Hawthorn (29 page)

She shook her head. “I'm sorry, Ava. He looked . . .
haunted.
Like he was being followed.”

“And we didn't have time to worry about him,” Professor Jager said. “I had a lot of loose ends to tie up at the embassy. As it was we were barely able to get here ahead of the German army.”

“Are they that close?” Mr. Bellows asked. “How many days' march?”

Professor Jager shook his head sadly. “I'm afraid it's not a matter of days, my friend. The German army is less than a day's march away. And they're not marching alone.”

THAT NIGHT RAVEN
and I flew a reconnaissance mission. We didn't have to go far to see the evidence of the army's passing. We flew over a terrain of sacked houses and blackened villages. Broken glass littered the empty streets. The roads were jammed with carts and wagons, and refugees huddled together in the ditches. We flew over abandoned farms where unmilked cows lowed piteously in the barns and the hay fields lay unmown in the moonlight. We flew over a village where the townspeople wept in the square over a pile of bodies. We landed there and asked an old man what had happened.

“When the Germans arrived they were angry because the telephone wires had been cut. They rounded up all the villagers and then they shot every tenth man. My grandson . . .” The man dissolved into tears. Raven put his hand on the man's shoulder. I'd seen him comfort the dying by touching them, but instead of murmuring soft words he said fiercely, “They will pay for this.”

He spread his wings, not caring if the old man saw. As he took flight I heard the old man whisper, “
L'ange de vengeance!
” The Angel of Vengeance. Was that what we were to become?

I caught up to Raven over the Meuse. “Can't we stop this?” I cried. “Can't we help these people?”

“How?” he asked, pointing toward a black mass along the riverbank. “How do we fight this many?”

I looked and saw that the mass, which stretched for miles, was a German encampment. There must have been thousands of men camped in orderly rows of tents, infantrymen in gray-green uniforms shining their boots and sharpening their bayonets, cavalrymen tending their horses, and grim, silent soldiers guarding the huge siege guns. Over all of them hovered a black cloud. At first I thought it must be the smoke from their cooking fires, but then I saw the smoke writhe and twist into the shapes of bats and crows and grimacing faces. The shadows ebbed and flowed over the troops like an airborne river.

“
Tenebrae
,” Raven whispered. “They're riding with the army, feeding off them.”

A current swept over a troop, twining around the men. One of the officers stood up with a tankard in his hand and burst into song. “
Heil dir im Siegerkranz
,” he sang. I didn't know the German but the words were sung to the tune “My Country, 'Tis of Thee” so I imagined it had much the same sentiments. And as I listened with my Darkling ears I found that I
did
understand some scraps of conversation.

“. . . the Belgians are delaying us by their senseless guerrilla warfare . . .”

“. . . if they didn't fight we wouldn't have to kill them . . .”

“. . . our orders are to put down such treacherous attacks . . .”

“. . . they must be punished . . .”

“. . . any village harboring saboteurs must be burnt to the ground . . . the resistance is centered in Bouillon . . . we must root it out and destroy the resistance!”

“Did you hear that?” I asked Raven. “They're going to attack Bouillon. They'll kill the villagers. We have to warn them!”

Raven nodded grimly. But instead of turning to fly back he landed next to one of the siege guns, using his wings to cloak him from the view of the guards. I followed him as he walked all around it, staring at the black oily metal. I'd seen him looking at a broken watch with this concentration, but his face had none of the patience he had when he was fixing something. Instead his face was filled with a murderous rage. “If only we could jam it somehow . . .” But when he reached out to touch the muzzle a black shape oozed out of its gaping mouth and struck at his hand like a snake. I pulled him away before the thing could touch him, but his cry of alarm alerted the guard.

“Who goes there?” he barked in German, swinging his bayonet in our direction. I gripped Raven's arm to keep him still. Suddenly our feathers seemed like frail protection against the cold blue steel of the soldier's bayonet. Worse, the snake shadow—all six feet of it—had slithered out of the gun and was coming toward us. If we took flight the soldier would hear us and shoot. But if we stayed still the snake shadow would strike us. When it was only a few inches away it rose like a cobra, its flat head hovering a few inches from our faces, its red eyes staring at us. It opened its fanged mouth and van Drood's voice came out.

“Go back to playing knights and castles, children, and see how your walls hold up to my pretty guns.”

The snake spit at us and then lowered back to the ground
and slithered back to the gun—but instead of crawling back into the gun it coiled its way up the guard and poured itself down the poor soldier's mouth. The sight of it swelling in the man's gullet made me feel sick, but when the man's eyes turned red and fixed on us, Raven grabbed my arm and yanked me into the air.

A bullet whizzed past my ear as we climbed into the sky. As we flew over the camp, knowing now that any shadow-ridden soldier could see us and shoot us down, I could hear the same words traveling from soldier to soldier: “Tomorrow Bouillon!”

We got back to Bouillon at dawn. The village looked peaceful, nestled in its loop of the river in the shadow of the castle. For how many centuries had it clung here while the knights of the castle rode off to the crusades and defended the land against foreign invaders? Was it possible that now an invader was coming who would destroy all this?

“We have to get the villagers inside the castle,” I said as we landed in the courtyard. “I'll get Manon to help me.”

“And I'll talk to Bellows and Gus about fortifying our walls against those guns.”

I found Manon dozing in a chair between Helen's and Louisa's beds, her lacework fallen to the floor. I picked it up as I leaned over her, and even though I was frantic with the news I carried and haunted by the terrible things I'd seen in the night, I was arrested by the beauty of what I held in my hand. It was a veil stitched in an intricate pattern of birds and flowers and
quaint rustic figures of shepherds and shepherdesses. How Helen would love it!

But Helen slumbered on, tossing fitfully. “I'm tired of playing hide-and-seek, Nathan. Come out now. Olly olly oxen free!”

I laid the veil in Manon's lap and shook her shoulder to wake her. Her nut-brown eyes stared at me a moment as if she didn't recognize me, but she came instantly awake when I told her the Germans were on the way.

“They'll punish the villagers for harboring us,” I told her. “We have to move them into the castle. Do you think you can convince them to come?”

“I am not so sure they will listen to me,” she said, stretching her arms over her head. She looked down at the lace in her lap as if she didn't recognize her own work and then shook her head like she was trying to clear the cobwebs out. “But
Grand-mère
will make them see sense.”

I left Manon on the drawbridge and went back to the great hall to see what progress was being made to fortify the castle. Mr. Bellows was seated at the war table with Gus, Dolores, Professor Jager, and a group of Darklings who had come in the night. I recognized Raven's parents, Wren and Merlinus, and when he looked up I was overjoyed to recognize my father, Falco. He stood up and embraced me, mantling me with his wings that rustled with a sound like paper. There
were
papers in his wings. My father had saved the book
A Darkness of Angels
from van Drood by stitching the pages into his wings. The pages were so integrated now into my father's wings that they could not be removed.

“I thought Master Quill was still transcribing you,” I said.

“I couldn't sit in a library while my daughter and her friends fought a war,” he said. “So I flew over with a flock of others who didn't want to sit on the sidelines, including these two.” He pointed to the two other Darklings at the table and I recognized Buzz and Heron. Sirena had also come to join them from London.

“Yeah,” Buzz said, “I wasn't going to let Raven and Marlin and Gus have all the fun.”

“It's not fun, you idiot,” Sirena scolded. “But this is where we should be. If van Drood's shadow army takes Bouillon and releases the vessel, we'll all be finished. We're here to fight.”

“The Darklings will provide our aerial defense,” Mr. Bellows said, pointing to the plan of the castle. “Regiments of six will be stationed on each tower and three regiments will guard the curtain wall. They each will be armed with an incendiary device to drop on the enemy if they get too close to the wall.”

“Gus has made the bombs,” Dolores said proudly. She pointed to a squat wine bottle wrapped in a straw basket with a wax candle sticking out of the top. I'd seen bottles like these, dripping with wax, standing on checked tablecloths in restaurants in Little Italy back home.

“It's really a very simple device,” Gus said modestly. “I found the bottles in the castle cellars, dumped out the wine”—Buzz made a disgusted noise—“filled them with gunpowder and stuck a candle in. You just have to light the candle, drop it on your target and . . .
kaboom!
”

I noticed that everyone was using words like “the enemy” and “your target” instead of “man” or even “soldier.” These were flesh-and-blood men we would be killing. Even if they
were possessed by the shadows, they had once been men. “I wish there was another way,” I said.

“There isn't,” Sirena said. “If we don't stop them, millions will die. You know that better than anyone.”

“The best we can hope for is a swift offensive that will discourage the rest of the soldiers and make them back down,” Mr. Bellows said. “If they don't fight, we won't have to kill them.”

The rest of the group echoed his words. There wasn't anything I could say to argue with them, but as I turned to go I couldn't help remembering that I'd overheard the German soldiers saying much the same thing last night about the Belgians.

In the courtyard I found Miss Sharp and Miss Corey passing out quivers of arrows to the new recruits. “These are special arrows,” Miss Corey said, holding up an arrow fletched with bright green and purple feathers. “The lumignon have generously provided their own feathers for the fletching and pixie dust for the arrowheads. Be very careful when nocking your arrow not to cut yourself. Once you've nocked your arrow, have your partner”—she smiled at Miss Sharp, who held up a long thin piece of wood—“light the fletch.” Miss Sharp dipped the taper in a fire-filled brazier and applied it to the lumignon feathers. They instantly burst into flame.

“You must not hesitate at this moment. Take aim and . . .” She shot her arrow at a straw stuffed target on the far side of the courtyard. “Fire!” Miss Corey cried gleefully as the target exploded. “As you can see, the pixie dust is highly flammable.”

“And particularly deadly to the
tenebrae
,” Miss Sharp added. “We learned that from you, Ava, when you defeated the shadow attack on Blythewood.”

I remembered that I'd also burned off all my hair.

“I'd suggest the archers tie their hair back. Even you,” I told Marlin, whose tawny red-gold mane was flying around his face.

I walked past Kid Marvel drilling a troop of lutins in an “underground offensive” and Omar discussing strategy with a Wieven. I walked along the curtain wall and stood in a sheltered loop pierced with a slit to shoot arrows through. Did we really think we were going to defeat the German army with quaint medieval weaponry like arrows—even coated with pixie dust? The idea seemed as outdated as the French army's red
pantalons
. I had a sinking feeling that this was going to be a different kind of war.

My spirits revived when I spied a white-haired woman leading a troop of villagers up to the castle. She was carrying the Belgian flag and singing “The Brabançonne.” If I hadn't known she was Manon's eighty-year-old
grand-mère
I would have thought she was a girl of twenty who just happened to have white hair. The villagers—mostly old men and women too stubborn to leave the village and boys too young to join the Belgian army—carried pitchforks and ancient-looking muskets. Here we thought we were offering them shelter and they'd come ready to fight. Their élan lifted my spirits . . . until I looked up and saw a dark haze filling the sky to the northeast. It looked like a storm cloud but I knew that it was the shadow-ridden army coming to destroy us.