The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [9]
“Yes, and on that day, if we are to look at things historically, certain … events may occur,” said Mrs. Fortune. “Your mother began to show signs at sixteen, although sadly I understand we don’t know when or how she was exposed. Your family carries a latent infection, this has been proven by her doctors. The Headmaster needs to prepare you with certain truths. That’s all.” Her big face was flushed, red from neck to hair, and she swayed from one side to the other in her hiking boots, like we were on the deck of a ship.
I stayed quiet and listened to my breath hiss in and out through my nostrils. Proven my behind. There was no reliable test for the necrovirus—half the time someone was committed because someone else didn’t like their look. That much, I had learned from Dr. Portnoy and my dealings with the asylum.
Mrs. Fortune clucked when I was quiet. “Do you have anything to say for yourself, Aoife?”
“I’m not my mother,” I snarled, vicious as the nightjar. I was different than Nerissa. I didn’t want to wander lost in dreams. I had iron and engines in my blood.
“No, dear, we’re not saying anything of the sort, but you must admit that Conrad …,” she started. I glared at her, a hard glare made of tempered glass. Mrs. Fortune swallowed her last words.
“I’m not my brother, either,” I ground out. “Is that what the Headmaster will say? We’re mad because my mother didn’t marry our father? Her being easy made us mad? Well, it’s not true and I’m not mad.” Heat rose in my cheeks like too much steam in a feed pipe. The pressure was going to make me explode.
Mrs. Fortune, for her part, looked relieved to be back on familiar footing. “You will not speak to a head of house so, young woman. Now finish your schoolwork and get into your nightclothes. Lights out in one hour.”
“I’m not going to go mad,” I said again, loudly, as she backed out of the room.
“Oh, Aoife.” Mrs. Fortune sighed. “How can anyone possibly know that for sure?” She smiled sadly and shut the door.
The aether hissed. I felt tears spill over my cheeks and I didn’t wipe them away, just let them grow cold on my skin.
I waited for a good while after Fortune’s footsteps moved away, then grabbed the letter from under my pillow and tore it open with my thumbnail. Three other letters had come in the year since my brother Conrad went away, and I kept the envelopes in my footlocker, underneath my blue sweater with the moth hole in the armpit.
The letters in his handwriting always arrived invisibly, never more than a few lines, but they told me that Conrad was still alive. After his escape from the madhouse, where the Proctors sent him after his sixteenth birthday, it was the only sign I had left. Treated with ghost ink, the letters smelled of vinegar and smoke. Ghost ink had been Conrad’s favorite trick—treat the paper and the ink with the patented Invisible Ghosting Liquid, and when you held the missive over heat and set it aflame, innocuous poems turned into full-length letters written in smoke that would disappear when the paper finally burned down to ash.
If the Headmaster or the Proctors in Ravenhouse, dedicated to protecting us from the heretics and viral creatures, found out I was getting letters from a condemned madman, I’d be locked up as quickly as Conrad had been. I unfolded the thick paper, feeling the fibers coarse against my fingertips, expecting something like the last letter:
Winter comes with sharp teeth
Wind to polish my bones
Which, burned, read:
Dear Aoife,
Cold here, and snowing, dreary and dark as the Catacombs in Ravenhouse at home …
Conrad never sounded mad in his letters. Then again, to anyone who didn’t know her, my mother didn’t seem particularly mad at first glance. Until she started talking about lily fields and dead girls. You had to look deep, in the cracks and crevices, to see the madness of the infection eating her insides. Once you really looked, though … there was no question it was there. Just like Conrad’s words