The Iron King recap

Meghan Chase turns sixteen in rural Louisiana and comes home to find her four-year-old brother Ethan replaced by a hostile changeling. Her best friend Robbie admits he is really Puck, the trickster, set to watch over her by Oberon, king of the Summer Court, who is Meghan's true father. Crossing into the fey world to get Ethan back, Meghan is acknowledged as a half-blood princess of Summer, loathed by Queen Titania, and forced to bargain with Ash, the Winter Court prince sent to catch her: he will help her, and afterwards she belongs to his mother, Mab. The search leads to a new kind of fey born from human faith in technology, whose iron is lethal to the old courts and whose existence Faery refuses to acknowledge. Their king, Machina, took Ethan to draw Meghan in. In his dying realm he offers her a place at his side; she refuses and destroys him, freeing her brother, while Machina promises that the Iron fey and their empty throne will outlast him. Meghan takes Ethan home, then leaves with Ash to pay what she owes.

Meghan Chase turns sixteen on a hog farm in rural Louisiana, where she lives with her mother, her stepfather Luke and her four-year-old half brother Ethan. Her own father walked away when she was six and was never found. Around her birthday the strangeness she has spent years ignoring stops being ignorable: Ethan insists a man hides in his closet, something moves inside her computer screen, and her best friend Robbie Goodfell begins behaving as though he is expecting trouble. After a humiliating day at school Meghan comes home to find Ethan changed, vicious and wrong and no longer her brother. Robbie tells her what she is looking at: the real Ethan has been taken into the fey world and a changeling left in his place. Then he drops the disguise he has worn for years. He is Robin Goodfellow, the trickster called Puck, placed at Meghan's side long ago by a master he will not name, and he agrees, reluctantly, to take her across into the Nevernever to get her brother back.

Puck leads Meghan into the Nevernever, the fey world shaped by human belief, and drills her in its rules: never give a fey your true name, never eat its food, never accept anything without first agreeing the price. They are hunted almost at once, dodge the Wild Hunt, and acquire a travelling companion in Grimalkin, a talking grey cat who trades guidance for a favour to be collected later. Meghan then learns that she was never entirely human. Puck's master is Oberon, the Erlking of the Summer Court, and Meghan is his daughter by a mortal woman, a half-blood princess of Summer, which is why the fey have always noticed her. Brought before the Seelie Court, she is acknowledged by a father who is courteous, remote and unwilling to send his court after Ethan, and detested on sight by Titania, Oberon's queen, to whom Meghan is living proof of her husband's infidelity. Whatever took Ethan, the Summer Court will not name it.

Titania makes the Summer Court unsafe for Meghan, and Oberon's protection amounts to keeping his daughter where he can see her rather than helping her search. At Elysium, the truce gathering where Summer and Winter meet without bloodshed, Meghan meets Ash, the youngest son of Mab of the Winter Court, a prince who hunts for his mother and would like nothing better than to bring Oberon's half-human daughter home to her. Out of options, Meghan makes a bargain with him: he will help her find and recover Ethan, and when it is done she will go with him to the Winter Court as Mab's. With Grimalkin's help she gets out of the Seelie Court and away from Titania, and the search finally begins on terms of her own.

Meghan's search takes her back across the Nevernever, where the wyldwood is sickening in patches: trees rusting, glamour failing, whole groves dying in ways nothing in Faery will discuss. Puck rejoins her, and the answer arrives with the creatures that keep attacking her. There is a new kind of fey in the world, born not of the old stories but of what humans believe in now, machines and wires and progress, and the iron in them is lethal to every traditional fey. The courts refuse to acknowledge that the Iron fey exist, because admitting it would mean admitting the old fey are being killed by the very thing that once made them. It was the Iron fey who took Ethan, on the orders of their king, Machina, the figure Meghan glimpsed in her computer screen and Ethan saw in his closet.

To find Machina's realm Meghan has to leave the Nevernever and go looking in the mortal world. In New Orleans she seeks out the Oracle, a fey seer in the shape of an old woman who deals in what is coming and sets her own terms for it. The price is steep and Meghan pays it. The Iron fey track her through the city, proving that the wyldwood, the mortal world and even a dryad's hold in a public park are all now within their reach, and the attacks come closer together. Meghan also begins to work out what she can do herself: she is Oberon's daughter, carrying Summer glamour she barely knows how to hold, and her human half lets her handle iron that would burn a full-blooded fey to the bone.

Meghan, Ash, Puck and Grimalkin cross into the Iron Realm, a country of slag, scrap and poisoned air where Ash and Puck weaken with every hour they remain. They bargain passage from packrats, evade iron dragons, and are hunted first by Ironhorse, one of Machina's lieutenants, and then by the Iron King's armoured knights. There is no way through for all of them. Ash turns and holds the knights off so that Meghan can reach Machina's tower, and she goes on without him, knowing what it is likely to cost him.

Meghan reaches the heart of the Iron Realm and finds Ethan alive and wired into Machina's machinery, being used to feed the Iron King's power. Machina does not attack her; he explains himself. He is dying and his realm is dying with him, and he wants Meghan, Oberon's daughter, untouched by iron, able to carry Summer glamour and iron glamour alike, to take a place at his side and sustain what he built. She refuses, turns her own power on him and destroys him, but he goes out unafraid: the Iron fey are made by human belief, belief has not stopped, and his crown will not stay empty. Meghan frees Ethan, brings him home, and returns him to a family who will never learn where he was. Her reprieve is short. Ash arrives to collect on the bargain she made at Elysium, and Meghan leaves with him for the Winter Court.

Meghan destroys Machina in his own tower and frees Ethan from the machinery that was keeping the Iron King alive, but Machina's last words are a warning rather than a plea: the Iron fey exist because humans believe in machines, that belief is not going away, and his crown will find another head. Ash, who held off the Iron knights so that Meghan could reach the tower, survives; Puck and Grimalkin come through as well, and Grimalkin's favour is still unclaimed. Meghan gets Ethan back to Louisiana and to a family who will never know where he was. The Summer Court has acknowledged her without protecting her, Titania remains an enemy, and both courts still refuse to admit the Iron fey are real, which leaves the underlying problem entirely unsolved. Then Meghan's own bargain comes due: Ash arrives at her house to take her to Tir Na Nog, where she will be Mab's hostage as agreed. She goes willingly. The next book opens with her inside the Winter Court, in the hands of a queen with no reason to be kind to Oberon's daughter, beside a prince whose feelings for her are a danger to them both.