Iona Thorne was born in 1555 at Bellingham, Northumberland, in North Tynedale, a country of heather hills, sheep farms and stone peel towers where the Charltons, Robsons and Milburns held the valley through feud and marriage. Her mother was Mariota Thorne, a dairymaid, known within the House of Thorne by the name The Amber Beacon, a vampire slayer who had learned her craft on the border moors before Iona was born. The child was raised in a small cottage of undressed stone with a turf roof, a dairy at one end and a byre at the other, where the heat of the cattle rose through the floor in winter. Queen Mary had just lost Calais and the reformation lay only a few years ahead. To a girl in Tynedale, though, the great events were less real than the weather, the raiders and the dark.
Her mother's work was known but not discussed. Mariota milked the cows before dawn and ran the cheese and butter, and by night or in the twilight she went out with a hawthorn stake and a knife and did what the family's women had done for longer than anyone could count. Iona grew up among the smells of sour milk and pennyroyal, and she learned early that the household kept two sorts of time, dairy time and hunting time, and that she was to fit herself to both. Her father is not recorded in the Thorne papers, and neither she nor her mother spoke of him. It was a household of women, tightly run, and Iona was later described as the kind of child who watched how doors were shut and who noticed which dogs bristled at which visitors. She learned to sew from a neighbour, and the skill would earn her a living.
At fourteen she was sent to a seamstress in Hexham, where she learned to cut cloth, turn a hem, stitch a seam that would not fail and mend a saddle cloth or a leather jack. In the years after the rising of the northern earls, when the queen's army pressed through the marches, there was good work for anyone who could patch soldiers' coats or run up shirts by the dozen. Iona was quick and precise, and she supplemented her trade with the small subtle work of adapting clothing for her mother's needs: pockets for stakes, loops for a pistol, a hood cut so that it would not catch at the neck. It was a thoroughly practical education, and her later gear owed as much to her needle as to any smith. By twenty she was a competent seamstress with a modest name in the town, tall, lean and sharp of feature, with a shock of chestnut hair that she kept under a plain cap.
She married Ralph Faulkner in 1573, when she was eighteen and he was twenty-two. Ralph was a forester on the edge of Pendle in Lancashire, the son of Margery Faulkner, and a slayer of the Red Ledger's line. It was an unusual match, since the Thornes and the Faulkners had seldom mixed, and the wedding required a long journey by carrier's cart across the Pennines. They met, it is said, when Ralph came north on the trail of a vampire who had followed the drove roads from Lancashire, and found the dairymaid's daughter already waiting on the moor with a lantern and a hawthorn stake. He proposed after three weeks. The marriage took Iona from Northumberland to the wool farms, abbey lands and stone-walled moors of Lancashire, and she brought the border's hard habits to a house that already prized its own. Ralph's brother Hugh Thwaites, a tavern keeper at Padiham, welcomed her with a roast and a barrel.
Four sons and a daughter, in the order the family kept them, grew up in the foresters' cottage: Quentin Faulkner, born in 1575, William Faulkner in 1576, Sabina Faulkner in 1578 and Nicholas Faulkner in 1583. They were all to become vampire slayers. Iona raised them in the border manner, with a sewing basket beside the hearth and a stake behind the door. She made their clothes herself and hid small pockets in all of them. She taught the boys to move quietly, the girl to read a track and all of them to be still when told. She was a warm mother but a firm one, and the children knew that on nights when a lantern was lit in the window, they were to bar the doors and not open them for anyone, not even a neighbour they knew.
Her own calling came in 1579, four years into the marriage, on the day a stranger died in a barn and the dogs would not go near the body. She was walking back from a fitting at a farm near Whalley when she heard the howling of the dogs in the yard and found them pressed against the wall, shivering. Inside the barn lay a thin, pale man with a wound in his chest and no blood on the straw. The stranger looked at her once, laughed and stopped breathing, and she felt something turn over in her, like a key in a lock. Within a week she could see what she had never seen before: the wrongness in some faces, the stillness in some doorways. Her mother, who came south that winter, became her mentor, and taught her on the Pendle slopes what had been taught to Mariota on the moors of Tynedale.
She took the name The Wild Wren, in the Red Ledger's entry, for a small brown bird that nests low and fights fiercely. The archetype she fitted was that of a mercenary, in the family's terminology, someone who would take on a hunt for hire, for a fee in coin or grain, or for a debt owed. Her craft was Mist Walking, an ability to move through fog and low cloud without leaving a trace and to vanish into it, so that a vampire hunting by scent found nothing. Her gear was practical: a matchlock pistol loaded with a silvered ball, and hawthorn stakes carried in a long leather roll that she had sewn herself. In one hunt on the Ribble marshes in the autumn of 1582 she followed a creature into a wet white fog and killed it with a single stake from behind, and the ledger noted the entry without comment. Ralph's death in 1597 left her alone at the head of the household, and she took to the roads with her grown children.
Her later years were a long working life. She hunted with Quentin, who died in 1600, and with William and Sabina, and with Nicholas, who lived to 1631. Sabina died in 1606 and William in 1607, and the losses cut hard. She kept a needle in her hand through it all, and in the evening, after a hunt, she would sit and mend her children's coats. The Faulkners, as the keepers of the Red Ledger, recorded her tally with respect, and the Proctors, who watched the Lancashire book with professional jealousy, had to concede that her Mist Walking was a fine and dangerous craft. She thought little of the rivalry and less of the Guest at Towton, saying that a border woman had enough to worry about without inherited quarrels.
Iona Thorne was killed in 1607, aged fifty-two, in an ambush on a lonely road, when a party of creatures caught her at dusk as she returned from a hunt. She died with a stake in her hand, and the road was quiet for years afterward. She is remembered in the Slayerverse as one of the Thorne women who brought the borders' toughness into the Faulkner line: a seamstress, a mercenary and a mother of slayers, whose work was measured in stitches and in tallies alike.
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