The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [163]
“The end,” Tremaine said simply. “I cannot pass through the Iron Land, and you cannot yet venture alone into Thorn. As iron poisons the Folk, this is the intersection of time and tide upon which we must meet while you linger in that infernal Engine.” He spread his arms to encompass the ruined Engine. “You’ve seen it before, Aoife. In your dreams, perhaps? The end of all things, if you do not break the curse?”
He pointed at the Engine, now a shuddering wreck of metal, now perfectly fine and whole. My mind was playing tricks on me, my madness digging its claws tighter into my brain. “Harness that power vaster than any in Thorn. Wake the queens, Aoife. Even now that foul machine sings its desire in your blood.”
The Engine gave another clank and rattle in this time-crossed vision I was seeing. Toxic smoke and gas poured from its ruptured core, and it begged me, in the language of machines, to set it free, to channel its great death-blast away from the innocents of Lovecraft and across the lands of Thorn instead, to the queens, who would soak it up and save my city from immolation.
I could feel the Engine in my blood. All I had to do was turn the channel toward Tremaine and his queens. The Weird was my blood, my legacy. The last thing I could do before I, a small and insignificant girl, went mad and lost the gift that my lineage had granted me. I could save Dean, Cal and the Folk. That had to be enough.
Dean’s voice came to me from far away. “Aoife, wake up!”
“Why, child,” Tremaine said, stronger and more present as I hesitated for just a moment, Dean’s voice tugging at me. “Surely you are not afraid?”
The power at my fingertips gibbered and whispered seductively. It begged to be grasped, and it burned when I did. I felt I could disintegrate on the tide of power from the Engine.
“I’m not,” I told Tremaine, knotting my fists. “But I’d feel better if you stood with me.” Everything except the Weird—Dean’s voice, the real Engineworks, even the vision—was fading like a spotty aether connection. The combination of the Weird and the hallucination had crossed the wires in my mind.
Tremaine came to me, the knifelike smile playing about his face. “Of course I will stand with you, child.”
I pulled the lighter and the paper knot free of my suit and, with a flick of my thumb, touched the flame to the paper. The geas, at least, was something I was certain I wanted to send at Tremaine. Dead certain.
“And while you stand with me, I’d like it if you told the truth,” I said to Tremaine as the paper hung suspended in the air, pulling in the flame, turning into a prism of fire. The enchantment of the thing tickled and bedeviled my Weird, as if I’d sat on my hand and gotten pins and needles all up and down my arm.
“What is this?” Tremaine bellowed.
“This is human,” I told him with no small satisfaction. “You’ll give me a straight answer, Tremaine. One way or another.”
Tremaine’s throat worked. “You think an Erlkin geas holds a member of the Folk? A member of the courts? You presume?”
I drew back from him, for he looked terribly angry and I didn’t want to get a blade in the gut before I’d asked him my questions. “I do.” I snapped the lighter closed. The geas continued to burn between us.
“My mother,” I said. “You knew her. How?”
Tremaine twitched, but he spoke in a slurred rush. “Your mother was born with a foot in and a foot out of Thorn. There are a lot of names for Folk who have a little human blood, who can cross the gates, but the one in those infernal human storybooks she loved so much is ‘changeling.’ In her younger days, Nerissa traveled freely between her true world and the Iron one. Until she met him.”
I felt my eyes go wide, of their own accord. “My father?”
Tremaine sneered. “He only discovered her nature when she had already begotten your brother. And then it was too late. He knew the fate changelings face in the Iron World.”
When my