Pillage

  With no flowing water coming in we had discovered that beneath the shack the tunnel ran in two directions. One tunnel led to the manor’s basement and the other led to the huge underground cage. We couldn’t get inside the cage because of the massively solid lock holding the door shut.

  We headed toward the manor’s basement and quickly crossed the underground pool. In no time we passed up the bedroom and the library. I was starting to get the hang of navigating the tunnels.

  “You really should read that book you took,” Milo insisted.

  “I’m working on it,” I said defensively. “I’ve been a little busy raising dragons.”

  “That book could have something we need in it,” Kate said.

  “Kate’s right,” Milo joined in.

  “I know, I know.” I said. “I’ll finish in the next couple of days.”

  We had reached the room with the desk and ever-burning candle. It lit the room with awkward shadows. We walked straight to the tunnel that would lead us to the back of the wardrobe. While exploring the tunnels we had found another way into the manor, but it came out on the far side of the house, close to Scott’s room, so we always used our original entrance.

  I turned off the flashlight, knowing the wardrobe room would be dark, but light enough to move around. Kate helped me push the wardrobe away and all three of us climbed out into the dimly lit room.

  I thought I was experiencing a flash of revelation. It turns out the revelation was just Thomas flipping on the light switch to illuminate Millie and Wane who were standing on either side of him. They all three wore expressions similar to those I had seen by a few other adults and teachers in my life who had been less than pleased with me.

  “Beck,” Millie scolded sadly. “I can’t believe it.”

  Kate and Milo moved behind me as if I would protect them.

  “What are you doing here?” Wane demanded.

  “What are you doing here?” I countered instinctively.

  “Nothing happens in the house without us knowing about it,” Millie said.

  “So tell us the truth. What are you doing here?” Wane asked again.

  “We were dusting.” It was all I could come up with on the fly.

  “Dusting?” Thomas asked angrily, pointing his cane at me.

  I had never seen that color in Thomas’s cheeks before.

  “I told you to stay out of the basement,” Wane said.

  “Actually, you said there was no basement,” I pointed out.

  “That should make our insistence even clearer,” Millie argued.

  I vowed to never, ever talk or reason like an adult.

  Thomas stomped his foot and pointed to the door. “To your room,” he said. “And you children are to stay clear of the manor. Understood? Especially you.”

  Thomas pointed at Milo, but Kate nodded as well. They slipped out as fast as they could, running down the hallway and out through the door. I couldn’t believe how quickly they deserted me.

  “I’m disappointed,” Millie said to my back as I began my journey to my room.

  “Sorry,” I said, turning to face her. “We didn’t hurt anything.”

  “Children have no idea how high the stakes of life are,” Thomas chided harshly. “Go.”

  I walked faster. Thomas and Wane followed me all the way to my room. Millie walked a few steps behind them. As soon as I was inside, the door was locked behind me.

  “Wait,” I argued. “You can’t lock me in. What if I need to go to the bathroom?”

  “Look in the corner,” Wane yelled through the door.

  I turned and there in the corner was a pot not too terribly different than the one my uncle kept upstairs.

  “No way,” I said. “You have to let me out.”

  “Good night, Beck,” Thomas said. “This is for your own good.”

  Words of warped adult wisdom.

  “We’ll see you in the morning,” Millie called sadly. “You need some time to think about what you’ve done.”

  I could hear their footsteps retreating. I fell down onto my bed and rubbed my palms against my eyes. I glanced at the pot and realized that my life was going through a seriously weird phase.

  At least now it looked like I could finally do a little uninterrupted reading.

  Chapter 17

  Still Sick

  It took me a few minutes to clean up the book. I couldn’t get to the bathroom sink, so I had to use a lot of spit and one of my older shirts to wash off the cover. Slowly, a raised design emerged on the front of the book. At first I thought it was a large, smashed flower, but as the grime came off, I could see an image of two large dragons knotted together.

  My heart leapt.

  I worked on the title below the dragons and in time it spelled out The Grim Knot. In smaller words beneath the title, I read The House of Pillage.

  I liked how the book looked. The worn brown leather and raised front made me feel like I held something valuable and important. I opened up the book and discovered that the title page had been ripped out. There was a short dedication on the next page that read “For the sake of equality.” The dedication had an illustration of a dragon’s nest around it, though I wouldn’t have known that’s what it was if I hadn’t seen the real thing. The book was filled with a number of handwritten entries and appeared to be a record of one family’s history. The word Pillage was peppered throughout the pages. I looked it up in my dictionary: pillage—the act of looting or plundering, especially in war.

  I hadn’t noticed right off, but when I flipped open The Grim Knot again, I saw a number of names written in ink on the top corner of the inside cover.

  I felt a ribbon of cold wrap around my heart as I saw my uncle’s name. If this was his book and if the book was about dragons—and both facts certainly appeared to be true—then my crazy old uncle knew more about dragons than he was letting on. I laid on my bed for a long time, thinking of what the best course of action might be.

  It was obvious: I had to talk to Aeron immediately.

  I closed the book and got up, only then remembering that I was locked in. My key wouldn’t turn in my lock and the door was way too solid to kick down. I triple searched the room for some sort of hidden door or tunnel.

  There was none.

  I opened the window on the side of my room and looked out. My room was on the third floor and there was no way I could jump all the way down. There was a six-inch ledge right below my window. I looked up and realized that if I could find a way up to the next ledge I would only be two floors away from my uncle. There were some trees and shrubs nearby, but no matter how hard I concentrated I couldn’t make them grow upward and rescue me—I felt empty.

  I took another glance at how high up I was. I then looked at the book lying on my bed—I had no choice.

  I pushed the window up all the way and stepped out onto the ledge. It was cold outside, with barely any wind. I balanced my weight carefully on the ledge. The manor’s rough stone facing provided multiple places for me to get a grip.

  I stepped sideways along the ledge, moving slowly and looking for any sign of a way to climb higher. I had to go all the way to the back corner before I found a place where I could scale up. The stones joining at the corner made the ascension to the next level easy.

  I decided to stick with the corner and climbed up to the next floor like an inexperienced Spiderman.

  A light, bitter rain began to fall.

  At the top of the sixth floor, a balcony ran along the entire crown of the manor. I climbed past a huge gargoyle and crawled over the balcony rail. I walked around the entire balcony in the rain—not a single window or door was unlocked.

  I needed to get just a little bit higher.

  I saw a column of small stained-glass windows. The way they were set in the stone created a small ladder. I put my foot on the sill of the lowest window and began to climb.

  I pulled myself up onto the widow’s walk above the seventh floor where I could see the copper-topped dome
where my uncle lived. It was dark inside the dome. I pictured my uncle standing alone with his long staff. It probably wasn’t the best idea to surprise him with my unexpected visit.

  I knocked on a glass window near the door. “Uncle Aeron.”

  The cold rain increased.

  “Uncle Aeron.”

  He stuck his head out of an open window and looked at me as if I were a shadowy vision.

  “It’s me,” I said. “Beck.”

  “Beck? Again?”

  “I need to talk to you,” I begged.

  My uncle retracted his head and a couple of seconds later the glass door swung open. I walked into the dark room as Aeron pulled the door closed.

  “What are you doing?” he asked harshly. “I thought I—”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  He looked down at the trapdoor.

  “I couldn’t come that way,” I said, wiping rain out of my eyes. “Thomas locked me in my room.”

  “What?”

  “They locked me up.”

  “I’m sure they had reason,” he said uncomfortably. “Now leave.”

  “What?”

  “You were not invited.”

  “I need to know something,” I said firmly, pretending I wasn’t scared to be around him.

  “I’m busy,” he insisted.

  I looked around the shadowy room, wondering what in the world he was busy with. “They locked me up,” I argued.

  “The manor can be a dangerous place.”

  “I’m aware of that,” I said. “I’ve been locked up.”

  “You should be with Francine,” he scolded.

  “She’s gone,” I pointed out. “And I have no one else to go to.”

  Aeron sighed. “I’m not good with children,” he said.

  There was nothing new in that statement.

  “I climbed up the side of the manor to talk to you,” I argued.

  “I can’t be distracted.”

  I was sick of it. I had been shipped across the country after losing my mother and was now a prisoner in my own house. I could make plants grow, I had a crush on a girl who didn’t seem to care, and I was currently the caregiver to eight baby dragons.

  “I found your book,” I blurted out.

  Aeron didn’t even turn.

  “The Grim Knot.”

  Now he turned.

  “Where did you find that?”

  “In the basement.”

  Aeron knocked his staff violently against the wood floor.

  “You were to stay away.”

  “Well, I didn’t, and now I have your book.”

  “Rubbish,” he growled. “Nonsense. I had the basement filled in years ago. All that information is supposed to die with me.”

  “Well, someone’s been digging around,” I informed him.

  “Rubbish,” Aeron answered hotly.

  “I’m not making this up for fun,” I said. “I have to know about the book.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “What about the conservatory?” I asked.

  Aeron looked at me with his dark eyes. “That book was best buried. Fortunately, it takes more than a simple glance to understand it.”

  “I have to know about dragons.”

  Aeron’s hands shook slightly and I could see a dark change in his eyes, black clouds gathering for a deadly storm.

  “Dragons?” he whispered dryly.

  “Dragons,” I said firmly.

  Aeron stared at me. He breathed out slowly, letting his shoulders drop. “Dragons,” he finally said. “Well, unfortunately, they are a far more complicated thing.”

  “I’ve got all night,” I insisted, sitting down on a pelt as far from his pot as possible.

  “I can’t tell you,” he said sadly. “You were taken away so you’d never have to know.”

  “Well, I’m here now and I’m not leaving until you tell me the truth.”

  The rain continued to fall, splashing against the windows. Aeron said nothing, only continued to peer into the dark.

  “I’m not leaving,” I reiterated. “I have to know.”

  Fifteen minutes later, the rain had stopped and my uncle still had not said another word to me.

  “What do I do about the dragons?” I finally asked.

  “No,” Aeron spoke. “I already told you.”

  The clouds broke and the night sky came alive in a simmering sea of stars.

  “Please,” I begged. “I need to know what’s happening here.”

  Aeron sighed and, without turning, whispered, “Search the book, Beck. Like so many other things, it has fallen into your lap. There must be a reason for it.”

  I wanted to complain about all the things that had fallen into my lap for apparently no reason at all, but instead I said, “I feel responsible.” I could hardly believe those words were coming out of my own mouth. “For everything that’s happening.”

  “It will all be over soon,” he said. “Go.”

  His words brought such a heavy feeling to the room that I was happy to go out the glass door and begin to scale my way back to my room.

  I know it seems foolish to say this, what with everything that was going on, but something felt wrong. I wanted to blame the feeling on the fact that the walls were slippery and dangerous and that at any moment I could fall to my death. Or that my uncle seemed to speak only in riddles. But the feeling was deeper and more depressing than either of those thoughts combined.

  Something wasn’t right.

  I thought about climbing all the way down to the ground floor and running away, but I had nowhere to go. I had to believe that Thomas and Millie would let me out as soon as morning arrived.

  I made it to my floor and scooted along the edge until I was back at my window. I climbed in and closed the window behind me. I was planning to read, but after staying up half the night with my unhelpful uncle, my eyelids were so heavy that no matter how I fought against them, they just wouldn’t stay open. I left the book beneath my mattress and fell into a deep sleep.

  Chapter 18

  Disgusting Lie

  I could hear a sharp knocking. It pounded loudly and sounded like it was coming from inside my head. I forced open my eyes to see Thomas nailing boards to my window. I bolted up in bed.

  “Easy now,” Thomas said. “I’m almost done.”

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  Thomas turned. “It seems you spent some time outside your room last night. We just want to make sure it doesn’t happen again. We can’t have you falling and getting hurt.”

  “This is crazy,” I said. “My uncle will have a fit.”

  “I suppose if he actually comes down he might,” Thomas said.

  I couldn’t believe this was happening. I felt like the situation called for pleading.

  “Please, Thomas,” I begged. “I’m sorry. I won’t leave my room again. I’ll stay out of the basement.”

  Thomas turned and laughed at me. “This isn’t about the basement,” he smiled wickedly. “It’s about your dragons.”

  “My dragons?” I said, dumbfounded.

  “It’s your purpose for being here,” he said. “How easy it was to manipulate the mind of a child.” He shook his head.

  “What?”

  “Blame your family,” Thomas said harshly. “Had your uncle acted like a true Pillage, none of this would be happening.”

  “Pillage?” I asked. “Is this a joke?”

  “No,” Thomas said. “I’m afraid this is most serious.”

  “I’ll get out,” I threatened.

  “I doubt it, but if you do, Scott is watching the windows,” Thomas said. “He was the one who informed us of your little escapade last night. He’s outside right now and, for the record, he does not have your best interest in mind.”

  “I don’t believe this,” I said, feeling more frightened than when I had first seen the dragons hatch.

  “Do you think it’s easy to keep up this manor?” Thomas asked. “We’ve sold every bi
t of furniture and spent every dollar your family ever had. We’ve auctioned off every animal and let go of everyone but the four of us. Tax time is coming and we will not lose the manor.”

  “Tax time?”

  “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” Thomas said.

  My head felt like it was going to explode. Thomas nailed the last board to the top of the window, closing out the final bit of natural light.

  “I don’t understand,” I said sincerely.

  “This wasn’t my first option,” Thomas said. “I’ve done everything I could to get Aeron to take some action. But he’s turned his back on the gift your family is supposed to be cultivating. We needed you to wake the dragons.”

  “Why me?”

  “You’re a Pillage,” he said. “Your ancestors changed your name when they came to America. But only a Pillage—only you—could wake the stones. That’s why I needed to make sure Francine wouldn’t be around to stop you from coming.”

  He said the last line so sinisterly that my throat constricted and I dry heaved.

  “Nice,” he said, disgusted. “Just perfect.”

  “You hurt my mother?” I asked in disbelief, trying to breathe normally.

  “She was very ill,” Thomas said, unlocking the door and stepping into the hallway. “Her life was fat with turmoil.”

  “But the dragons need me,” I reasoned.

  “The dragons need nothing now but permission to pillage,” Thomas said. “It has been too many years since they have come to life. Our coffers will be full again.”

  “You brought me here for this?” I asked, exasperated.

  “I’m afraid so,” Thomas said.

  “But Millie said—”

  “Forget what was said,” he insisted. “It was all a lie. Mind yourself, and you might see the light of day again sometime. I do have a place for you. After all, you’re a Pillage.”