The Iron Thorn

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “It’s overload,” I murmured, because I’d seen the lanternreel. What to Do in Case of Overload. “We have to … get down … under our desks.…”

  “Desks, hell,” Dean said. “We’re blowing this joint. Up you come.”

  I managed to get up, with his help. “Yes … run.” The Engine was giving off smoke now and pressure alarms were screaming from every control set.

  The end of that lanternreel showed a burning, cratered city. A great wound on the earth, burned from the inside out.

  I had only meant to divert the Engine’s power, just for a moment. I hadn’t meant to cause overload.

  I hadn’t meant to unleash Tremaine and his Folk on the Iron Land.

  What had I meant to do? What had I done?

  Dean grabbed my good hand and together we joined the stream of evacuating workers, up staircase after staircase as the earth shuddered and convulsed beneath us.

  Up and up, into the free, fresh air. It tasted like nothing except metal and death to my tongue. Tremaine said the iron drove me mad. Drove changelings mad. He’d said so many things.

  Tremaine had done the thing my father had sought to deter his entire life. The Gateminder and the Folk need one another. To maintain a balance, to hunt down things that crossed from one to the other, to keep the gates between Thorn and Iron shut.

  And I’d opened them. I’d let magic into a world that called it a lie, that couldn’t absorb it. That was what I’d done.

  “Move, kid!” Dean bellowed in my ear. “This monster is gonna blow!”

  The Engineworks had vents, all over the city, and they were sending out jets of steam that were melting the stone and iron around them as we crested the ground. Manhole covers flew off like bullets and Klaxons screamed in the air.

  The grounds of the Engineworks were chaos, workers running headlong for the fences, piling up at the gate, screaming at the Proctors, who were themselves running for their lives.

  In the city itself I could see the steam gathering over the tall spires of Uptown like a pair of vast wings, stretching to engulf everything that the Proctors and the Rationalists held dear.

  The screaming wasn’t just sirens, I realized. There was a drone in the air, of human voices that rose and fell with the air-raid Klaxons. Outside the fences of the Engineworks, black shapes darted and hissed at the people inside. Nightjars, in the daytime. They were freed from the gates at last—every Proctor in the city was occupied, and the population was theirs for the picking.

  Thorn’s children would feast.

  “It’s horrible …,” I whispered. “I am so sorry. I didn’t want this.…”

  “Enough,” Dean said. He ripped off his fire suit and helped me do the same. “We have to go, doll.”

  The mob of workers were breaking the fences, only to be set upon by a cluster of nightjars and springheel jacks still wearing vestiges of their human faces. New screams joined the faint ones rolling back from the hills of Uptown.

  Dean turned away from the carnage at the gates and ran for the river, dragging me with him. The icy black rushed up at us, and before I could protest or balk we went over the edge, off the pier.

  In midair, a great hand snatched me and pulled me away from Dean, a crackle like a thousand rifle shots and then a boom and a loss of air.

  A great emptiness opened up where my Weird sang.

  I plunged into the dead winter water of the Erebus River knowing that the Lovecraft Engine was no more.

  The cold kept me from fainting at the great bodily shock the overload of the Engine caused. It seized my lungs and forced me to kick for the surface. I scraped my palms on floating chunks of ice, but when I broke free of its grasp I sucked down air and tried to kick against the current.

  From my vantage on the water, I watched Lovecraft burn. Crimson smoke from the Engineworks blanketed the sky like a red tide, and screams floated over the water. Clockwork ravens swirled aimlessly overhead, flummoxed by the devastation.

  By the shore, black shapes crawled, coming out of sewer drains and shadows and the air itself. I couldn’t discern which screams came from the Engine and which from the crawling remnants of the Folk.

  “Dean!” I shouted. My voice was gone, stolen by ice and smoke. “Dean!”

  “Aoife!” His shout came from a piling on the bridge, toward which I rapidly swept. “Hold on! I’ll catch you.”

  I caught his hand, nearly lost it again, grabbed on to his leather and clutched. Dean hauled me onto the piling next to him, only half out of the water, but half was better than none. “Thought I lost you, kid.”

  “I’m n-not …” As soon as I hit the air, I began to shiver again. “I’m not that easy … t-to lose.”

  “I’d drink to that, if I still had my flask,” Dean said. He squinted across the river. “It’s all gone. The Engine. The city. Lovecraft is eating itself.”

  I looked away. I didn’t want to see my old home, the cold streets and Ravenhouse and my mother’s asylum.

  My mother …

  “My mother!” I shrieked at Dean. “She’s still there … I have to go back!”

  Dean snatched me before I fell into the river again, but his arms couldn’t contain the swell of fear. Nerissa and I did not behave like mother and daughter, had never behaved that way, but she was my only mother and she was trapped in a dying city where the Folk were running free. I had to find her, had to take her somewhere the Iron Land engendered couldn’t touch her.

  “We’ll come back for her,” Dean said, rocking me. “We’ll come back. She’s locked down in a madhouse; she’ll be all right. You have my word.”

  I didn’t have the strength to fight his arms any longer, and I collapsed back against the pilings.

  “It’s all gone wrong,” I rasped. My throat was raw from the water and the smoke that even now filled my nose.

  I pulled my legs up to my chest, keeping myself as dry as I could, even though the wind meant that hypothermia would already be setting in. I’d escaped the Engine and Tremaine only to die under a bridge.

  “The awful thing,” I said, “is that I was starting to feel bad for Tremaine. His dying world. His poor, subjugated people. His cursed queen.”

  “I’m not going to say that I told you not to trust the Folk,” Dean said. “I think you’ve learned it by heart.”

  “It’s not easy to be ground under a heel your entire existence,” I said. “That, I understood.”

  I was starting to shake, to lose feeling in my hands. My head was floating and I gave a light giggle. “I understood. How stupid am I, Dean?”

  “Shit,” he said, rubbing my arms and back. “You’re sliding under. Stay with me.”

  “That feels nice,” I said. I knew that I was detaching, my mind like a dirigible drifting away.

  “Aoife …,” Dean started, and then stripped off his jacket, wrapping it around me. “Dammit, Aoife, don’t you check out now.”

  A rumble and a roar penetrated the warm, buzzing world I’d found myself in, and I looked up, irritated that yet another disaster was going to overtake me. “What now? Hasn’t the city been thoroughly destroyed yet?”

  “Harry!” Dean bellowed. “You swamp rat! Where’ve you been?”

  I shaded my eyes to watch the oblong shape of the Berkshire Belle, much patched and welded where she’d plowed into the ground, swing low over the river and come to rest above the waves.

  The hatch slid up, and Cal peered out, extending his hand. “Climb aboard! Make it fast—there are ravens everywhere!”

  Dean handed me up, and when the warmth of the cabin hit me I collapsed on the nearest bench, shivering uncontrollably. Dean hopped into the hatch and pointed at Cal. “Blankets and a hot water bottle if you have it. She’s in a bad way.”

  The Belle lurched and Harry shouted from the cockpit. “Where to, mes amis?”

  I turned my back on the wreckage of Lovecraft, looking west, toward Arkham, and curled inside the blanket Cal draped over my shoulders. “I want to go home.”


  The Fate of Graystone

  DEAN SLEPT ON the flight back to Graystone, but the rocking motion of the Belle failed to soothe me. Instead, I got out of my seat and made my shaky way to the cockpit, to stare over Harry’s and Jean-Marc’s shoulders at the landscape below.

  “You all right, mademoiselle?” Harry demanded. I tried to smile at him but it hurt.

  “I suppose I’ll live.” I’d stopped shivering and mostly dried out, but the ache of falling into the freezing water was prodigious. My head still rang from the Weird, and I’d watched my nose stop and start bleeding three times since Harry had snatched us from the jaws of the river.

  “Coming up on the village, Captain,” Jean-Marc said. “And it’s a pitiful sight.”

  The ship passed small fires burning like ghoul eyes in the fading light, over wrecked jitneys in the street and prone bodies lying facedown on the cobbles.

  “What’s happened?” Cal said, coming to stand next to me. “The whole town’s blazing.”

  I felt an awful premonition creep along my spine and into my twinging shoggoth bite, and turned to Captain Harry. “Can we go faster?”

  “We are at the mercy of the winds now, petite,” Captain Harry said. “And the ill wind, she’s blowing over your valley.”

  As we crossed the empty field and drifted up against the mountain, I saw more and more signs of carnage. Blood smearing the cut cornstalks of the fields. Dead crows circled by worrying, cawing live ones. Dark shapes that darted from shadow to shadow, like liquid.

  The rising moon overhead was swollen and yellow, nearly full. Ghoul howls echoed from the mountain, and the only respite I saw was that Graystone was not blazing like Arkham.

  “Set it down. Set it down!” I shouted at Harry, already scrabbling for the hatch. It was my fault the Folk’s monsters were lose, my fault that bodies were littering Arkham’s streets. Tremaine had played me, and it had worked. The barriers between Thorn and Iron were no more.

  Harry lowered the dirigible only long enough for me, Dean and Cal to jump off. He hollered at us from the cockpit, “Good hunting, chère!” and then with a whirr of fans the Belle was gone.

  The Enemy of Thorn

  IN THE SILENCE, I heard the hiss of a nightjar from the garden.

  Cal’s nostrils flared and Dean’s switchblade came out. “We got some uninvited guests,” he said.

  “They’re everywhere,” Cal said. “All over the garden. Under the porch …” His eyes went round and milky in the twilight. “Bethina.”

  Cal shifted into ghoul on the fly and took off at a four-legged run for the house. I thought that poor Bethina was about to get the shock of her life, if she hadn’t already.

  “He had the right idea, doll,” Dean said. “About making tracks for inside, I mean.”

  A nightjar crawled away through the apple orchard, and from the roof tiles, a springheel jack snarled at us before leaping from cupola to ground in one fluid motion.

  “Definitely the right idea,” Dean said, and we ran.

  The creatures were everywhere, crawling over the house itself. “Why are there so many of them?” I shouted to Dean, though I had an idea. Maybe there had always been this many horrors lurking in the shadows of Thorn.

  “Figure it out later!” Dean shouted, and that also was a good point. We slammed and locked the kitchen door behind us as something ran into the other side, scrabbling and chittering and making the hinges bow from the impact and the assault of its claws.

  I braced the door while Dean grabbed a kitchen chair and stuck it under the knob. When I let go, I nearly fell into the arms of a ghoul.

  He didn’t look anything like Cal, Toby or their mother—this was one of the cemetery ghouls, wild matted hair, wilder eyes, and a stench that could fell a war Engine. He snarled at me.

  “You murdered Tanner.”

  I reeled away from him, until I realized I was backed into a corner. I heard soft whimpering behind me and turned slightly to find Bethina occupying the same space. “Are you all right?” I asked.

  She shook her head, eyes wide and pupils vibrating with shock. Cal stood behind her, hand on her shoulder. Thankfully, he’d made himself look human again. We’d have a discussion about his deceiving Bethina, but this was most certainly not the time.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “I’ve got it under control.”

  “How,” Bethina gasped, “in hell can you have this under control, miss?”

  More ghouls crept into the kitchen, and in the dim light they appeared all eyes and teeth.

  I looked at Dean. He was watching each ghoul in turn, an expression I hoped to never see again on his face. Dean looked as hungry for a fight as they did, and his switchblade flicked open. “Who wants the first taste?” He grinned at the ghoul’s leader. “It’s silver-coated. I hear you puppy dogs don’t much care for that.”

  Graystone whispered to me frantically, pleaded with me to rid it of its interlopers. The Weird wanted to open itself up, wanted it so badly it made my heart beat out of time.

  The Weird had unleashed the ghouls in the first place, brought every awful thing to bear on the Iron Land.

  I supposed it was time my Weird did something good. I touched Dean on the arm. “I think you’d be better served by giving us some light, please.”

  He looked at me for a long moment and then nodded. “I dig you, princess.”

  To Bethina, I murmured, “Cover your eyes.”

  Dean gave the kitchen aether globes a nudge, just a shove, with the wicked bit of wild magic that always wrapped around him. A globe cracked, then another, and then in a brilliant flash the aether exploded, contacting the air and sending the scent of burning parchment running through the hallways of the house.

  I reached out to every trap and trigger in Graystone with my Weird, brought them to bear on the ghouls as they howled and clawed at their faces, their night-blackened eyes dazzled by the blue fire of the aether.

  The house responded to me, with a vengeance. I could hear the howls and cries resounding from top to bottom as the clockwork fed on its Folk intruders, and the ghouls broke for the kitchen doors and windows, fleeing before they became like Tanner.

  It was dark again in two and a half seconds, the aether burned out as quickly as one blows out a candle. My dazzled eyes couldn’t see a thing, but Dean found me. “We got them,” he said. “Traps all sprung. Not a living thing in this house besides you and me and Bethina and, er, … the kid.”

  Cal held up a sobbing Bethina. “She needs to sit down.”

  “Take her to the library,” I said faintly. The Weird hadn’t overwhelmed me this time, hadn’t tried to swallow me alive. Cold comfort after what I’d done.

  “Library’s a good idea for all of us,” Dean said. “It’s safe there.”

  “At least from the Folk,” I muttered. I wasn’t sure, as I trailed after Dean, about myself.

  The danger inside the house was dead, but as we hurried into the library and barred the doors, the howling outside did not cease.

  “Something’s stirred my brothers,” Cal said softly so Bethina couldn’t hear. “Stirred everyone. There’s a Wild Hunt. First I’ve ever seen. Thought such things went the way of horse-drawn jitneys.”

  Bethina and Cal huddled together while Dean lit the fire in the library grate. I wondered if Cal would ever tell her, or if, like me, he would carry a secret to the grave.

  “The queens are awake,” I said. “And I think … I know I’m responsible for all of this.”

  Dean blew out his lighter and put it back in his leather. “We’re safe for now. They can’t get past the clockwork.”

  “Did you not hear me?” I demanded. “I did it, Dean. Magic is walking the world. The gates are down. I did that.”

  “Aoife.” Dean came and wrapped my fingers with his. “Don’t think of that.”

  “What am I supposed to think of?” I demanded. “How Draven wanted to ensnare me to ensnare my father? How Tremaine wanted to burn me to ash? If I think of anything b
esides what I did I really will go mad.”

  I jerked away from him and paced to the window, looking down at the ghouls and springheel jacks roaming through the orchard and the garden.

  “I’ve never seen ghouls like this,” Cal said again. “It’s like a war zone out there.”

  “That’s what Tremaine said,” I murmured, pressing my forehead against the glass. “He said it was a war. He wanted this to happen.”

  “Waking up the queens must’ve sent out some waves,” Dean said. “But wouldn’t they take the throne and have done? I would.”

  “The queens have to be awake,” I said. “To keep Thorn alive. But they aren’t in charge. Tremaine is the Regent and he makes the rules. He made that very clear.” The nightjars in my view were turning on one another, having decimated every other living thing in the garden.

  A mortal curse in the Folk’s lands. Cast by Draven, who either had been tricked into thinking his campaign against the Folk had just reached its greatest success or was in league with Tremaine.

  I didn’t care. What mattered was that I was just as gullible. I’d done exactly as Tremaine had planned for me to do. Conrad and my father had held out, had refused to play into the Folk’s hands. Whereas pliant little Aoife had fallen in line with Tremaine because she felt sorry for him.

  The memories unspooled like a needle under the skin. My first encounter with Tremaine. Draven’s smirk. The doctor who’d stared at me with his mossy eyes. The same eyes that looked back at me from the rippled glass now.

  “You know who I am, Aoife.”

  It was my father. My father had saved my life. I felt a flutter in my chest. He hadn’t left me in the end, hadn’t believed I shouldn’t have had anything to do with my birthright. He’d helped me as much as he could.

  And I’d betrayed him. I’d betrayed every one of the Graysons, Conrad, even Nerissa. Draven had the witch’s alphabet. Tremaine had his queens, his open gateway, his place ruling the Thorn Land, which was no longer dying, but was awake and hungry after hibernation.