Page 35 of The Kingdom Cursed By Iron

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.

Chapter 12

The whimpers and sobs filling the air pull me back to myself. Fae are scattered around me, clinging to what remains of the gallery, trying to move even as I see the iron draining them of strength. Some of the stronger fae are attempting to help the others, dragging their friends and family closer to safety even as their knees start to buckle beneath them. I help catch the other side of a white-haired fae lady being held up by a younger woman who looks to be her daughter.

“The stairs are covered,” the younger fae gasps. “There’s no safe way down.”

But even as she speaks, an almighty rustling sound, like a hurricane ripping through a forest, reaches us. I look down to see Ruskin by the steps, his face taut with concentration. He’s holding his hands aloft as a sea of vines and leaves crawls across the palace floor towards the gallery steps. I think I see his arms shake a little even as he fights to hold them firm. It must be hard, even with his High King power, to summon his magic amid all the iron.

I feel like I’m watching time sped up—a thousand years’ worth of growth overtaking the cold metal in a matter of minutes. Meanwhile, the fae around me release cries of relief as the plants swallow up the poisonous metal.

“Come on,” I say to the older fae I’m holding. “You can climb down now. Just be careful.”

Ruskin’s efforts have ensured the iron won’t burn the fae as they descend, but his magic won’t block all of its effects, and the white-haired fae’s limbs immediately begin to shake as she tries to ease herself down onto her knees on the steps—which now resemble more of a ramp with all the metal and foliage obscuring them.

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