The Harp and the Ravenvine

by Ted Sanders

  Derek leaned down to the dog, his face full of consternation. He held up his hand.

  “Four fingers,” April said.

  Through Baron, she saw Derek’s surprise. He glanced over in her direction—her actual direction—then turned his back to her and bent down again. This time he made a circle with his left hand and brought it to his right eye, staring hard into Baron’s face.

  April felt a little catch in her throat. “The oath,” she tried to say, but even Baron could hardly hear her. With effort, she found her voice. “The oath. You’re doing the orphans’ oath. And I swear I’m telling you the truth this time.”

  Derek dropped his hand. He looked back once more at the shadows where April was hidden, then up at the porch and the house. “You’ve got me on camera or something. You must. Why are you doing this?”

  April practically boiled with frustration. “There’s no camera. This is real.”

  “Oh, yeah? Then prove it.”

  Gritting her teeth, April opened herself more fully to the vine, to the torrent of information pouring from the dog. He was content, happy for the attention he was getting, but confused about why April was so far away. With his ears, she could hear a complicated blanket of sounds—far-off cars and Uncle Harrison’s air conditioner and the steady buh-thump, buh-thump of Derek’s pulse. It occurred to her that Derek was much more unsettled than he was letting on.

  She could discern the aftertaste of dog food in Baron’s mouth, earthy and oddly spicy. She could feel the grass beneath his rough paws. But above all, she was awash in that ocean of smells, rich and overpowering and for the most part unidentifiable, like colors that had no names. A few of the scents were recognizable, but even these took shapes she could never have imagined. She could smell the night trees, and somehow she knew that morning trees had a different scent than this, and that morning trees in June were different yet again from morning trees in September. She could detect smoke from some distant fire, acrid and chemical, and realized she could even tell what direction it came from, as if the dog were smelling in stereo. There was also a deeply pungent odor that was very distracting, and vaguely unpleasant, drifting in from the woods to the north. It took April a moment to realize that it was the smell of something dead, and that to Baron the stench wasn’t unpleasant at all—just another rich note in this omnipresent swarm of odors.

  As she struggled to make sense of it all, she slowly became aware of an extra dimension Baron’s nose opened up—specifically, the dimension of time. She grasped that this dead thing, for example, was nothing new to Baron; he’d been smelling it for days or weeks, tuned in to the evolving states of decay. He could smell April’s recent passage through the grass, fading slowly from house to tree in the direction she had walked. Because of his sense of smell, Baron wasn’t locked into the here and now . . . almost like Horace. And of course—sights and sounds disappeared at once, but smells lingered. Every object in Baron’s world, April realized, oozed with history, telling a story.

  And that included Derek.

  April stepped out from behind the tree. “Did you know a dog’s sense of smell is tens of thousands of times stronger than ours?” she said. “If you translated that into sight, it would mean that whatever humans could see from three hundred feet away, dogs could see from eight hundred miles away. From here to New York City.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  April closed her eyes and started walking toward him, homing in on First Baron’s location like a beacon. “You haven’t showered since yesterday,” she said firmly. “And when you did, you used my strawberry shampoo.” She watched herself through Baron’s eyes, tall and willowy and gray. The porchlight threw the dog’s and Derek’s shadows across the lawn at her feet. “You ate something with peanuts today. And you were around people who were smoking cigarettes, but you didn’t smoke one yourself.”

  “None of that is news,” Derek said unsteadily. “I have peanut butter sandwiches a couple of times a week. Half the guys I work with smoke.” He hesitated and then said, “And I’m out of shampoo.”

  April dug deeper, hardly listening to him, coming closer still. She caught new smells, and identified them. Blood. Plastic. She opened her eyes. “You cut yourself somewhere,” she said, gesturing along her left side. “You had a Band-Aid on, but I think it’s gone now. You didn’t put any medicine on it.”

  Derek glanced down at his left elbow, silent.

  “You were out with a girl. Last night, I think.” April focused hard, trying to separate and translate the scents that were thick in Baron’s mind. Butter and salt. Flowers and fruit. “You went to the movies. You had popcorn. The girl was wearing perfume or lotion or something . . . it smells like peaches. She has a cat—no, not a cat.” April stopped just in front of Derek and the dog, trying to ignore her own powerful scent in Baron’s nostrils, concentrating instead on this foreign animal odor. Musk and wildness. Meat and mischief. At last she thought she had it. “A ferret? You’re dating a ferret owner?”

  Derek slowly sank to the ground, his eyes ablaze with confusion. “How did you . . . ? And anyway we’re not dating, we’re just—”

  “Friends, I know. But . . .” Just then Baron sniffed amiably at Derek’s face, and the peachy scent April had been catching blossomed wondrously, unmistakably. “She kissed you,” April said, and pointed to her right cheek, just below the corner of her eye. “Right here.”

  Derek reached for the same spot on his own face, his mouth open in amazement. “No one saw that,” he murmured.

  April cleared Baron’s thoughts from her mind and sat down in the grass beside them. A moth fluttered by unseen overhead, headed for the bright beacon of the porchlight, where a mindless swarm of insects already droned dizzily. Baron lay down and put his head in her lap, exhaling noisily, his jowls flapping.

  “This is real,” Derek said.

  “Yes.” April watched her brother, knowing she’d done enough.

  After a few minutes Derek spoke again, softly. “Tell me,” he said.

  So she told him. She held nothing back—or at least, almost nothing. She told him about Isabel and Joshua and the daktan, about Morla and the Riven, about Horace and Chloe and Mr. Meister. And Arthur, of course. She gave him a vague account of the vine being repaired, so caught up in her story that before she knew what she was doing she mentioned Brian and Tunraden. These were secrets she knew she shouldn’t share, even with Derek. From inside the house, the grandfather clock suddenly began to chime, as if to warn her off. April ended her story awkwardly. “Anyway, that’s what happened,” she said lamely. “And now here I am.” She counted the rest of the clock’s chimes as they sounded. It was eleven o’clock.

  Derek took a deep breath and let it out, but didn’t speak. He watched the night sky. They sat there for a few minutes, April knowing she had to let him absorb everything. She’d had days to absorb it—weeks, really. He’d had scarcely half an hour.

  Suddenly, a jolt of alarm shot through the vine. Baron sat up straight, ears perked, staring out into the dark yard. A thin, whining growl leaked out of him, and his nose pulled at the air, twitching. April opened herself up to the dog’s senses. Her hand fell involuntarily onto the raven’s eye in her pocket.

  “What is it, boy?” Derek asked lightly, clearly unconcerned.

  A stinging scent. A memory of a bad shadow in the woods. Anger. Fear. Foulness. That cruel stench, sulfurous and vile, filling April’s head—brimstone. It was faint and far away, even for Baron, but unmistakable.

  She rocketed to her feet. “Gabriel,” she called, and then, louder: “Gabriel!”

  Derek stood. “What are you doing? Who’s Gabriel?”

  Then the sound of footsteps, sprinting across the yard. Baron’s protective rage exploded. The dog lunged and barked ferociously, powerful motors churning in April’s legs and chest. Derek took a step forward as he spotted Gabriel running toward them. “Whoa, whoa!” he called. “Who the hell are you?”

  “It’s okay,
” April said, to dog and brother alike. She grabbed Baron by the collar, feeling the worn leather digging into her own throat. “It’s okay—he’s a friend,” she said, quieting the dog and reassuring her brother.

  Gabriel came to a stop twenty feet away. He held the staff like a weapon. “What is it?” he said.

  “Brimstone.”

  Gabriel lifted his chin and sniffed the air. “I don’t smell it.”

  “I do,” she said. “The dog does. But we have the raven’s eye. Shouldn’t we be—”

  “Check it.”

  April yanked the still-warm stone from her pocket, holding it up in the light. No longer solid black, the raven’s eye was now clear around the outer edges, with a spiky cloud of violet in the center. The cloud pulsed faintly, contracting, almost seeming to shrink as she watched.

  “What’s going on, Pill?” Derek insisted. “What is that thing?”

  “Well, I’m no expert,” she said, “but I’m pretty sure it’s bad news.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  A New Journey

  MR. MEISTER SAT BACK IN HIS CHAIR, HIS LEFT EYE AS BIG AS A silver dollar. Horace didn’t blame him for staring. In fact, everyone—Brian, Neptune, Mrs. Hapsteade, Horace himself—had been staring at Chloe as she told her astonishing story. They were packed into Mr. Meister’s office, listening to every incredible detail about what had just happened. The raven’s eye. Mordin. The pier. The Auditor. Isabel. Even Joshua, who had witnessed part of it and was with them now, listened with wide, fearful eyes, particularly to what Chloe revealed in the end.

  April and Gabriel were apparently in danger.

  Horace could hardly believe it. For the first hour after Chloe had left his house, taking the raven’s eye with her, he’d fretted. His mother too. They’d stumbled through a bad game of chess in which neither one of them was able to focus. But then they’d both relaxed, starting a second game. Ten moves in, however, Chloe had returned. She’d stalked right through the bedroom door without notice, looking grim and smelling of brimstone. She didn’t say a word—she didn’t have to. Obviously something had gone terribly wrong. Horace followed her down to the waiting car, her parents and Joshua still inside. There was no sign of the raven’s eye.

  The ride back to the academy had passed in painful near-silence. Horace itched to know what was going on, but Chloe had refused to say, insisting she would only tell the story once. She had uttered just two words on the way downtown, when Isabel had twice tried to talk to her, pleading. Chloe interrupted her both times, adamantly: “No.”

  Mrs. Hapsteade had been waiting for them in the entryway of the Mazzoleni Academy, somehow anticipating their arrival. “Go upstairs,” Chloe had ordered her parents. “Stay there.”

  But Mrs. Hapsteade, looking confused and concerned, had pulled Chloe’s parents aside. Horace only heard one scrap of the murmured conversation that followed, when Isabel whispered earnestly, “It’s all my fault.” She’d then retreated to the upstairs dormitory, her husband in tow.

  Now down in the Great Burrow, her story told, Chloe was sulkily avoiding everyone’s eye. “Anyway,” she said. “Here we are again, having an emergency meeting because of one of my parents. It’s turning into a super-fun tradition for me.”

  Mr. Meister’s chair croaked alarmingly as the old man leaned as far back as it would go. For a long moment he seemed to contemplate Isabel’s wicker harp and the spitestone that sat beside it, the little cyclops owl. But then his gaze shifted even higher, straight up through the ceiling of his office—as if he could see up through hundreds of feet of wood and stone and concrete to the Mazzoleni Academy, where Isabel was. Horace couldn’t help but wonder if he was thinking back across the years to what he’d done to Isabel, and Horace’s mother. Even though Horace’s mother didn’t seem to be harboring any grudges, still Horace found himself hoping the old man felt responsible for what was happening now. Guilty.

  When at last Mr. Meister spoke, he seemed to be talking to himself. His voice was almost inaudible. “Her powers are unique, yes,” he murmured. “Quite astounding. But even so, I cannot—” Suddenly he stopped as if something had occurred to him and sat up abruptly. “No more talk. Our friends are in danger, and we must get to them as quickly as we can. Chloe, when did your encounter with the Auditor end?”

  “A little over an hour ago, I guess. We got here as fast as we could.”

  “An hour! What is the time, please, Horace?”

  “Ten forty-five.”

  “With haste, the Riven could reach April’s house as early as eleven o’clock. Meanwhile, we could not hope to arrive until nearly midnight—even if Beck were here to drive us. And I’m afraid we have no other means of travel that would get us to April and Gabriel in time.” He sank into thought, his brow knitted once again.

  Horace shrank into his seat. But something in the words Mr. Meister had just spoken ignited a spark of memory in him. “Other means of travel . . .”

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Last night we were talking about falkrete circles, and April said she thought there was one by her house.”

  Mr. Meister shook his head dubiously. “Very few cloisters remain that far outside the city.”

  “Well, from what April said, it sounds like the cloister is gone,” Horace said. “But the stones are still there—some of them, anyway.”

  Neptune was already drifting overhead. She grabbed the rolled-up parchment Mr. Meister had been examining the other day and handed it down. “Check the map,” she said.

  Mrs. Hapsteade, also alert now, took the scroll and unrolled it across Mr. Meister’s desk. Joshua pushed through the others to get a closer look at it. Two feet wide and four feet high, the wrinkled parchment was covered in a patchwork jumble of colorful circles connected by a dizzying network of lines. It looked more like a diagram than a map. But then Horace noticed the faint outlines of streets and waterways—and the lakeshore itself—beneath the array of circles. And now he saw that each circle was a ring of crudely drawn, distinctive shapes, and that within each ring was a small bird. Each was labeled with a word in a flowing script he couldn’t quite decipher. The map was covered in notes and scribbles and additions. Most of the circles were slashed through with a red X.

  “Cloisters,” Horace said. “Falkrete circles.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Meister said. “What’s left of them. If there truly is a cloister near April’s house, it should be on the map.”

  Joshua stretched onto his toes and stabbed a finger at the top left corner of the map. “April lives right here,” he said firmly. His fingertip touched the edge of a falkrete circle. The bird there was a jay—blue, but with a black head and a taller crest. “I saw a rock that looked like this bird,” said Joshua. “And there were other rocks, too, like part of a circle—April was jumping on them.”

  But no sooner had Horace’s hopes risen than they fell again. “There’s a red X through the circle, though,” he said. “That seems bad.”

  “Not always,” Neptune replied. “Sometimes even after the cloister is gone, the falkrete stones do still work.”

  “We must try,” Mr. Meister said. “Track it back, please. Find the route, and we will go.”

  Neptune and Mrs. Hapsteade bent over the map. They were clearly the experts. Pointing and tracing lines from the black-headed jay in toward the city, they recited the strange names of the cloisters like a chant. Each time they reached a dead end, they started over. At last Neptune raised her hand.

  “Got it. There’s a way—assuming the final stone is working, of course. Tharwen, it’s called. And the third stop is a question mark.”

  “How many jumps in total?” Mr. Meister asked.

  “Six.”

  “Six!” The old man’s eyebrows leapt high over his glasses, but then he regained his composure. “No matter. It will have to be done.”

  “Why so many jumps?” Horace asked. “Why can’t we just go straight there?”

  “Leaps between falkrete stones are limited to a dozen m
iles or so. If the stones are any farther apart than that, the trip becomes . . .” He shrugged, as if he did not want—or need—to explain more.

  Brian nudged Horace’s elbow. He pantomimed his brain exploding, and then let his eyes roll back in his head. The shirt he was wearing said BEWARE OF DANGER.

  “Yes, thank you, Brian,” said Mr. Meister. “Your subtlety is most appreciated.” He examined the map for a moment. “Very well. Let us waste no more time. Have we committed the route to memory?”

  “Yes,” Neptune said.

  Mr. Meister glanced at Mrs. Hapsteade. The woman shook her head. “I’m staying here. With Joshua and Brian.”

  Mr. Meister was clearly taken aback. He studied Mrs. Hapsteade’s face and then said, almost scoldingly, “There is no cause for that, Dorothy. The spitestone still burns. The Warren is quite safe.”

  Horace and Chloe exchanged a look. They were talking about Isabel.

  “So you say, and so it might be,” Mrs. Hapsteade replied breezily. “But your opinion is your own, Henry, just as mine is mine. This won’t be the last time we go our separate ways.”

  “We may need your help at April’s house tonight.”

  “Let Horace take the phalanx.”

  “Horace has other duties.”

  “What, like dodging about with the breach set to mere seconds again?”

  “Wait, you did what?” Brian said, staring at Horace.

  Nobody answered him. The two adults stood in silence, locked in a stubborn, unspoken battle.

  “Very well,” Mr. Meister said at last. “Neptune, Horace, Chloe—meet me at the home cloister in ten minutes. As for the rest, may yours be light.” It was hard to tell whether his eyes lingered on Mrs. Hapsteade a little longer than the others with these words. And then he swept from the room.

  “Trouble in paradise, I guess,” said Chloe.

  Mrs. Hapsteade snorted. “If this is paradise, where’s my apple? Now let’s go—time for you three to get moving.”