The Iron Thorn (31 page)

This was something else.

I knew virals, perhaps too well, because of my mother. I knew the shandy-men and the shoggoth. This wasn’t viral, wasn’t from a lanternreel or Professor Swan’s stupid pamphlets. This wasn’t something that had once been human, twisted into a viral, or something purely a mutation that had come from this world.

The owl screeched as it splintered a pane, snowflakes of glass falling to mix with the debris on the library floor. Its feathers were a sick, watery bronze, and a few of them fluttered down along with the shards as it tried to wriggle through the hole.

It wasn’t born from the necrovirus. It wasn’t from anywhere this side of Tremaine’s ring. And if it came through the window it was going to kill me.

These were the facts that unspooled through my mind, clinical and cool as the voice of Grey Draven through the aether tubes. Screaming for help didn’t even occur to me. Cal and Dean were too far away, enveloped by the sound of their baseball game. They’d never get here in time and they wouldn’t be able to help if they did.

I had to think. I had to be the girl who killed the beast, not the princess who became entranced by it and so trapped in its maze, forever.

I’d never liked the ending to that story, anyway.

The not-owl had one wing through the hole now, its greenish oily blood dribbling viscous on the library floor. I pressed myself as far back against the shelves as I could, trying to give myself a few precious seconds to think.
Think, Aoife. Thinking’s what you’re supposed to be aces at
.

The thing’s hideous talons, twice again as long as a
flesh-and-blood owl’s should be, left deep hash marks in the sill as it struggled toward me.

“Child,”
it croaked, an obscene parody of a human voice.
“Little child …”

I turned my face away from it, terror making me squeeze my eyes shut, dust and the corner of vellum pages tickling my nose. Graystone had defenses, even here in this most secret repository. But I was as far from the library panel below as I was from the moon.

If only I had some way to block off the window. If only I could spring a trap on the inhuman thing that hungered for my flesh and bones.

I felt it first in the very back of my head, a gentle ticking as the pendulum of my heartbeat counted off the seconds I had to live. It was a small pressure, like someone resting his hand on the back of my skull. The shoggoth’s bite throbbed, as it had when I’d lain in a fever dream, listening to the house.

Listening to the voice of Graystone whisper. It crawled back to me, from the corners and crannies, the clockwork wheels and rods and gears that made the house.

The pressure built, flowing through me, into my chest and fingers and toes. I thought my skull was going to burst, but all at once my focus narrowed, to the window and the owl and the iron trap on the window waiting to snap shut.

My senses went razor sharp. Everything hurt. And then the pressure burst, my head filling with the voice of Graystone, and I felt iron in my blood and gears in my brain.

I was the house.

The house was me.

We were one.

The trap window smashed down, the spikes that locked the bars in place at the bottom cutting the owl nearly in half.

It gave a moan, hardly a sound at all, from its ruined throat. One wing fluttered spasmodically, and blood dribbled over the sill and ran down the plaster, staining whatever it touched.

Then it died, and the only sound was the wind through the shattered glass and my own heart throbbing in my ears. The fullness in my head was gone. The connection with Graystone was shut. My Weird had come and gone, and left me alone again.

The Lily Field

I
STAYED IN
the library above for a long time, staring at the trap and the thing caught in its jaws without blinking. I tried to raise the trap back up, to feel the fullness in my head again and the clean, sharp clarity of communing with Graystone.

A word like
weird
didn’t do the feeling justice. I had felt like nothing else on earth. I wasn’t simply Aoife when this foreign thing stirred in my mind. The Weird made me feel. The Weird made me alive.

But nothing happened. My head ached, behind my eyes, and my ears rang. The stench of the dead owl filled the small space, until I dislodged it from the trap and watched it fall to the ground four stories below. The blood got on my hands and I swiped them furiously on my dress, loose papers, anything to get the foul, oily blood off of my skin.

I went back to sitting, my knees tucked up under my chin, and stared at the window again. I concentrated
viciously, until I was sure my head would fragment into pieces from the pain of my headache.

Nothing stirred except the ends of my hair against my cheek as the wind picked up. Try as I might, I couldn’t replicate the sweet, pure strangeness that had flowed through me when I’d been inches from the owl’s talons. There were the things in the mist, things whose faces I hadn’t seen. Something could have followed me home from the Land of Thorn.

I leaned my head back against a shelf, resting it on a soft pile of paper, and stared at the cobwebbed ceiling of the library. My father had made use of the Weird sound so simple. All I was finding was frustration and blood on my hands.

My eyes drifted shut. I told myself it was just for a moment, just until I could force my head to stop pounding, but when I opened my eyes the iron blue fingers of dawn had taken hold of the world.

I worked the cramps out of my neck and legs and went to the window. Surely Dean and Cal would be awake and have discovered the owl’s body fallen to the front drive in mangled pieces.

Instead, I saw a lone figure standing on the drive, solitary in the glassy dawn light. The familiar ring of mist roiled at his feet.

Tremaine put up his finger and beckoned to me, and like my father before me, I went to him.

Tremaine stayed silent as we stepped through the
hexenring
, silent as he took my hand and helped me out. Once we stood on the red moor, he regarded me with his arms
folded. His bracers gleamed. It was dawn in the Land of Thorn as well, a pinky-red dawn in a yellow sky. The scent of the air was foreign, and I shuddered as gooseflesh blossomed on my thinly clad arms.

Taking his blue velvet jacket from his shoulders, Tremaine wrapped it around mine.

“Thank you,” I murmured. The jacket smelled like grass and roses, at once fresh and sick-sweet with decay.

“Don’t,” he said shortly. “I’m doing you no favors, child. I need your full attention.” He regarded me, hunched inside his jacket. It was miles too large for me, and I swam inside the sleeves that flopped over my hands. “You are a frail little thing, aren’t you?” he said, looking up at the ridge of mountains to our west. “Nothing like the others.”

“I’m not frail,” I snapped, chafing at the comparison, no doubt, to men like my father. Tremaine showed his teeth.

“We’ll see.” He beckoned to me and started up the same trail that we’d encountered the mist upon. This time we crested the moor and came down into a hollow, filled with a stone circle like a mouth of broken teeth. As we cleared the outer ring of stones I saw that they lay in a distinct pattern, a starburst like the ink stain the witch’s alphabet had left on my palm.

“To stave off the no doubt interminable flood of talk,” Tremaine said as we passed through the circle and started to climb again. “Those were corpse-drinkers in the mist. Before.” He flourished his hand as if that explained everything. I was getting sick of his patronizing me, as if I were a very silly child who couldn’t possibly understand.

“Can you at least tell me what those are?” I grumbled. “Or am I to guess?”

“Corpse-drinkers,” Tremaine sighed, as if I were a hopelessly backward student. “Incorporeal beings searching for a vessel, a body. They possess corpses and drink of the living. They come from the other place. The Land of Mists.”

Tremaine’s explanation hadn’t done anything to lessen my terror of the creeping mist, but I set my feelings aside. I was only interested in one thing the Kindly Folk had, and lore wasn’t it. “My brother …,” I started. “Before, you said the boy—”

“If you spend any time in Thorn, with my people, you will come to understand the value and the beauty of bargain,” said Tremaine. “You must do something for me, Aoife, before I’ll grant favors for you, and—”

“I don’t want a
favor,
” I cut him off as he’d interrupted me, perhaps more viciously than was prudent. The Kindly Folk were not terribly kindly, and they were rude, too. “If something happened to Conrad, just tell me.
Please.
”

Tremaine stepped onto a set of steps carved into the downward slope of the moor, his green vest and trousers making him a living piece of the land. I followed, with far less grace.

“I said bargaining, not begging. Perhaps if you were a more sedate girl, who held her tongue before her betters, you’d have heard me.”

I hated Tremaine, I realized all at once. I wanted to hit him in those shark teeth, swing for the fences like Cal’s baseball players. “If you’ve just brought me here to riddle me, you might as well send me home,” I gritted. “I didn’t even know my father properly. I can’t tell you where he’s gone.”

“But he
has
gone,” Tremaine said. “He has not visited for three full moons. No inane tasks for our aid. No arcane
knowledge sought. I declare, I almost miss the old man. He was at least diverting. You are not.” He walked, and I had the choice of following or being left alone on the moor. “So since you don’t have a quick wit or a pleasant face, what
do
you have for me, Aoife?”

“Well, I haven’t got anything except fifty dollars,” I said primly. “And that’s earmarked for someone else.”

Tremaine threw back his head and cackled at the rapidly graying sky. “I don’t want your money, child. I don’t want any sort of tribute. You are not the Gateminder. Not like your father, and never will you be.”

“All right.” I dug my feet in. “You’d better tell me what you
do
want, or I’m not going another step.” We had reached the edge of a pine forest, the sharp scent of the trees scraping the inside of my nose. Gravel paths wound away like ribbons, well groomed but eerily empty.

Tremaine stroked his tail of hair like it was a pet. “Do you see anyone else in this place, child, anyone to aid you? I could do you harm so easily. Your blood would stain the Winnowing Stone and the Stone would drink your offering down.”

My father’s book had talked about the Winnowing Stone. I had the distinct feeling I didn’t want to meet it. Not yet, anyway.

“If you were going to kill me,” I said, raising my chin so he had to meet my eyes, “you would have done it the first time I came through the
hexenring
. Or left me for the corpse-drinkers. Either way, you want me alive. For something.”

I only hoped my fate wasn’t worse than being consumed by one of those cackling, horrid things in the mist.

“So it is,” Tremaine said, all traces of humor gone from his face. “You must think you’re a clever girl, Aoife?”

My jaw set. “I do my best.”

Tremaine’s delicately hewn face rippled, just for a moment, with anger. It was the first emotion of any kind I’d seen pass over his features. “I despise clever girls,” he spat. “Come along. I’ve something to show you.”

When he got a few steps ahead of me and I stayed immobile, he threw up his hands. “It’s the truth, you wretched human. I swear on silver. Now come along before I fetch you by that bird’s nest you call hair.”

I felt my eyes go wide. Even when I was just an orphan, not even an Academy student, people rarely spoke to me like that, either out of breeding or out of fear of my madness.

“Where are the other Folk?” I blurted. The question had been niggling me since the day before. “My father’s writings speak of Folk. Not just one. And his chambermaid has seen scores of you.” I put my hand on my hip, cocked it, doing my best imitation of Dean. He was the only person I could picture standing up to Tremaine.

The pale man scoffed, his nostrils flaring out like the sails of a weather ship. “So?”

“So,” I returned, “what’s happened to the rest?”

“You ask a lot of questions,” Tremaine said quietly, his tone like a knife in the dark, “for someone who won’t like the answers.”

“Why did you bring me here?” I pressed on. “Why do you want me and not my father?”

“I
do
want your father!” Tremaine exploded. He closed on me, looming a head taller, his eyes ablaze.

I went cold and insensible all over, but I let the fear root
me to the spot rather than drive me on. I wasn’t running from Tremaine. He’d enjoy it far too thoroughly.

“I would vastly prefer him,” Tremaine amended through gritted teeth, his nostrils and body quivering with suppressed rage. “You think I want a simpering child when I could have a gifted future Gateminder? I do not. But you are all that is left, Aoife, and the sooner that you accept that, the better off you’ll be.”

“I want my brother.” I could grit my teeth too.

“And I want the sky to open and rain down fine green absinthe,” Tremaine returned. “Neither of us will be gratified today.” His hand snapped out, quick as the traps of Graystone, and seized my arm. It was the first time he’d been overtly violent, but I can’t say he surprised me. Tremaine jerked at me. “Now, are you going to come along, or do I have to drag you?”