The Iron Thorn (32 page)

I looked up, away, so I wouldn’t have to meet those burning coal eyes any longer. If I stared Tremaine in the face, I’d lose my nerve. We’d come a distance—the sky was pure white now, clouds giving me a glimpse of a pink sunset—but only a glimpse. The air tasted cold and sharp. Winter seemed to hold sway, and I pulled Tremaine’s jacket closer with my free arm.

“Tell me where the rest are,” I whispered, “and I’ll follow you.”

Tremaine warred with himself a moment, shutting his eyes. His lashes were long and crystalline, and if I hadn’t known what he was I’d have thought him beautiful beyond compare. As it was, he just reminded me of a wicked springheel jack—the creature with the beautiful face hiding a ravenous monster.

“The Land of Thorn is no longer a fruitful land,” he finally bit out. “Many of the Folk have gone or fled, and many have simply wasted away. I am stronger, and I remain. That’s all the answer your clever mind is getting.” He snatched my arm again and growled through his pointed teeth. “Now, come.”

Having no way of getting back to Graystone on my own, I had no choice but to follow.

“You do what I ask and I will answer you one question,” Tremaine said as we cleared the pines and entered a low heath, heather scraping my legs. “That is the bargain. Say yes. Or say nay, and I’ll return you to your home and never trouble you again.”

I stayed quiet for a moment. What would Conrad or Dean do? They’d bite the bullet. They’d do what needed to be done. “I suppose I don’t have any choice,” I said, slogging on through the peat. Tremaine stopped striding and looked at me. He reached out a hand and put it on my shoulder. When we touched, I felt a deadening prickle down my arm, like I’d rolled over on it in my sleep.

“There is always a choice, Aoife. But often it is between the jaws of the beast and the doorway to death. This is fact, and I cannot change it.”

It wasn’t a debate for me, not really. I didn’t even want to hesitate. Tremaine held the answer I’d sought so fervently. I was one simple indulgence away from finding my brother.

I sucked in a breath. “Fine. Show me what you have to show me.”

“This way,” Tremaine said. “Over the hilltop. They’re not far.”

Tremaine was a silent man, and his countenance forbade any effort to spark a conversation, so while we crossed the heath I busied myself with memorizing the details of my journey through the Land of Thorn.

Trees with blue leaves waved in the distance, a grove on the unbroken rolling hills of heather, pricked only by stone tors. The sky darkened slowly, like an oil lamp spending the last of its fuel. Everything smelled different, overpowering. The same mountains I’d seen from the
hexenring
loomed larger now, a bit like the Berkshires of my home, but they weren’t. The Land of Thorn was as alien as the surface of the moon. You could taste it in the wind and see it in the bend of the horizon. It was beautiful, in a cold, frightening sort of way, like staring at a solar eclipse for just a split second too long, so that your eyes dazzled.

“Almost there,” Tremaine told me, ending my plodding through the heather. “We’re passing through a singing grove.” He removed his goggles and handed them to me. “The agony trees sing the memories of those who’ve passed before and cloud your senses. Wear these.”

“How can they do all that?” I demanded. “They’re just trees.”

“Aye, and the dryads who call the trees home exude a power that can sway you to their side for the rest of time. Would you like that, child? To put down roots here?”

I snatched the goggles and strapped them to my face. They were too large and pressed painfully against my cheekbones. But through the blue glass I saw things very differently.

The trees were alive, arms and hands reaching for me with a delicate hunger as we passed through. Even the
wind had a shape, and bore a laughing, dancing rivulet of tiny things with fangs.

“Blue is the color,” Tremaine said. “The color of truth. Keep the goggles. Use them if you venture here on your own.”

“Don’t worry,” I whispered. “I never will.”

“So you say now,” Tremaine murmured. The trees knotted and formed an archway, dying and overgrown with fungi and vines. The dryad who crawled headfirst down the trunk was emaciated, her barky body and vine-twisted hair dry and wilted.

“Everything is so bleak,” I said softly, because it seemed as if speaking loudly would break the delicate balance of this grayed place.

Tremaine lifted a curtain of ivy and ushered me farther into the grove, as the agony trees moaned and sang around us. He looked just the same through the blue glass, his face pale and his teeth sharp as ever. Tremaine wasn’t hiding himself from my gaze. He wasn’t setting out a lure—the ice-sculpture beauty was his true face. That worried me far more than the sweet and seductive song of the trees. If Tremaine’s cruel visage was his true one, I really did have reason to fear him.

The dryads watched with unblinking eyes like dark knots in their carved faces, claws digging into the bark of their tree. It was like listening to a funeral dirge come from far off, and I felt myself grow slow and sluggish even though I still saw the world through blue glass.

“Bleak indeed,” Tremaine agreed. He steered me between the trees to the other side of the grove and the grasping limbs. “Come, Aoife,” he said. “Observe the why
of Thorn’s bleakness. Of the decline you see all around you.”

I stepped through the branches and the crunching brown leaves, lifting the goggles away from my eyes and letting them dangle about my neck. I finally let out the shocked sound I’d been holding in, nearly gagging on the scent.

I stood at the edge of a field, contained by hills on every side. The field was filled with lilies, pure white, their faces upturned to the weak and dying sunlight. The funerary scent of them was overpowering, rotted and sweet enough to swallow.

The lilies went on unbroken but for two pyres raised in the center of the flowers. Gleaming with refracted light, they were so bright that I had to turn my face away. In the face of the vision of white and gleaming glass, my mother’s voice whispered in my ear.

I went to the lily field.…

Unbidden, I started toward the pyres, crushing flowers under my feet, releasing more of their heady, witchy scent. I had to see for myself what dark shapes lay under the glass.

I drew close, and my feet stopped of their own accord as I stared not at geometric glass boxes containing formless shapes, but at a shape that was too familiar for comfort.

They were coffins. Coffins made from glass, seamless in their construction, sealed like diving bells floating on a sea of petals.

A girl lay in each coffin, one fair and one dark, their arms crossed over their chests. The fair one, closest to me, had a spun-sugar complexion and the dark one had hair like ebony and lips like wet blood.

No breath passed their flower-petal lips, and no blood
beat in their translucent veins, their skin flawless as marble.

“They sleep,” Tremaine said, his voice startling me. He’d crept through the flowers silent as the mist. “As they have slept for a thousand days and will sleep for a thousand more.”

I put my hand on the fair girl’s coffin. “They’re alive?”

“Of course they’re alive,” Tremaine snapped. “Alive and cursed.” His shadow fell across the fair girl’s snow-white face. “They walk between their life and the mists beyond, and they will walk until a cursebreaker lifts their burden.”

“They look so young,” I said. My hand still rested on the coffin of the fair girl. She was perfectly still, like a clockwork doll wound down. I couldn’t stop looking at her unearthly face, her translucent eyelids. “Who are they?”

Tremaine stepped between the coffins. The flowers there were bent and bowed from someone’s constant pacing. “Stacia,” he said, placing his hand next to mine over the fair girl’s face. “And Octavia.” He bowed his head to the raven-haired girl. “The Queens of Summer and Winter.”

“Queens?” I blinked. Neither of the girls looked a day older than myself.

“That’s what I said.” Tremaine, if it was possible, had become even more condescending when we entered the lily field. “Seelie and Unseelie. Kindly Folk and Twilight Folk. Call it what you will. Octavia and Stacia rule over the Land of Thorn. Or they did, until they fell asleep and the land began to die.” Tremaine took his hand away. The look he gave to the dark girl was sorrowful, and then he brushed it off with a flick of his head and a twitch of his bracers.

“Who cursed them?” I asked. I couldn’t look away from
the fair girl’s face. It was beauteous. A more perfect face I’d never seen, but there was a flat waxy quality to it when I looked closer. Queen Stacia was a doll, a dead doll, and I backed away, crushing more flowers.

Tremaine still stared at the dark queen. Very slowly he reached out and laid the tips of his fingers, just for a moment, against the place on the glass where her cheek would be.

“Tremaine,” I said sharply. “Who did this to them?”

“A traitor,” said Tremaine. He dropped his hand from the coffin and strode over to me. I was unprepared when he grabbed me by the wrists, tugging me nearly against his broad chest. Metal clanked against my collarbone on the left side, some manner of brass plating under his shirt in the place of skin. He leaned down until I could feel his breath on my ear.

“I
will
be the one to awaken my lady Octavia and stop the slow blight on our lands, Aoife. I will return the wheel of Summer and Winter to the sky where it belongs and keep Thorn from withering on the vine.”

“Let go of me,” I said as his fingers dug into my shoulder painfully.

“You’re the only one left now,” he hissed. “You can play the fool with me, but I know what blood flows in your veins. Unsuitable or not, you
will
take up the mantle of Gateminder, and you
will
aid me.”

Tremaine’s face had changed—there wasn’t anger or amusement there, just desperation, and that was more alarming than his quick, cold fury.

“I said”—I struggled against Tremaine’s grasp, half
panicked and half indignant—“let
go
of me!” My shout rolled back from the gray hills. In the soft wind, the lilies worried their petals, whispering.

“We have a bargain, child,” Tremaine reminded me with a snarl. “You do as I say. I answer your question.”

“I don’t want to do this!” I shouted. I was fighting in earnest now, and I felt the sleeve of my dress tear at the shoulder.

“Another hysteric.” Tremaine shoved me from him in disgust and I fell back, landing in a bed of silky petals. “Just like that useless cow Nerissa.”

“My mother …” I gulped down my tears and rubbed my shoulder where Tremaine had grabbed me. “How do you know her name? How?” That bastard. How dare he bring Nerissa into this!

“The same way I know yours,” Tremaine growled. “Your father was the fourteenth Minder. He told me the truth when I asked. That is the duty of any man unfortunate enough to bear the Weird, if he wishes to remain free and healthy.”

“My father hated you,” I muttered, to counter his superior tone. “His diary said so.”

“I have no doubt.” Quick as Tremaine’s ire rose, it receded, leaving his glacially beautiful face calm as before. “Archibald was a man of temper, but rest assured, mine is worse.” He gestured to the coffins. “My world is dying every day they sleep, Aoife. My people are scattered to the winds. Do you really believe the blight will not reach the Iron Land once it has eaten Thorn to the bone?”

“Even if I would,” I said, getting to my feet, “I can’t.
I don’t have any say over my Weird.” My dress was stained with lily pollen, fragile fingers of yellow on the green cotton.

“Then I suggest you gain some,” Tremaine told me. “Because you are the last Grayson in the line, and you must be the cursebreaker. Do it and I will tell you what happened to your brother. That’s the last bargain I’m willing to give you.”

I didn’t care for the way Tremaine’s eyes gleamed when he talked about me breaking the curse. “If my father wouldn’t do such a thing, then I shouldn’t. I trust his example in these matters.”

I watched the tide of rage flow in again, and this time I dodged Tremaine’s grasp. He backed me up against the fair girl’s coffin, glass edges digging into my back. “Consider this, fragile little human fawn,” Tremaine said. “I found you and stole you easily as a wolf brings down its prey. How easily might I find your Dean Harrison, or your strange friend Calvin Daulton? How might I savage them in my hunt, child? What would you, alone, do then?”

“They’re not part of this,” I whispered, feeling cold prickle all over me. It wasn’t from the air. I realized my brashness had just pulled Cal and Dean into Tremaine’s sights. I had to salvage this somehow. “Your quarrel is with me,” I said softly. “Leave them alone.”

“Go back to Graystone, get hold of your Weird and do your blood duty,” said Tremaine. “And then I’ll have no reason to make good my threat.”

“I wouldn’t know how to break your curse, I’m sure,” I said lamely. The coffin was cold against my body, rigid and unforgiving.

Tremaine lowered his eyes. “You think me hard and unyielding. Frozen. I am a creature of Winter, it’s true.” He gently lifted my chin with his fingertip. “But I am not a hard master. Like opening your eyes to the sunlight for the first time, the Weird will point your way.” He let go and stood aside. “Back to the ring, little fawn. And remember that this task is not one for failure. It is your duty now, whether it pleases you or not, to wake my queen.”

I looked back at the dryad’s grove and shuddered. “You won’t escort me?”

“My place is here, with the queens,” said Tremaine. “I guard their slumber.”

The thought of the corpse-drinkers or the singing trees catching me alone was almost worse than being with Tremaine. He laughed, softly, at my expression. “The ring knows where to take you, child, and the dryads know your smell now. You’ll find your way to Graystone unmolested.”

“I guess I have no choice,” I grumbled. I hated the fact that Tremaine had backed me into this crevice even more than I hated my inability to think my way out of taking up the mantle my father had abandoned. I didn’t want to be like him, alone and lonely, troubled by the Kindly Folk.