The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [0]
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2011 by Caitlin Kittredge
Illustrations copyright © 2011 by Robert Lazzaretti
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kittredge, Caitlin.
The Iron Thorn / Caitlin Kittredge. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: In an alternate 1950s, mechanically gifted fifteen-year-old
Aoife Grayson, whose family has a history of going mad at sixteen,
must leave the totalitarian city of Lovecraft and venture into the world
of magic to solve the mystery of her brother’s disappearance and the
mysteries surrounding her father and the Land of Thorn.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89598-2 [1. Fantasy.] I. Title.
PZ7.K67163lr 2011
[Fic]—dc22
2010000972
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
To Howard Phillips Lovecraft,
who first showed me that strange far place
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
Chapter 1 - The Ashes of the World
Chapter 2 - The School of Engines
Chapter 3 - Heresy and Banishment
Chapter 4 - The Secret in the Ink
Chapter 5 - Nightfall
Chapter 6 - Across the Night Bridge
Chapter 7 - The Berkshire Belle
Chapter 8 - The Shoggoth’s Dream
Chapter 9 - Poison Blood
Chapter 10 - Graystone
Chapter 11 - A Clockwork Heart
Chapter 12 - The Chambermaid’s Tale
Chapter 13 - The Sinister Clock
Chapter 14 - The Iron Bones
Chapter 15 - The Forsaken Tomes
Chapter 16 - The Witch’s Alphabet
Chapter 17 - The Fiery Stars
Chapter 18 - The Dark Place of Dreaming
Chapter 19 - The Mist-Wrought Ring
Chapter 20 - The Mysteries of Thorn
Chapter 21 - The Lily Field
Chapter 22 - The Lore of the Weird
Chapter 23 - The Miskatonic Woods
Chapter 24 - The Graveyard Below
Chapter 25 - The Arcane Payment
Chapter 26 - The Bottomless Room
Chapter 27 - The Enchantment’s End
Chapter 28 - The Cursebreaker
Chapter 29 - The Flight of the Crow
Chapter 30 - The Secret of the Steam
Chapter 31 - An Audience with Draven
Chapter 32 - The Proctor’s Truth
Chapter 33 - Escape from Ravenhouse
Chapter 34 - The City Under the World
Chapter 35 - The Gift of the Ghouls
Chapter 36 - In the Engineworks
Chapter 37 - The Kindly Folk’s Bargain
Chapter 38 - The Iron World
Chapter 39 - The Fate of Graystone
Chapter 40 - The Enemy of Thorn
Acknowledgments
About the Author
The moon is dark,
and the gods dance in the night;
there is terror in the sky,
for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse
foretold in no books of men.
—H. P. LOVECRAFT
The Ashes of the World
THERE ARE SEVENTEEN madhouses in the city of Lovecraft. I’ve visited all of them.
My mother likes to tell me about her dreams when I visit. She sits in the window of the Cristobel Charitable Asylum and strokes the iron bars covering the glass like they are the strings of a harp. “I went to the lily field last night,” she murmurs.
Her dreams are never dreams. They are always journeys, explorations, excavations of her mad mind, or, if her mood is bleak, ominous portents for me to heed.
The smooth brass gears of my chronometer churned past four-thirty and I put it back in my skirt pocket. Soon the asylum would close to visitors and I could go home. The dark came early in October. It’s not safe for a girl to be out walking on her own, in Hallows’ Eve weather.
I called it that, the sort of days when the sky was the same color as the smoke from the Nephilim Foundry across the river, and you could taste winter on the back