The Iron Thorn

by Caitlin Kittredge

  All of it was my secret now, because if I told anyone what I’d seen here, or that I believed it, they’d lock me away before I could say “blueprint.”

  “You knew him.” I jabbed my finger at Tremaine. “You knew him and now he’s gone. What did you do?”

  Tremaine tilted his head, like he was listening to music on an aether frequency I couldn’t discern. I was struck once again by his eyes. I’d seen the same eyes on madmen, sick with tuberculosis from the terrible drafty conditions of the madhouse. Their bodies were wasted and their minds shredded, but their life force blazed in their eyes like open flame. They were most dangerous then, because they had nothing left to lose by dying.

  “I do indeed know Archibald Grayson,” Tremaine agreed at length. “And now I know you. Anything else is beside the point.” He turned his back on me and began to walk uphill, along a small deer trail that cut through the stubby brush growing on the moor. “Keep up, child. Like I said, we haven’t much time.”

  I hastened to follow him, because it was follow Tremaine or be left behind. The Kindly Folk hadn’t wanted to hurt my father. What they did wish of him, I had the sinking feeling I was about to find out. “Time for what?” I called to Tremaine’s back.

  “No ceaseless questions,” he ordered. “Walk. I must have you back to the hexenring by sunset.”

  “You know, you shouldn’t prohibit questions and then invite them with cryptic nonsense,” I told him, annoyance overtaking caution. That was the counterweight to my practiced outer calm—my mouth was never steady and never circumspect. The words rushed out, and the trouble followed.

  Tremaine sucked in air through his awful teeth. “I do so wish the boy had come back. You, miss, are a frightful chatterbox.”

  Startled, I broke into a run to pull myself even with Tremaine’s long strides. “Boy? Wait! What boy?”

  Before Tremaine spoke, to reveal or deny some new information about my brother, he stopped walking, his eyes searching the sky. He checked a spinning dial in the brass of his bracers, fed by gears that were in turn attached to spikes that seemed to implant themselves directly into his wrists. The puncture sites, which I’d mistaken for tattoos, were blue and swollen. The gears began to tick, faster and faster, as cloudy blue liquid fed itself through a return system within the gauntlets. Tremaine grimaced as he examined the dial, worked in a crystal unlike any I’d ever seen. “Iron damn this day,” he murmured. “I hope you’ve got a fast step to go with that quick tongue, child.”

  Instead of asking what and risk his ire again, I followed Tremaine’s gaze skyward.

  The mist thickened and curled around us, only this time it was stained yellow-green like an old bruise. The figures within returned also, but they were solid rather than slippery fragments, and I watched them turn as one and fix on us. I’d seen enough lanternreels about the exotic predators that roamed the West to know we were in bad trouble.

  Tremaine took my arm. His grip was stronger than a machine vise. “Get back to the hexenring. Don’t stop and don’t let the mist touch you. If you get caught up in it, they can find you.”

  “They?” I squeaked, partly from the pain in my arm and partly from alarm at the preternatural speed of the mist as it enveloped the meadow. I could no longer see the trees, the hills—even my footprints twenty feet behind were obscured.

  “This part of Thorn is a borderland,” Tremaine said. “It borders yours—the Iron Land—and it also borders places best left to the imagination. Do you understand?”

  I nodded, while the same sharp odor of applewood and rot assailed my nose as when I’d passed through the hexenring. “I understand.” There was no more fear beating its way out of my chest. There was only a cold determination not to fall prey to anything else that skulked on the borders of reality.

  “Good.” Tremaine nodded. “Now close your mouth and run.”

  I obeyed his words and my own instincts, digging my toes into the springy peat and bearing for the gap in the mist that lead back to the ring. Behind and to the side and all around I heard a scattering of giggles and the flapping of wings. Gears ground in Tremaine’s bracers as he brought up my heel, and a bronze-bladed knife popped free of its confines, nesting into his hand like it had grown there.

  “Pay attention to your feet!” he grated when he saw me looking. I wanted to tell him that he needn’t worry—if I couldn’t fight off the bullies in Lovecraft, I could at least outrun them—but the mist was closing in, the corridor back to the ring growing more claustrophobic with every breath that ripped through my lungs.

  I reached the hexenring, and Tremaine grabbed my shoulder and propelled me over the hump of toadstools. I stumbled and went down hard, scraping my knee on a rough patch of ground.

  “Stand within the ring,” Tremaine panted. “Don’t move.”

  The mist was nearly upon us, and I felt something brush wet, sticky fingers through my hair.

  Frantic to get the thing away from me, I grabbed air as I stood and swatted around my head.

  “Don’t move!” Tremaine ordered. “They’ll see you!” He turned the dial in his bracers, but all I wanted was to make the mist stop touching me, to get the sticky miasma off of my skin and the stench out of my nose.

  This time I twisted something in my knee as I dropped. My shoulder hit the earth, my hip and my ribs crying out, and I fell.

  I fell and fell still, and kept falling. Sound ripped from my throat, sight from my eyes, my stomach twisting violently as if I were back in the crashing Berkshire Belle.

  Just as I was about to black out, I landed. The air wuffed out of me, but when I rolled onto my back and sucked in a great gulp of cool moist oxygen, I saw the apple trees and the rosy morning sky of Massachusetts, welcoming as a warm fire after the flat gray sky of the Thorn Land.

  Getting up was a difficulty, and I felt the dozen places where I’d have bruises later. I scrubbed off my cape and skirt as best I could, the red earth of the Land of Thorn falling away and mingling with the dead grass of the orchard.

  I had been to the Land of Thorn, and I’d returned unharmed. But not by a large margin.

  The fog still curled, but it had faded to lace, revealing the overgrown gardens and the spiky profile of Graystone in the distance.

  “I’ll come for you soon, Aoife.” Tremaine’s ghostly voice hissed at me once more before the ring vanished like the vapor it was and I was alone.

  “We’ll see about that,” I muttered. There was no one to hear me, but it felt better to be defiant than to cower and wait for the next shock to my system.

  Turning back toward the house, I limped as quickly as I could across the uneven ground and up the hill to the kitchen door.

  My father knew how to deal with the Kindly Folk and the Land of Thorn. It was time that I learned, too.

  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 volum
e, 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.