The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [142]
Draven slammed his fist against the window sash. “Don’t pretend you don’t know! Archibald Grayson is a heretic and a traitor to the Iron World and you are going to be the honey that brings him home.” Draven leaned in and sucked a deep breath through his nose. “And what sweet honey it is.”
I cringed away from him. The Iron World. How did he know that term? “I never knew my father. He doesn’t give one whit about me. I can’t make him come anywhere.” That, at least as far as I knew, was the absolute truth.
Draven shook his head and laughed. I saw something else in his hard, beautiful face, a marring and a blurring. “You didn’t know him, Aoife, it’s true. But I do. And I know exactly what he thought of his filthy-blooded brood.”
I felt tears starting and shut my eyes briefly to hold them back. “My father never even spoke to me in person. All I have are his eyes and his blood.”
Draven’s lips pulled back and he gave a wordless snarl. “You think Archie’s little band of conjurers are the only things in this world that have magic beating in the blood? You think the Graysons stood alone after the Storm and the erecting of the Gates?”
I was lost as to what he meant, but the rambling and the abrupt anger—that I’d seen before. I gave voice to what I’d recognized in his eyes. “You’re insane, Mr. Draven.” Not because he’d admitted he believed in magic as easily as he breathed—that was merely surprising. The insanity wasn’t apparent in photos and lanternreels, but up close, to a person who’d seen madness every week for nearly a dozen years, it was clear as day.
“What I am is possessed of the truth, Aoife, and being called things like insane is the price I pay. And here’s the truth of that pitiful spark inside you that gives you a pitiful little piece of power: it will only get you killed.”
Undoubtedly, that would be easier. If I confessed to heresy as the Proctors defined it, I’d be spared burning. But I didn’t want to be easy. Not after everything I’d endured trying to prove I wasn’t going mad. I met Draven’s eyes. “I’ll never renounce the Weird. It’s real. I know it and you know it. So burn me. Get it over with.”
Draven reached his hand back and cracked me across the face, faster than a snake striking. The spot where Tremaine had hit me began to bleed again and I cried out in shock.
“You walked through iron to come here,” Draven snarled. “This room may look like the lair of a soft man, but there are bones of steel running through these walls, bones charged with enchantment that will bleed something like you from the eyes. Do not force me to use it.”
“Now who’s speaking heresy?” I grumbled, too confused and enraged to worry about whether he’d hit me again. “A City Head using enchantments. Honestly. Tell me another.”
“The world was much younger when the Storm came.” Draven’s eyes went soft. “There have been many names for what came into our world that day since—witchcraft, Spiritualism, necrovirus. Many explanations to sate the public and make it feel safe. But they are all poison, all a filthy, otherworldly plague. And they have the gall to call it magic.” He sneered, then reached out and tucked a stray piece of hair behind my ear. “Archibald Grayson thinks differently. He believes these forces are his to use. He consorts with the Folk and endangers every human being on earth each time he passes through the Gates. He thinks the Bureau of Heresy extremists, but I know he is a traitor to everyone like me, who only want to keep the Lands separated, keep the infection Archibald calls magic at bay. That is why I will have him here in Ravenhouse, and assure myself he can do no more harm.”
I reeled. The avalanche of information was making my head hurt. I picked out the most shocking fact of the bunch. “You … you know of the Folk?”
“Of course I know,” Draven scoffed. “The Folk, the Weird, the Mists … all of those portentous names humans before the Storm gave such things.”
“But … no one believes in the Weird … no one in Lovecraft, no one rational.…” I was sure I was going to toss my last meal onto Draven’s elegant carpet.