by Julie Kagawa
I groaned again, and his voice became a bit more soothing.
“Do not fret, Robin Goodfellow,” he cajoled. “If the girl never comes into Faery, she will have a perfectly normal human lifespan, and mortals do not live very long. At the very worst, you will have to stay in the mortal realm only until she dies.”
“Guess I really don’t have a say in this, do I?” I muttered, and the Erlking didn’t bother to answer that question. “Fine. I’ll do it, but I won’t like it. Where is this remarkable human, and how will I know I’ve found her?”
“The child was born of a human mother,” Oberon said, sounding wistful for the barest of seconds. “As of right now, they are living in a place called Louisiana. The child’s name, or the name her mother gave her, is Meghan Chase.”
10
INTO THE IRON REALM. FINALLY
This time, there was no trouble. Though the knights did glare daggers at Nyx as we walked by, they didn’t attempt to speak or stop us as we strolled past the gates onto the bridge. I didn’t see Glitch again, either, and once past the gates, the presence of the guards disappeared. We had a clear shot to the Iron Kingdom with no opposition whatsoever.
Honestly, I was kind of disappointed. That spiteful, vindictive part of me I was trying to ignore still wanted to enact a bit of gleeful revenge against the stiff-necked Iron faeries, and the thought of the tin cans rolling around in the mud like pigs made me snicker. Maybe later, when we had finished our business in Mag Tuiredh, I would pay Glitch and the knights a little visit. Remind them why the rest of Faery didn’t screw around with Robin Goodfellow.
“You have that evil smile on your face again,” Nyx remarked as we continued across the bridge. She hopped easily onto the railing and strolled along the edge as the wind howling up from the chasm tossed her hair and made her cloak snap around her. “If you’re plotting your revenge, I hope you plan to wait until after we’ve seen the queen. I get the feeling your vengeance plans are rather extensive.”
“Revenge? Me?” I echoed, grinning up at her. “Revenge is such a petty pastime, my good Forgotten. Is this the face of someone obsessed with vengeance?”
“You have horns, hooves, and are smiling like a fox who just discovered the chicken coop was left open,” Nyx replied without hesitation. Abruptly, she jumped from the railing and landed in my path with a challenging smirk, her face inches from mine and the moonlight blazing down on her. “You tell me, Robin Goodfellow.”
In that moment, I almost kissed her. An instinctive reaction, really. I was Robin Goodfellow, the infamous Puck; I had kissed countless pretty girls, human and fey alike. Graceful nymphs, flirtatious satyrs, ethereal sidhe, and naive human females in the mortal world, none could resist my charm once I’d turned it on. I’d kissed a few boys as well, along with a mermaid, a trio of plant creatures that had no discernible gender, and one very disillusioned frog that thought it was a princess.
Kissing, and all the activities that came with it, was so common an occurrence in the Nevernever it was almost expected. Love was never an option, or even an afterthought. While some fey did grow quite attached to each other, even to the point of developing real affection, true love required work, sacrifice, and putting the other person before yourself, something few faeries understood. So while I had done a lot of kissing in my long years as Robin Goodfellow, very little of it meant anything to me.
With a couple exceptions, of course. The most notable was the queen we were on our way to see, right now. The princess I’d lost, who had chosen my greatest rival instead of me.
Nyx wasn’t Meghan. In fact, the two were so different it was laughable. But she was beautiful, dangerous, and the most intriguing faery I’d met in a long time. I wondered what would happen if I did kiss her. Would she put a knife to my throat? Stab me in the delicates? Or...would she return it?
Did I dare take that chance again?
A squeaking, clanking, jingling sound interrupted us before I could make a decision. Looking back, I saw the Tinkerer’s wagon coming toward us on its segmented insect legs, looking so much like a massive metal spider I nearly leaped over the railing to avoid it. As the wagon’s girth nearly took up the middle of the bridge, Nyx hopped smoothly onto a post, and I pressed myself back against the wood as the structure lurched by, hissing, smoking, and leaving a trail of oil behind it, and continued toward the Iron Realm.
“Sure, don’t mind us, we’ll just get out of your way, then,” I called after it, and glanced at Nyx. “Well, he was in an awful hurry. Maybe there’s a long-armed-faery soiree he can’t be late for. Or maybe he was avenging all those times I stepped on an ant nest.”
Nyx didn’t answer. She stood tall on the post, perfectly balanced with the wind ruffling her hair, staring after the wagon with a faintly awed look in her eyes.
“I can see the Iron Realm,” she murmured.
I smiled grimly, remembering the first time I’d been to the capital city of the Iron fey, and the feeling of amazement, excitement, and unease it brought. “Yeah,” I acknowledged, wondering how Nyx would react when she saw it up close and personal. “Almost there.”
* * *
Tinkerport, the hilariously named town on the other side of the bridge, was your first introduction to the Iron Realm once you crossed over from the wyldwood. As towns went, it wasn’t very large; while the grand capital of Mag Tuiredh was home to thousands of Iron fey (most of them gremlins, but still), Tinkerport had only a few hundred. But once you crossed the bridge and stepped onto the cobbled streets beyond the gates, your first thought probably went along the lines of, Toto, we ain’t in Kansas anymore.
Or maybe more accurately, holy shit.
That was the look on Nyx’s face as we stepped through the brass gates of Tinkerport and onto the main street through the center of town.
It was hard to describe Tinkerport. It was like a scatterbrained inventor took his entire collection of bits, bobs, and metal parts, upended it on the floor, and somehow made a city. Buildings lined the cobblestone roads, but not your regular stone, wood, and straw configurations. Walls glimmered in the fading moonlight, gears and cogs spun as they opened doors, weather panes twirled, and lengths of seemingly useless pipe stuck out at random intervals. Streetlamps sprouted right out of the ground, sometimes bent at odd angles or twisted around a tree, as if it had just grown that way. Steam hissed from vents and random pipes, curling into the air or drifting into the gutters, giving the town a hazy look.
Then, of course, there were the Iron fey. Hacker elves, cog dwarves, clockwork hounds, wire nymphs, and rust eaters were only a few of the creatures walking the roads or hovering in the shadows. And those were the faeries whose names I knew. Other, even stranger fey wandered the hazy streets. Despite their weirdness, they had one thing in common: they were all immediately recognizable as Iron fey. They had a name, and someone who knew them. Unlike Nyx, whom no one had a name for at all.
I had to give the Forgotten credit. Despite being surrounded by—quite literally—nightmares of the fey world, she remained remarkably calm. I remembered my first venture into the Iron Realm; it had involved a lot of exclamations like eeeew and creeeeeepy and oh-crap-get-it-away. This might’ve had something to do with the prevalence of bug-like things in the Iron Kingdom, but still. Just the fact that Nyx hadn’t gone for her weapons was impressive, though she had drawn deep into her cloak and tugged the hood up to cover her face.
“So, whadya think?” I asked, giving her a sideways look. “It’s your first trip to the Iron Realm... How are you going to describe it to everyone when you get home?”
“Shiny,” Nyx muttered, and I snorted a laugh. “Truthfully, I’ve never seen anything like it,” she went on, her voice sounding awed but trying not to let it show. “These fey...how can they exist? Is this what the humans dream of now?”
“Pretty much,” I told her. “The Iron fey came from mankind’s obsession with progress an
d technology. That’s why they’re so comfortable in the mortal world, and why they don’t Fade away when cut off from the Nevernever. Iron and the banal effects of nonbelief don’t have any effect on them.”
“I see.” Nyx observed the town, golden eyes taking everything in. “It doesn’t seem large enough for a court, however,” she mused. “I take it the Iron Queen does not reside here?”
“Sadly not.” I shook my head. “Meghan lives in the capital, Mag Tuiredh, which is still quite a ways from the border. Don’t worry, though. I don’t plan on hoofing it to Mag Tuiredh, not when there are other, much more convenient ways of travel through the Iron Realm.”
“Like the carriages? I saw a few of them earlier.”
“Ugh, definitely not.” I shuddered. “Did you not notice their wheels, or rather the lack of them? They have legs. Spider legs. I am not riding to Mag Tuiredh on the back of some creepy-ass spider wagon.” My skin itched, and I brushed at imaginary bugs crawling up my arms. “Seriously, what is it with all the insect-themed rides in the Iron Realm? It’s like the world’s creepiest amusement park. Nope, no spider taxi to the capital.”
Nyx raised a brow in that amused way of hers but chose not to comment on my perfectly reasonable spider phobia. “Then what do you suggest?”
“I thought we’d take the train.”
Nyx furrowed her brow. “I am unfamiliar with this...train,” she said. “Is it like a carriage?”
“Oh, I could tell you,” I said, grinning. “But why ruin the surprise?” She frowned at me, and I stepped back. “Come on, it’s something you really need to see for yourself.”
The train station sat on the outskirts of Tinkerport, a raised wooden platform resting beside the railroad tracks that stretched away into the distance. When Meghan had become queen, one of the first things she did was build the extensive rail system so that it reached all corners of the Iron Realm. I’d ridden the train a couple times before, and I had to say, I wouldn’t mind having something like it in the wyldwood or Arcadia. Tromping through the wyldwood on foot, fighting weather and vegetation and everything that wanted to eat you, got so tedious sometimes.
Only a few Iron fey waited on the platform beside the railroad tracks, mostly siting on the benches scattered about. One spindly fellow, wearing a crooked top hat that was twice as tall as normal, perched on the very edge of the platform, gazing down the tracks for the engine that had yet to appear. I caught a few strange looks from the faeries waiting for the train; I supposed that even with easier access to the Iron Realm, not many traditional fey considered it a great vacation spot. And as Nyx and I seemed to be the only non-Iron faeries in the entire town, we kind of stood out. A trio of fey that sort of resembled gnomes, but with jaws like steel traps, eyed us from a corner of the platform, whispering among themselves.
“I’m starting to feel like a satyr in a redcap den,” Nyx murmured beside me, having also caught sight of our toothy observers. “I hope they don’t decide to cause trouble while we’re on this train.”
“Oh, I dunno.” I grinned, feeling the gleeful spitefulness stirring in me again. “It might be fun. They’d certainly find that they bit off more than they could chew.”
“If it’s all the same, I’d rather not have anything bitten off.”
I chuckled, but with a piercing whistle and a billow of black smoke, a rusty, black iron engine pulled into the station and came to a heaving, panting halt beside the platform, leaking steam and puffing like an out-of-breath dragon. Nyx flinched and darted behind me, then peered over my shoulder as the train wheezed and hacked and coughed, sending smoke and bits of soot everywhere.
“What is that?” she muttered, staring at the huge, huffing engine in both wariness and awe. “Some kind of iron monster? Is it alive?”
“That,” I announced, glancing back to grin at her, “is our ride to Mag Tuiredh.”
“That’s the train? Why didn’t you tell me it was...” Her eyes narrowed. “You just wanted to see my reaction, didn’t you?”
“It would’ve been funny if you tried to stab it—ow.” I winced as she punched me in the ribs. “Still worth it.”
The inside of the train wasn’t exactly crowded, but it wasn’t empty, either. It seemed Mag Tuiredh was a popular destination in the Iron Realm. Iron fey sat alone or in small groups. Curious, wary, and faintly hostile gazes followed us down the aisles, which I did my best to ignore. Finding a relatively quiet corner, I slouched onto a bench with a sigh and put my feet up on the seat across from me. My hooves clattered against the edge of the bench, and I winced. “Oof, that’s going to take some getting used to again. I hope Meghan doesn’t see me and freak out. Hell, I hope ice-boy doesn’t see me and freak out.” I paused. “Wait. No, that would actually be hilarious.”
Nyx, leaning against the window with her arms crossed, glanced down at me. “Who is this ‘ice-boy’ you keep mentioning?”
“The Iron Queen’s husband.” I laced my hands behind my head, affecting a pose of lazy nonchalance, a stark contrast to the sudden bitterness that prickled inside. “Third son of Mab, Queen of the Winter Court. His real name is Ash, but ice-boy fits him so much better. You’ll see when we meet them.”
The train chugged into motion, and soon the lights of Tinkerport faded behind us. As we picked up speed, moving away from the town, a vast, rocky expanse could be seen through the window, jagged cliffs silhouetted against a navy blue sky. The moon hung very low over one of the peaks, and the stars were beginning to disappear. Dawn would soon break over the Iron Kingdom, for which I was glad. After the darkness of the Between and the eternal twilight of the wyldwood, I was ready to see the sun.
I yawned, stretching out on the bench. “Might as well get comfortable,” I told the faery standing at the window. “I’m not sure how long it’ll take us to reach the capital, but Mag Tuiredh is near the center of the Iron Realm, so it could take a while. This might be a good time for a nap.”
“Sleep?” The Forgotten gave me a strange look, lowering her voice. “We’re in the Iron Realm, in a metal box surrounded by dozens of Iron fey. There’s no way I’ll be able to sleep.”
“Suit yourself.” I slouched farther on the bench with a yawn. “But I have the feeling we’re not going to get much rest once we actually get to Mag Tuiredh, so I’m going to relax while we have the chance. Yell if something tries to eat my face off.”
Nyx shook her head but turned away, staring out the window again with her arms crossed.
I leaned back and let my eyes close, shutting out the rest of the world. I wasn’t really that tired, but I could feel the mire of resentment stir when Nyx mentioned Ash, and I didn’t want to continue talking about it. For the first time in a long time, I felt it was better that I not say anything at all. Hopefully the memories would fade and take these feelings of anger and hostility with them.
The train chugged on into the night. None of the other passengers bothered us; it seemed the rest of the train had either fallen asleep or were keeping to themselves. I dozed, but was aware enough to know Nyx did not sit down the entire time, continuing her silent vigil at the window until dawn.
I felt the moment the sun broke over the distant mountains, the light warming my face and pressing against my eyelids.
A strangled sound made my blood chill. I opened my eyes just in time to see Nyx stagger back from the window. Her face was pale, her eyes glassy and pained. One hand clutched at her chest, then she swayed and fell to her knees on the wooden floor.
“Nyx.” I swung my hooves off the bench and dropped beside her, putting a hand on her arm. The Forgotten shuddered, her skin cold in the faint rays of sunlight streaming through the window, and my alarm grew. “Hey, talk to me. What’s going on?”
“I...I don’t know.” Her voice was a breath, a whisper, as if she couldn’t summon the strength for anything louder. “I feel strange. Weak.” She trembled and pressed a hand to the f
loor as if the room was spinning. “What is happening to me? Is this...iron sickness?”
My senses prickled. I glanced around to see we weren’t going unnoticed. The faeries on the train who, a few seconds ago, had been dozing or gazing out the window, minding their own business, were starting to stare at us. Eyes turned, heads swung around, and gazes rose to watch us with more than a passing fascination. Glowing, curious, hungry eyes stared at Nyx, making me tense. The denizens of the Iron Realm, though they claimed to be more civilized than Summer or Winter, were still fey. And faeries could sense weakness like a shark smelled blood. I could see that predatory nature awakening in the calculating stares sizing us up, wondering how easy it would be to take us apart. The three steel-trap gnomes sitting toward the end of the car peered over a seat back, their eyes glowing and intense as they watched us.
Okay, it was a good idea to not be here now. “Nyx,” I said, turning back to the Forgotten. Was it my imagination, or did she seem paler than before? Even less substantial than she had been? “Not to alarm you or anything, but we need to get out of here. Can you stand?”
Her jaw clenched, but she nodded jerkily and pushed herself to her feet, swaying a little as she did. “Go,” she told me. “I’m right behind you.”
I stepped into the aisle, smiling dangerously at any Iron faery who met my gaze, daring them to try something. They stayed where they were, though their eyes glittered as they shifted past me to the Forgotten at my back, making my fingers itch for my daggers.
“Don’t look now,” Nyx muttered, her voice low and strained. “But we’re being followed.”
I glanced back and saw that the trio of steel-trap gnomes had slid out of their seat and were trailing us down the aisle like dogs following a wounded cougar, scenting blood but knowing not to get too close. Annoyance flickered, dangerously close to turning into something deadly. At this rate, they were just begging to meet the old Robin Goodfellow, who in his current mood was not inclined to be nice. Unfortunately, if I responded to this threat in any way, it might trigger the rest of the faeries in this car to attack. And in such tight quarters, that could get really messy really fast. If Nyx was at her best, I wouldn’t be concerned. But the Forgotten was clearly suffering from some mysterious affliction, and I was more worried about getting her to safety than giving a bunch of razor-tooth gnomes a permanent case of lockjaw.
