“Fae,” I said, my voice strained as I tried not to move against the knife. “You’re Fae.”
He didn’t reply, just pressed the knife harder against my flesh. It didn’t make any sense. Why try to leave us helpless in the water if all he wanted was my death, in the end? Was he an agent of Tremaine’s? How was he surviving, trapped in an iron tube, when I was already getting the first symptoms of poisoning?
Jakob still didn’t say anything. The pain in my shoulder was dizzying, and I felt tears squeeze from the corners of my eyes from fear. “Who are you?” I choked out. “What are you going to do to me?”
“I got you alone to deliver a message,” Jakob said. “You always have to be the clever one, Aoife. The one to fix things.” He kicked the door to the engine compartment shut, never moving the blade from my throat. Thin, and made from pure hardened silver—Tremaine had a similar knife. He’d also held it to my neck, and it hadn’t made me any more inclined to listen to him than I was to listen to Jakob. “Nobody can break in here. Nobody will hear you scream.” The knife pressed, and I felt a thin line of blood trickle down into the hollow of my throat. “The message is this, Aoife—the Brotherhood can’t help you. The nightmare clock can’t help you. Your only chance to find your mother is to come back to Tremaine and beg for forgiveness.”
A pounding started up outside the door. “Effie! Effie, girl! What is happening in there?”
Jakob cut his eyes toward Chief Sorkin’s voice, but he was immovable, and quick as a cat besides. I stood no chance of trying to get away on my strength alone. My father’s words came back to me: You’re not much in a stand-up fight.
“Shut up, Dad,” I grumbled. Jakob cocked his head, then smiled, a thin smile. He turned his wrist to dig the knife in more, and I caught a flash of a flaw in the skin of his wrist, a brand of some sort, which surrounded a small metal rivet. My Weird responded, frantic and hot against my mind in my panic. I had an idea, just a germ of one. I might not be a fighter, but I was smart. And Jakob hadn’t counted on how badly I wanted to live.
Rasputina’s voice joined the clamor outside. “Open this door, Jakob! What’s happening in there?” Something heavy hit, and Sorkin shouted.
“Jammed, Captain! Something is wrong!”
Rather than focus on Jakob, his pointed features, his now-pupil-less blue eyes, I focused on the door. Using my Weird felt like driving a drill through my temple, and blood gushed from my nose, but the wheel that opened the door turned, ever so slowly, and then, with one last push, flew back and dented the bulkhead with a clang like a coffin lid.
Rasputina and Sorkin stood there, and Jakob spun me to face them, arm clamped across my shoulders, knife at my neck. I was closer to this Fae than I’d ever been to anyone, even to Dean, and I could feel his heart beating. “You little sneak,” he hissed in my ear.
I snarled, not willing to be afraid of his blade or the fact that a Fae was here, alive, aboard an iron ship. “What? Did Tremaine fail to mention that?”
Rasputina drew her pistol and aimed it at us. “Jakob,” she said softly. “Your eyes. What’s wrong with your eyes?”
Jakob’s laugh was short and harsh as a seal’s bark. “My eyes? Nothing, you idiot woman. My eyes are open. Yours are closed. You are ignorant to everything around you, especially me.”
I twisted my neck a bit while he ranted, trying to see if I had any give with the knife. There wasn’t much. Jakob’s skin felt cold and clammy where his bare torso pressed against me, and I caught a glimpse of his eyes, which had so alarmed Rasputina. Fae eyes gleamed with an inner light. If I were Rasputina, I’d have been losing my cool staring into them as well.
“Speak,” Rasputina said. “You’ve been loyal crew for months, Jakob. What are you going to do to this girl?”
“Cut her throat if you don’t lower that crude weapon and leave us to our business,” Jakob snarled. “And also if she declines to obey my terms.”
Fury flared in me. Tremaine still thought he controlled me, either via an agent or directly, through my fear of the Fae catching up to me. Now it had happened, and strangely, I wasn’t panicking. I was just furious. “It wouldn’t be the first time,” I told Jakob. “My brother sliced my throat. He almost killed me. I was bleeding all over myself. I’m not going to scream and beg.”
“You mad bastard,” Rasputina said, lowering the hammer on her pistol. The click echoed in the closed space, and I swallowed in fear, acutely aware that I was in the way of the bullet.
“Let the girl go.” Her voice had gone soft, placating, more like that of a kindly teacher than that of a captain. “This can still end with everyone alive, Jakob.”
“She’s a destroyer,” Jakob snarled. “When she turns the wheel and opens the kingdom, they will come and come and come, come from the stars and cover this world, and the next, and the next.…”
Finally, my opening. I recognized those ramblings—iron madness, eating into your brain until you just rambled endlessly, about the things only you could see. My mother had talked about the same things.
I snapped my head back into Jakob’s face, feeling something give—something nose-shaped. Jakob yelped, the knife skidding down my neck and over my collarbone as he wind-milled.
Rasputina’s arm never wavered; she didn’t even blink. The gunshot was impossibly loud, stole all sense of sound from me, and I felt the bullet fly through the air next to my face.
She missed Jakob by inches, the bullet digging another dent in the bulkhead, and he bared his teeth. They weren’t pointed like Tremaine’s, but they were white and sharp, ready to tear flesh.
I didn’t know for sure that it’d work, but I didn’t hesitate. I grabbed Jakob’s wrist, above the brand surrounding the curious metal rivet. Fae couldn’t survive in iron. I dug my fingernails into the spot and accessed my Weird.
Jakob groaned and swiped at me with the knife, but Sorkin darted forward and pinned his arm to the bulkhead with a roar. I felt skin, blood and metal beneath my nails, and Jakob’s screams spurred me on. I yanked on the piece of metal—silver, I saw now, carved in the shape of a tapered screw, going all the way down to Jakob’s bone—with my fingers and my Weird together.
Splitting pain in my skull, a shattering scream from Jakob, and he collapsed, still, on the floor of the engine room.
I looked down at my bloody hand, which gripped the silver screw. My shoulder throbbed at the contact with it. Powerful Fae enchantments were wound around this piece of silver—powerful enough, I thought, to keep a Fae citizen alive in the Iron Land for months.
“Jakob,” said Rasputina, bending down and feeling for his pulse. Jakob thrashed and screamed when she touched his skin, as if her touch were flame, and I darted back, into the arms of Sorkin, who held me steady.
“It’s all right, little girl,” he rumbled. “It’s going to be all right.”
I tried to pull away, to get to Jakob and make sure he was really finished. Rasputina had no idea what she’d let onto her boat, and as she shook Jakob by the shoulders, I wanted to snatch her away, to scream that she wasn’t nearly as afraid as she should be.
Jakob was even paler than he had been, all his veins standing out, as he grabbed for Rasputina.
“Burn, witch!” he shrieked. “You burn! Bright as the red fire they put into your blood!”
Rasputina jerked her hand back. “What are you saying?” Her face had gone from flushed to pale in an instant, and she drew away from Jakob’s twitching body.
He giggled, and I flinched. It wouldn’t be long now. This much iron around a full-blooded Fae … I didn’t want to think about what would happen when the poison took full effect.
It would be too much like looking into my future.
“The fire and the ice,” Jakob hissed. “The beginning and the end. The waking dreamer there, Aoife Grayson, will end you. She’ll drown the whole world, and she’ll do it with a smile.” His laughter turned into a shrill scream. “I don’t want the clockwork inside me! I don’t want the dreams!” His h
and lashed out again, and he snatched Rasputina’s pistol from her belt.
“No—” she started. Not a shout, not an exclamation, just the softest beginning of a plea, before Jakob put the barrel to his chin and squeezed the trigger.
I immediately tucked my head down against my shoulder, and the force of the gunshot slapped me like a hand. Rasputina screamed, and I stayed perfectly still, with my eyes screwed shut, until she stopped. I didn’t want to look.
Footsteps raced, and other crewmembers who’d heard the shot from outside came spilling in. There was yelling, in Russian and French and half a dozen other languages, and still I stayed where I was, until Rasputina got off the floor, scraping the fine spray of blood off her cheeks, and grabbed me by the arms. I braced myself to be hit. The rage and confusion on her face were plain, and those feelings only led to one place, in my experience.
But after a long moment, she let go of me. “You better be worth it” was all she said before she picked up her cap from the floor and put it back on her head, sweeping past the crew and out of the engine room.
I stayed. I had to see, to make sure Jakob was really gone. Crewmembers bundled his body into an oilcloth sack and hauled it away, and only then, as they brought a mop and bucket to scrub up the blood, did I open my hand.
The enchanted silver had bitten deep divots into my flesh, but the thing was dead now, no more magical than a bread box.
Tremaine had known where I would be before I’d known myself. Had sent an agent ahead to retrieve me. Had willfully put close to fifty lives in danger just to get me alone, to deliver his message to me. And I wasn’t surprised at any of it. That was Tremaine’s way—destroy an Engine, destroy a city, destroy my life. Nothing mattered but the agenda of the Fae, and his agenda in particular.
I made my way back to my bunk, past crew who gave me a wide berth. I looked down at myself and saw that I was covered in Jakob’s blood. I was as numb as I’d been when Sorkin and Rasputina had pulled me from the ocean—all that mattered was that the Fae knew where I was.
My legs were rubbery and my heart was thudding as I collapsed on my bunk, listening to the Oktobriana’s screws come back to life and feeling the slight sway in my stomach that said we were under way. At least I’d accomplished that much. We were still headed north. Draven wouldn’t take out his wrath on Dean just yet.
Having come that close to being taken to Tremaine again made me nauseous. Draven was malicious, but I could out-think him, outmaneuver him. I knew I was smarter, and that I could make a plan that both kept Dean alive and got me what I wanted from the Brotherhood.
With Tremaine, I had no such assurances. He’d fooled me before, made me a virtual puppet, and now he’d gotten close enough to draw blood, all without my seeing it. I’d done what he wanted, I thought, with the same burning rage I’d felt when I’d fought off Jakob. I’d started a slow hurricane that would eventually sweep the entire Iron Land bare. And yet he still wanted me. For what?
The only answer I could muster was that it was more important than ever for me to find the nightmare clock. It could deal with Draven, with the Fae, with all my mistakes. Find it, use it, set things right. That was my only course now, no matter what the cost.
Being resolute helped me calm down a little, but only a little. I wiped the blood off myself as best I could with the single towel Rasputina had provided and shut the door. I got back into bed, and pulled my legs up to my chest and a blanket around my shoulders. Draven might have given me passage that kept me safe from the Proctors, and Rasputina had agreed to carry me, but the journey to the Bone Sepulchre was turning out to be anything but easy.
Rasputina knocked on my door after a time. “Join me in my cabin,” she said, and gestured me into the corridor. I was too tired to argue, or even to wonder what she was going to do to me. Nothing she could come up with would be worse than Draven or Tremaine.
We took the same seats, the two small chairs, but there was no offer of a drink this time, and Rasputina didn’t stare a hole in me as if she could read my thoughts. “Are you going to tell me what happened to Jakob?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I did,” I said. I could have put my head down and slept there—Rasputina’s cabin was warm and smelled faintly of cinnamon. It reminded me a bit of our old apartment in Lovecraft, the last we’d had before Nerissa was committed.
“You looked scared when he talked to you,” I said. “He knew things about you nobody does, right? Things you never told anyone?”
Rasputina took off her cap and rubbed her forehead in distress. She’d washed most of the blood off, but a faint line of pink lingered at her hairline. I looked down at my own rust-streaked hands and shuddered. The gunshot seemed to echo in my ears.
“And how do you know that?” Rasputina asked at last.
“Jakob isn’t a man,” I said, and then amended it. “Wasn’t. He was a creature from a world that’s close to ours, but isn’t ours. He was poisoned by iron in the ship. He was here to spy on me.” That was as simple as I could make it. The Crimson Guard didn’t deny magic and the other lands as heresy like the Proctors did, so I thought maybe Rasputina would be willing to believe me. I hoped she was, because otherwise she was sure to think I was insane, just as all those people back in Lovecraft did.
“I grew up in a village called Dogolpruydny,” Rasputina said softly. She tipped her head back and shut her eyes. “A wild place, mostly run by crime lords. The Crimson Guard press-gangs children to serve as grunts in their army, but otherwise, the people there are less than cattle to those in the capital.” She sighed. “There are things roaming the streets at night. Halfway between men and dogs. They feed on your blood, and they are deathless. Not even bullets can stop them.”
My mouth felt dry. I remembered some of the creatures that lurked below the surface of Lovecraft. Even Cal’s family, the only ghouls I’d met not out for my blood, was unsettling. I couldn’t imagine how Rasputina had survived.
“One caught me one night,” Rasputina said. “I was small, and slow. Sick much of the time. It bit me, but it didn’t like my taste.” She opened her eyes again and went to the steam hob, rattling a teapot. “I found out in that moment that my blood is poison to the deathless creatures that come from that dark place, the place your Proctors insist doesn’t exist.” She turned on the water and watched it hiss from the tap with great concentration. “I just don’t know what they want with you.”
“They want me to do something,” I said. “It’s part of why I’m going north. I can’t do what they ask, and I can’t escape them, as you saw.” I wrapped my arms around myself. Since I’d come aboard the Oktobriana, I hadn’t been able to get warm. I didn’t know if it was from having been frozen or from my creeping apprehension that I was making a huge mistake.
But I couldn’t think that way. This was my only choice.
“And the other part is Dean?” Rasputina poured the hot water over a tea strainer and swirled the pot a bit, steam rising to obscure her face.
I looked at my hands, not able to meet her eyes. “I don’t know if we should be talking about this, seeing as you two have history. Dean tends to make me say things I don’t mean to.”
Rasputina choked on the tea she’d poured and then started to laugh. I flushed and blinked at her, surprised. I wasn’t sure what I’d said that was so funny.
“Oh,” she said, “he does, does he. Rest well, Aoife—we are friends, and I am grateful to him for saving my life, but Dean is not my type, not in age and not in the sense that he’s … well, a boy.”
“Oh,” I said, realization dawning. “Oh.”
“See? You are smart,” Rasputina told me. “And loyal. And fearless. Dean is damn lucky to have you.” She checked her chronometer, a wrist style that I’d always wanted but could never afford. “We’ll be at Newfoundland in a half hour or so. Try to keep out of the way until then, all right? My crew will be busy.”
I got up and managed to smile my assent, but at that moment all I could think of was tha
t I might never see Dean again. There was a chance I wouldn’t even make it back to the United States, never mind free him from Draven and tell him I thought Rasputina was right but the reverse was also true—I was lucky to have Dean.
At least I knew it in my heart, even if I never got a chance to tell him.
12
Below the Ice World
Fifth entry:
This boat, and Rasputina, made me realize something important: even if I never see him again, I’ll never forget Dean Harrison. He’s quiet and strong, and he doesn’t fuss and worry over me like every other man I’ve known. I could see myself standing next to Dean for the rest of my life.
I don’t know anything about love. I don’t know what it’s supposed to feel like. I don’t think birds swoop down and bells chime, like in those stupid romances other girls at the Academy loved to giggle over. I think it might be more like the Gothic novels our house matron, Mrs. Fortune, read when she wasn’t looking after us—if two people are in love, you may be torn apart by circumstance, but you’re always together, at least in your hearts.
Of course, it’s not a scheming stepmother keeping me and Dean apart. It’s someone much worse. Draven knew exactly where to cut me to draw the most blood. I hate that he’s not willfully ignorant like most Proctors. I hate that if I’m honest, he’s as smart as me, if not smarter. I hate him, in the way that spreads poison through a mind. The more I think about Dean being under his control, the more I hate Draven. Hatred is not what my father would choose in this situation. He’d stay calm. He’d figure out some horribly clever solution. He’d fix everything.
There’s Draven. There’s my father and Valentina. There’s the Brotherhood. Three directions, all pulling at me, like I’m the magnet in a compass. All wanting different things, all wanting to use me for different things. And now Tremaine, letting me know he hasn’t forgotten, that he wants more from me than everything I’ve already given. He’s the worst, because I know that he will be unceasing until I bend to his will.
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