No, but there are too many wrong things in my life right now to count. “I’m just tired.”
“Maybe your mother’s right. Maybe you should consider homeschooling.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Maybe.”
XVIII
Henry is still in Dad’s study when I get back.
I pause in the doorway, my back against the solid oak frame that was crafted hundreds of years ago. The walls are a deep navy color; the waist-high wainscoting the same dark oak as the door and bookcases. There’s a fireplace against the wall across from me, framed by two long, slender windows that look out on the trees lining 315. They’ve started changing color overnight, catching up to our wood. Soon their leaves will fall, and snow will blanket the ground. If Dad were still here, he’d call me into the study to watch the deer at sunset. We could only see them from the front and side windows of the house; they never went into our wood. I can still see fourteen-year-old me standing at the window, a mug of hot chocolate in hand, green garland winding around the fireplace mantel, Dad standing behind me as we watched the deer glide through the snow.
It’s been too long since I’ve been in here.
I clear my throat. Henry looks up from the desk, where he has three books of yellowed, crinkled parchment open. His hair is messy and flops to one side as if he’s been running his hands through it all morning, and he’s wearing his own clothes again.
“Have you ever heard of dragon’s bane?” I ask him.
Henry scrunches up his face, thinking. “Not that I can recall.”
I cross the room and sit in the reading chair in the corner, wedged between a window and a bookcase. “What about an Old One named Varo?”
“The Old One who wanted to overthrow the council?”
I nod.
“I do not know very much about him; only that he was once a respected elder, but his greed caused him to overreach, and he was ultimately banished from the wood,” Henry says, a small smile playing across his lips. “My parents used it as a cautionary tale whenever I felt like challenging their authority. Why do you ask?”
I debate how much I should tell him. Uncle Joe’s words ring in my ears—anyone could be an enemy in disguise—but the only reason I know as much as I do is because of Henry, and on the chance that he’s right, that Dad is somehow connected to the disappearance of his parents, I have to trust him. And if Henry’s lying to me, well … I’ll deal with that when the time comes. But for now, I decide to lay it all out, explaining Varo’s connection to dragon’s bane and how his supporters were never found.
“Do you think it’s possible one of this Varo guy’s supporters is behind all of this?” I ask.
“I suppose anything’s possible.”
I gesture to the open books in front of him. “What did you find?”
“Old treatises,” he says. “Journals dating back to the twelfth century. The most recent”—he holds up a book of soft brown leather—“being your grandfather’s. I did not find your father’s journal, nor yours.”
“That’s because I don’t have one, and Dad didn’t, either.”
Henry frowns. “You are certain of this?”
“Very.” He would’ve shown me if he’d kept a journal. He’d shown me Grandpa’s and all the others, though I’d only been able to read the entries dating back to the late 1600s before all the thee’s and thou’s and weird cursive got too confusing. I’d always assumed I’d have better luck reading the medieval texts when I was older, but after Dad disappeared … Like I said, it’s been too long since I’ve been in here. “I don’t think he saw much of a point in it.”
“There is very much a point in it,” Henry says. “Did your father never tell you this is one of your duties, to keep a record of how the wood changes? How many travelers come through on a daily basis, where and when they come from, which thresholds are unusually active—”
“Okay, I get it,” I say. “And yeah, I report those things to the council, but Dad never told me to keep a journal.”
“Mayhap he was keeping one for the both of you?”
I shake my head. “No, he would’ve told me. He would have had me read it.” But there’s a niggling stab of doubt puncturing my heart. Maybe he was waiting until I was older, farther along in my lessons. Or maybe there were things he didn’t want me to read. Things he wanted to keep secret.
Henry curses under his breath.
“What is it?” I ask. “What were you hoping to find?”
He shakes his head. “I am not entirely certain,” he admits, “but I had hoped your father’s journal would contain some clue as to what happened to him. I thought, perhaps, if I could make some sense of it, I would be able to deduce what happened to my parents.”
“Trust me, I looked for every clue imaginable after he disappeared, but there was nothing. There is nothing.”
“It is not logical,” he says. “Every guardian since the signing of the Compact has kept a record of the travelers who have crossed into their territories. Why wouldn’t your father?”
Maybe because he hated the wood? It was his dirty little secret that wasn’t much of a secret at all. Mom tried to hide it from me on his worst days, telling me he was just in a bad mood, and then taking me out to see a movie or go shopping while Dad holed himself up in the study with a bottle of whiskey.
But there was one time she wasn’t home, one time when I sat in here with him after an “incident” in the wood he refused to tell me about.
Nothing we do actually means anything, he said between sips, cradling the bottle. Don’t you get that? It’s one big, fat joke. No, no, no. It’s worse than that. It’s a curse. I only wish I could go back in time and slug the sick son of a bitch responsible for it.
I close my eyes. When I open them, I’m sixteen again, and Henry is the one sitting across from me. “I don’t know what to tell you,” I say. “I never saw my father with a journal.”
“You never saw him with one,” he says. “Is it possible your mother did?”
“I guess anything’s possible.”
Henry presses his steepled fingers against his lips, thinking. “Is it also possible that he might have hidden one?”
“Why would he do that?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.
“Perhaps he was protecting you from something?”
I don’t have to respond. My silence says it all.
Henry leans forward. “Where would he have hidden it?”