The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [17]
Cal sighed and scratched at the top of his ear, a habitual gesture that meant his nature was warring with the rules of the Academy and the Proctors. “What do you want from me, Aoife?”
“Read it,” I said, putting my palm under his nose. Cal frowned.
“What’s Graystone? What are these numbers?”
“Graystone is my father’s house. It’s upstate, in Arkham,” I said. “At least, that’s what my mother told me.” I sighed. “The numbers … I don’t have the faintest idea.”
Truthfully, I hadn’t the faintest idea about my father, either. I had his name—Archibald Grayson—and my mother’s rambling about his strong hands and moss-green eyes. They were my eyes, and they caused Nerissa by turns to be doting and furious toward me. Most days, I wished the bastard had kept his eyes to himself.
But if Conrad had evaded the Proctors long enough, if he’d made it to Arkham … he could have found our father. A man who’d fall for and get a woman with the necrovirus in a family way, twice, unafraid of madness. A man who might help him.
“Please, Cal,” I said when he hesitated. “I just need someone to believe that this might not all be madness.”
“I can’t believe I’m helping him again—or you,” Cal sighed. “The Proctors could have me in the Catacombs in a heartbeat.”
I nudged his shoulder. “Not if you don’t run up to Ravenhouse and confess to them.” Relief lightened me and stopped my heart from thudding. Cal wasn’t going to turn me in. He was still the boy I’d met on Induction Day.
“Ravens are wise, Aoife,” Cal said. The rain was coming down in earnest now, and I dug my collapsible umbrella out of my satchel while we walked back to the common house. “The Proctors use them for a reason.”
“Ravens are too busy chasing real live heretics and Crimson Guard spies down in the Rustworks,” I said, hoisting the umbrella over Cal’s much taller head. I left out the rumor that Conrad had told me, that the Crimson Guard were witches who could do impossible things. Cal was sensitive enough. “Ravens have bigger worries than a couple of Academy students.”
“If you say so,” Cal muttered darkly, looking over his shoulder as if a Proctor were closing in on us.
“I do say so,” I told him as we climbed the steps and shook off the rain inside the common-house door. I patted Cal on his damp shoulder. “Nothing is going to happen to you.”
“So what are you going to do?” Cal asked, looking longingly at the other boys sitting around the aether tube listening to the baseball game. “Maybe you could send him a letter back, or something. You can write it and I can get the score.”
The truth that had been circling my thoughts since I read the letter solidified. Writing wasn’t going to help Conrad. “I’m going to Graystone,” I said. “Like Conrad asked.”
Cal choked. “What? Right now?”
Mrs. Fortune loomed in my head, and the meeting with the Headmaster. “Tonight.”
I thought Cal was going to faint on the floor of the common house. “You really are mad, Aoife.”
“Stop saying that,” I warned. I unwound my scarf and passed my fingers over the scar that Conrad’s knife had left. Conrad wasn’t like our mother. Conrad fixed our meals. Conrad braided my hair for school.
But no one cared about the Conrad before. They just saw him standing over me, his knife crimson on the tip, madness burning in his eyes. They didn’t see the torture he went through, how hard he tried to hold it back.
If Conrad needed my help, he’d get it, for all the years before he came into my room on his birthday, holding the knife.
They won’t be silent until I do it, Aoife. I’m so sorry.
“How are you proposing to just … take flight from the Academy with nothing except this wild notion to go to Arkham?” Cal demanded, when I stood silent for too long.
“Will you speak up?” I said, jolted to attention as the group of boys turned toward us. “I don’t think everyone on Academy grounds heard that.”
Cal pulled me down onto one of the threadbare sofas and leaned close, as close as we’d ever been. “This isn’t a simple thing, Aoife. Even if we made it out of the school—which is impossible,