Blythewood

by kindle@abovethetreeline. com

  “I only dream of nice things,” Helen insisted. “Of cotillions and dances, lace dresses and diamond earrings. I would never, ever dream of horrible slavering monsters!” She swatted angrily at a low-hanging branch and swore in a most unladylike fashion when it snapped back and hit her in the face.

  “You must keep up with the others,” admonished the Diana behind us, a stern-looking girl with spectacles and sharp chin whom I recognized as the girl who’d run by me chasing a falcon yesterday. “You’re already the last in the queue and I’m not allowed to linger behind.”

  “You needn’t take that tone with me, Charlotte. Everyone

  156 Blythewood

  knows the Falconraths are only chosen for the Dianas because they own the land that borders on the school.” “You’re a fine one to speak, Helen. The van Beeks are only tolerated here because of your mother’s friendship with Dame Beckwith.”

  “How dare you! My mother would never presume on India Beckwith. Why, I didn’t even want to come here. I begged Mother and Daddy to let me stay home, and Dame Beckwith herself came to implore me to come.”

  “Then why don’t you leave,” Charlotte Falconrath suggested, jutting out her sharp chin. “You were given a chance before the initiation. Why don’t you just slink off in the dark like the other cowards?”

  “Dame Beckwith said there was no shame attached to those who left,” Daisy cut in. Charlotte and Helen both turned to stare, as startled as I was to hear Daisy speak up. Charlotte recovered from her surprise first.

  “ That’s what we tell the girls who leave, but of course it’s not what we say amongst ourselves. You wouldn’t know that, not being one of our kind.”

  “Leave her out of this,” Helen growled. “Daisy has just as much right to be here as you or I do.”

  “Maybe, but what right does she have”—Charlotte’s eyes raked me with undisguised disdain—”after what her mother did?”

  The words were hardly out of her mouth before Helen was upon her, fists flying. Charlotte was so shocked at the attack that she automatically drew back her arms, releasing the arrow she’d been holding ready. It shot into the woods and hit something that yelped. We all looked at each other.

  “Now look what you made me do—” Charlotte began, but then her eyes widened with terror. Something was coming out of the woods toward us. Something big.

  “Draw another arrow!” I yelled at Charlotte, but she had already turned and fled, running toward the house—which is what we all should have done. But when I grabbed Daisy’s hand and pulled, she was frozen to the spot. Helen grabbed a stick from the ground and brandished it. I did the same and stood, prepared to meet the thing that was coming for us. From the noise it was making in the underbrush it seemed to be as large as a rhinoceros. It broke through the fog with a crash, fair hair flying, arms pinwheeling, spraying blood. Helen cocked back her stick to strike it, but I grabbed her arm.

  “It’s Nate!” I shouted, recognizing the pale, drawn face just before Helen struck him.

  “Nate?” Helen cried, falling to her knees beside him as he fell to the ground. He was clutching his shoulder, from which protruded Charlotte’s arrow. “What are you doing here?”

  “I followed you . . .” he gasped. “They told us about the fairies at Hawthorn, but I wanted to see it for myself. Mother forbade me—she said the initiation was only for girls—so I snuck out.”

  “But if you were outside the circle, why didn’t the goblins and sprites attack you?” I asked, appalled at the thought of being outside with those creatures—and then realizing that we were outside the circle with them now.

  “I climbed a tree and hid,” Nate said. “Besides, they didn’t look so fearsome until Mother provoked that fire thingum. And look—it was one of her amazons that mortally wounded me.”

  “Pshaw!” Helen clucked. “It’s only a scratch.” She pulled his shirt back to uncover the place where the arrow was lodged an inch into his skin. “I suppose I can pull it out.”

  “No!” Nathan screamed. “Are you daft? I’ll bleed to death!”

  “Well, then we’ll take you to your mother and she’ll see to it,” Helen said. “She was a nurse in the Second Boer War.”

  “But then she’ll know I was out in the woods and she’ll send me away again. No, I suppose you had better take it out, but let me brace myself—” Before he could finish, Daisy reached out her tiny hand and wrenched the arrow cleanly free of Nathan’s shoulder. Nathan screamed and grabbed his arm.

  “Well done!” I told Daisy. “Now let’s wrap his arm. Here.” I tore off the ruffled flounce at the bottom of my nightgown and handed it to Helen to wrap around Nathan’s arm. We each had to sacrifice a ruffle from our gowns to staunch the blood, but when we were done the bleeding had stopped and Nathan, although pale, was still conscious—and speaking.

  “Are you sure I don’t need a few more lengths of bandage?” he asked, ogling our bare ankles.

  Helen swatted him. “The only cloth I’m going to sacrifice for you is a gag for your mouth, Nathan Beckwith. Now if you can walk, we’d better be getting back to the house or we’ll be punished for breaking curfew.”

  “I think we have a worse problem.” Daisy’s voice, hardly louder than the creak of branches, made me look up from Nathan’s face to hers. She was staring into the woods behind my back, her eyes huge as a startled deer’s. The hair on the back of my neck rose and a cold chill crept down my spine. The bass bell was tolling inside my head and had been for several minutes, I realized, only I’d been too busy tending to Nathan to notice it. I turned, slowly.

  There were dozens of creatures: the rat-faced goblin men, the glowing lampsprites, and others we hadn’t seen before— hairy dwarfs with bulbous noses, green-scaled lizard men, goat-horned women—all creeping stealthily closer to us.

  “We’re surrounded,” Daisy whimpered. “What can we do?”

  What could we do? We had no weapons—no bell, or bow and arrow, or lantern fire. I saw one of the lizard men lick its lips with a long forked tongue, drool dripping off sharp fangs. It opened its mouth wide. I was sure it meant to lunge and bite us, but then it did something even more frightening. It spoke.

  “Hunn . . . gree!”

  “Did it just say it was hungry?” Daisy asked, wide-eyed.

  “Well I don’t think it’s asking us for tea!” Helen cried. “I believe it means to eat us.”

  “Not if I can help it,” Nathan growled, his good hand curling around a stick. “I’ll beat them back while you girls run.”

  “No,” I said, the word coming out of my mouth before I’d known I was going to speak. “We’ll stand together.” I found the stick I’d dropped and grasped it. I rose to my feet slowly and the others followed. I could hear Helen’s quick, shallow breaths and a soft whimper from Daisy and a creak of wood as Nathan shifted the stick in his hand. Back in the circle, while the rest of my classmates took their oaths, I’d felt like I was on the outside looking in, but now I felt like I belonged—maybe not to Blythewood, but to this little group of four. I clenched my arm and swung back the branch and braced myself for the attack.

  But it came not from the woods but from above. A great whoosh of wind and roar of wings crashed into the clearing like a black whirlwind descending from the clouds. The creature landed a few feet in front of us, its back to us, huge black wings beating the air. One of the goblins darted beneath its feet but the winged creature grabbed it and flung it against a tree, where it slid limply to the ground. The goblins, sprites, and other creatures scattered, evaporating into the fog as suddenly and stealthily as they had appeared. Then the winged creature turned to face us.

  I heard Helen and Daisy gasp. My mother had taken me to the Metropolitan Museum once and we’d seen a Greek sculpture of Adonis. This young man, dressed in only loose trousers, had the same beauty, the same fine white limbs and muscular chest—all the whiter against the ebony gloss of the enormous wings spread out behind him. His wings were the same color as his tumbling d
ark hair and bottomless black eyes—eyes I had seen before, on the day of the Triangle fire and nearly every night in my dreams since then.

  “You!” I cried, the word escaping from my lips. His lips parted, but before he could speak Nate ran at him with his stick raised. The dark-winged boy flexed one wing and swatted Nate away like a fly. Then he turned back to me, and his eyes locked on mine. He took a step forward. As his wings beat, the air stirred around me like warm water lapping against my skin. I should have felt afraid, but I didn’t. The bass bell was no longer ringing in my head. Instead the treble bell chimed sweetly as a crystal chandelier swaying in a breeze. He tilted his head, as though listening.

  He heard them. The dark-eyed boy could hear the bells inside my head. The thought filled me with joy. Because if someone else could hear the bells inside my head it meant I wasn’t crazy.

  But then the tinkling was replaced by a solemn knell, the leaden bells of Blythewood ringing midnight. The boy looked up, his white profile a cameo carved against the ebony of his wings. When he turned back his eyes were as fearful as when he’d seen the crows swooping down on us on the roof of the Triangle building. I felt the same tingle of electricity flowing between us as I had then. I took a step forward, my hand raised, but he flexed his wings and took off, the force of his wings’ draft knocking me backward as he rose into the night.

  Something fluttered down to earth in his wake. I knelt and picked it up. It was a long black feather, identical to the one I had found on the floor beside my mother on the day she died.

  The boy who had saved me from the fire, who haunted my dreams, was one of the Darklings Dame Beckwith had warned us about. And a Darkling had been with my mother when she died.

  14

  WE WERE ABLE to sneak back into the house because Nathan knew of a back door near the scullery that was never locked.

  “Won’t Charlotte have told them we were left behind?” I asked.

  “And get herself in trouble for abandoning us?” Helen scoffed. “Not her. The Falconraths are notorious cowards. One of her ancestors was executed for desertion in the Revolutionary War.”

  “My bet is that she told the others that you returned,” Nathan added. “Otherwise there’d already be a search party out looking for us.”

  “Won’t your mother know you were gone?” I asked him, unsettled by the idea that we all could have gone missing with no one the wiser.

  “Mother stays up all night in her study working. I doubt she’d notice if the castle burned down around her—and besides, my room is two floors below hers in the North Wing.” He shrugged and then winced at the pain in his shoulder.

  “But won’t she notice that you’ve been hurt?” I asked.

  “Not unless I fling myself between her and her books and drip blood over some priceless ancient manuscript. Honestly, I’ll be fine, but you three will get kitchen duty for a week if anyone catches you outside your room. You’d better hurry up.”

  Daisy plucked at my sleeve, anxious to go. Helen was watching Nate and me warily.

  “You’ve certainly become chummy with Nathan in a short time,” Helen remarked when we’d left him.

  “I’m worried about his injury. And not only that. He seems . . . haunted somehow.”

  Helen snorted. “Haunted by gambling debts and jealous husbands, perhaps. Don’t let Nathan fool you. That sensitive soul pose is just an act to make girls fall for him. Clearly it’s worked with you. You obviously have a crush on him.”

  “I do not—” I began, but Daisy, who was ahead of us on the stairs, stopped dead and wheeled around.

  “Are the two of you really arguing over a boy when we have just learned that the world is populated by fairies and monsters—which is definitely not what I was brought up to believe—and we are the ones supposed to protect people from them?”

  “Of course it’s a shock—” Helen began.

  “Did you really not know?” Daisy demanded. “Even with all the van Beek women who have gone here?”

  Helen shook her head. “I’d heard stories, but nothing like this.”

  “And you.” Daisy turned to me. “Your mother went here. She never told you?”

  “No,” I said. “Whenever she spoke of Blythewood it was with fondness and longing. I knew there were secrets she

  CAROL GOODMAN [ 165 wasn’t telling, but I thought they had to do with my father.” “Perhaps your father was killed by one of those monsters,”

  Helen suggested.

  “I’ll bet it was a Darkling,” Daisy said. “One of the creatures

  that Dame Beckwith told us were so beautiful they tricked the

  Order into believing they were good. You can see why.” Daisy’s

  voice grew faint. “The one we saw was beautiful.”

  “But deadly,” Helen said.

  “But he saved us!” I blurted out. I couldn’t tell them that it

  wasn’t the first time he had saved me. “I thought he was going to

  abduct one of us from the way he was staring.” Helen shivered

  and wrapped her arms around herself.

  “He was staring at Ava,” Daisy said. “It looked like he was

  going to grab her, but then the bells rang. That’s what saved us

  from him. Remember what Dame Beckwith said—the fairies

  can make themselves look beautiful to fool us. Who knows

  what that Darkling really looks like. He could be a monster.

  And it’s up to us to protect the world from his kind. I feel . . .”

  Daisy lifted a hand and placed it over her heart. She was shaking so hard she swayed on the steps. I reached out a hand to

  steady her, afraid that the shock had been too much for her and

  she was going to faint or have a convulsion of some kind, but

  when she spoke her voice was steady and strong as the toll of

  the bells in the tower. “I feel as if, for the first time in my life, I

  have found my purpose.”

  z o Z Only when I was in bed did I allow myself to think about what I had seen. Daisy and Helen likely assumed that my quiet while we got into bed came from the shock of “the revelation of the Rowan Circle (as, we would learn on the morrow, the Blythewood girls called the first night’s events). They couldn’t know it came from the shock of discovering that the boy who had saved me from the Triangle fire was a Darkling—the sworn enemy of the Order.

  But maybe he hadn’t been trying to save me. He’d shown up at the factory just before the man in the Inverness cape had. And then I’d seen him whispering in the man’s ear—to distract him, I’d thought at the time, but what if he’d really been working with the man in the cape? After all, I’d woken up in Bellevue after the fire. Mr. Greenfeder said he thought the boy had left me on the pavement, but maybe he was the one who had carried me to Bellevue—right into Dr. Pritchard’s and the caped man’s hands.

  Knowing what I now knew about the dark-winged boy and the other creatures that were part of our world, I wondered what other symptoms of my madness were real. Had smoke really poured from the mouth of the man in the Inverness cape? Had he followed me to my grandmother’s townhouse? What about the bells inside my head? Were they somehow connected to the Blythewood bells that scared away the boy?

  And then there was the black feather I’d found lying on the floor beside my mother’s body. Had a Darkling visited my mother just before she died? Or even killed her?

  My thoughts spinning in a dizzying cycle, I fell into an uneasy slumber . . . straight into the dark woods, where I was running, chased by slavering goblins and vicious firesprites. I heard their angry growls behind me, coming ever closer. I tripped on a root, fell to the ground, and felt their claws on my legs, their hot, fetid breath on my face.

  And then he was there, his great black wings beating away all the fearsome creatures, his arms wrapping around me, lifting me up. I looked up into his face: as always, a rim of fire from the setting sun haloing noble features stamped cl
ean as a coin. Then he turned his face and the line of fire spread in a network of veins, just as lightning had spread across the face of the firesprite. The flame crawled from his face down the fine white skin of his throat and across the carved sinews and muscles of his chest. It spread like cracks in an old China teacup when you pour hot water into it, only these cracks were made of fire and burned away flesh, changing him before my eyes from the beautiful boy of my dreams into a horrid monster.

  I lifted my hand to ward off the sight and saw something even more terrifying. The cracks had spread to me. My own skin was dissolving along with his.

  I woke, drenched in sweat, sheets tangled, to the sound of bells. I held my hand up to my face, terrified that I’d find those cracks in my skin. After last night who knew what was a dream and what was real? Morning sunlight limned my fingers with fire, but my flesh remained whole. Still, as I rose and dressed for the day I felt as if the cracks were there, just as in an old teacup that hides its flaws until hot water reveals them. Sooner or later they would show up for all the world to see.

  z o Z I discovered at breakfast that I wasn’t the only girl who had been visited by bad dreams. There were empty places at the tables in the dining hall. Passing Georgiana’s table I heard her say, “At least some of the chaff has been separated from the wheat. Notice that the girls who have left are not legacies. Breeding will out.”

  By my side, Daisy flinched. “I have half a mind to tell her what I think,” she muttered under her breath, but just then a girl at another table began screaming about “boggarts in the sugar bowl” and had to be escorted from the hall.

  “Irish,” Helen said with a sniff as we sat down at our table. “We had an Irish maid once who had to be dismissed because she said she’d heard a brownie in the chimney.”

  “Does it occur to you now,” Beatrice asked drily, “that she may have been correct?”

  “Just because there are real fairies in the world doesn’t mean we should credit every fool who believes in them,” Helen tartly replied, and then added, “You certainly look nonplussed. Did you know?”