The Iron Thorn (29 page)

My companion, for his part, crouched and folded his hands over his knee. “You have no need to fear me, Aoife Grayson. Not at this precise moment, and not in this place.”

“Are you …” I eased myself up and away from him, across the damp moss. “Are you reading my thoughts?”

“Hardly.” The figure snorted. “It’s written on your face, plain as ink on paper.”

He leaned toward me, blocking the sun, and I beheld his face. It was thin, pale, with cheekbones and chin square as if they’d been cut from stone. Spidery gray fatigue lines crawled away from the corners of his eyes and a smile formed on his lips, amused and razor-thin. He wore a long green coat and heavy pants, a style decades or centuries out of date. His high boots were bound in brass, and when he moved his arm toward me, gauntlets made of the same caramel hide and sun-drenched metal creaked. “Get up, child. We’ve much to talk about.”

I scooted farther away from him instead, feeling a few of the toadstools break under my hands. His smile lengthened and sharpened.

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that. It’s terrible bad luck, don’t you know? To break a fairy ring.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about fairies. I’m an engineer.” My voice came out high and childish, and I couldn’t have sounded more cowed if I’d tried. The pale creature laughed—laughed until his face crinkled up and he could have passed for human.

“Is that so.”

“It’s the truth,” I said hotly. “Fact.” I got to my feet, still keeping my distance, and took my moment on the high ground to examine the stranger. His hair was the same shade of pale his skin held, the pale of a body too long underwater without breath or life. “You said I could leave,” I reminded him, and this time I sounded stronger, more like I imagined Dean would. I glared at the pale man. “I want to leave
now
, please.”

He stood as I did, and far exceeded my height. I wasn’t petite, but I also wasn’t large, even for a girl. The stranger was long and lank as a contrail left behind in the sky by a zeppelin, a pale column with powerful shoulders and hands that said they would catch and break me if I ran. “I said that you might leave the
hexenring,
” he replied. “I said nothing about the manner in which you could do it.”

Stiff all at once, I took a long, careful step away from the noxious-looking mushrooms. “Who are you? What have you done to me?”

The stranger leaned close, as if I were a small child who
needed a basic principle of physics explained to her. Silver-rimmed goggles with blue glass lenses dangled around his neck. The strap disappeared underneath his pale hair, long and straight as the rest of him. His hands were arrayed to the first knuckle with silver rings, and I saw the twitch of tattoo ink where his cuffs and bracers pulled back from his bony wrists. “I’ve already warned you, young lady, that ‘who’ is not the proper question.” He stepped over the toadstools carefully, big boots flattening the grass. “But you may call me Tremaine. Seems rude and unbalanced, otherwise—I know so much about you.” Whatever that meant. I had a feeling I was supposed to cower again and beg. He had another thing coming.

The pale man extended his hand, the rings giving off a dirty-water gleam in the clouded light. “Take my hand and you can leave the ring safe and sound.”

“I don’t want to touch you,” I said frankly. Tremaine showed a crop of teeth, white and jagged as a shark’s.

“And why is that, child?”

I kept my eye on his hand, the same way I’d watch a belly-crawling ghoul pup on the riverbank. “I don’t trust you.”

Tremaine’s pale silver eyebrows quirked. “You’re not as vacant as you appear at first blush, then.” His long skeleton’s fingers drifted across the back of my palm and I whipped my hand out of reach, burying it in my pocket. Tremaine’s eyes narrowed.

“Listen well, Aoife Grayson. The
hexenring
is a place of great power; every second you spend in it, time passes on the outside tenfold. Here, in the Thorn Land, and in your
cold, sad little iron world as well. You’ve dawdled away a decade while you stand there quibbling with me over trust or the lack of it.”

My stomach dropped like a stone. He must be lying. Must be. But I detected no lies in his marble face, no deceit in the set of his scornful mouth. I couldn’t speak for a moment, and I thought, truly, that I would break down and lose all composure. “Ten years? I’ve been in this ring ten
minutes.
” A person could no more bend time than he could bend a spoon with his mind.

And yet my father reached out to me from a magic book and told me he could light viral creatures on fire with his mind.

“I don’t believe you,” I told Tremaine, and felt fairly sure that was the truth.

Tremaine laughed again; this time it sounded like knives sharpening. “It was a figure of speech, child. Perhaps ten years was hyperbole, but
know
that time is slow around vortices of enchantment just as it is around the vortices of your dead stars. Lift up your skinny fawn legs and come with me before we’re both ancient. Time is what I simply don’t have.”

When I didn’t move, Tremaine snapped, “Take my hand, girl!” His brows drew together and his visage was so fearful that I thought even Grey Draven and the Proctors would have recoiled. I certainly wasn’t going to argue the point with him.

I took Tremaine’s hand, and it was cold and bloodless—smooth. The pale stranger might have been constructed entirely of leather and brass, for all the life I felt pulsing through him.

He dragged me with him, and we cleared the toadstools as one. Tremaine dropped my hand the moment we were standing on the free soil, and brushed his own across his coat as if he had gotten grease on it.

I would have been offended, but I was too relieved to feel my panicky, frantic sickness ease, as if an invisible creature had removed its claws from my neck.

Tremaine smirked. “I trust it’s more pleasant out here?”

My face went hot at having to admit he was right. “I thought you were tricking me,” I murmured.

His smile vanished. “Not yet, child. Trickery comes when I make you a bargain you’ll sore refuse.”

I decided to let his rambling go for the moment. A more important question niggled at my mind. “Before … you called this the Thorn Land.”

Tremaine spread his hands to indicate the rough red moor we stood upon. “And so it is.”

Bethina’s words, and my father’s writing, rushed unbidden to my thoughts. The tall pale men. The Kindly Folk.

His encounters with the Land of Thorn
.

“You’re one of them,” I blurted, truth making my own words tumble out too quick. “Kindly Folk. You knew my father.” I kept the rest of my thoughts from rushing out—the Land of Thorn existed, the Kindly Folk existed, the magic that flowed through my Grayson blood existed.

There was no fairy story here. It was all real, all bleak as Nerissa’s story of the princess abandoned in the high tower, never to be rescued because men no longer believed she existed. Magic, the Weird, the strange visits my father made to this land.

All of it was my secret now, because if I told anyone what I’d seen here, or that I believed it, they’d lock me away before I could say “blueprint.”

“You knew him.” I jabbed my finger at Tremaine. “You knew him and now he’s gone. What did you do?”

Tremaine tilted his head, like he was listening to music on an aether frequency I couldn’t discern. I was struck once again by his eyes. I’d seen the same eyes on madmen, sick with tuberculosis from the terrible drafty conditions of the madhouse. Their bodies were wasted and their minds shredded, but their life force blazed in their eyes like open flame. They were most dangerous then, because they had nothing left to lose by dying.

“I do indeed know Archibald Grayson,” Tremaine agreed at length. “And now I know you. Anything else is beside the point.” He turned his back on me and began to walk uphill, along a small deer trail that cut through the stubby brush growing on the moor. “Keep up, child. Like I said, we haven’t much time.”

I hastened to follow him, because it was follow Tremaine or be left behind. The Kindly Folk hadn’t wanted to hurt my father. What they
did
wish of him, I had the sinking feeling I was about to find out. “Time for what?” I called to Tremaine’s back.

“No ceaseless questions,” he ordered. “Walk. I must have you back to the
hexenring
by sunset.”

“You know, you shouldn’t prohibit questions and then invite them with cryptic nonsense,” I told him, annoyance overtaking caution. That was the counterweight to my practiced outer calm—my mouth was never steady and
never circumspect. The words rushed out, and the trouble followed.

Tremaine sucked in air through his awful teeth. “I do so wish the boy had come back. You, miss, are a frightful chatterbox.”

Startled, I broke into a run to pull myself even with Tremaine’s long strides. “Boy? Wait! What boy?”

Before Tremaine spoke, to reveal or deny some new information about my brother, he stopped walking, his eyes searching the sky. He checked a spinning dial in the brass of his bracers, fed by gears that were in turn attached to spikes that seemed to implant themselves directly into his wrists. The puncture sites, which I’d mistaken for tattoos, were blue and swollen. The gears began to tick, faster and faster, as cloudy blue liquid fed itself through a return system within the gauntlets. Tremaine grimaced as he examined the dial, worked in a crystal unlike any I’d ever seen. “Iron damn this day,” he murmured. “I hope you’ve got a fast step to go with that quick tongue, child.”

Instead of asking
what
and risk his ire again, I followed Tremaine’s gaze skyward.

The mist thickened and curled around us, only this time it was stained yellow-green like an old bruise. The figures within returned also, but they were solid rather than slippery fragments, and I watched them turn as one and fix on us. I’d seen enough lanternreels about the exotic predators that roamed the West to know we were in bad trouble.

Tremaine took my arm. His grip was stronger than a machine vise. “Get back to the
hexenring
. Don’t stop and don’t
let the mist touch you. If you get caught up in it, they can find you.”

“They?” I squeaked, partly from the pain in my arm and partly from alarm at the preternatural speed of the mist as it enveloped the meadow. I could no longer see the trees, the hills—even my footprints twenty feet behind were obscured.

“This part of Thorn is a borderland,” Tremaine said. “It borders yours—the Iron Land—and it also borders places best left to the imagination. Do you understand?”

I nodded, while the same sharp odor of applewood and rot assailed my nose as when I’d passed through the
hexenring
. “I understand.” There was no more fear beating its way out of my chest. There was only a cold determination not to fall prey to anything else that skulked on the borders of reality.

“Good.” Tremaine nodded. “Now close your mouth and
run
.”

I obeyed his words and my own instincts, digging my toes into the springy peat and bearing for the gap in the mist that lead back to the ring. Behind and to the side and all around I heard a scattering of giggles and the flapping of wings. Gears ground in Tremaine’s bracers as he brought up my heel, and a bronze-bladed knife popped free of its confines, nesting into his hand like it had grown there.

“Pay attention to your feet!” he grated when he saw me looking. I wanted to tell him that he needn’t worry—if I couldn’t fight off the bullies in Lovecraft, I could at least outrun them—but the mist was closing in, the corridor back to the ring growing more claustrophobic with every breath that ripped through my lungs.

I reached the
hexenring
, and Tremaine grabbed my shoulder and propelled me over the hump of toadstools. I stumbled and went down hard, scraping my knee on a rough patch of ground.

“Stand within the ring,” Tremaine panted. “Don’t move.”

The mist was nearly upon us, and I felt something brush wet, sticky fingers through my hair.

Frantic to get the thing away from me, I grabbed air as I stood and swatted around my head.

“Don’t move!” Tremaine ordered. “They’ll see you!” He turned the dial in his bracers, but all I wanted was to make the mist stop touching me, to get the sticky miasma off of my skin and the stench out of my nose.

This time I twisted something in my knee as I dropped. My shoulder hit the earth, my hip and my ribs crying out, and I fell.

I fell and fell still, and kept falling. Sound ripped from my throat, sight from my eyes, my stomach twisting violently as if I were back in the crashing
Berkshire Belle
.

Just as I was about to black out, I landed. The air wuffed out of me, but when I rolled onto my back and sucked in a great gulp of cool moist oxygen, I saw the apple trees and the rosy morning sky of Massachusetts, welcoming as a warm fire after the flat gray sky of the Thorn Land.

Getting up was a difficulty, and I felt the dozen places where I’d have bruises later. I scrubbed off my cape and skirt as best I could, the red earth of the Land of Thorn falling away and mingling with the dead grass of the orchard.

I had been to the Land of Thorn, and I’d returned unharmed. But not by a large margin.

The fog still curled, but it had faded to lace, revealing the overgrown gardens and the spiky profile of Graystone in the distance.

“I’ll come for you soon, Aoife.”
Tremaine’s ghostly voice hissed at me once more before the ring vanished like the vapor it was and I was alone.

“We’ll see about that,” I muttered. There was no one to hear me, but it felt better to be defiant than to cower and wait for the next shock to my system.

Turning back toward the house, I limped as quickly as I could across the uneven ground and up the hill to the kitchen door.

My father knew how to deal with the Kindly Folk and the Land of Thorn. It was time that I learned, too.

The Mysteries of Thorn