I drew back, feeling as if he’d slapped me. Even if this was a dream, just my brain dancing with the pathogen in my blood, it was a horrid thing for my memory to serve up.
“I left the city,” I said. “For you. Conrad, just tell me—”
“Listen.” His outline shimmered, and in the refraction of light on water Conrad was only a black shadow, a shimmering insubstantial dream figure just like everything else about this gray, dream-place Lovecraft. “I put you in terrible danger, Aoife, and I didn’t know it. I haven’t any time and all I can say is stop looking for me. Stop looking for answers. Go home and never, never look back.”
I could see through him now, through his outline and into the ruins of the foundry across the river. Above its crumbled chimneys, a flight of wild ravens swooped, their clockwork claws catching and carrying off a shandy-man for torture. The Proctors might not exist in my dream, but the price of heresy still ran strong.
“Conrad …,” I begged. I couldn’t lose him, couldn’t let him slip away again. The thought of waking up alone was more than I could bear, a weight on my chest that wouldn’t let me breathe.
“I got away, Aoife, but you won’t,” he whispered. “That’s why you have to go back. It’s not real. None of it is.…”
Conrad’s outline curled up at the edges, burned away like a piece of celluloid, and he grew transparent.
I screamed as he vanished, went to my knees and buried my face in my hands. I could endure any torment from my fellow students, any punishment of a care-parent or professor. I could take my mother’s fits and Cal’s well-meaning scorn with my head held up. But to see Conrad vanish before my eyes a second time was more than I was prepared to withstand. I broke, sorrow and rage ripping themselves from my throat. I screamed into the rank, tainted air of my dream-city until the ghouls closed in on me and smothered me with the scent of the dank underground and the caress of their drowned-corpse hands.
“Miss Aoife!”
I bolted awake, lashing out at the thing holding me down. Bethina shrieked as I cracked her in the nose. “All His gears, miss! You were screaming to wake the dead in your sleep!”
I clapped my hand over my mouth, realizing that the air-raid wailing was emanating from me. Sweat worked its way down my body and I saw that I’d kicked all of my bedding to the floor.
“I’m so very sorry,” I said, jumping up and grabbing a handkerchief from the clothespress for Bethina’s bleeding nose.
“ ’S not really your fault, miss,” she said around the cloth. “I ran to shake you awake, and that was foolish. You sounded like you was being tortured—are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I lied, one I’d repeated innumerably. I twitched back the curtains and was startled to see it was light. I’d dreamed away the darkness, and the morning was silver and woven with mist.
“Didn’t sound fine,” Bethina said. She examined the blood-spotted handkerchief and made a face.
“I’m sorry I hit you, Bethina, really I am,” I told her, wrapping my arms around myself as my sweat went cold in the unheated room. “It was just a silly nightmare.”
19
The Mist-Wrought Ring
IN THE DAWN, I decided to go walking. I needed to leave the confines of Graystone and shake off the lingering touch of the dream.
The wardrobe yielded a wool skirt and jumper, as old and out of fashion as the red dress, but I added them to my boots and cape to ward against the morning chill.
No one else was awake, except Bethina cooking breakfast in the kitchen, so I left by the main door and walked around the foundation of the house.
Graystone’s estate was larger than I’d imagined, the stone walls of the borderlands disappearing to the vanishing point in every direction as I left the house behind and started down the long slope of the back garden. Oak trees bent over the path, their twisted limbs black against the dove-wing sky.
Mist was my constant companion. It wandered among the trees, slithered over the ground, wrapped the day in solitude and silence.
The path ended a few hundred yards from the rear of the house, at one of the swaybacked stone walls that veined the landscape. I climbed over the boundary of a forgotten farm field, a ley line traced in moss and rock.
An abandoned orchard crouched beyond the wall, hunched shapes of apple trees writhing in the light wind sweeping up from the valley.
Late fruit crunched under my feet as I walked, putting the scent of cider in the air. Crows flew overhead, their wings and my footsteps the only sounds.
Here, I could forget about the dream, about Conrad telling me to go home and stop looking for him.
Dream-Conrad didn’t know anything. He was my fear. He was trying to make me turn back, when I’d finally gotten close enough to rescue my brother. My madness was not going to sway me from my course, not now. Not when I’d promised Dean that I’d find out if I did possess the Weird, and Conrad—the real one—that I’d find him.
I walked in no particular direction, except away from Graystone. I didn’t want to be around other people, to have to make pleasant conversation, because I had nothing to talk about. Either I had a gift that no one on the planet was supposed to possess, or I was crazy. One or the other.
It didn’t make for an easy mind as I walked, and I wondered if I’d ever stop feeling fragile, like everything I’d managed to do since I left the Academy would shatter at any moment. Until I could regain my resolve, and the strength that I’d found when I ran across the Night Bridge with Dean and Cal, I would walk.
The fog was seductive, and it kissed my skin with cold and jeweled my untidy braid with droplets. It pulled me deeper into the orchard, until I lost sight of even the jagged weather vanes at the top of Graystone’s spires. I felt that I could walk and wander until I found a new path, one that led away from the life of Aoife Grayson and into the land of mists, where, Nerissa had once said, lost souls wandered, wakeful and unclaimed.
The marching lines of apple trees dropped off, one by one, until I stood at the edge of the real forest, in a clearing of dead grass and toppled stones. An iron cider press, rusted to a standstill, and a chimney were the only things left of the cider house. Beyond, a stone well stood at the edge of the field. Frayed rope in want of a bucket flapped dismally in the wind.
I should turn back—Dean had said the woods around Arkham weren’t safe, and the ghoul traps we’d seen last night proved it. Ghouls didn’t need to live in bricked-over sewer tunnels. They could thrive nicely in bootleggers’ caverns, I’d imagine.
Dean had told me to be sure. But I had no inkling of my potential Weird beyond the whispers inside my head whenever I got close to the secrets in Graystone. I had no sudden flash through the aether, no awakening moment.
The only thing I’d ever been certain of was machines. Machines and math made sense even when the world seemed to be burning down around me. Tinkering was the only comfort I’d had left when my mother went away. Machines put me in the School of Engines, where I had a chance to become something more than a stenographer or a nurse. But they couldn’t help me now, and frustration welled up in me so sudden and strong that I gave the ground a kick, rotted apples and clods of earth flying.
Machines and engineering had staved off my madness, staved off the infection, but my father believed in something other, something invisible and intangible as the aether. He’d used his Weird. I couldn’t even discern what mine might be. If he was telling the truth.
He might be. I wanted him to be. Otherwise, I was crazier than either Nerissa or Conrad and all I had to look forward to was a long life full of poking and prodding in a state-run madhouse.
That couldn’t be my fate. Not when I’d come all this way.
Weary from the long walk, I sat on the foundation of the cider house, brushing my boots and stockings free of dew. A gust blew through the clearing, pulling strands of my hair free, and the temperature dropped, quickly enough to prickle against the back of my neck. The crows cried out as one, their cacophony ringing against the mountain and back, a chorus of discordant bells chiming a funerary toll.