to learn our secrets of sorcery and craftsmanship with his foul Brotherhood of Iron, and I, for one, am glad he’s gotten himself good and lost.”
Before I could retort, the geas went out with a crackle and a snap. Tremaine lunged for me, and in my shock I let him take hold of my throat. “Open yourself to the Engine,” Tremaine ordered. “Allow your Weird to right the wrongs visited on my people.” His nails dug half-moons from my flesh. “I had to threaten you, but I’d rather you understand. Whether you approve or not, there is a natural order and the Folk have a place in it. With their queen ruling and their lands alive. Otherwise, we’ll both suffer. The natural order. That’s all I want.”
“Do you really?” I demanded, thinking of Conrad’s voice in my dream. “Do you really want your queen awakened, or do you want Winter for yourself?”
Tremaine’s lips peeled back in a sinister grimace. “Politics of the Folk aren’t your concern, Aoife. The safety of yourself and your friends is.”
Tremaine hadn’t answered my question, but it ceased to matter—I couldn’t hold back the Engine any longer, the power I’d drawn already breaking through my last barriers. My Weird flamed in my mind and I saw the lily field, the coffins wreathed in their poison sleep. Far from being noxious and foreign, the curse wreathing the coffins was familiar. I’d felt the enchantment before, when I’d stared into a pair of cold eyes.
Human eyes.
Grey Draven’s eyes.
What I’d mistaken for insanity had really been power. Draven had a Weird too, a terrible and poisonous one.
He wanted to destroy the Folk, all memory of magic. He’d cursed the queens so Thorn would wither and die.
But if I listened to Tremaine, it would destroy the Iron Land as well. Did Draven not know, or did he not care?
And then, it didn’t matter. My Weird had taken over.
The Engine sang in me, sweeping like a wind across the lily field. I saw the energy I commanded with my Weird swoop and cut across the pure white of the flowers like a flock of ravens. Real ravens, not the clockwork obscenities of the Proctors. It met Draven’s curse—Draven knew of the Thorn Land, like my father. Draven had cursed the queens.
But none of it mattered as the surge I’d taken from the Engine and harnessed to my Weird met the curse of iron and, like a hammer on a cold morning, shattered it, scattering its flimsy, glass-shimmer pieces to the four corners of Thorn.
Grey Draven had cursed the queens, but the enchantment broke, snapped, shattered into a thousand gleaming fragments before the power of the Engine, driven by the impetus of my Weird. I could wonder at his true motives another day.
Now I was stronger than Draven. In that moment I was stronger than anything in the world. I was fire and ice, cleansing and calming, opening the bonds that held the queens in eternal sleep.
I was the Engine. The Engine was me.
And then Tremaine let me go and the connection with the Engine broke and I was nothing but Aoife again. I fell, feeling the catwalk dig into my legs. “You have done the right thing, child,” he said. “Perhaps more than one human will take our side in the coming war.”
I blinked at him, dumbly. “War?”
In their coffins, the queens stirred.
In my mind, something pale and terrible raised its head and woke. It was larger than the Weird, sharper, and it blew through me like the aetheric fire of Oppenheimer’s war Engine.
Magic.
The Winter Queen opened her eyes and stared into mine. My shoulder flamed with pain and my vision blacked out.
“The Iron Land has dreamed a great dream,” Tremaine whispered in my ear as I writhed under the onslaught of power pouring back into the Thorn Land. “Peace from all but a few escapees of Thorn, exceptions that you explained with a virus. Peace from ensnarement and enchantment, as it was in the old days. But no longer.” He touched my forehead.
“Your father and your brother and Draven all played their parts,” Tremaine whispered. “In their furor to do what they felt was the true and righteous thing for Thorn and Iron. And now you’ve played yours. And now a new storm is coming, Aoife. If I were you”—Tremaine’s lips brushed mine, so soft and close was his whisper—“I’d run and hide.”
New pain erupted from my palm, sharp, thin silver pain, and my eyes flew open.
38
MY PALM WAS crosscut, bleeding freely into the heart of the Engine where I’d reached out my hand to touch the glowing star-fire blue of the aetheric chamber.
“You wouldn’t wake up.” Dean knelt by me where I lay. His voice shook. “I cut you. You wouldn’t wake up.” His switchblade was dark with blood.
The Engine gave a rumble, a death spasm, and a girder dropped in a graceful parabola, narrowly missing us and falling into the gears, fouling a set the size of cottages.
“It’s overload,” I murmured, because I’d seen the lanternreel.
“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
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
Tremaine had done the thing my father had sought to deter his entire life.
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.
