The Iron Thorn

hungered for my flesh and bones.

I felt it first in the very back of my head, a gentle ticking as the pendulum of my heartbeat counted off the seconds I had to live. It was a small pressure, like someone resting his hand on the back of my skull. The shoggoth’s bite throbbed, as it had when I’d lain in a fever dream, listening to the house.

Listening to the voice of Graystone whisper. It crawled back to me, from the corners and crannies, the clockwork wheels and rods and gears that made the house.

The pressure built, flowing through me, into my chest and fingers and toes. I thought my skull was going to burst, but all at once my focus narrowed, to the window and the owl and the iron trap on the window waiting to snap shut.

My senses went razor sharp. Everything hurt. And then the pressure burst, my head filling with the voice of Graystone, and I felt iron in my blood and gears in my brain.

I was the house.

The house was me.

We were one.

The trap window smashed down, the spikes that locked the bars in place at the bottom cutting the owl nearly in half.

It gave a moan, hardly a sound at all, from its ruined throat. One wing fluttered spasmodically, and blood dribbled over the sill and ran down the plaster, staining whatever it touched.

Then it died, and the only sound was the wind through the shattered glass and my own heart throbbing in my ears. The fullness in my head was gone. The connection with Graystone was shut. My Weird had come and gone, and left me alone again.

21 The Lily Field

I STAYED IN the library above for a long time, staring at the trap and the thing caught in its jaws without blinking. I tried to raise the trap back up, to feel the fullness in my head again and the clean, sharp clarity of communing with Graystone.

A word like weird didn’t do the feeling justice. I had felt like nothing else on earth. I wasn’t simply Aoife when this foreign thing stirred in my mind. The Weird made me feel. The Weird made me alive.

But nothing happened. My head ached, behind my eyes, and my ears rang. The stench of the dead owl filled the small space, until I dislodged it from the trap and watched it fall to the ground four stories below. The blood got on my hands and I swiped them furiously on my dress, loose papers, anything to get the foul, oily blood off of my skin.

I went back to sitting, my knees tucked up under my chin, and stared at the window again. I concentrated viciously, until I was sure my head would fragment into pieces from the pain of my headache.

Nothing stirred except the ends of my hair against my cheek as the wind picked up. Try as I might, I couldn’t replicate the sweet, pure strangeness that had flowed through me when I’d been inches from the owl’s talons. There were the things in the mist, things whose faces I hadn’t seen. Something could have followed me home from the Land of Thorn.

I leaned my head back against a shelf, resting it on a soft pile of paper, and stared at the cobwebbed ceiling of the library. My father had made use of the Weird sound so simple. All I was finding was frustration and blood on my hands.

My eyes drifted shut. I told myself it was just for a moment, just until I could force my head to stop pounding, but when I opened my eyes the iron blue fingers of dawn had taken hold of the world.

I worked the cramps out of my neck and legs and went to the window. Surely Dean and Cal would be awake and have discovered the owl’s body fallen to the front drive in mangled pieces.

Instead, I saw a lone figure standing on the drive, solitary in the glassy dawn light. The familiar ring of mist roiled at his feet.

Tremaine put up his finger and beckoned to me, and like my father before me, I went to him.

Tremaine stayed silent as we stepped through the hexenring, silent as he took my hand and helped me out. Once we stood on the red moor, he regarded me with his arms folded. His bracers gleamed. It was dawn in the Land of Thorn as well, a pinky-red dawn in a yellow sky. The scent of the air was foreign, and I shuddered as gooseflesh blossomed on my thinly clad arms.

Taking his blue velvet jacket from his shoulders, Tremaine wrapped it around mine.

“Thank you,” I murmured. The jacket smelled like grass and roses, at once fresh and sick-sweet with decay.

“Don’t,” he said shortly. “I’m doing you no favors, child. I need your full attention.” He regarded me, hunched inside his jacket. It was miles too large for me, and I swam inside the sleeves that flopped over my hands. “You are a frail little thing, aren’t you?” he said, looking up at the ridge of mountains to our west. “Nothing like the others.”

“I’m not frail,” I snapped, chafing at the comparison, no doubt, to men like my father. Tremaine showed his teeth.

“We’ll see.” He beckoned to me and started up the same trail that we’d encountered the mist upon. This time we crested the moor and came down into a hollow, filled with a stone circle like a mouth of broken teeth. As we cleared the outer ring of stones I saw that they lay in a distinct pattern, a starburst like the ink stain the witch’s alphabet had left on my palm.

“To stave off the no doubt interminable flood of talk,” Tremaine said as we passed through the circle and started to climb again. “Those were corpse-drinkers in the mist. Before.” He flourished his hand as if that explained everything. I was getting sick of his patronizing me, as if I were a very silly child who couldn’t possibly understand.

“Can you at least tell me what those are?” I grumbled. “Or am I to guess?”

“Corpse-drinkers,” Tremaine sighed, as if I were a hopelessly backward student. “Incorporeal beings searching for a vessel, a body. They possess corpses and drink of the living. They come from the other place. The Land of Mists.”

Tremaine’s explanation hadn’t done anything to lessen my terror of the creeping mist, but I set my feelings aside. I was only interested in one thing the Kindly Folk had, and lore wasn’t it. “My brother …,” I started. “Before, you said the boy—”

“If you spend any time in Thorn, with my people, you will come to understand the value and the beauty of bargain,” said Tremaine. “You must do something for me, Aoife, before I’ll grant favors for you, and—”

“I don’t want a favor,” I cut him off as he’d interrupted me, perhaps more viciously than was prudent. The Kindly Folk were not terribly kindly, and they were rude, too. “If something happened to Conrad, just tell me. Please.”

Tremaine stepped onto a set of steps carved into the downward slope of the moor, his green vest and trousers making him a living piece of the land. I followed, with far less grace.

“I said bargaining, not begging. Perhaps if you were a more sedate girl, who held her tongue before her betters, you’d have heard me.”

I hated Tremaine, I realized all at once. I wanted to hit him in those shark teeth, swing for the fences like Cal’s baseball players. “If you’ve just brought me here to riddle me, you might as well send me home,” I gritted. “I didn’t even know my father properly. I can’t tell you where he’s gone.”

“But he has gone,” Tremaine said. “He has not visited for three full moons. No inane tasks for our aid. No arcane knowledge sought. I declare, I almost miss the old man. He was at least diverting. You are not.” He walked, and I had the choice of following or being left alone on the moor. “So since you don’t have a quick wit or a pleasant face, what do you have for me, Aoife?”

“Well, I haven’t got anything except fifty dollars,” I said primly. “And that’s earmarked for someone else.”