Chapter 11
“Slow down,” I grumble to Ruskin, as my horse, tethered to Ruskin’s, breaks into a half-hearted canter. “You’re getting it so riled up that I’m going to fall off.”
I don’t think I’ll ever get the hang of riding a horse, especially not on my own. But it was this or share the saddle with Ruskin again, and that’s precisely the opposite of me putting necessary distance between us.
“You won’t fall off,” Ruskin says confidently, but it feels easy for him to say when he looks like he was born in the saddle, steering the animal with the slightest pressure of his thighs.
I grip the reins tighter, even though there’s no need when my horse is being led, and try to distract myself by examining the plants and foliage of the Emerald Forest. We’d agreed it made more sense to return to Styrland via the common gate, which will put me much closer to home. Jumping water portals between my home and the Kilda is already nauseating enough without adding unnecessary distance to the journey.
I try to relax into the swaying of the animal beneath me, wondering why riding the creature has to put me quite so far from the ground. I will not miss the way everything in Faerie seems to be extra big or extra dangerous—or both. The exquisite beauty of it all counteracts that, of course, but in the same way the pretty colors of a carnivorous plant distract an insect from its deadly intent.
I’ll be glad when we’re back in Styrland, where the most dangerous beast is a broody cow, and where my enemies have fewer tricks up their sleeves.
“How will you go about it, taking Albrecht’s memory?” I ask, thinking of my one true enemy in Styrland. I could survive without knowing the answer to this question, but the conversation keeps my mind off the ride, and I want to remind Ruskin what he’s promised me. Now I’m headed home, my and Dad’s safety is my focus.
“I haven’t forgotten,” Ruskin says without looking at me. I pull a face at his back, annoyed I’m so transparent.
“That wasn’t what I asked,” I point out, even if it was the reason why I asked.
“I’ll enquire to see if there’s anything he wants first. A deal could still be made in return for his memories of you.”
“What?” I sit up straighter in the saddle. “You want to negotiate with him?”
“That is usually what a deal involves, yes.”
“You can’t. The man’s a pig.”
“I’m sure. But if I can avoid blatantly breaking my own treaty, I will.”
I silently fume for a few moments, wondering how Ruskin dares play the righteousness card now, when he’s quite happy to cheat elsewhere. It’s possible he’s just deliberately doing it to piss me off.
“Where was the treaty when you killed Albrecht’s men?” I ask.
He squares his shoulders.
“That was different.”
“How?”
My horse gives a little whinny in what I like to think is support, even if the noise does make me jump.
“They were trying to kill me.”
“Hardly. You can’t even be hurt with regular iron.”
“But they didn’t know that. Their choice to carry iron weapons made their intention clear.”
“They must be worried after your last visit to the castle.” I bite my lip, considering the consequences. “I’d never even heard of someone carrying iron weapons. Not in my lifetime.”
Thinking outside the box is unusual for Albrecht, so this experimentation with new weapons still worries me. My mind goes to the piles of notes and papers I left in the castle when I tried to escape. Could Albrecht be trying to take a leaf out of my book? I didn’t know the secret ingredient to cold iron until yesterday, but I had certainly hypothesized enough times in my notes that a catalyst from the land of the fair folk was essential for making new kinds of metal.
“It’s of little consequence,” Ruskin says, as if he’s able to hear my thoughts. “The secret of cold iron died with the court of the king who attacked my mother.”
I shiver, remembering the story. I can easily imagine the brutal death Ruskin visited upon those who tortured Evanthe. If I thought what he did to Albrecht’s soldiers was brutal…
“Was it easier, back then, when you thought us all inferior? Has the treaty really changed anything for you?”
Knowing we’re going to part ways in a few hours makes the questions slip off my tongue. I might not be able to have the answers I really want, but these questions don’t seem to cause him pain. Annoyance, maybe—but not pain. So there’s no reason for me not to ask.
I lean forward, catching Ruskin closing his eyes for a moment, apparently thinking.
“What you need to know about back then, Eleanor, was that despite her popularity, my mother’s position was still quite precarious. I never imagined what depths Cebba and Ilberon would sink to, but I knew some of the High Queen’s choices were being criticized at court by powerful people. When she named me heir after my father died, and then announced her plans for peace with the human realm not long after, it was too much for the traditionalist faction. I worried for her place on the throne.”
“So you telling Evanthe we’re inferior was just a political ploy?” I say. I’m sure he can tell by the bitterness in my voice that I don’t think much of this excuse.
“No, it was ignorance. Plain and simple. But that’s surely a folly of all youth, isn’t it? It’s easy to dismiss what we don’t understand. I had barely interacted with humans, had no interest in the stories Cebba would tell about her visits to your realm with the Hunt. Your kind were too different, and my empathy was not yet so developed.”
I narrow my eyes, trying to decide if I buy his reasoning. Ruskin is very good at locking parts of himself away. Perhaps it wasn’t that he didn’t possess the empathy, but that he didn’t allow himself to feel it. That kind of compassion tends to get in the way of things, like making deals. Though by the sounds of it, Ruskin hasn’t always been making them.
“When did you start taking an interest in my kind, then?”
“After I was cursed. When I started visiting Styrland to search out gifts and life force I could channel for my own ends. It was impossible not to catch glimpses of people’s lives, to learn about your world. It was then that I saw the breadth of human experience—people in love, the elders who’ve built for their families, the young who look after them in their old age—and decided that I’d been wrong about your realm being any simpler than ours.”
It shouldn’t have taken him all that to have reached this conclusion, but Faerie is a literal world away from Styrland. I consider all the things I hadn’t understood about the fair folk before I came here—how they’d mostly been ruthless monsters in my eyes before I got to know the likes of Destan and Halima.
Before I fell in love with Ruskin.
He’d changed so much for me, and now we ride through the forest like mere acquaintances, strangers sharing a brief history and a mysterious pair of true names that only I know about. That’s the only part of all this I still haven’t sought answers on. Now, with time running out, I decide to bring it up.
A raven swoops overhead, its croak carrying through the trees.
“Ruskin, I need to know…”
I trail off as the raven comes to land on a branch beside Ruskin’s head. Its cawing seems absurdly loud among the mysterious sounds of the forest, but as I listen, the croaking takes on a new shape, forming words.
“Prince Ruskin, you must return to the Seelie Court at once.”
It’s a messenger raven, one of hundreds that dwell in a tower at the palace, ready to carry messages in return for a handful of seed or berries.
“The iron has returned. Bring the human quickly, to the memorial square.”
The crow tilts its head to examine us with its shiny black eye, before extending its wings and taking flight in a flurry of iridescent feathers.
I meet Ruskin’s gaze, which is tense with expectation, and I realize he’s waiting for me to say something. He’s giving me permission, however selfish it might be, to refuse to return to the palace.
“Well, let’s get going,” I say. “The bird said ‘quickly.’”
I squeeze my thighs around the side of my horse and hang onto the reins for dear life as Ruskin kicks his horse into a gallop.
On the huge fae horses the return to the palace is quicker than finding a pool to portal through. The hooves of our steeds are soon clopping across the paving stones of the palace stables. Ruskin dismounts with ease, his hands around my waist a moment later, swinging me down from the saddle.
We’re close enough to the memorial square that I can feel the ground shaking underfoot, the shouts of panicked fae bouncing around the palace’s open courtyards and flowery corridors. I don’t fight Ruskin as he grabs my hand and pulls me along. I’ve been to the memorial square once before, where Halima showed me the statue commemorating the war between the two courts.
Now it is unrecognizable.
Even with the horses dashing at full speed, we’ve taken too long to arrive. The gray snake of iron that’s punctured the earth has spread across the square, the statue disappearing under the weight of crushing tendrils, a deformed face of one of carvings peering out between the thick shoots.
From the lack of blood and bodies I guess the square was relatively empty when the iron first struck, but there’s been no one here to stop it, and the dark, heavy substance has climbed the steps on the far side, coiling up the palace wall one hundred yards from us and wrapping around the edge of a gallery. This is where the shouts are coming from, a crowd of figures congregated beneath the gallery and on its balcony. Some of them are frantically waving for help, others are already doubled over, incapacitated by the iron sickness, I guess.
“That’s a residential quarter for High Fae. Five families live up there,” Ruskin says. I hitch up my skirts, eyes on the rapidly spreading iron.
“Be careful,” he orders.
I sprint across the square, clambering over the limbs of cold metal. I have to use my knees to haul myself up and over them, but it’s still the quickest route, and I’m the only one here who can take it.
As I reach the other side, scrambling up the steps, the iron finishes its creep across the front of the gallery. The fae stuck on the balcony push themselves back from it, their faces gray and terrified, as the sound of crunching stone mingles with the screams.
“Get off the balcony!” I shout, but I don’t know if they have another exit, given that the steps down from the gallery have been engulfed in metal. The front of the balcony begins to crumble under the force of the iron, and as I watch, one side of it completely breaks away, coming crashing to the ground. The tumbling body of a fae comes with it, her pretty pink dress fluttering in the breeze. She’s too close to the chunk of debris for anyone to reach her. Catching her is impossible as the jagged balcony fragment hurtles to the ground. I catch a close-up view of her petrified face before she hits the edge of the fallen balcony, her body resting there, limp as a rag doll.
Mournful wails pierce the air around me.
I focus on the iron above me, already beginning to devour the chambers leading off from the gallery. The scale of this is so much bigger than the orchard. Yet I know that somehow I must stop it—or at least slow it enough for people to be evacuated.
I try to multi-task, finding my inner pool of magic while climbing the steps, so blanketed with tendrils that I slip on them and nearly fall several times. I manage to haul myself up by gripping the iron where I can. This close it feels like more than just metal. Each time I touch it, I’m pricked with a feeling of dread, a sense that there are secrets these twisted, sharp vines want to tell me. But I don’t have time to listen right now, pushing the awareness away in favor of directing my own magic.
The pool in my mind’s eye stills just as I reach the gallery floor, skirting the edge of the balcony that’s no longer there. I duck into the rooms, crashing through grand chambers to get ahead of the creeping iron. A sickening trail of impaled bodies tells me I’m on the right track, their blood staining the metal and leaving a pool of slick red under my feet. My gut tells me I need to see the iron to slow it, and that means facing it down before it can hurt anyone else.
I turn right and stumble into a grand drawing room where three figures cower—two in one corner, clearly both Low Fae servants, and a High Fae in the other—a boy who looks only slightly younger than me. They’re pressed against one end of the room as a tendril thick as a tree trunk advances on them.
I push my magic towards it, gripping the iron shoot in my mind, wrestling with it. I try to pull it back but its momentum is considerable. Rather than actually bringing it to a standstill, it’s like I’m mentally digging my heels into the ground, only able to slow it down by dragging my own power against it. I hold firm, trying to convince myself that this isn’t beyond me. Ruskin’s words of encouragement from days ago come floating up to me: Iron Tamer. That’s who I am. I can do this.
“Go around me,” I grunt to the fae. But none of them move, staring at the iron. It’s showing the signs of its fight with me, quivering in place as it tries to pull free. I realize the fae are afraid that it will break loose and lash out if they try to pass by it.
“It’s all right, I’m holding it,” I explain. “But you need to move, now!”
The Low Fae obey, perhaps feeling braver as a pair. They run in a low crouch towards the door. The iron bucks in my magical grasp as they pass, but I hold it firm.
They’re nearly out of the room when the iron gets the better of me. As if it’s sentient, as if it knows it can’t move from my grip, it sprouts an offshoot, dividing itself so that a fresh spike punches its way towards the retreating fae. It’s thinner than the first, but with a sharper looking tip.
I panic and, rather than use my power to keep hold of the iron, I blindly shove outwards at it, just as the High Fae boy in the corner decides to move.
“No, stay put!” I scream.
It’s too late, however. He’s seen the new tendril and is like a rabbit in a trap, his eyes wide with terror, unable to hear me, only capable of carrying himself forward, darting for the door…
Right into the path of the iron spike.
It hits him in the chest at an angle, punching through his rib cage and out through the back of his neck. It’s so quick my eyes can scarcely believe it. One moment he was a living, breathing young man, the next he’s an empty pile of flesh, eyes blank to the world, limbs drooped against the floor.
Anger flares in me. What a stupid death, so wasteful and meaningless. This iron is just a faceless, devastating force without a heartbeat, with no sense of the people it’s destroying.
The wails and screams still sound outside and I join them, watching the iron slither onwards, penetrating deeper into the palace as I stand there over the dead body.
The pool of magical power within in me isn’t still, and there aren’t any ripples across its surface either. It’s an exploding wave of rage.
I seize the iron with everything I have, picking it up in my mind and hurling it back from where it came from, kicking it the whole way with violent bursts of power. It falls back over itself, even as it struggles to keep up, until its movement becomes frantic and feeble. I wander back through the chambers, seeing the network of vines twitch and shrink back, before ceasing to move altogether.
There’s no great retreat of the poisonous substance. There’s too much iron for me to send it back to the memorial square. But it does retract from the center of the rooms, much of the metal withering a few inches, like watching straw curl in on itself when you take a flame to a hay bale.
It’s not spreading anymore, but as I find the gallery again, staring down at the gray-coated steps and the broken balcony, I know it’s not enough. It won’t be, not until I can erase the sight of that boy’s expression from my memory—the blind fear and pain in that moment, knowing he’d made a choice that had doomed him, and unable to deviate from that path anyway.