“Yes?”
He shakes his head. “I did not want the last conversation we had to be in anger. I could not have lived with myself.” He doesn’t look at me as he says it, and I get the feeling this isn’t the whole truth. I want to press it, but I haven’t exactly given him the whole truth, either. I told him I felt something for him, but that’s such an unworthy expression that can encompass so many different things: a short-lived crush, a passing attraction, an appreciation that doesn’t really change you on any significant level.
But Henry has changed me, has made me want things that are impossible. For the first time since Dad disappeared, he made me feel safe. Whole. Alive. But how do you tell someone that? Where do you start?
I take a deep breath. “Henry, there’s something I need to tell—”
“Henry?” a woman’s voice murmurs softly, hopefully.
Henry glances up. “Mother! Father!” He pushes off the wall and runs across the room. I follow him with my eyes as he wraps his arms around a small, stocky woman with silver hair pulled back from her face and wide amber eyes, and then a tall, slim man with snow-white hair and a nose that used to fascinate me as a kid for the way it hooks down, like a hawk’s beak.
Augustus and Celia.
They cling to each other. Augustus’s shoulders shake. Celia runs her hands through Henry’s hair, whispering something in his ear.
Alban strikes his gavel against the table, and they break apart, Celia still clutching Henry’s arm.
“It seems we have a bit of trouble on our hands,” Alban says. “You two wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
XLII
My stomach twists as Augustus and Celia give a detailed account of how they eavesdropped on a conversation in which they discovered Joe was the one behind the conspiracy to overthrow the council. They knew they could not bring such a claim to the council without hard evidence, or else Joe would be able, with the help of his supporters, to talk his way out of it, so they began searching for concrete proof of what they’d overheard.
But Joe had more eyes and ears than they had realized. He confronted them about it in the wood over a week ago.
“He was unrecognizable,” Celia says. “His eyes were completely black, soulless, as if there were no goodness left inside of him. He told us we were standing in his way, and that if we refused to join him in his pursuit of the advancement of our people, then we would need to be silenced.”
“He called the Sentinels on us then,” Augustus continues, “and in the confusion, he nicked both of our arms with his dagger. We didn’t understand, at first, why he didn’t try to wound us more than that, but then he explained the dagger was tipped with dragon’s bane.”
He left them to die there, in the wood, but Celia used her healing powers to leach the poison out of their bodies. It seeped into the ground around them, infecting the wood instead. They tried to get to council headquarters, but they were too weak, so they fell through the nearest portal they could find. But first they left a clue behind for their son about where they’d gone, knowing he would probably come looking for them if they couldn’t make it back to him soon.
“The threshold closed behind us, and our powers were too diminished to make it open again,” Celia says. “We camped outside the threshold, waiting for it to open. We knew we would need our strength, not just to open the threshold, but to confront Josiah again, if he or one of his supporters found us before we could make it here.”
“That’s where I found them,” Leok explains. “Just outside the threshold, trying to get through.”
Alban sighs. “There is much in your story I would like to discuss with the both of you,” he says. “Mainly the fact that you have adopted a human son and told him everything about us and the wood, going against our laws to do so. However, that matter will have to wait until we’ve dealt with Josiah.”
“Yes, well, we were not just twiddling our thumbs in Brussels, waiting for the threshold to open,” Augustus says. “We have a plan.”
Alban’s eyes widen. “By all means, let’s hear it.”
I listen with a cold numbness. They want to kill Joe with the very dragon’s bane with which he tried to kill them, leaching it out of the ground and placing it into a weapon. The problem will be getting close enough to him.
“I can do it.”
Everyone turns to me.
“I can get close enough,” I say.
Henry shakes his head. “No.”
“It isn’t up for discussion.”
“The hell it’s not,” Henry says.
I arch a brow at him. Henry stares back at me defiantly.
“He won’t let anyone else get close,” I say. “He has no reason to trust any of you, but he … he has a soft spot for me. If I can convince him I’ve decided to join him, he’ll let me get close enough, and then if I can catch him off-guard, if he can be distracted for just a second, I can…” I close my eyes. “I can kill him.”
The room is quiet.
Alban clears his throat. “Are you certain you are capable of doing such a thing?”
“He killed my father.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Yes,” I say, my voice a hard, dead thing. “It does.”
Alban studies me. Then he nods, strikes his gavel, and says, “Very well. All those in favor of this plan?”
Everyone except Henry raises their hands.
“All those opposed?”
Henry raises his hand.
Alban says, “It is unanimous. Now then, Guardian Parish, what exactly did you have in mind?”
XLIII
Celia and I cross over into the wood while the others wait a few more minutes to take their positions. I hand Celia my dad’s knife. She holds it in one hand and touches a black, infected tree trunk with the other. I watch in amazement as the disease slowly bleeds from the tree, turning the blade of my knife black as polished obsidian.
“There,” Celia says, handing back the knife. “That should be more than enough.”
This process was already discussed at headquarters. At first, Celia wanted to rid the wood entirely of the disease as quickly as possible, but I pointed out that Joe would suspect something was up if the wood was suddenly one hundred percent healthy again, and so the healing of the wood will have to wait. Besides, keeping the wood like this a little while longer has its advantages, I think, palming my coin.
Celia slinks into the shadows, whispering, “Remember, dear, we’ll be right behind you.”