Hawthorn Read online

  “Raven and I will fly to London right away,” I said. “Someone should go to the Ardennes to warn the guardian of the vessel.”

  “I’ll go,” Mr. Bellows said. “I know the region. I’ll take Daisy as far as London and then catch a train for Brussels.”

  “We’ll go along to keep Moffy company and to fight for Becky—and England if need be,” Collie said with a quiver in his voice and so much love in his eyes that my own eyes stung.

  “For Becky and Britain!” Jinks and Bottom cheered. We all joined in the second time, even Raven, who whispered to me, “Who’s Becky?”

  “I’ll explain later,” I whispered back. “We’d better go.”

  As I turned to say good-bye to my friends my vision blurred, and for a moment they all looked as faded and indistinct as the figures in a tapestry. Mr. Bellows looked like a knight, Daisy a medieval lady, and Collie, Jinks, and Bottom like brave squires. I rubbed my eyes, and instead of this bringing my friends into focus, the faded tapestries behind them sprung into vivid life and I saw that we were all there in the tapestry as if we had always been part of the fabric of this story. I blinked my eyes and the figures in the tapestry faded again into the shadows. Perhaps it had been my imagination. But as I said my farewells to my friends and Raven and I flew out of the skylight, I had the uneasy feeling that the future had already been woven on some great loom, and our attempts to change it would be as fruitless as unraveling time itself.

  I caught up to Raven as he sailed over the castle gatehouse. “The others might need our help getting past the shadows to the train station,” I shouted.

  “I don’t think so,” Raven replied. “Look.”

  He pointed down into the woods. At first I thought the woods were on fire. The ground was covered with smoke. But as I looked closer I saw that the smoke was made of shadowy creatures—rats and weasels and wolves—streaming through the forest. At first the sight made me even more afraid for my friends, but then I noticed that they were all moving away from the castle.

  “They’re retreating,” Raven said. “Drood has called them off because he knows he has the location of the third vessel within his grasp. He must feel pretty sure of Nathan.”

  I didn’t have anything to say to that. That Nathan had stolen the location of the third vessel and locked me inside the second vessel to get Helen back was a little better than thinking he had done it because he was possessed by the shadows. But the end result would be the same if we didn’t stop him. And watching the stream of shadow creatures did little to make me feel better. As they ran, their shapes blurred and blended into each other in a sickening boneless fashion. Rats grew wolves’ tails and weasels lengthened into snakes until they all became one clotted stream of bubbling ooze. I pictured this corrupt tide sweeping over all of England—and, when van Drood had broken the third vessel and they were joined by the hope-eaters, tainting all that was good in the world. How could Nathan have believed that giving van Drood the location of the vessel would save Helen, when it would condemn us all to living in a world of shadows?

  At the end of the woods the polluted stream broke up into winged creatures—bats and crows and giant moths.

  “We have to hurry,” Raven shouted to me. “We need to outfly them.”

  We flew faster, over the village of Duntuath and the Bells, over gorse-covered hills and heathery moors. It felt good to be moving, to be breathing the fresh air. When we reached the sea we banked right and followed the coast south. We passed over an island near the coast with the ruins of a castle atop it.

  “Lindisfarne.” Raven said the name softly but the wind carried it to me. “The Holy Island. It was once an outpost of your Order. When it was attacked by Vikings, the Order blamed the Jotuns from the north, but according to our Elders the Jotuns had been taken over by the shadows. It is still a sacred place watched over by the fay . . . look.”

  He swept down toward some rocks on the south side of the island. I made out slick shapes lolling in the sun. A dark head bobbed up and blinked up at us, then barked and beat its flippers against the water, and slithered up onto the rocks. As it moved its sleek black coat fell away and a woman emerged, naked and shining in the sun.

  “Selkies,” Raven said. “They patrol the coastline.”

  The woman waved at us, unembarrassed by her nakedness, only partly covered by her long green-black hair, and called out, “Good hunting, Darklings. I am Roanne of the Merfolk. My folk tell me that the shadows are amassing over Londinium. Be wary and go with the blessing of the Sidhe.”

  “Many thanks, Roanne. Tell your folk that the Order and the Darklings have joined together to defeat the Shadow Master, but if we fail there will be a great war. Your folk may want to find refuge in your underwater caves.”

  She shook her head, her long lustrous black hair undulating around her like seaweed. “This will not be the first time that our folk have fought in your wars. When the long ships came from the north and again in the great armada we swam out to keep our lands safe. We will do so again if need be.”

  Other men and women had emerged from their sealskins to stand beside Roanne. They looked so vulnerable in their bare skin that I shivered to think of them facing an invading army, but then they sent up a fierce shout that made my pinfeathers stand up and bristle and I was glad they were on our side.

  As we flew south we saw more seals along the rocks, who barked at us and waved their flippers. They were circling the island of England, preparing to protect it as they had against the Vikings and the Spanish Armada. Their valor cheered me, but it also frightened me to think how much worse this war would be if van Drood unleashed the shadows from the third vessel. We had to stop him!

  At the mouth of the Thames we flew inland toward London. I was excited to see the city for the first time, but as we grew closer a fog rose from the river, covering the marshes on either side of the Thames and obscuring everything in front of us. We were flying blind.

  “I’ve read about these London fogs in Mr. Dickens’s books,” I told Raven, “but I never knew they were this bad.”

  “It wasn’t like this when I left this morning. I don’t like flying where I can’t see, but we can navigate by sound.”

  “By sound? Do you mean like bats? I’m not sure I know how to do that.”

  “My father showed me how. Just follow me.”

  I flew close to Raven, our wingtips touching, and stayed quiet so as not to interfere with his sound navigation. He was tilting his head from side to side, the way I’d seen Blodeuwedd do when she was hunting, but he seemed uncertain and flew more slowly. I opened my Darkling ears and understood why. The fog distorted sounds, making some, like the foghorns on the ships we were flying over, swell to an unbearable pitch and others, like the cry of the seagulls, piercingly sharp. Listening to them all made me feel dizzy. It felt like my ears were filled with water. I tried shaking my head to clear them—and ran straight into a ship’s mast.

  Raven grabbed my arm before I could plummet to the ship’s deck and steered me through a thicket of masts. We must have been near the city for the river to be so crowded with ships, but I still could barely make out anything.

  “Let’s try getting off the river,” Raven said, his voice oddly distorted. “Maybe the fog won’t be so bad inland.”

  Only it was so bad that we flew straight into a stone wall. Raven, flying ahead of me, hit the wall first. This time I kept him from falling. I pulled him up to an open window and we both perched on the stone windowsill to catch our breath.

  “I’m beginning to think this isn’t a natural fog,” he gasped when he could talk again. “I think it was raised by—”

  “Drooood!”

  The harsh croak came from behind us. I whirled around to see who had spoken but except for a few crows the tower room was empty. One of them opened its beak and croaked again. “Drooood!” The other crows—there were five more—joined in.
“Droood! Droood! Drooood!”

  I slid my dagger out of its sheath and whispered, “Shadow crows,” to Raven.

  “No,” he said, staying my hand. “They’re ravens. They’re . . .” He looked around him at the tower we were perched in. “This is the Tower of London and these are its resident six ravens. They protect the tower. Ancient lore says that as long as there are six ravens in the Tower of London England will never—”

  “Fall!” One of the ravens cawed. It hopped up onto Raven’s knee and squawked again. “Fall! Drood! Fall!”

  “What’s it trying to say?” Although I’d learned a little about communicating with birds I wasn’t as good at it as Raven. “Can you speak to it?”

  In answer Raven let out his own raucous series of caws and croaks. The ravens ruffled their feathers excitedly and clamored around Raven, cawing and bobbing their heads up and down.

  “They say that Drood raised the fog to keep the Darklings grounded. His crows have tried to attack the tower and kill the ravens but they fought back.”

  “Would their deaths really mean the fall of Britain?”

  “They seem to think so and clearly Drood does, too. I’ve told them we’re here to defeat Drood. They say we shouldn’t fly, that other birds have warned them that the fog is dangerous to fly in and that their wild brethren have gone to their deaths slamming into buildings. The fog gets into their wings and weighs them down and spoils their navigational skills.”

  “Then how are we going to get to van Drood?” I asked.

  One of the ravens cawed in answer.

  “What did it say?”

  “He said we should take something called the tube.”

  The tube turned out to be an underground train system much like New York’s subways. We found a station not far from the tower and bought tickets. Raven seemed ill at ease taking the stairs below ground. It must have reminded him of the dungeons under the Hellgate mansion where he’d been kept a prisoner and tortured last year. I squeezed his hand and took over finding Belgrave Square on the map. While we were waiting for the train I studied the map and memorized the route to Victoria Station in case we needed it for tomorrow. I was hoping, though, that we’d be able to get Helen away from van Drood before that.

  The train was full of clerks and secretaries traveling home from work. Many were reading newspapers. ARCHDUKE ASSASSINATED IN SARAJEVO, the headlines read. It gave me a sick feeling in my stomach to read the same headline I’d seen in tattered clippings pinned to Mr. Bellows’s corkboard in the ruined Blythewood. I overheard a man and woman talking about the assassination. “No need to trouble yer little head over it, luv, that’s a far piece from here. A spot o’ bother in the Balkans don’t have nothink to do with us.”

  I wondered what these people would think in a little over a month’s time when their country was plunged into a war because of a spot o’ bother in the Balkans. How many of these young men would go off to war to die? How many of these women would lose husbands, lovers, brothers, and friends?

  Raven squeezed my hand, guessing where my thoughts were trending. “We’ll stop him,” he said. “And save Helen.”

  I squeezed his hand back and then noticed that we’d reached our stop. As we climbed up to the street in a crowd of young men and women I wondered for the first time what I would do if it came to a choice between saving Helen and averting war.

  20

  WE EMERGED FROM the tube station into a fog so thick that I couldn’t see my own hand in front of my face. “How are we ever going to find it in this?” I wailed, just as a stout gentleman with a walrus mustache and a bowler hat hove into view.

  “Excuse me, sir!” I shouted. “Can you tell us how to get to Belgrave Square?”

  The gentleman stopped with a huff and responded with a series of garbled noises that sounded as if he had swallowed a foghorn. Then he vanished into the fog.

  “Did you get any of that?” I asked Raven.

  “I’ve had more intelligible conversations with mockingbirds and they only repeat whatever you say—here, someone else is coming.”

  A black pram breached the fog like the prow of an iceboat cutting through a frozen river. It was steered by a diminutive woman in a black-and-white uniform and a white frilled cap.

  “Excuse me,” Raven said, bowing. “Can you tell us the way to Belgrave Square?”

  “I could tell you but it wouldn’t do you a bit of good in this pea soup,” the tiny woman replied. Looking at her closer I saw she couldn’t have been much older than me. “It ain’t natural, I tells the mistress this morning, and not ’ealthy for Baby’s lungs, but she would ’ave me take ’im out for his exercise as if it’s ’im what’s pushing me around the block.” She barked a short laugh. “But if you want to get to Belgrave Square without foundering in the fog you’d best follow me. But be sharp about it, I don’t have the time to lollygag all morning.”

  Raven and I exchanged a look and then jumped to keep up with the baby nurse, who, despite her short stature, was walking at a brisk clip. “How long has it been like this?” he asked.

  “The fog came up this morning before first light. Cook says it rolls in from the river, but I was up giving young sir ’ere his four a.m. and I saw it coming up from across the square—from that ’ouse with all them strange goings-on.”

  Raven and I looked at each other over the nurse’s head. “Is it the house where the American gentleman is staying?”

  “Oi, he’s not a gentleman if you ask me, though no one ever asks Lizzie what she thinks. I seen all manner of unsavory types coming and going from there at all hours. I’m awake on account of young sir ’ere, so I sees it all. There’s men that come to that ’ouse that ’ardly seem like men at all. Shadowy types, if you knows what I mean.”

  “Yes,” Raven said, sliding his eyes toward me. “I think we do.”

  “Have you noticed a young American girl staying there?” I asked.

  “Pretty blonde thing?” she asked.

  “Yes. Helen, her name’s Helen van Beek and she’s my friend.”

  “Oi, I’m glad to know she’s got one. Poor lamb looks like she’s being led to slaughter. Every day at four o’clock she takes a turn around the park like clockwork—like she’s a piece of clockwork. ’Er eyes, what you can see of them through the veil she always wears, glazed over like she’s walking in ’er sleep, that ’orrible mother of ’ers clinging on to ’er arm as if afraid she might bolt. I ’ope you’re ’ere to talk some sense into ’er.”

  “I am!” I said. “Four o’clock, you say?” I took out my repeater and flipped open the cover to see the time. The figures hammered out a tune I’d never heard before, ringing the four o’clock hour.

  “Well ain’t that somethink,” Lizzie said, peering over the pram at my watch. “That’s the tune your friend ’ums all the time. Is it a favorite song between you two? Somethink you sang at school mayhaps?”

  “Something like that,” I said, warily eyeing the row of iron spikes emerging from the fog.

  “There’s the park,” Lizzie said. “Your friend will be inside by now. I ’ope she’ll wake up a bit when she sees you. Ta-ta, now, try not to get lost in the fog.” Lizzie waved at us and hurried past the entrance to the park. Within seconds she was swallowed up as if she had never existed, although I could still hear her remonstrating with “young sir” not to toss his pacifier on the ground.

  “That’s not an old school song,” Raven said when Lizzie had gone. “Is it?”

  “No,” I said. “I’ve never heard it before. It must be part of van Drood’s mesmerism spell, which means I won’t be able to use the repeater to demesmerize Helen. Oh, I do wish Mr. Omar was here.”

  As if summoned by his name, the tall Hindu appeared out of the fog. His white turban and tunic blended so well with the fog that it was as if his head were floating bodiless. As eerie as the sight was I was overjoyed to see
him. “Oh, Mr. Omar! Have you seen Helen yet?”

  “No, but we have observed that she always walks in the park at this hour and have come to have a look at her.”

  “Do you think you can free her of van Drood’s spell?”

  “If he can’t, no one can.” I jumped at the voice and looked down to see Kid Marvel.

  “Let us hope that is not true,” Omar said. “I have no way of knowing if Helen’s spell will yield to my influence until I see her. I do not like this fog. It befuddles the head and saps the spirit, it—”

  “Messes up my ears,” another voice announced. Marlin appeared out of the fog, clad in a long waxed duster, water dripping off his shoulders and the brim of his hat.

  “Have you been swimming in the Thames?” Raven asked.

  “Might as well. I’ve been tracking the fog since dawn. It started from van Drood’s house—”

  “Just as Lizzie said,” I said to Raven.

  “—then swept counterclockwise around the city making stops at the House of Lords and Number Ten Downing Street.”

  “Ah,” Omar said. “Van Drood is using the fog to infiltrate centers of power, lulling government officials into a false complacency just when they should be most alert to the threat of war.”

  “The fog makes you want to lie down and give up,” Marlin said, his face grimmer than I’d ever seen it. I remembered what Raven had said about Marlin not being the carefree clown he appeared to be and how he’d been disappointed in love once before. I wondered what the fog had been whispering into his ears this morning—apparently nothing good.

  “I found myself thinking of hanging it all up and flying home to Ravencliffe, but then I remembered . . .” He paused and held out his hand. “Here she comes.”

  A veiled woman dressed head to toe in black stepped out of the fog so silently that even my Darkling ears had failed to hear her approach, but clearly Marlin was more acutely attuned to her movements. I thought it must be an older woman, but then I caught the flash of blue eyes beneath the veil and recognized my friend.