The Iron Thorn

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