The Iron Thorn

37 The Kindly Folk’s Bargain

I LOOKED BACK to Dean as we crested the highest catwalk. I needed his calm face and storm cloud eyes, even hidden behind a hood. The Engine sang to me slowly, and I drew its enchantment around me, warm and close and humming with so much power my head went light.

When I looked away from Dean, Tremaine was there instead.

“Aoife. You have arrived at the heart of all things.”

The Engine sound faded around me, the foreign air of another time reaching me through my mask, and I saw only a frail, rust-bitten skeleton where my feet should be resting on solid metal. The Engine itself groaned and shuddered, in death throes of grinding gears and pistons. The aether in its four gigantic globes was a sickly violet. Above and far away, air-raid Klaxons wailed. This wasn’t happening—I was being shown something, something I’d only glimpsed in the shoggoth’s dream before now.

“Where are we?” I said, my stomach dropping in concert with the shaking walkway. This wasn’t right. Wasn’t real. Something was dreadfully out of prime with the world Tremaine and I stood in. My Weird curdled, retreating into my mind like it had been burned.

“The end,” Tremaine said simply. “I cannot pass through the Iron Land, and you cannot yet venture alone into Thorn. As iron poisons the Folk, this is the intersection of time and tide upon which we must meet while you linger in that infernal Engine.” He spread his arms to encompass the ruined Engine. “You’ve seen it before, Aoife. In your dreams, perhaps? The end of all things, if you do not break the curse?”

He pointed at the Engine, now a shuddering wreck of metal, now perfectly fine and whole. My mind was playing tricks on me, my madness digging its claws tighter into my brain. “Harness that power vaster than any in Thorn. Wake the queens, Aoife. Even now that foul machine sings its desire in your blood.”

The Engine gave another clank and rattle in this time-crossed vision I was seeing. Toxic smoke and gas poured from its ruptured core, and it begged me, in the language of machines, to set it free, to channel its great death-blast away from the innocents of Lovecraft and across the lands of Thorn instead, to the queens, who would soak it up and save my city from immolation.

I could feel the Engine in my blood. All I had to do was turn the channel toward Tremaine and his queens. The Weird was my blood, my legacy. The last thing I could do before I, a small and insignificant girl, went mad and lost the gift that my lineage had granted me. I could save Dean, Cal and the Folk. That had to be enough.

Dean’s voice came to me from far away. “Aoife, wake up!”

“Why, child,” Tremaine said, stronger and more present as I hesitated for just a moment, Dean’s voice tugging at me. “Surely you are not afraid?”

The power at my fingertips gibbered and whispered seductively. It begged to be grasped, and it burned when I did. I felt I could disintegrate on the tide of power from the Engine.

“I’m not,” I told Tremaine, knotting my fists. “But I’d feel better if you stood with me.” Everything except the Weird—Dean’s voice, the real Engineworks, even the vision—was fading like a spotty aether connection. The combination of the Weird and the hallucination had crossed the wires in my mind.

Tremaine came to me, the knifelike smile playing about his face. “Of course I will stand with you, child.”

I pulled the lighter and the paper knot free of my suit and, with a flick of my thumb, touched the flame to the paper. The geas, at least, was something I was certain I wanted to send at Tremaine. Dead certain.

“And while you stand with me, I’d like it if you told the truth,” I said to Tremaine as the paper hung suspended in the air, pulling in the flame, turning into a prism of fire. The enchantment of the thing tickled and bedeviled my Weird, as if I’d sat on my hand and gotten pins and needles all up and down my arm.

“What is this?” Tremaine bellowed.

“This is human,” I told him with no small satisfaction. “You’ll give me a straight answer, Tremaine. One way or another.”

Tremaine’s throat worked. “You think an Erlkin geas holds a member of the Folk? A member of the courts? You presume?”

I drew back from him, for he looked terribly angry and I didn’t want to get a blade in the gut before I’d asked him my questions. “I do.” I snapped the lighter closed. The geas continued to burn between us.

“My mother,” I said. “You knew her. How?”

Tremaine twitched, but he spoke in a slurred rush. “Your mother was born with a foot in and a foot out of Thorn. There are a lot of names for Folk who have a little human blood, who can cross the gates, but the one in those infernal human storybooks she loved so much is ‘changeling.’ In her younger days, Nerissa traveled freely between her true world and the Iron one. Until she met him.”

I felt my eyes go wide, of their own accord. “My father?”

Tremaine sneered. “He only discovered her nature when she had already begotten your brother. And then it was too late. He knew the fate changelings face in the Iron World.”

When my lips parted to deny it, Tremaine let out a laugh, cruel and throaty as the crows’. “You mean you haven’t figured it out? One bred of the blood and the iron, that’s a changeling for you. But iron poisons your blood just as it poisons mine. Slower, but just as surely. Usually womanhood speeds the poison. It’s your fate, for belonging to neither side. In the Thorn Land, we drown your kind. Though you and Conrad both escaped that fate, your brother was smarter than you. He escaped me entirely.”

I nearly lunged forward and socked Tremaine in the jaw at that last, but I kept the geas between us. The flame began to flicker from the draft. “You told me he was shot,” I snarled.

“I lied,” Tremaine said. “I do so, from time to time. Oh, did your mother tell you the pretty fairies couldn’t lie? Her mind must be rotten enough from iron poisoning by now to believe that.”

“Why?” I cried, wanting to strangle him bare-handed. “All it did was nearly make me give up and die. I wasn’t going to help you.”

“I am pragmatic,” Tremaine said. “A useful trait of men. If you thought that sot of a brother was alive, you would be loyal to the Graysons, not the Folk. You’d try to find him. To rescue him. You could be diverted from your mission. But revenge against the Proctors by awakening the Folk? That cause made you quite able.”

“I hope I fail and your queens sleep forever,” I spat. “You’re vile.” I felt as if I were seeing Tremaine for the first time, and that even with his sculpted face and haunted eyes, he was indescribably ugly.

“I am the Regent of Winter!” Tremaine growled. “And the Thorn Land is mine to command whether my queen lives or dies!” He breathed and gained control over his trembling visage. I could tell the geas—and the truth it drew out like venom—was straining him.

“If this little tale has put you off your purpose,” Tremaine said, “consider that I could still simply kill your brother, your ghoul friend and your besotted Erlkin. Slowly, and in that order. Would that be sufficient motivation?”

The geas gave off the scent of rowan wood as it began to sputter and go out. “I’m not your subject,” I said softly, looking Tremaine in the eye so he’d know that he might have me cornered, but he didn’t frighten me anymore. “And don’t ever make the mistake of thinking I’m loyal to anything that comes from that foul place you call a kingdom.”

“I think you’ll change your tune in … six days, was it?” Tremaine folded his hands with the satisfied expression of a predator that had just brought down a lame deer.

“My father may have understood you,” I snarled. “But I don’t.”

“Your father?” Tremaine spat. “Grayson was my adversary, Aoife. He sought to keep Thorn and Iron locked in their old ways, old traditions. He and those foul mistling Erlkin.”

I started when he mentioned Dean’s people in the same breath as my father, but I kept my composure. “I knew Dean hated you, but it’s nice to know why.”

“The Gateminder and the Folk need one another for many reasons, Aoife, but need does not equate to love,” Tremaine said. “Someday, you’ll learn that. Archibald Grayson was not the human who favored the Folk. He sought to learn our secrets of sorcery and craftsmanship with his foul Brotherhood of Iron, and I, for one, am glad he’s gotten himself good and lost.”

Before I could retort, the geas went out with a crackle and a snap. Tremaine lunged for me, and in my shock I let him take hold of my throat. “Open yourself to the Engine,” Tremaine ordered. “Allow your Weird to right the wrongs visited on my people.” His nails dug half-moons from my flesh. “I had to threaten you, but I’d rather you understand. Whether you approve or not, there is a natural order and the Folk have a place in it. With their queen ruling and their lands alive. Otherwise, we’ll both suffer. The natural order. That’s all I want.”

“Do you really?” I demanded, thinking of Conrad’s voice in my dream. “Do you really want your queen awakened, or do you want Winter for yourself?”

Tremaine’s lips peeled back in a sinister grimace. “Politics of the Folk aren’t your concern, Aoife. The safety of yourself and your friends is.”

Tremaine hadn’t answered my question, but it ceased to matter—I couldn’t hold back the Engine any longer, the power I’d drawn already breaking through my last barriers. My Weird flamed in my mind and I saw the lily field, the coffins wreathed in their poison sleep. Far from being noxious and foreign, the curse wreathing the coffins was familiar. I’d felt the enchantment before, when I’d stared into a pair of cold eyes.

Human eyes.

Grey Draven’s eyes.

What I’d mistaken for insanity had really been power. Draven had a Weird too, a terrible and poisonous one.

He wanted to destroy the Folk, all memory of magic. He’d cursed the queens so Thorn would wither and die.

But if I listened to Tremaine, it would destroy the Iron Land as well. Did Draven not know, or did he not care?

And then, it didn’t matter. My Weird had taken over.

The Engine sang in me, sweeping like a wind across the lily field. I saw the energy I commanded with my Weird swoop and cut across the pure white of the flowers like a flock of ravens. Real ravens, not the clockwork obscenities of the Proctors. It met Draven’s curse—Draven knew of the Thorn Land, like my father. Draven had cursed the queens.

But none of it mattered as the surge I’d taken from the Engine and harnessed to my Weird met the curse of iron and, like a hammer on a cold morning, shattered it, scattering its flimsy, glass-shimmer pieces to the four corners of Thorn.

Grey Draven had cursed the queens, but the enchantment broke, snapped, shattered into a thousand gleaming fragments before the power of the Engine, driven by the impetus of my Weird. I could wonder at his true motives another day.

Now I was stronger than Draven. In that moment I was stronger than anything in the world. I was fire and ice, cleansing and calming, opening the bonds that held the queens in eternal sleep.

I was the Engine. The Engine was me.

And then Tremaine let me go and the connection with the Engine broke and I was nothing but Aoife again. I fell, feeling the catwalk dig into my legs. “You have done the right thing, child,” he said. “Perhaps more than one human will take our side in the coming war.”

I blinked at him, dumbly. “War?”

In their coffins, the queens stirred.

In my mind, something pale and terrible raised its head and woke. It was larger than the Weird, sharper, and it blew through me like the aetheric fire of Oppenheimer’s war Engine.

Magic.

The Winter Queen opened her eyes and stared into mine. My shoulder flamed with pain and my vision blacked out.

“The Iron Land has dreamed a great dream,” Tremaine whispered in my ear as I writhed under the onslaught of power pouring back into the Thorn Land. “Peace from all but a few escapees of Thorn, exceptions that you explained with a virus. Peace from ensnarement and enchantment, as it was in the old days. But no longer.” He touched my forehead.

“Your father and your brother and Draven all played their parts,” Tremaine whispered. “In their furor to do what they felt was the true and righteous thing for Thorn and Iron. And now you’ve played yours. And now a new storm is coming, Aoife. If I were you”—Tremaine’s lips brushed mine, so soft and close was his whisper—“I’d run and hide.”

New pain erupted from my palm, sharp, thin silver pain, and my eyes flew open.