Page 1 of Ironling
Prologue
“What are you doing in here?”
Aislinn threw open the door of her study to find her younger brother, Jerrod, toying with one of her new devices. Jerrod looked up guiltily, sticking out his bottom lip in a pout.
“I just wanted to see,” he said by way of apology.
Aislinn scowled, looking from Jerrod to her new instrument. It was a delicate thing and had taken her days to assemble. The glass lenses set in tiers of metal rods were meant to help magnify old texts and anything else too small to see well.
She’d barely gotten to use it herself, and she certainly didn’t want her eleven-year-old brother getting his sweaty fingers all over it. She didn’t like him in her space, either.
Their father, Lord Merrick Darrow, had let Aislinn have the room for her study barely a year ago. Aislinn had spent that time filling it with her favorite things—books. She collected books and tomes and treatises on math, astronomy, architecture, and more. Anything she could, she gathered and read. The study had quickly become a haven of paper and ink, a little refuge from the busyness of Dundúran Castle.
And…since their mother had passed in childbirth, and theirinfant brother along with her, two years prior, Aislinn had found much comfort in the company of books and learning.
She didn’t appreciate the intrusion, and Jerrod knew it. When she didn’t immediately demand he leave, though, he dropped his guilty look and turned back to the device.
“Fine,” she grumbled, “just don’t touch anything.”
Aislinn rounded her desk and sat down, keeping an eye on her brother. He was often careless, and many cups and plates and crystal had broken under his sloppy hand.
Taking up her quill, Aislinn got started sketching a new idea. She’d been talking with one of the senior gardeners, Morwen, about the castle gardens and orchard, and it got her thinking about irrigation. Morwen told her the last time the irrigation system had been worked on was under Aislinn’s great-grandmother nearly ninety years ago.
She’d left her study for less than an hour to find a book on irrigation in her father’s large library—and apparently hadn’t locked the door behind her.
Aislinn glanced at the interloper. He had his hands folded behind his back as he inspected the device, at least.
She chewed her cheek, wishing she could tell him to leave, but the voice of Dundúran’s chatelain, Brenna, echoed in her mind.“Be kind to your brother, he’s suffered so much.”
Nothing more than I have; she was my mother, too,she often grumbled, but only to herself, as such thoughts were selfish.
It was also selfish of Aislinn to resent that Brenna, who had come with their mother Lady Róisín when she married their father, favored Jerrod over her. Always Jerrod got away with his antics, while Aislinn was scolded, reminded that Lady Róisín wouldn’t have done such a thing or acted in such a way.
“Ladies don’t have tantrums,”Brenna was fond of telling her.
Aislinn wasn’t a lady, though. Not really. Not like her mother.
She didn’t like the things her elegant mother had and didn’tthink like her, either. Aislinn disliked attending court functions. She didn’t like wearing fancy, stiff gowns and sitting for hours through speeches. She dreaded the word play and games of politics. She loathed greeting guests and having people kiss her hand and holding her tongue when she’d rather just tell the truth about being bored.
While Róisín had lived, she’d helped Aislinn learn enough about courtly etiquette to survive. Her mother had understood Aislinn’s difficulties and taught her as best she could, all to combat the roiling emotions that sometimes overwhelmed Aislinn.
Brenna called them tantrums or fits. Róisín had called it feeling too much.
Whatever it was, Aislinn hated her outbursts of emotions.
Without her mother to help her, she’d taken to avoiding things she disliked or that easily overwhelmed her. Aislinn spent her time reading and studying on her own, as tutors had little to teach her anymore, even if she was only fourteen.
Her father needed her, though. He’d made it his mission to root out the awful slave trade that took root in southern Eirea during the brutal wars of succession fifteen years past. Someone had to oversee Dundúran, and although Jerrod, as the son, was heir, Aislinn was older—and smarter.
Brenna as chatelain handled much of it, but Aislinn was growing up and more than capable, as her father put it. She wanted to make him proud. Anything to relieve the devastation in his eyes after losing Róisín.
Aislinn sighed, wishing for the hundred-thousandth time that her mother hadn’t fallen pregnant, that she was still—
Is that smoke?
Looking up, Aislinn saw Jerrod angling the biggest lens of the device into a beam of sunlight from the window. A concentrated cone of light radiated down on an open book, a thin plume ofsmoke rising from the darkening paper.
“What are you doing?” Aislinn screeched.
