“We won’t always be schoolkids, Aoife,” Cal piped up. “What will a husband think of this bookworm habit?”
“Cal, why do you care?” I slammed down my plate, appetite gone after half a bowl of oatmeal.
“I’m helping,” he muttered. “You—you don’t have a mother to tell you these things.”
I grabbed my father’s book and shoved my chair back with a screech. I loved Cal like another brother, but right then I felt like I did when Conrad teased me once too often—like I wanted to slap him and tell him to go jump off a bridge. “Cal, unless you want the job, lay off. Stop being my fussy aunt and just be my friend.”
“You’re misunderstanding …,” he started, and then scrubbed at his chin with his napkin. “No, you’re right. I shouldn’t have spoken up.”
“You shouldn’t,” I concurred. Cal’s jaw twitched.
“Aoife, what’s gotten into you? You’re rude and short and you disappear for hours on end. Is there something you want to tell me?”
I tightened my grip on the journal. “Not a thing,” I gritted and turned on my heel, storming into the library.
The orderly rows of books were soothing, familiar. After the alien landscape of Thorn, it was a larger relief than I’d imagined.
Alone after I’d climbed into the attic space, I felt a deep, fathomless cold envelop me. Tremaine had threatened Cal and Dean if I disobeyed him. He knew what had happened to Conrad and he would keep the secret eternally, I had no doubt, if I crossed him.
Even believing that there was more to my world than the School, the necrovirus and life with the stigma of madness was still difficult in the light of day.
To think that I now had the task of serving the Kindly Folk in my father’s place made my chest tight, my heart beat too fast. I sat down, or rather folded over, and put my head on my knees. I breathed until it wasn’t difficult anymore. I might not have known my father the way most children did theirs, but I was still his daughter. The truth was inescapable, after what Tremaine had shown me—my father and I shared a duty, and I would not let him down while our odd blood still flowed in my veins.
I opened his journal. The ink swam for a moment before it settled onto the page when I touched it. I paged through my father’s more recent entries, but found nothing of much use.
I become more disconcerted each time the Strangers visit me,
my father wrote. Before my geas-bewitched eyes, he paced a vast bedroom, rain lashing the night beyond.
They conceal secrets beyond imagination about the Thorn Land, and I fear the dark shadow that belies their appearance a little more at each turning of the moon.
I heard glass shatter somewhere beyond my view, and my father’s head whipped around, then he turned back and continued pacing.
Breathless, I read on to see what became of him.
Not very becoming of the line, to admit fear, but the Strangers are harbingers of the foe we both face in the Kindly Folk’s secrets, and what that foe is, even nightmares could not conceive.
My father put his pen down quickly, then ran from his bedroom, and I rubbed my fingers over my eyelids. Sighing, I flipped to the most recent entry in the diary.
No further mention of Strangers leapt out at my eyes. They came in shadow, and shadow had taken Conrad.
Not for the first time, or even the hundredth, I wished that I’d known Archie sooner. If I’d grown up with a father who’d prepared me to take the reins of Minder, I would know where Conrad was already. I wouldn’t owe Tremaine my end of the bargain.
“I could use some help,” I told the diary. “Not that you appear to care one bit.” I turned my eyes back to the ink.
2 September, 1955.
A few months before I’d gotten Conrad’s letter. Such a small amount of time, when you put it on the vast line of the universe, yet so large when it was the gulf separating me from using my Weird and staving off the Folk from my friends.
I must be quick.
I paid full attention to the page for the first time that evening. My father was, if anything, as verbose as he was cryptic. His normally bell-clear handwriting was jagged, too, jumping all over the page and leaving behind a snowfall of ink drops from where he pressed down too hard with his fountain pen.
They are at my heels at last. I have refused their command, their mantle of cursebreaker, for the final time.
They are coming, and there is no help for it now. Not even the clockwork bones of my house can hold them back. I must flee. I must find the Bone Sepulchre and seek the shadowy aid of the mists, of the Strangers. I must, I must, I must, or perish on the Winnowing Stone surely as the chosen maiden at the harvest moon.
My throat was dry in the warm air of the attic and my fingers rattled the vellum paper as I turned the page.
Conrad, Aoife … my charge to you is to flee. Never visit the Land of Thorn. Never seek the truth that lies beyond the iron and steam of the Proctors’ world. Let it die with me.
If you value your lives, let it die. Do not seek me. Do not find me.
Save yourselves.
The journal hit the floor with a muffled
My father knew I’d come looking for him. He’d tried to warn me about the very thing I’d agreed to do for Tremaine.
What had I done?
A creak sounded at the foot of the ladder and I composed myself. “Cal …,” I sighed, turning to the hatch. “I just need to be alone for a bit, all right?”
“Not Cal, I’m afraid.” Bethina’s copper curls crested the ladder, eyes roving over the unruly shelves, the dust, my cross-legged seat on the floor. Anywhere, I noticed, but my face. “May I come up, miss?”
I composed myself, running a hand over my face to erase the anger and fatigue. “It’s a free country,” I said. “ ’Less you’re a heretic.”
“I don’t talk so, you know.” Bethina hoisted herself over the hatch, puffing. “The gals from Arkham—the nice ones—don’t spit out whatever they’re thinking.”
“It’ll be the bane of my imaginary husband’s existence, I’m sure,” I said bitterly.
“I like it, actually.” Bethina ducked her head. “You’re frank, miss. Like a boy.”
I tucked the journal under my knee. I didn’t want anyone reading it, especially not an ordinary girl like Bethina. She wouldn’t understand and I didn’t have the words to explain.
“Truth is the only constant thing we have,” I said. “My mother used to say that.” Like Nerissa would know a real truth if it bit her. There were the things my father wrote about, and then there were my mother’s ramblings.
“She sounds like a whip-smart lady, miss,” Bethina said.
“She’s not.” My curt tone made me even more disgusted with myself. Useless to find my brother or my father, and now snooty on top.
“Mr. Cal speaks highly of her. He says that she did a fine job of raising you.”
I worried the edges of the journal, surprised that he’d actually said that out loud after our fight, and to Bethina, of all people. Cal thought girls were a different species. “Cal’s kind,” I said aloud. “He … he prefers to see things as they might be.”
“He’s got a shine for you, miss,” Bethina said. “And with the way you fight like cats and dogs, might I assume that it goes both ways?”
“You might not,” I sniffed. “And you’re being …” What was it the snooty characters in the lanterns said? “Entirely too familiar,” I finished, with the requisite disapproving eyebrow.
“Apologies, miss,” Bethina said, though she didn’t seem sorry. “I didn’t mean to jabber at you. I just wanted
