Devon Monk - Dead Iron

Somehow, Mrs. Dunken caught wind of what she’d been on her knees for—likely Mrs. Small had told her. Then the whole town knew it. Knew she was crazy.

No one had looked at her the same since, no matter how hard she’d tried to hide her strangeness.

Too wild, they said. Touched in the head. A pity she’d never amount to anything. A pity she hadn’t died young. No wonder her mama left her on a doorstep.

Now, at the ripe age of seventeen, it was clear she was unmarriageable.

Rose tipped her face up and blew out the breath she’d been holding, trying to push some of the old pain away. Yes, she’d wanted a husband and children. Once. But that life wasn’t ever coming her way.

She’d lost it the day she told her daddy she wasn’t like other children.

It was the blacksmith, Mr. Gregor, who had taken her in. Let her sit at his bench and watch him work metal over fire so hot, it took her breath away.

She didn’t hear the metal like she heard living things. But she seemed to understand it better, the way it could be dug up, melted, hammered, and molded. She would sometimes stop still in whatever she was doing, caught by the realization of how a brace could change the power a matic could muster, or how an extra wheel, a shorter chain, or bits never put together before could make something different. Something new. Something worthwhile and good.

Some women were clever with thread and cloth. Some with cooking and gardens. Rose was clever with metal, spring, and cog.

Next spring, she planned on leaving. She’d take what money she’d tucked back for herself, and she’d ride until she found a place in this wide world where she could make things, turn things, devise things, no matter that she was a woman. Maybe she’d come up with a medical device, something that helped the lame walk again. Maybe she’d find a way to catch the light of a star and stick it in a jar for the kitchen table. Maybe she’d devise an airship powered by nothing but a song.

One thing was for sure: she refused to die out her days here, pitied, scorned, and alone. She even had a hope, though it was small and wan, that she might stumble across kin. That there was family out there somewhere, who knew the color of her mother’s eyes, and had once heard her father’s laughter. That there was family who knew her real name.

The matics puffed again, a loud thump of air pounding down. Rose wished she’d thought of bringing a coat or shawl. Even though there was still heat in the day, that Mr. LeFel sucked all the warmth out of a person.

He was clever; that was clear. He was charming and breathtakingly handsome. But he had the feel about him of a snake hidden in reeds. The strangest thing was that all the trees and plants and growing things went dead silent around him.

She’d never seen that happen before. Not once in all her years with all the folk who had stopped through her parents’ shop. Living things didn’t stop living just because a man walked by.

Unless that man was Mr. Shard LeFel.

Rose rubbed at her arms to take the chill out of her skin. Whatever sort of man he was, she wanted nothing more than to be away from him. She’d done her part and delivered the papers. If luck was with her, she wouldn’t need to be anywhere near that man for a long, long while.

Mae didn’t have much time. By the new moon, she’d be headed back to the coven, whether she wanted to or not. She’d vowed her life to Jeb, and those vows bound them together stronger than anything else on this earth. But now that he was dead, other vows, older vows, were tightening down on her, digging in like a thousand small fingers, and dragging her home.

She paced the floor of her cottage, restless, already feeling the need to turn east. Cedar Hunt had refused to help her. Unless he changed his mind, she would have to find her husband’s killer on her own. And soon.

It wasn’t just the vows that would force her home. It was the coven’s magic.

Mae picked up a bowl of water that had sat in the moonlight, and walked with it to the hearth. Most magic could not be used for curse, for darkness, for pain. But in her hands, magic always followed a darker path.

The sisters refused to believe magic could be used for evil things. Mae wanted to believe that too. But when she called upon magic, it changed in her hands. And pain was always the way of it.

She’d done her level best to use it for good. Dark spells to speed the death of an animal who suffered. Dark spells to curse vermin so they wouldn’t enter the garden. With time and practice she had found a way she could use magic as a binding between two things. Health to a bone, ease to a soul. Love to a heart. These were all good things, healing things. But it didn’t take much for a binding, even the kindest of them, to become a curse.

And so she’d learned how to break bindings, untie vows, end curses, and stop magic from answering a prayer. It was not an easy thing to do. But she had practiced and learned.

The sisters were frightened of her and how magic bloomed dark in her hands. Though they never said it, she saw it in their eyes.

They had insisted she bind herself to the soil beneath the coven before she was even thirteen. And she’d done it, used her blood, and the blood of the strongest witch among them, to make it a binding that even she could not break. That binding was a rope around her foot, and if ever there was too much hate in her heart, or if ever she used magic for too dark an end, she would have no choice but to return to that soil so that the sisters could cleanse her of the darkness in her soul.

No matter what was in her way.

No matter her grief.

No matter if she wanted to stay in the home she and her husband had built, stay in the land where her love had died.

She had to return.

Mae absently wiped away the tear caught on the edge of her cheekbone. She knelt and placed the bowl in front of the heart of her home, the heart of the life she and Jeb had built together.

A small, bright fire crackled there, flames from the hickory burning clean and sweet.

To find him, she’d need a direction. Jeb had asked for work with the rail man, but he had turned him down—Mae had been there and seen firsthand how poorly Mr. Shard LeFel treated her husband. It had made her angry, but Jeb bore it like it was no matter. But when Jeb heard a rancher out in Idaho was looking for hands to drive cattle across to Oregon City, he’d gone to see if the rancher would take him on.

He should have been home more than a month ago.

She drew a strand of wool out of her pocket, twined with a thread of her hair. At the base of the string was her wedding ring.

She had been sixteen when Jeb Lindson came walking through town on his way out west. She’d fallen in love with him from the first time she set eyes on him, heard his warm laughter, his kind words. She became his lover that winter, and his wife that spring.

And those vows, to love him and keep him, until death did them part, were the strongest and truest she had ever spoken. Those vows had overtaken even her ties to the coven’s soil.

Jeb and she headed west to Oregon, with hopes of a quiet farming life on fertile ground beneath the shelter of the mountains.

It was a good life for seven years. Then something changed. Darkness crept across the land like a shadow cast by the railroad.

In that shadow, as mile after mile of iron was laid down, something Strange grew stronger and stronger.

And now her husband was dead. Fallen under that creeping shadow.

Mae drew the back of her hand across her cheek, wiping the last of her tears away. Crying would do her no good.

She could not see the future, but there were always hints, like scents in the wind that could send her down the right path to see that her husband’s killer was dead and buried.