages from his feathers without severely damaging his wings.”

“That’s his own damned fault,” Gos sneered. “I say we lop off his wings right now and take the book.”

“You can’t do that!” I cried, trying to push through the crowd surrounding my father.

“The girl’s right,” Master Quill said, his eyes glittering. “It would be a terrible shame to ruin such a masterpiece. The book has become a living thing. I believe it was meant to bond with a Darkling’s wings in just this way. It says so here.” He touched his quill to one of Falco’s feather and read aloud from it: “And so shall the page become the wing, and it shall lead us home.”

“What does that mean?” Raven asked. “Is it all written in riddles like that?”

“Oh, that’s one of the clearer lines,” Quill said, chuckling. “It will take me days—weeks!—to read it all.”

“But you
can
read it?” Merlinus asked. “And transcribe it?”

“Yes, yes, yes!” Quill answered, all the feathers stuck in his hair trembling in his excitement. “It would be an honor—the opportunity of a lifetime.”

“We don’t have a lifetime, Quill,” Wren told the old man firmly. “If the Shadow Master wants this book he’ll have his
tenebrae
searching for it. The wards of Ravencliffe will conceal Falco and the book for only so long. If there’s something in this book that will lift our curse and defeat the Shadow Master, we must learn it before he finds it and destroys us all.”

Wren’s speech cast a somber pall over the room. I looked around and saw the fledglings looking nervously at each other. But then my father spoke up, his voice ringing clear in the vaulted tower.

“The book will tell us how to lift the curse and much more. Although I could not read it because I am not gifted in the old languages as Master Quill is”—he bowed his head to the old scribe, who quivered with delight at the compliment—“since the book has bonded with my wings, I have had dreams. I can hear it speaking to me. I believe that the end of our curse lies in its pages, and much more.” He looked toward me, and I felt the sadness in his eyes echo in my heart. “I believe that the book will heal the rift between us and the Order.”

I saw Gos begin to object, but Merlinus silenced him. “We must see about that,” he said. “First, let you and Master Quill repair to the scriptorium”—he pointed up to the very highest ledge of the tower—“to transcribe the book. When it is done we three will read it and consult to reach a decision together.”

“You won’t hurt him?” I asked, pushing my way through the flock to stand in front of the scribe.

Master Quill tore his eyes away from Falco’s wings and gave me an appalled look. “Hurt him? Of course not! Your father has become the living repository of our most precious lore and history. I will treat him with the same respect with which I treat our oldest tomes.”

I wasn’t exactly reassured by this. “He’s a person, not a book,” I told Master Quill. “He’s my father, and I’ve just gotten him back.”

Falco’s eyes glittered at my speech, and he stepped forward to touch my hand. “It will be all right, dearling. I trust Master Quill, and this is something I must do for my people and for yours. The rift between them must be healed, or else you will be torn apart.” His gaze traveled from me to Raven, and I blushed, guessing his meaning. “I do not want you to suffer the same fate that befell your mother and me.”

I squeezed his hand and then looked up at Merlinus. “Can I at least visit him while he’s being . . .
transcribed
?”

Merlinus surprised me by looking to Quill. “Will it disturb your work?” he asked the scribe.

“Not at all. I have always welcomed young people to my scriptorium. Few enough”—he cast a disparaging look up at the fledglings—“darken its ledge.”

“Very well, then,” Merlinus said with finality. “Raven will bring the half-bloodling to the scriptorium once a week. And,” he added with a stern look at Raven, “to our chambers afterward for dinner. It’s about time I became better acquainted with my son’s flying mate.”

“You didn’t tell me Merlinus was your father,” I complained to Raven on the flight back to Blythewood.

“Would it have made a difference?” he asked.

I thought about it. “I suppose it would have made me even more nervous meeting him.”

“Exactly. He’s not . . . an easy man. But I think he liked you.”

“Really? How could you tell?”

“He didn’t order your wings clipped and toss you in the dungeons, for one thing.”

“Oh,” I replied, trying to swallow. “I suppose that’s a start. Is Wren your mother?”

“Yes.” Raven smiled. “She definitely liked you. She told me so when we were leaving.”

“I didn’t hear—” I began, but then I recalled that she and Raven had exchanged a series of whistles when we left that must have been their way of communicating. “At least we know
my
father likes you. Thank you for finding him.”

Instead of responding, Raven dipped his wings and landed us on a sturdy, ice-limned branch near the top of an old oak tree. He turned me toward him and cupped my face in his hand. In the moonlight his face looked different—older than it had a few weeks ago.

“When I saw you suffering with the soul-sickness, I felt . . .” He paused, looked away, his dark eyes glittering fiercely. He squeezed my arms. “I felt as though a piece of
my
soul was missing. I had no choice but to find your father and make you whole again, because”—he looked back at me—“I would never be whole without you.”

I stared at him, taking in the force of his words. “I feel the same, only—”

“
Only
?” He pounced on the word, his voice making the whole tree quake, shaking icicles loose and scattering them to the forest floor.

I forced myself to go on. “
Only
, you could be banished for loving me, Raven. Are you sure you want to take that risk?”

“To lose you would be a worse exile,” he replied without hesitation. “If I am banished I would take you with me . . . that is, if you would be willing to share my exile.”

He said the words with a formality that made me feel that we had both grown suddenly older. The trees of the forest arching above us, their branches filled with milky white moonlight, felt like a chapel. I felt as if the whole woods had stilled to listen to my reply. Before I could answer, though, I heard a shriek coming from below us—a girl’s voice. Raven instantly tensed and crouched on the branch to look down through the tree limbs.

“It’s Etta,” he said. “Stay here while I see what’s wrong.” He flexed his wings and dove . . . and I followed him. He’d just told me that he’d go into exile for me; I wasn’t about to sit on a tree branch while he plunged into danger. I was still too weak to use my wings, but I scrambled down the tree, nearly sliding off the ice-slick branches, and falling the last dozen feet to land in a tumble beside him. I saw that we were in the Rowan Circle. Raven had his arm around Etta, who was weeping. I whirled around, searching for an attacker, but the circle was empty and still, sealed by icicles that hung from the rowan trees so thickly they formed a sort of jagged circular portcullis. No one could have passed through it unless they were as tiny as Etta.

“What is it, Etta?” I asked. “What are you doing out here alone at night?”

“I—I heard the branches br-breaking and saw the ice storm,” she stammered, shivering and sobbing. “I started thinking about what it would mean for the changelings.”

Guiltily I remembered that I had wondered the same thing—and then quickly forgotten about them. But Etta hadn’t.

“I knew they were still traveling back and forth on the river looking for Rue. One told me just yesterday that they were infiltrating a mansion on the river that they thought might be where she was hidden—and then this ice storm came out of nowhere! The temperature dropped thirty degrees in less than an hour. It didn’t feel natural. So I came out here to talk to them—there are always a few here in the woods keeping a circle the others can come back to—and this is what I found!”

She pointed at the icicles hanging from the rowan trees. I stepped closer to look . . . and gasped. Each icicle had a shimmery red glow, like a flame behind glass, only these flames had faces flickering at their hearts.

“It’s the changelings,” Etta said. “They’re trapped inside the ice.”

We stayed in the Rowan Circle for nearly an hour trying to communicate with the trapped changelings. A few lampsprites appeared, beating their wings against the icy shrouds, but when they brushed their wings against our faces we heard them say, “We cannot hear them, nor they us.” Featherbell tried blowing flames onto the ice, but instead of melting, the ice sprayed over her wings and she dropped to the ground with a dull thud. Etta grabbed her and held her in her hand until she recovered.

“This is no ordinary ice,” Raven said, picking up one of the shards that had fallen to the ground. As he lifted the shard I saw a shadow flickering inside it, reminding me of the shadow crow I saw inside the splinter of broken mirror inside the fun house—the crow that had
bitten
me.

“Drop it!” I cried. “There are
tenebrae
inside the ice.”

I looked around at the ice-covered woods with a new horror. I thought I could see shadows moving under the surface of the ice, like dark water under a frozen stream.

“We have to get out of here,” Raven said.

“But I can’t leave them!” Etta cried.

“You can’t help them now,” Raven told her sternly. And then in a gentler voice, “You’ll be frozen yourself if I don’t get you back. And Ava’s still weak.”

Etta looked worriedly between me and the changelings, but then Featherbell brushed against her face. She listened to her chatter and then nodded solemnly. “Featherbell says the lampsprites will stay in the circle guarding the changelings.”

Without waiting for her to change her mind, Raven gathered Etta into his arms and carried her up into the trees to cross over the frozen barrier around the Rowan Circle. As I waited for him to come back for me, I saw something out of the corner of my eye—something dark. I turned to catch what it was, but it moved as I moved. I spun around, following the movement. It looked like the edge of a cloak trailing behind a fleeing figure—like the figure of van Drood I’d glimpsed in the fun house. He was here, his consciousness moving through the ice. I could hear him in the chime of frozen branches clattering together.