Hawthorn Read Online Free PDF Page B

I dragged Helen over to a toppled wall and plucked at a vine climbing over the stones.It came loose with a dry snap. Something moved within the rocks. Mice. Or snakes. “This didn’t just happen, Helen. It happened
years
ago.”
    Helen turned to me, the whites of her eyes glowing in the moonlight. “But we just left. We’ve only been gone a few hours.”
    â€œWe must have passed into Faerie at some point in the tunnels and come out in a different time. Remember how your watch stopped and my repeater started acting funny?” I took out my repeater now and opened it. It played the mournful tune the bells tolled when a Blythewood alumna had died. I looked up at Helen. Her eyes were full of tears.
    â€œHow long?”
    â€œI don’t know.” I followed the broken wall to a smashed marble heap that had been the front steps. The once majestic oak doors with their carved shield of Bell and Feather were still there but they were gouged and scarred as though animals had scratched at them. A rough plank was nailed slantwise across them with a rune burned into it.
    â€œIt looks like they tried to barricade and ward the doors,” I said, touching the rune. I felt a faint tingle of magic, its power drained. My fingers came away blackened. “Someone might still be inside,” I said doubtfully. The truth was I was afraid to go inside, afraid of what we might find amidst the rubble and the mice. But Helen was braver.
    â€œSomeone must be inside,” she said, squeezing my arm. “Else who rang the bell?”
    I looked up at the bell tower. The belfry was a crater, but she was right—there must still be one bell hanging and we had heard it ringing. “We’ll explore,” I said, “but we have to becareful. The whole place could come toppling down on us.”
    â€œSo what?” Helen asked, her face stone white. “If all our friends and teachers are gone, what’s left for us to live for?”

    I followed Helen through a gap in the stones. Blythewood’s walls were over three feet thick, built in the Middle Ages to withstand a siege, before they were carried to America.
What could have been strong enough to bring those walls down?
We had to scramble over a lot of stones, disturbing whole nests of mice. I felt like we were digging ourselves into a pit, but then we came out into a large vaulted space. Skeletal stone arches stood bone white against a midnight-blue ceiling spangled with gilt stars.
    In Mr. Bellows’s history class he had shown us a picture once of a chapel in France with a vaulted ceiling painted with gold stars against a blue background. It wasn’t half as beautiful as this, because this ceiling really was the night sky. We were in the Great Hall, where we’d eaten our meals and listened to Dame Beckwith give her inspirational speeches. It was where I’d taken my oath to protect Blythewood—
to stand by my sisters in peril and adversity.
I could almost hear the ghosts of girls’ voices and the chiming of the handbells. I listened for a moment for my own bell signaling danger, but heard nothing. I had a bell that rang for danger and one for love, but none for the empty ache of sadness I felt now. All I heard was the wind clattering the loose glass hanging from twisted lead in the windows. The seven arched windows that had held stained-glass portraits of our founders—the seven bell maker’s daughters—had been reduced to a framework of glass shards. Our feet crunched onbroken glass as I moved closer and looked up at one remaining pane that featured Merope, the youngest daughter. The top of her face had been blown away, leaving only a ghostly smile that smoldered in the moonlight like a dying ember. I felt a hand steal into mine.
    â€œCome this way, Ava. The North Wing seems to be mostly intact.”
    She pulled me into the hall that led to our old classrooms. Without the open sky it was darker here, but