12. Chapter 12
twelve
I ducked out of sight, my heart leaping to full speed and my face flaring, cheeks igniting with shame.
“Nick…I’m sorry.” Breathless, I pressed my spine to the frozen stone. “I should have knocked, I…” I stopped myself, because how could I have knocked when there’d been no door? “I mean I shouldn’t have…” Climbed these steps. Encroached on this part of the castle. After all, the hour had to be past midnight.
“My Tip,” he said. “You’re well again, I see. Well enough to go traipsing about in the dead of night.”
I shut my eyes and cursed myself, cringing.
“I-I heard your singing,” I stammered. “It’s not an excuse. I still shouldn’t be here. But I had a nightmare, and I meant to go check on Rye but…”
I trailed off. The wind whined and whistled. Then Nick spoke again.
“Well, don’t linger in the doorway,” he said. “If you’re up for a visit, enter and be without fear. I have seen your secrets and now you have set eyes on mine. No point in hiding.”
I didn’t want to go in there. Not with my embarrassment eating me from the inside out.
“I didn’t mean to pry,” I said.
“I know, Tip. It’s all right.”
All right? It didn’t feel so.
“Come in, would you?” he called. “It’ll all be so much worse for both of us if you run away and try to pretend when next we interact that I am not this and you do not know it.”
Augh. He had a point. So, I drew a shaking breath and forced myself into the room.
I did not look at him. Instead, as I approached, coming halfway to where he sat in the otherwise empty and cavernous chamber, my heart hammering away at my pulverized nerves, I kept my gaze fastened to the weathered floorboards.
“There’s been no crime, Tip,” Nick said. “Come and let me show you what makes The Tin Man tick.”
I flickered a glance up at him, still uncertain.
In that mirror, two eyes met with mine—one of flesh and the other a sort of…lens. Like that of a telescope but shorter. While the silver-gray human eye blinked, a round shutter behind the glass lens of the mechanical one spiraled closed and open with the faintest of clicks.
I swallowed thickly, my discomfort almost a second presence in the room as he watched me with that face—one half man, half machine. Within the cavity of his chest whirred clockwork mechanisms, tiny gears ticking and twitching, bigger ones rotating, grinding together with cogs and sprockets.
His innards—they seemed like a microcosm of the Emerald City Palace’s clock tower.
“Tin Man?” I repeated, still holding my distance in the barn-sized chamber, its interior lit half by silver moonlight and half by the golden lamp glow.
“That is what they call me in some regions,” said Nick, lips forming words on one side, exposed metal teeth parting and meeting on the other. “So I hear. Perhaps because of my name. Perhaps because I am made of metal. Perhaps both.”
“They mean it disrespectfully?” I asked, my voice almost too quiet for my own ears. Nick heard me, though.
“Endearingly, I like to think.”
“Oh,” was my only reply, and then, when his hand, the one holding a copper oil can, shifted into view, I looked down again.
“I am that ugly, eh?” he asked.
“No,” I rushed to say. “You’re…not at all.”
I spoke the truth. He was not ugly. Especially not the half of his face that retained its human appearance. He even had hair on half his skull. Thick, wavy, and unruly, chin length white-blond locks covered only the side of his head that was not, like so much of him, metal.
Truly, had there been more of him to assess, more of him that was not cold steel, I would have even pronounced him quite handsome. Perhaps even beautiful.
“Don’t let this fool you,” he said, gesturing to his flesh features. “I am not this young truly.”
“How old are you then?” I asked, wanting to keep the conversation going in any direction that helped to ease, well, my unease.
“Perhaps around thirty-five now,” he mused. “I died when I was…oh, just a few years older than you.”
“Died?” The word frayed in my throat.
“The girl I meant to marry found me dying,” Nick said, “slain in the house I’d been building for the two of us in the forest. She sent for The Wizard but…he did not get her message in time.”
“H-how…?” I trailed off, uncertain of which question I wanted to ask, let alone how to phrase it.
“The Wizard sent for my body the day before I was to be buried,” Nick continued. “And he—or someone in his employ—fashioned me into this.”
He spread his metal arms.
This time, I did not look away. Instead, I rounded him, coming to stand between him and the mirror. Stopping there, I stared directly into his heart.
The muscle was no muscle at all. All metal and gears—truly clockwork as he’d said—its mechanisms spun and ticked within a heart-shaped casing that did not beat.
“I did not awaken,” Nick continued, “until I was returned to my village. The Wizard, though, had sent instructions for my reanimation, and the young woman who had begged for my life to be restored did as those instructions commanded.”
A horrible sense of foreboding stole through me, punctuated by the icy wind that swept in through the tattered and torn roof.
“What happened then?” I asked.
“When I opened my eyes,” said Nick, “I did not love her anymore. I did not love anything. I did not feel anything. So, I went to work in the woods, my mind set on completing the house I had not been able to finish. Perhaps because it was the last thing I had been doing before… Well, I worked and ignored the girl when she came to beseech me. I pretended not to see her, not to hear her, not to know her, because I had no interest in her or her love anymore. I only wanted to complete the house, though I did not know why. One day, she stopped coming. I kept working. Morning, noon, and night. In the rain, in the snow. Until one day…I rusted solid.”
I could not keep from touching Nick’s shoulder, fingers brushing off the dusting of snow there that had not melted—and would not in a room as cold as this.
“I stayed that way for a year,” he said, “frozen in form, but…very active in mind.”
He tapped his temple with one metal finger, the quiet clink delivering another nick to my own heart.
“I remembered the girl,” Nick continued, “and I remembered loving her, even though I still did not love her. I could recall, however, her warmth, even though I only knew what it was to be cold. I thought about the things she said to me, and I remembered that her words had once…mattered. Time passed and I began to realize I was not a man at all anymore but…a thing. Somehow, some way, during my transformation, I had lost my soul. The thing that I loved with. The Wizard…had he extracted it? Had it failed to follow me into this incarnation?”
“The stained-glass windows downstairs,” I said, “they show that Dorothy and Rye found you.”
“I’d been out in the forest, chopping wood when I rusted. That is how they found me. They went into my house and discovered a can of oil. Dorothy opened my chest, and she oiled every part of me she could. When I could move, they accompanied me to the village to find my intended. I wanted to explain to her what had happened to me…and why I had treated her as I had. But she was not in the village any longer, for the village was gone. Burned by East.”
“Oh, Nick, I’m so sorry.”
“There was evidence the people had time to flee,” he replied. “As you know, Dorothy and Rye were going to see The Wizard. I wanted my soul back from whoever had taken, lost, or forgotten to reinstall it. If it had abandoned me for another realm or was no more, I wanted to know that, too. No matter the case, I wanted the answer as to why it was not with me. When and if I got it back, well, then I was going to find my lady and keep my promise to her.”
“Your soul—I know you got it back,” I said, “but something tells me this is not a happy story.”
“It is not as unhappy as it seems,” he said. “My soul, as it turns out, was there all along. Lost within. Buried under hatred for the person who had murdered me in cold blood. Dorothy helped it to bloom into being. Rye and Cahal teased it forth from me, too. But…I’m sure you want to know about the young woman.”
“Please say she was among those who escaped,” I said.
“I found her,” Nick replied. “Alive. She had fled to the northern woods. And there, she had met and married…another man.”
“Oh, Nick.” My shoulders fell. That was not a death. But in a way, it also was.
“It’s all right,” said Nick, his tone dropping in a way that said it really wasn’t. “She looked so happy when I saw her. And the love I had for her, in that moment, it turned into a ghost. It haunts me, yes. But, like me, it ceased to be a living breathing thing.”
I winced, my heart clenching, then collapsing when a black tear escaped his eye, tracing a track down his human cheek. Unable to help myself, I pressed my thumb to the spot and cleared the oil away.
“Why?” I asked him. “Why did this happen to you?”
“I was not just a woodsman,” said Nick. “I was also a courier—a covert messenger. I received and passed on intel for The Wizard regarding the movements of East and West, who were both quickly rising to power at the time. In fact, without this preexisting connection to The Wizard, I doubt The Wizard would have done anything about my death.”
I frowned at this, my mind conjuring an image of Diggs. Also, Rye’s mention of “clockwork magic” came to mind. Nick seemed to fit Rye’s description of that type of sorcery, one he’d said amounted to a blend of the “magic” from the world I’d come from and this one.
“You were intercepted?” I guessed. “Or wait…you said you were attacked in the home you were building.”
“East sent a messenger of her own,” Nick said, “in the form of an assassin.”
I blinked, the motion slow, laden with too much shock, burdened with all the dread that flew at me from out of nowhere, brought upon my skull by that last hissing word.
“A coward in a mask,” said Nick, continuing his story even as my entire world began to tilt, thoughts and images sliding too quickly through my suddenly slanted reality to flash warnings in my soul. “He left a deadly violet bloom at the scene—as he did for all his marks. A Carta Mort. His calling card.”
I barely absorbed this detail. I could hardly concentrate with my blood rushing in my ears, my sight blurring around the edges.
“Rye and I have spent countless hours sparring,” Nick added. “And he has taught me much about combat. I told him I will find the bastard one of these days, if he still breathes, and kill him with these metal hands.”
I took an involuntary breath, one that came in too fast and full—like the kind a dying person takes.
“Tip?” said Nick, that pale gray eye straying from his reverie to focus on me along with that lens-like one. I caught sight of my wan face reflected in its circular glass window and immediately made myself wipe my expression clean.
“I think…” I said, “I’m…not well again.”
Lie. Lie. Lie. A lie.
I didn’t want to lie to Nick. Neither did I want him to think this reaction was about what he’d shared—his appearance, his nature.
He didn’t know about The Shroud, though. And Rye…Rye didn’t either.
God. I did.
If only I could unknow it. Be as unwitting as them.
Damn Morella. Damn Eulalie.
Nick rose from the stool, metal hands held out to me.
“What is it?” he asked, “what have I said?”
I grasped him by the wrists and squeezed. Could he feel the pressure? Sense it?
“N-no,” I stammered, “it’s not anything you’ve said.”
I’d vowed to myself not to lie to him. Not after Morella. But this secret, it was not like Morella. It was worse. So much worse.
“Tip,” he pressed, “what on earth is it?”
I had few choices. Telling him what I knew, any of it, was out of the question. Departing quickly after he’d divulged things to me that had required so much trust could not be done, either. Especially not after I had kept what I had from him regarding Morella. He would see through me just like he had with West.
Hide. I needed to hide the truth. Which had to be written across my face.
That something was very very wrong.
So, I did the only thing I could. I rushed into him, wound those freezing and unyielding shoulders in my arms, and hugged him tight. And gazed as I did through that giant hole in the ceiling that framed the moon. The only other witness to what I knew.
The darkest secret I now bore.
One I vowed to myself I would die with.