The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [96]
The truth was my passage to safety, and I had to find it before Tremaine found me again. Simply had to. Not to mention a way to avoid being snapped up by the Kindly Folk whenever the impulse took them. My father had some modicum of control. I needed it if Tremaine and his strange brass gauntlets were on the hunt for me.
I wasn’t going to make the mistake of passivity with Tremaine again.
Settling myself in the same position on the floor opposite the arched window, I put the lamp on the shelf next to my head and dug into the pile of grimoires that I’d unearthed the previous day. Much as I wanted to peruse the Machina volume, I instead found a battered volume bound in purple velvet that had the word Geographica burned into the front cover. I rooted through every cranny of the map cabinet; at the bottom, shoved far back so that it gummed up the drawer, I found a book of charts. Armed with the book, the map, my father’s journal and a fourth volume labeled Animus in the precise hand that I was coming to recognize as endemic to the Grayson men, I set to work.
The charts weren’t useful—topographical maps that made no sense to me. Cal would know how to read them. He’d told me he’d been a Badger Scout before he came to the School. I hoped fervently that one day soon I could show him the charts and seek his wisdom, without him calling me crazy.
The Geographica book yielded more information. The Grayson who’d set it down wasn’t as precise or detailed as my father, but as I riffled the pages filled with delicate watercolors of mountain ranges, lakes and fields that could be found nowhere in the known world, I gleaned a few things.
The Land of Thorn, populated by the Kindly Folk, might seem at first an exotic and tempting land for exploration. Do not be fooled. For it is not the Kindly Folk alone who dwell within its nebulous and mist-ringed borders …
I turned pages, until I found one that I first took to be blotted with mildew. It was only another painting, however, this one of the noxious mist that had nearly snatched me away from Tremaine. The faces were different—elongated mouths with a horror of teeth as opposed to the frighteningly human visages I’d glimpsed, but the author of the grimoire and I had clearly glimpsed the same thing.
The transportive mist is a devilish companion. The Kindly Folk do not speak of where it originates and tell little of its incorporeal yet vicious denizens. Some of the Folk claim this foulness comes from a dark kingdom ruled by a dark king, but they will only whisper about this shadowland in the stories they tell at night, when they think no outsider can hear them.
Thinking of the sticky, grasping hand that had tangled itself in my hair, I shuddered. I never wanted to meet what lay beyond the borders of the Land of Thorn.
I swapped Geographica for Animus and paged through description after description, detailed sketches accompanying each entry. Where the Grayson who’d assembled the book about the Land had been dreamy and slapdash, this Grayson had been compulsively detailed and immeasurably dry in his recounting of various species he’d encountered on the other side of the hexenring. I checked the endpaper of the grimoire: Collected observations of Cornelius Hugo Grayson, compiled 1892. I bet Cornelius was all the rage at parties.
His entry on the Kindly Folk was brief, but it made me cold, even though the snug library above never really got any cooler than the temperature of my skin.
Kindly Folk. Also called, in various languages such as Irish, Manx and Welsh, Seelie, Daoine Sidhe or elven. Their preferred term is Kindly Folk. They are susceptible to iron and to little else. They have mechanical aptitude, though they are backward compared with our advancements in steam and clockwork, and a command of