Help us, Winter. Save us.
I don’t know if it’s the wood or Uncle Joe messing with my mind or something else entirely. I still have so many questions, and it’s all because of Joe. He took my father away. He owes me the answers my father can no longer give.
I turn to Henry, tears blurring my vision as I hide the coin in my palm. “I want you to know I lied. I do feel something between us. I wish we lived in a time where that wouldn’t mean heartbreak and having to say good-bye, but we don’t. I am the guardian of the wood. I have a duty here, and you have a duty to live out your life as you were meant to live it, in your own time.” I let go of his hand, and by the time realization dawns on his face, I’ve already called the fireflies. “I’m sorry.”
“Winter, no!” He lunges forward, but the little blue bugs are already there, swarming him, zapping him back. “Do not do this!”
“Take him to the council threshold,” I say.
“No!” He lunges at them again, his fists pounding into them. The smell of burnt hair sears my nostrils. “I will not let you do this.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“Winter!”
“When you get there, make sure you tell them everything. Don’t try to protect me. They might not believe you if you don’t tell them everything.”
“Winter,” he shouts. “Don’t do this!”
His skin is red, blistering, and the fireflies are pushing him back, but he doesn’t stop trying to break through them. I turn my back on him and start down the path, unable to bear the sight any longer, but I can still hear his flesh sizzling like eggs in a skillet as he rams himself into the bugs. He screams my name again and again, each time a little farther away as they push him toward the council threshold, until his words are muffled by the whispers in the trees and, somewhere to my left, the sound of flames crackling.
My mind is nothing but static, my heart a dead thing that hasn’t pumped blood in years. I am unfeeling, robotic, cold, just like the man sitting on the bench in front of me, a gas lamp to his right, a stone fire pit in front of him, flames casting shadows across the planes of his face.
“Hello, Uncle Joe.”
XXXVIII
Joe cocks his head at me slowly, as if he has all the time in the world.
“Winter. What are you doing here?”
I expect him to sound as different as he looks to me now, but his voice is the same, and I want to believe it’s not true. For a brief, guilt-ridden second, I want to act as if I don’t know. I want to sit beside him and watch the fire and slip back into that place where Uncle Joe equals safety, protection, guidance. I have lost one father already, and there’s a part of me—a spoiled, naive part—that doesn’t want to lose another.
But you already have, I remind myself.
“First patrol,” I say. “It’s dawn.”
Joe looks up at the pink-orange sky and sighs. “So it is.”
“I found my father’s journal.”
He hesitates. “I wasn’t aware he still kept the old thing.”
“But you knew he kept one once,” I say. “Why didn’t you ever tell me to do the same?”
He waves off my question. “It’s not really that important, more of a tradition than an obligation. As long as you report to the council every week, there is a record of every traveler you’ve ever dealt with, and seeing as how you’ve never missed a meeting…”
“But that only guarantees a record in the council archives,” I say. “What were the Parish guardians who came after me supposed to study? There would be a whole gap of information.”
His eyes narrow. “Why so interested in posterity all of a sudden?”
I stare back at him, unflinching. “It’s an interesting read, Dad’s journal. Especially the last entry.” I grit my teeth. “Were you with him the morning he disappeared?”
“No. Why would you say such a thing?” There are all the right tones of surprise and incredulity and concern in his voice, all the things that have lulled me into believing whatever he wanted me to believe in the past. But I feel them now, the lies underneath, the manipulation that flows from him like the Olentangy. I pick the lies apart like a loose thread, unwinding them until his words ring hollow in my ears. If only I could have done it sooner, all those times I should have questioned him about the wood, about my father, the words fizzling out on the tip of my tongue, all because I trusted him. Because I didn’t think someone who supposedly loved me so much could ever hurt me.
“Dad seemed to think you were behind the conspiracy to overthrow the council,” I say. “You wouldn’t happen to know why he would think that, would you?”
Joe’s expression is tired now, as if he’s a very busy man who doesn’t have time for my silly teenage musings. It’s the same look he’s worn for years, and only now do I see the cracks in it, the flicker of anger in his eyes, the slight curl of his lip. “Winter, you’re in shock. You don’t know what you’re saying—”
“Bravo. Really, Unc, you should have gone into acting.”
He stiffens. “Winter, listen to me. You’re making a mistake—”
“No, you listen to me. I know, okay? I know everything. I read Dad’s journal. I know you’re the one who brought Varo back.”
He stands, cracking his knuckles against his palms. “I didn’t, actually,” he says. “Varo was properly banished almost five hundred years ago. There was no way for him to return. But I was able to use his ideology to begin recruiting his old followers, and when your father discovered what I was doing, I knew it wouldn’t be long before others noticed, too. I needed an alias, someone I could pretend to be to shift the focus off me. Varo seemed the perfect disguise, and glamours are such easy magic once you have the power of the wood bending to your control.”
My heart stutters. I try to take in his words, but it’s like trying to breathe underwater.
All this time, Joe was Varo. Every time Joe told me to stay out of it, it was just because he didn’t want me discovering his secret. Not because he was worried about me.
“You killed Dad,” I say, my voice small. “Didn’t you?”
He rolls his neck and pulls down his shoulders, and when he looks back at me, it’s with a mixture of sadness and defiance.
“I didn’t want to,” he says. “Your father left me no choice.”
Hearing him say it knocks the air from my lungs. I stagger back, my heart pounding in my ears. “Why?” That one word slams through my head over and over again. Why, why, why? “Why did you have to drag us into it? Why couldn’t you just leave us alone?”
“I didn’t foresee it ending this way. I cared for your father very much—”
“Liar.”
“Please don’t look at me like that,” he says. “Your father was a casualty in a war that has been brewing for hundreds of years.”