Read Online Hawthorn by Carol Goodman - Free Book Online

me.”
    â€œWhat?” I’d been too dumbfounded to know what to say—and then he had snapped closed the jeweler’s box and snapped open his wings to fly off.
    And here was the box again. Had he left it with Gillie to remind me of what I’d lost?
    I took the box from Gillie, not sure I could bear to look at the ring Raven had picked out for me—a moonstone surrounded by tiny diamonds—but when I opened the box I found that there wasn’t a ring inside. There was a pocket watch and a note written in Raven’s hand.
    Dear Ava,
    Perhaps this will be a little more to your liking than a ring. It’s set to our time and will take you back if you go through Faerie again. Just press the stem when you are ready to come back. I will be waiting for you.

6

    â€œWHAT DOES HE mean,
more to your liking than a ring
?” Helen, reading over my shoulder, demanded. “Did Raven ask you to marry him? ”
    â€œNone of your business!” I snapped, stuffing the note in my pocket. I took the watch out of the box and opened it.
    It wasn’t an ordinary watch. Instead of hands, two wings spread out from the center. Instead of numbers, two gold rings circled the face, one engraved with the phases of the moon, the other with symbols I thought I recognized as Darkling numerals. Both rings could be moved. I touched a finger to one of the rings, but Helen cried out.
    â€œDon’t move it! He said in the note that it’s set to our time.”
    I stared at the moon—a waning crescent—and the Darkling numeral at the top of the watch. If it was set to a time, it wasn’t one I recognized, but then the Darklings had a different calendar.
    â€œHe was clever with clocks,” I said wistfully. “He was always tinkering with them. That’s why he went to apprentice with Mr. Humphreys, and he did fix the clocks at Violet House. But a clock that could bring us through Faerie back to our own time—”
    â€œDamned clever!” Gillie cried. “He told me he’d found a way to make things right again and bring you back. I thought he might have gone daft. He was half mad when you went missing—storming into the Dame’s office, demanding she send everybody out to search for you, blaming me for sending you out in search of the trow, blaming himself for some spat you’d had—”
    â€œDid he say anything about the watch?” I asked, ignoring Helen’s curious stare.
    â€œHe said that a Darkling was able to stop time in Faerie when he held the doors open with this wings so there might be a way to lead someone back through Faerie to a particular time. If only that person had a special watch—then he said something else, but . . .” He shook his head and looked away. “It’s a long time ago and I can’t say I remember exactly what. I do remember that he muttered something in Latin.” Gillie looked down at the watch, which I held cradled in my hands as if it were a newly hatched chick. It was ticking faintly and slowly. “Aye, that’s it.” He tapped the face of the watch gently.
    I peered down at the watch face. Inscribed in gold between the wings was a Latin motto.
Tempus fugit.
    Time flies.

    Gillie wanted us to wait until morning to go back because the woods were dangerous at night, but I couldn’t bear to wait another second. The words Raven had inscribed on the watch had lit a fire in my belly. Time
was
flying. Each tick of the watch, made all the more maddening because there were nohands moving, moved me further away from Raven.
    Helen was anxious to go as well. As we walked across the lawn to the woods she kept up a steady chatter to me and Gillie. “The sooner we go, the sooner we can put things to rights. We’ll find the unbroken vessel before van Drood does and we’ll stop this awful war. Nathan won’t die in a beastly muddy battlefield, nor Mr. Bellows, nor any of those