The Iron Thorn

20 The Mysteries of Thorn

BETHINA LOOKED UP from the old-fashioned coal range when I banged through the door. “Miss. You’re back.”

“Yes, I …” I looked at the pots on the stove. “You’re still cooking breakfast?”

Bethina shook her head, frowning at me. “Dinner, miss. Stew and potatoes. My mum’s recipe.”

“Dinner?” I sagged against the doorframe, recognizing the pink sky outside for what it was—sunset, not sunrise. “I’ll be damned.”

“Miss,” Bethina scolded me, spooning out a bit of stew and smacking her lips against it. “A lady like you shouldn’t use such language.”

“I’m not a lady,” I snapped. “I’m an engineer.”

Bethina’s face fell, and she turned her back on me and started slicing half-soggy tomatoes with short, choppy motions that telegraphed her irritation better than any words.

“I apologize,” I told her sincerely. I didn’t really want to be that girl who snapped at the servants. “I got lost in the forest. I suppose I’m a little testy.”

“I suppose you are,” Bethina huffed, setting her knife aside. “Dean and Cal were both out looking for you. They’ve been searching all day.”

The throbbing in all of my battered bits redoubled. Of course Cal and Dean would expect the worst. I’d lost an entire day in the Land of Thorn.

Even as I kicked off my dirty boots by the door and slung my cape over a hook, elation crept in. I felt terrible for worrying Cal, but I’d learned something. Tremaine had told the truth about the hexenring. Time did encroach around it, and my ten minutes inside had turned into ten hours.

One fact, but an important one. I resolved that before the night was out I’d learn another, and enough to discern what I was truly dealing with now that the responsibility of the Kindly Folk had come to me.

“Bethina,” I said, “where are Cal and Dean?”

“Back parlor, I think. Mr. Cal said that he wanted to try and find the baseball game.” She shook her head at the notion. She didn’t know that Cal would crawl across an acre of glass to listen in on a baseball game.

“I’ll go find them and let them know I’m all right,” I said. “They must have been terribly worried.”

“Dean was talking about calling up some friend of his with a dirigible and scouring the hills for you,” Bethina said. “Pure foolishness. As if he really knows anyone licensed to fly an airship.”

“Dean knows a lot of things,” I murmured, though I wouldn’t debate her over whether Captain Harry was in actuality licensed to fly under the laws of Massachusetts.

“Supper’s in half an hour. Don’t you wander off again and let it get cold!” Bethina called over her shoulder.

I ignored her—she might try to sound like a mother, but she wasn’t one, not even close—and went toward the sound of a scratchy play-by-play announcer in the back parlor.

“Come on, you bum!” Cal was shouting. “It’s a fly ball, not a grenade!”

“Will you knock it off?” Dean demanded. “My noggin’s had about all the yelling it can take for one day.”

“You’re the one who said we had to stop looking,” Cal retorted. “I’d still be out calling for her if it wasn’t for you.”

“I told you,” Dean sighed. “Woods ain’t safe at night. You’d just get yourself drained by a nightjar or laid out by a ghoul if you stayed out after sunset.” He shifted his weight restlessly on the settee, putting one booted foot on the parlor table.

“Listen to you,” Cal scoffed. “You sound like you’re scared of a few virals. I’m not scared of a thing out in those woods!”

Dean rubbed a hand across his forehead. “Thank stone Aoife has more sense than you. Being afraid keeps you from being eaten.”

“So far, anyway,” I said. Cal yelped and Dean jumped to his feet.

“Aoife!” He rushed to me and for a moment I thought he was going to sweep me into his arms, but he pulled himself upright and put his hand under my chin, turning my face from side to side. “You look right as rain, princess. You all there?”

“I got lost,” I said. “I’m sorry. Bethina says you went to a lot of trouble.”

Cal practically knocked Dean out of the way and grabbed me by the arms. “Aoife, I thought you were dead. I thought you’d gotten snatched by something out there, or that you’d wandered off because you couldn’t find your way home anymore—”

“Cal.” I interrupted his red-faced slurry of words, dipping my head so that I could pretend not to notice the moisture in the corners of his eyes. My friend would do the same for me. “I’m fine. I promise.”

Cal pressed me closer, against his bony frame, though I was startled to feel a bit of steel in his grip and a fullness in his chest that hadn’t been there when we left the Academy. Being on the run had solidified Cal, firmed up his boyish edges. My wounded arm started to throb. I pulled away too fast, and felt a prick at the downturn his mouth took.

“Where were you?” he demanded. “We looked everywhere, over every inch of grounds. Even in the old cemetery … did you know there’s a cemetery up here?”

“I just got lost,” I repeated. Dean cleared his throat and cocked an eyebrow at me. I shook my head slightly, just once. Not here. Not where Cal could get an inkling. I couldn’t go through another scene like the one in the library.

“You should get some rest,” Cal said. “Bethina can draw you a bath and you need to have a long soak and forget all about this day. What were you thinking, going into the woods like that?”

“I was thinking I wanted to be alone,” I said, and it came out far sharper than I’d intended. Cal winced like I’d stuck him with an actual blade.

“You could have been hurt, or killed,” he sniffed.

“Yes, but I wasn’t.” I could see the argument derailing the return of our good feeling and I put up my hands. “And you’re right—I could use some rest.” I caught Dean’s eye and held it for a moment, and his lips twitched upward. Deceiving Cal sat badly in my stomach, like I’d eaten something too sour, but I consoled myself that it was for his own good. Until I could show him my Weird, something tangible, he’d just think I was nuts anyway.

“I can draw my own bath, but could Bethina bring up a plate for me?” I said. “I’m famished.” That at least was the truth—I hadn’t gotten any breakfast before Tremaine snatched me away.

Cal smiled and nodded, patting me on the shoulder as if I’d just agreed to take my medicine like a good girl.

“Of course. You run along and try not to tax yourself anymore.”

“I will. Good night, Cal. Good night, Dean.”

Cal was back at his baseball game before I’d stepped out of the parlor, but Dean gave me a smirk. “Good night, princess. Sweet dreams.”

I pelted up the stairs, paying no mind to my bruises, and skidded into my bedroom. In the wash closet I spun the taps of the steam hob open and guided the water via valve into the brass tub in the corner, leaving the drain open so I wouldn’t cause a flood. When the hob was burbling away merrily, refilling itself with hot water, I stripped down to my slip and pulled a plain green cotton dress on, leaving my muddy clothes just outside the wash-closet door. Then I locked it from the inside and shut it from without. No one could get in without a skeleton key, and Bethina didn’t appear to have custody of the house’s key ring.

Then, stocking-footed, I crept back downstairs. Once I was in the shadow of the entry, I made a hard right turn into the library to avoid the sight line of the parlor, and pulled the doors shut behind me.

Dean would have to be disappointed tonight. I needed solitude, time with the books in the library above. I didn’t quite trust Dean’s faith to extend to some of the things in those books. I was still having a difficult time believing this wasn’t all just a terribly long nightmare.

I lit one of the oil lamps on my father’s writing desk and cycled open the trapdoor of the attic. I climbed, my slight weight silent on the ladder, and shut the door after me. I had at least a few hours undetected, until Bethina realized I hadn’t touched my supper tray and Dean realized I’d never left the wash closet after my theoretical bath.

I couldn’t claim to be one of those students who studies best when pressured. Cramming always made my head feel too small, as if facts were spilling out to make room for inconsequential chaff. But if all I had was a few hours to learn about the Land of Thorn, then by the Engine, I was going to do it. This wasn’t a silly test, a fake schematic for a machine that would never be built. This was potentially my life, and if I did poorly the lives of Dean, Cal and Bethina as well.

The truth was my passage to safety, and I had to find it before Tremaine found me again. Simply had to. Not to mention a way to avoid being snapped up by the Kindly Folk whenever the impulse took them. My father had some modicum of control. I needed it if Tremaine and his strange brass gauntlets were on the hunt for me.

I wasn’t going to make the mistake of passivity with Tremaine again.

Settling myself in the same position on the floor opposite the arched window, I put the lamp on the shelf next to my head and dug into the pile of grimoires that I’d unearthed the previous day. Much as I wanted to peruse the Machina volume, I instead found a battered volume bound in purple velvet that had the word Geographica burned into the front cover. I rooted through every cranny of the map cabinet; at the bottom, shoved far back so that it gummed up the drawer, I found a book of charts. Armed with the book, the map, my father’s journal and a fourth volume labeled Animus in the precise hand that I was coming to recognize as endemic to the Grayson men, I set to work.

The charts weren’t useful—topographical maps that made no sense to me. Cal would know how to read them. He’d told me he’d been a Badger Scout before he came to the School. I hoped fervently that one day soon I could show him the charts and seek his wisdom, without him calling me crazy.

The Geographica book yielded more information. The Grayson who’d set it down wasn’t as precise or detailed as my father, but as I riffled the pages filled with delicate watercolors of mountain ranges, lakes and fields that could be found nowhere in the known world, I gleaned a few things.

The Land of Thorn, populated by the Kindly Folk, might seem at first an exotic and tempting land for exploration. Do not be fooled. For it is not the Kindly Folk alone who dwell within its nebulous and mist-ringed borders …

I turned pages, until I found one that I first took to be blotted with mildew. It was only another painting, however, this one of the noxious mist that had nearly snatched me away from Tremaine. The faces were different—elongated mouths with a horror of teeth as opposed to the frighteningly human visages I’d glimpsed, but the author of the grimoire and I had clearly glimpsed the same thing.

The transportive mist is a devilish companion. The Kindly Folk do not speak of where it originates and tell little of its incorporeal yet vicious denizens. Some of the Folk claim this foulness comes from a dark kingdom ruled by a dark king, but they will only whisper about this shadowland in the stories they tell at night, when they think no outsider can hear them.

Thinking of the sticky, grasping hand that had tangled itself in my hair, I shuddered. I never wanted to meet what lay beyond the borders of the Land of Thorn.

I swapped Geographica for Animus and paged through description after description, detailed sketches accompanying each entry. Where the Grayson who’d assembled the book about the Land had been dreamy and slapdash, this Grayson had been compulsively detailed and immeasurably dry in his recounting of various species he’d encountered on the other side of the hexenring. I checked the endpaper of the grimoire: Collected observations of Cornelius Hugo Grayson, compiled 1892. I bet Cornelius was all the rage at parties.

His entry on the Kindly Folk was brief, but it made me cold, even though the snug library above never really got any cooler than the temperature of my skin.

Kindly Folk. Also called, in various languages such as Irish, Manx and Welsh, Seelie, Daoine Sidhe or elven. Their preferred term is Kindly Folk. They are susceptible to iron and to little else. They have mechanical aptitude, though they are backward compared with our advancements in steam and clockwork, and a command of what my compatriots in this venture call the Weird.

A few lines drifted by stained only by an inkblot, as if Cornelius were debating long and hard before he set the next line down on paper, where he couldn’t erase it from prying eyes.

The Folk can be your greatest friend or most diabolical foe. They have motives that far surpass my understanding. I only pray that their eventual purpose for me is benign.

I cannot contemplate the alternative.

It was the last entry in the grimoire. I set it aside and turned down the lamp as it guttered. I was nearly out of wick.

The Kindly Folk weren’t human, at least not like me or Dean or Cal. The Land of Thorn was real, and so was everything my father had written. Tremaine had sought me out, for what? I certainly wasn’t my father. I didn’t even have a Weird.

I was about to reach for the journal again when the lamp went out. It didn’t flutter and die slowly for want of fuel or wick, it simply ceased to be. One moment there was light and the next I was plunged into blackness, a pale sliver of starlight the only hope I had to see.

“Shoot,” I muttered. I’d left Dean’s lighter in the pocket of my skirt, in my room.

I stood to feel my way to the trapdoor.

A heartbeat later, something smashed into the window.

I screamed, stumbling backward against the shelves. A rain of journals and paper came down from my impact, but I was focused upon the thing at the window.

Its great wings were outstretched, and its hooked beak smashed at the panes as its talons scrabbled for purchase on the windowsill.

An owl, but far larger than any I’d ever seen. It was so big it blocked out the light, covered up the glass, until the only illumination came from its glowing green eyes.

The owl reared back and smashed at the glass again. A spiderweb of cracks appeared, and the creature gave a shriek of triumph. Its wings beat louder than my heartbeat, and my panic wore off enough for me to realize that no owl would act in this manner.

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.