The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [132]
“You don’t need to know that, child,” Tremaine sighed. “You don’t need more nightmares.”
“Tell me!” My shout echoed off the glass coffins and the hills beyond, like a faraway bell.
“He was shot in the back running down a village street,” Tremaine said. “My strix owls couldn’t stay long. Arkham is bound in iron and we do not know where they took his body. A pauper’s funeral, I imagine, and then the crematory furnace to burn off any memory of their crime. Is that good enough for you, Aoife?”
The world slid sideways. “You’re lying.” He had to be lying. Conrad’s end couldn’t be so simple.
Conrad had to be alive.
“You know that I would not,” Tremaine said. “You know that’s what happened, child, because you know your brother. I wish he had survived, truly. He was an intelligent and respectful boy. Very much not like you.”
I couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. I didn’t want to believe that Conrad was gone, but there wasn’t a hard certainty, just soft, slithering doubt taking up residence in my heart.
“I’ve given you a task,” Tremaine said. “Now you give me your half.”
When I didn’t speak, he clapped his hands in my face. Once, sharp. Like the gunshot that had taken Conrad away from me.
“Aoife,” Tremaine growled. “Focus. What will break my curse?”
“I think …,” I started, and then couldn’t continue.
Tremaine’s lip curled, and he placed his hands on my shoulders. “Don’t think, child. Know. Thinking won’t help me.”
“The Engine,” I said numbly. “The Lovecraft Engine. Thorn doesn’t have Engines or anything like them, you said it yourself. I can use my Weird. Send the power that the Lovecraft Engine generates into Thorn. Use it to wake up your precious queens.” My will to defy Tremaine had run out. I felt as hollow as one of the Proctors’ ravens, just a mess of gears and metal on the inside. No feeling. No will.
Tremaine, for his part, patted my cheek. “Good child. I knew you’d be the one. Of course, I’ll be far more excited when you succeed.” He took my elbow and guided me back into the hexenring. “May you have fair weather and a following sea in your task, Aoife Grayson. You know what will happen if you fail me. Your brother may be gone, but Dean and Cal are still alive, I take it? They will still bleed if you force me to find them?”
I just shrugged. It didn’t matter any longer. Nothing did.
Conrad was dead.
“And there’s your mother,” Tremaine mused as the hexenring took me. “So alone, in that madhouse. So many other screams to cover hers up …”
I tried belatedly to reach for Tremaine again, to demand that he leave Nerissa and Dean and Cal alone, that I’d do his work even though he’d tricked me, had known Conrad was dead. Had known from the moment he took me in the orchard.
Too slow, I touched nothing. A sob wrenched from my throat.
“Aoife.” Dean’s face blurred back into view, lines at his mouth and eyes. “Dammit, I hate it when you just blink out like that.” He examined me more closely and his jaw set. “You look awful. What’d he do to you?”
I tried to speak, but all that came out was a soft, broken sound. I fell against Dean and he wrapped his arms around me to save me from falling. My tears were silent, but they soaked my face and the fabric of Dean’s shirt. All I saw was white as I clung to Dean, and all I felt was a widening black pit where my insides used to be.
The Flight of the Crow
“MY BROTHER’S DEAD,” I whispered after twenty heartbeats. “The Proctors shot him in the back.”
Once the words flew from my lips, the truth slammed into me, a weight I could never shake off. I fell to my knees, grit and old dirt digging in through my stockings, and I shook, wrapping my arms around myself.
“Oh, princess.” Dean knelt and hugged me again. I sobbed, wretched sounds ripping from my throat, as a knife of memory twisted deep in my stomach. I would never see Conrad again. Never tell him that I knew he wasn’t mad. Never tell him that I understood why he’d run away.
I could never tell him I forgave