1

“HAVE YOU EVER wished you had a spell to stop time?”

I turned to my friend and roommate Helen van Beek. We had come to the edge of the Blythe Wood and she had turned to look back over the playing fields and gardens to the great stone castle of our school, Blythewood, glowing golden in the late afternoon sun. Four more girls and one boy were walking toward us. If the moment had been arrested it would have made a fine medieval tapestry, the lawns an emerald carpet stitched with a thousand bright flowers, the stones of the castle and the sleek heads of the girls picked out in gold thread, the boy’s in silver marking him as a nobleman or fairy prince. The Falconers, it might have been called, since they each carried a falcon on their gauntleted hands.

The viewers of that tapestry might imagine the girls and the boy were discussing the fine points of falconry or courtly love, but they weren’t.

“A Morane-Saulnier monoplane with a Gnome Omega 7 cylinder engine!” Cam’s excited voice rose into the air, her little kestrel squawking as it attempted to keep its balance on her gesticulating hand. “That’s what I’m going to fly when I get out of here next summer.”

“You should see the hydro-aeroplanes they’ve got over in England now,” Nathan remarked, excitement breaking through the pose of boredom he’d maintained since returning from Europe. “They can take off from ships now. I’m going to join the Royal Navy as soon as I graduate.”

“No more chattering, Dianas,” I called to the others, “we’re on patrol.”

“I thought I made it clear that I was not to be referred to as a Diana,” Nathan drawled. “The male equivalent is Apollo.”

“Diana or Apollo, we’re all here to patrol the woods. Gillie found trow tracks at the edge of the Blythe Wood this morning. We need to scout the perimeter to make sure it hasn’t gotten out.”

“And what are we supposed to do if we find the trow?” Daisy asked.

“Kill it, of course,” Cam said, patting her quiver of arrows.

Before Daisy could object—I knew she had a soft spot for all creatures of Faerie—I said, “Actually, Gillie says we should try to capture it. There’s been an increase in fey activity in the woods lately—creatures straying out of the woods, ransacking local farmyards and orchards, even wandering into town. Gillie thinks something must be scaring them out of the woods.”

“What’s big enough to scare a trow?” Beatrice asked, raising an eyebrow.

“That’s what we need to find out,” I said. “Nathan and Cam, head toward the river. Bea, Dolores, Daisy, you take the eastern perimeter. Helen and I are going to go into the woods. If anyone finds any sign of the trow, whistle three times. Send your falcon if you need backup. Everybody clear?”

They all nodded, looking a little scared. Of the trow, I wondered, or me? Had I spoken too sharply to them? Well, I didn’t have time to coddle them. We had a trow to find.

I turned to enter the woods with Helen close at my heels. As we passed from the bright sunshine of the lawn into the cool green shadows under the pines, I felt Eirwyn tense on my hand, her talons gripping so tightly I was afraid they’d pierce the thick leather of my glove.

Helen’s peregrine squawked and darted from her glove.

“Frederica!” Helen cried as she watched the falcon rise into the trees. “Where do you think you’re going?”

To a place where no one calls her by that ridiculous name, I began to say, but then my gyr launched herself from my hand and followed, uttering a high-pitched whistle.

“That’s her hunting call,” I told Helen. “Come on, they’re tracking something.”

I plunged into the woods. My wings itched to unfurl and follow Eirwyn and Frederica in the air, but I didn’t want to leave Helen alone on the ground. Besides, it wasn’t easy flying through the woods with a six-foot wing span, and the falcons were leading us into a denser part of the forest, where the trees grew so close together their branches interlaced overhead in a thick canopy that blocked out the sun. I couldn’t see Eirwyn or Frederica ahead of us, but with my Darkling hearing I could hear Eirwyn’s shrill hunting cry. I followed it into a copse of thorny shrubs that caught at my shirt sleeve and tugged at my skirt.

“Is it my imagination,” Helen asked in a hushed whisper, “or do the trees seem to be moving closer together?”

I halted, my gloved hand raised to push aside a thorny branch, and turned back to look at Helen.

“The last time the woods acted to protect us, so we should be all right.” I turned back and pulled the thorny branch away  . . .

Uncovering the snarling face of a trow.

I screamed and let go of the branch, which slapped the trow across its thick overhanging brow. That only made it angrier. The creature opened its blue-lipped mouth and roared. Hot, rank breath blew into my face—it smelled like rotting meat and ashes.

Trows are naturally vegetarians in their indigenous habitat. The line from Miles Malmsbury’s Field Guide to the Lychnobious Peoples wafted into my head. I’d have to tell him he was wrong—if I lived. I reached for the dagger strapped at my waist as the trow launched itself at me, but before I could unsheathe it I was slammed to the ground by what felt like the proverbial ton of bricks. Only bricks wouldn’t have such bad breath, I thought staring up into two glazed eyes that appeared to be covered in some kind of film behind which dark shapes moved like fish swimming under ice.

I’d seen something like that before—

Then the ice shattered.

Black ooze poured out of its right eye and then the creature’s weight collapsed on top of me. “Mnnn,” it said, then mercifully rolled off me.

“Ava!” Helen was shouting into my face and shaking my arms. She was still grasping her bow with one hand. I turned my head and stared at the trow. One of Helen’s arrows—all of hers were fletched with snow-white dove feathers which she deemed “smarter” than the dull brown ones the rest of us used—had gone straight through the back of its head and pierced its right eye. Black bile was oozing down its cheek.

“Y-you . . . you shot it.”

“Don’t start with Gillie’s orders,” Helen cried, her voice edging into hysteria. “That thing was going to eat you!”

“They’re s-supposed to be veg . . . vegetarians,” I stammered, struggling to my knees and kneeling over the trow.

Helen made a choking sound. “Well, this one’s gone off his diet. He looks like he just finished a six course steak dinner at Delmonico’s. Why, his fur . . . whatsit . . .” Helen gestured at the shaggy fur tunic the trow wore. “. . . doesn’t fit him properly.”

The trow’s belly was indeed bulging out of his tunic and over his leather pants. It was disturbing to look at those clothes. This wasn’t an animal—it was a person of sorts, one of the fey that had wandered out of Faerie into the Blythe Wood. Perhaps it had gotten lost and been scared. Its intact eye looked dazed.

No, not dazed—glazed. As if covered with ice. I leaned over to look more closely and saw something move beneath the opaque surface of the intact eye.

“Helen,” I said, starting to get to my feet, “I think we’d better—”

Before I could finish the trow’s left eye split open, releasing a spray of black ooze. Helen screamed and covered her face, shielding herself from the geyser that spewed out of the trow’s eye—a geyser with feathers.

“Shadow crows!” I screamed, yanking Helen to her feet. “Run!”

I pushed Helen through a narrow opening in the brush into a clearing—a perfect circle surrounded by bushes covered in white flowers. I dimly had the thought that the woods had been leading us here all along, mocking our desire to stop time. There was no way to stop time. If you didn’t take the future in hand it took you and yanked you where it wanted you to go. Then Helen and I were falling down a long dark tunnel into the vast unknown.