Chantress (28 page)

“I’ve found the door, but the lock’s like the other one,” he said. “It won’t give way. You’re going to have to sing it open.”

I did not understand one word in ten. The fear was tearing me away again.

You are ours.

With steady fingers, he pressed a seedy, stringy pulp into my palm. Gripping my other hand, he used it to snag my necklace and lift it above my head.

No!
I buckled to my knees as the world became a boiling sea of sound. The voracious song of the hatchlings swirled around me, even louder and greedier than before.

But then I heard something else: the moonbriar song rising from the pulp in my hand and from the floor around me. Cool and sweet and clear, the song wove itself like a shield around me, as Nat clasped my hand in his. When I gave voice to the music, the ravens lost their hold on me. Instead, I fell into Nat’s mind, tumbling into it without effort, just as I had done on that long-ago day in Penebrygg’s attic.

But this time was different. This time Nat was inviting me in.

Through his eyes, I saw the sea: great blue-green waves rolling onto a golden shore, their low and steady rumble like the breathing of the earth itself.

I saw Norrie, ever loyal, standing before me, and behind her the friends I’d come to trust in London: Penebrygg and Nat himself.

And then, even more miraculous, I saw myself as Nat saw me: arguing with him by candlelight; facing the Invisible College; mastering song after song. Behind every image, I felt an
astonishing blend of emotions: desperation, frustration, admiration, respect, tenderness, desire. And weaving through them all, something more—a faith in me that went beyond anything I’d ever dreamed.

Nothing could have startled me more, or comforted me so deeply. Courage and strength streamed into me.

Still clasping Nat’s hand, I heard the magic of the Chamber door call out to me. In triumph I sang it open.

A cool blue light poured in, illuminating the part of the Pit nearest us. Nat had been right: There was a grille between us and the ravens. But I had been right too: Behind the iron rods were hundreds of Shadowgrim hatchlings, their savage mouths red as blood.

We slammed the door shut behind us, and the hatchlings vanished from sight.

As we pressed our backs to the door, catching our breath, I offered up a silent prayer of thankfulness. The heavy door, encased in iron, was so thick that I could not hear the Shadowgrim hatchlings through it.

But my thankfulness splintered into desolation as I slung the ruby’s chain back over my head. My mind cleared, and the truth of what I’d done came home to me. I had sung the moonbriar song. I had read Nat’s mind. I had worked Wild Magic.

How could I have been so careless?

Suddenly weary beyond bearing, I forced myself to look down at the ruby. The faint light revealed what I had sensed from the moment I’d put it back on. A crack now crossed the stone’s glinting surface.

Not a fatal flaw. Not this time. But there was a fragility to the whole stone, a trembling at its core, that frightened me.

“I shouldn’t have read your mind,” I said to Nat.

“No need to apologize,” he said, misunderstanding me. “Not when I’m the one who pulled you in. It was the only way I could think of to save you.”

To my surprise, he blushed—a reminder to me that whatever the mind-reading had cost me, Nat had paid a price too. The most private of persons, he had let me see straight into his soul. All he felt for me had been laid bare.

But that, at least, I could put right. I could tell him what he meant to me . . . .

“Nat,” I began. My weariness was abating; my strength returning.

Something to my left clicked and moved.

Nat pointed in alarm. “The clock!”

On the wall, a golden disk shimmered in the hazy blue light. Ringed with stars and planets and signs of the zodiac, its stark black hands marked the time.

Nat knew what it meant. “Seven minutes till sunset!”

“So close?” I gasped.

“Yes. We’ll have to move fast. Where is the grimoire?”

There was no more time to reflect on the immensity of what had passed between us, or on the price we both had paid for it. Instead, I scanned the long room. Though it had no windows, it did have another door, much larger than the one we had come through. It was evidently the main entrance to the room, and it was fitted with many locks. I had no doubt whatsoever that there were guards standing outside it.

But what about the grimoire?

As Nat ran to bar the door from the inside, I turned toward the
other half of the room. With a strange mixture of excitement and revulsion, I recognized it as the place I’d seen through Scargrave’s eyes. There was the section of glowing blue wall. There was the ledge that tilted out almost like a table. And there, at its center, was the source of the light: a mottled ivory book, bound fast to the stone.

“There it is,” Nat said softly. “The grimoire.”

A tremor shook my body. I remembered the sick feeling of being in Scargrave’s mind, touching that book with Scargrave’s hands, of . . .

No, this would not do. I must not go there again. I must concentrate on the present. I was seeing the grimoire with my own eyes now. And this time it was not Scargrave’s will but my own that counted.

I strode toward the grimoire.

“Six minutes,” Nat warned.

I must sing. But as I lifted my hand to the grimoire, I stopped short. Once I claimed it, who would I be?

Nat must have noticed my hesitation. He came up to me. “You haven’t forgotten the song, have you?”

I shook my head but couldn’t speak.

“Then what’s wrong?” he asked. “Is it what comes after? You won’t be alone then, you know. We’ll fight them together. We’ll fight them with everything we’ve got.”

How had I ever thought those eyes hard to read? His loyalty, his passion, his faith in me—all were in plain sight as he stood beside me. He was hiding nothing now.

I knew then that I owed him the truth.

“It’s the wrong song,” I said, looking straight at him. “It won’t destroy the grimoire. It will only let me claim it.”

“What?” His eyes changed, and I saw his shock and his anger. “You meant to betray us. All this time—”

“No! I didn’t know, not till today. My godmother only told me after you left. That’s why we argued.”

“So she knew all this time? She plotted against us?”

Remembering her death, I tried to do justice to her. “She wanted me to be safe.”

“And what else did she want you to do?”

“It doesn’t matter what she wanted. What matters now is what I want. And that’s to defeat Scargrave. This song is all I have. If I don’t use it, Scargrave wins.”

“But there must be something else you can do. Your Wild Magic—”

“No!” I forced myself to explain calmly what had happened to my ruby when I’d read his mind. “I can’t afford to do any more Wild Magic, especially not with the grimoire. It was risky enough with the moonbriar, but with something as powerful and strange as the grimoire, it’s a hundred times more dangerous. It could shatter my stone—or make me sing music that sets every spell in the book loose, or that gives new powers to Scargrave. We can’t take that chance, not with so much at stake.”

The clock whirred again. Four minutes.

Nat’s eyes had a shuttered look, and I could no longer read them. “So you’ll claim the book. And then what?”

“Trust me,” I told him. “I’ll do my best to put an end to the Shadowgrims. I’ll do what is right.”

Nat shook his head. “You all say that.”

I looked up at the clock. “Nat, there isn’t time—”

“Open! Open in the name of the Protector and the King!” A tremendous shout went up on the other side of the great door. “Open, or we use the battering ram!”

The door quaked in its frame as they pounded against it. With a gasp, I turned back toward the grimoire.

“Another few blows, and we’ll have her!” It was Scargrave himself, urging his men on. “Your Majesty, you must go back! Only the Ravens’ Own should enter.”

At the sound of his voice, my doubts vanished. I had to stop him.

Nat took half a step toward me—to protect me? to stop me?—but I was already singing.

The song poured through me and out of me, utterly foreign and yet somehow deep in my blood. And as I gave myself over to it, it began to reveal its meaning to me for the first time:

Before and after,

Again and now . . .

The great door cracked in two. With a howl, Scargrave’s men burst through, with the Lord Protector himself among them. But before they reached me, I uttered the last notes of my song:

. . . I claim this book and its powers.

The book separated from its chains, its blue-white light flaring to a golden blaze. I felt only the most gentle warmth as it fell into my hands, but the air around me bent and curved, as if I were in the center of a great flame.

In that same instant, I saw the faces around me redden and freeze, as if a blast of raven heat had transfixed them. Every last person in the room stopped still: the King, hand on his sword; the Ravens’ Own, rushing toward me; Scargrave, caught in midstride by the Raven Pit door. Even Nat stared at me and did not move.

I glanced at Scargrave again. Behind him, the Raven Pit door was no longer shut. Had Scargrave had time to open it? Or was it my own song, claiming the grimoire and the Shadowgrims, that was responsible? Either way, the door swung free. Behind it, the
hatchlings’ mewlings were now joined by a terrible croaking. The ravens were wakening. And then, with an ugly screech, the croaking twisted into a guttural whispering, vicious and foul: the language of the Shadowgrims.

As the sound stole over the room, a new terror came with it. I could see it in the sweating and petrified people before me. To my astonishment, however, I did not share their fear. I did not feel the ravens’ fire.

Of course you do not. The Shadowgrims belong to you now; so do the Ravens’ Own. They are yours to command; they cannot harm you. And the others are so transfixed with fear they cannot move or speak.

I arched back in shock. The strange, sibilant words came from the grimoire itself. “You can speak?”

Only to you,
the grimoire said.
I have waited such a long time for you, Chantress. But now we belong to each other.

As the singsong voice slithered into my head, I shuddered. This was not what I had expected. But there was one advantage to having the grimoire speak: I could ask it questions.

“Tell me,” I said. “How do I destroy the Shadowgrims?”

You cannot.

“But I must!”

It is beyond my power. That clumsy Agnes and her incompetent songs damaged those pages past repair. The song to destroy the Shadowgrims is lost forever. Guardian, she called herself! She deserved what she got.

Frantically I flipped the grimoire’s pages. If I could piece together whatever scraps remained . . .

But the more pages I examined, the more bewildered I became. “I . . . I can’t read this. I don’t understand the notation—”

My creator’s own invention,
the grimoire explained smugly.
There is none like it in the world. But if you turn to the end, you will find three scorched pages. That is where the song used to be.

With trembling fingers, I touched the blackened stubs. “And there is no other way to destroy the Shadowgrims?”

None that I know,
the grimoire said blithely.
And if I do not know, then no one does. But do not fret. It is no great loss. You will find the Shadowgrims quite useful, once I teach you how to understand them.

Half blinded by the grimoire’s blazing light, I could see the room only as if through the wavering heat of a fire. But even so, the agony on Nat’s face made my stomach wrench.

“But they are hurting Nat!”

The grimoire rejected this.
The boy does not suffer, not in any permanent way. At this moment, he feels the power of the Shadowgrims. But it is only at your command that the Shadowgrims will attack. If you spare him that, he will be sound of mind once he leaves here.

“Of course I will spare him,” I said, horrified.

There is no “of course” about it,
the grimoire snapped.
You call him your friend, but can you truly trust him?

“He helped me,” I said. “I would never have reached this room without him.”

And he did this selflessly, without hope of gain? Or did he want something from you?

“He only wanted me to destroy the Shadowgrims.”

And very good that would have been for him. But what good would it have done you?

“It is what I came here to do,” I told the grimoire.

No. You came here to claim your old power.
The grimoire sounded very sure of itself.
And it is well and good that you did so. The Ravens’ Own would die to protect you now; they will do your bidding, no matter what you ask of them. But how long do you think that would last if you did not have the Shadowgrims? They would turn on you in an instant. Everyone in this room would.

“Not Nat,” I said.

Look into his heart if you do not believe me,
the grimoire urged.
Use the Shadowgrims.

The raven clamor rose in my head, swirling with anger, revulsion, and hatred. They had things to tell me, wicked things . . .

“No!” I shouted. “I will not use the Shadowgrims.”

The clamor in my head died away. But everyone around me remained motionless, and I still saw terror in their faces.

The grimoire was silent for a moment.
Very well, then. If you will not use the full powers of the Shadowgrims—at least not yet—there are other paths we can take. The Shadowgrims are the easiest, it is true, for they were sung into being long ago. But there are other powers that need only the merest word from you to live again: songs for plague and famine, songs of pestilence. Songs to conjure up creatures who will control others’ thoughts, and—