An abandoned orchard crouched beyond the wall, hunched shapes of apple trees writhing in the light wind sweeping up from the valley.
Late fruit crunched under my feet as I walked, putting the scent of cider in the air. Crows flew overhead, their wings and my footsteps the only sounds.
Here, I could forget about the dream, about Conrad telling me to go home and stop looking for him.
Dream-Conrad didn’t know anything. He was my fear. He was trying to make me turn back, when I’d finally gotten close enough to rescue my brother. My madness was not going to sway me from my course, not now. Not when I’d promised Dean that I’d find out if I did possess the Weird, and Conrad—the real one—that I’d find him.
I walked in no particular direction, except away from Graystone. I didn’t want to be around other people, to have to make pleasant conversation, because I had nothing to talk about. Either I had a gift that no one on the planet was supposed to possess, or I was crazy. One or the other.
It didn’t make for an easy mind as I walked, and I wondered if I’d ever stop feeling fragile, like everything I’d managed to do since I left the Academy would shatter at any moment. Until I could regain my resolve, and the strength that I’d found when I ran across the Night Bridge with Dean and Cal, I would walk.
The fog was seductive, and it kissed my skin with cold and jeweled my untidy braid with droplets. It pulled me deeper into the orchard, until I lost sight of even the jagged weather vanes at the top of Graystone’s spires. I felt that I could walk and wander until I found a new path, one that led away from the life of Aoife Grayson and into the land of mists, where, Nerissa had once said, lost souls wandered, wakeful and unclaimed.
The marching lines of apple trees dropped off, one by one, until I stood at the edge of the real forest, in a clearing of dead grass and toppled stones. An iron cider press, rusted to a standstill, and a chimney were the only things left of the cider house. Beyond, a stone well stood at the edge of the field. Frayed rope in want of a bucket flapped dismally in the wind.
I should turn back—Dean had said the woods around Arkham weren’t safe, and the ghoul traps we’d seen last night proved it. Ghouls didn’t need to live in bricked-over sewer tunnels. They could thrive nicely in bootleggers’ caverns, I’d imagine.
Dean had told me to be sure. But I had no inkling of my potential Weird beyond the whispers inside my head whenever I got close to the secrets in Graystone. I had no sudden flash through the aether, no awakening moment.
The only thing I’d ever been certain of was machines. Machines and math made sense even when the world seemed to be burning down around me. Tinkering was the only comfort I’d had left when my mother went away. Machines put me in the School of Engines, where I had a chance to become something more than a stenographer or a nurse. But they couldn’t help me now, and frustration welled up in me so sudden and strong that I gave the ground a kick, rotted apples and clods of earth flying.
Machines and engineering had staved off my madness, staved off the infection, but my father believed in something other, something invisible and intangible as the aether. He’d used his Weird. I couldn’t even discern what mine might be. If he was telling the truth.
He might be. I wanted him to be. Otherwise, I was crazier than either Nerissa or Conrad and all I had to look forward to was a long life full of poking and prodding in a state-run madhouse.
That couldn’t be my fate. Not when I’d come all this way.
Weary from the long walk, I sat on the foundation of the cider house, brushing my boots and stockings free of dew. A gust blew through the clearing, pulling strands of my hair free, and the temperature dropped, quickly enough to prickle against the back of my neck. The crows cried out as one, their cacophony ringing against the mountain and back, a chorus of discordant bells chiming a funerary toll.
I stood, pulling my cape tight around me. Aware for the first time of how utterly alone I was, I turned back toward Graystone. At this distance, Dean and Cal wouldn’t hear me even if I screamed.
I hadn’t taken three steps when the mist parted before my eyes, long fingers letting go their hold on the orchard. The soft tendrils curled in on themselves, caressing the ground, and formed a ring just a little wider than I was tall. It moved and flowed, weaving the air like fine dove velvet, and before I could move the ring encircled me. The crows continued to mourn.
“Dean!” I shouted sharply, so I wouldn’t sound scared. I looked toward Graystone. “Cal! Bethina!”
I tried to move away from the ring, but it constricted, the fog closing in again, so I couldn’t even be sure which way the house lay.
“Dean!” I cried. Real fear crawled in, beneath my unease. Something was here. Something that didn’t belong.
“Aoife.”
The voice came from all around, from the wind and the trees and the stone. It sat like a thorn in my mind.
“Aoife.”
“This isn’t funny!” I shouted, spinning in a wide circle, trying to penetrate the mist with my gaze. “Leave me alone!” The panic hadn’t caught me yet, but it was snaking up my back and into my brain as surely as it did the day Conrad pulled his knife on me and I saw that the person looking out of his eyes was my brother no longer.
“Come away, human child. Worlds full of weeping. Come away, Aoife.”
“I won’t …” Hysteria bubbled in my chest and made itself known like a fist around my heart, the niggling whisper that I was just mad and this was all a product of my mind. “I’m not hearing voices.…”
The mist thickened until I swore I was blind. I couldn’t see my own hands in front of me, not the cider house nor the forest nor anything but white.
“Don’t fear us, child.”
I was alone. Alone with the voice. I shut my eyes, like you did when a nightmare had hold of you and you couldn’t wake up.
“Open your eyes, Aoife.”
“No!” I shrieked. Silken fingers brushed over my cheek, across my hands and lips and neck, and I batted at them like spiders were raining down on my skin. This was not happening. This could not be happening. Just because I’d allowed the possibility of my father’s magic didn’t mean that I had to allow phantoms as well.
“You can’t wish us away, Aoife.” The voice became harsh, guttural and, most horrifyingly, real. “Open your eyes, child.”
Shivering, standing stock-still to make myself less of a target, I managed to wrench my eyes open. I wouldn’t bow my head. I would face the first vestiges of necrovirus infection, the hallucinations that ate a rational mind down to a nub.
“I’m not afraid,” I whispered, but even to my ears it was a poor lie. I was afraid, so afraid I felt I might shake apart.
“No need to be.” The fog was worse when I stared into it, writhing in every direction like a living thing. I swore I saw faces, shadows of tall, thin bodies just beyond my vision. Bethina’s story of the pale men and my father’s writings on the Kindly Folk came to terrible life in my memory, and I dropped to my knees, curling in on myself.
“You aren’t real. You aren’t …” My voice faded as the harshest gust of wind I’d felt ripped it away with icy fingers around my throat.
“You lie. You see us,” the voice whispered. “We are real. You just need to look closer.”
“Where am I?” I demanded. The ground had shifted under me, from fozen turf to a spongy marsh. The air smelled different, stiff with pine and deep wild forest rather than the fermented sweetness of apples. And the voice … the voice echoed not against the mountains behind Graystone but across a vast open space.
The pale men had come for my father. I had to assume they’d been responsible for taking Conrad. Now they had taken me, and I strove to calm my hammering heart. If I panicked, I would never get home. I had to keep my head. Dean would keep his head. Dean … I’d shouted for his help and he hadn’t come.
“Where am I?” I demanded again, louder. My voice didn’t shake so much this time, and the small spark of anger grew into
a font of fire. My father may have been at the mercy of the Kindly Folk, but they would get an altogether different story from me. I’d fight. It was all you could do if you wanted to survive. Fight was all I had left.
“You know where you are, Aoife.”
“I can’t see.” Despite all of my efforts, cold sweat sprouted against my skin and with it cold panic, the kind that precluded a long trip to the Catacombs from which one never returned.
“Your eyes deceive you. Look again.”
I pressed my trembling hands to my sides, closing them into fists. I looked, and didn’t shy away from the twisted, skeletal faces living in the mist. I could be afraid, but I wouldn’t let it show. That was the bargain I struck with myself as I stared, my eyes watering from the cold wind, into the dense blanket of white.
The mist was quicksilver, changeable with each breath of air, yet I looked not at the figures hidden in its chill embrace but past them, like glimpsing a faint star from the corner of the eye.
Bit by bit, I began to see eyes and faces, lips and teeth and skin in the mist. “I see you,” I chattered. “Who are you? What do you want from me?”
“What are we, child. And who. Who do we want. If you so choose, step closer. See the answers.”
The voice spoke as a ghost on my shoulder. It caressed me with a lilting accent, mercury sliding over glass.
“If I come to you,” I said, watching the figures drift through the mist, “you’ll let me out of this fog. Fair?” I didn’t know if bargaining would be my final sentence or a sign that I wasn’t some terrified, pliable girl, but it was what Dean and Conrad would do. “Either let me out or I’m going home,” I stated. “I don’t have all day.”
Another gust whipped my hair and my skirt like flags at sea.
“So be it.” The mist rolled back, quick and quiet as a velvet-footed animal fleeing a hunter. The figures and faces retreated with it, a rushing of leaves and the scent of briarwood smoke in their wake.
All around, the world came back into view. But it wasn’t my world.
The grass was rust red, the color of rotten iron or old blood. The sky hung overhead, charcoal clouds scudding before a wind that brought a faint scent of night flowers and turned earth.
A line of humped black toadstools crookedly spread in a wide circle around my feet, as if cast by nature’s hand.
“You can leave the hexenring now, child.”
I shrieked as the owner of the voice appeared at my back. Spinning too fast, I tangled my feet and fell to the ground. The spongy peat squashed and sighed like it was alive under me. Damp crept through my skirt and stockings, crawled over my skin and into my bones.
A form stepped into my sight, backlit by the faint white sunlight flashbulbing through the cloud layer. “Human child. Like a fawn. Fragile-limbed and limpid-eyed.”
I swallowed hard, to push down the tangle of wordless screams in my throat. I couldn’t run—he was right on top of me. I kept my face calm. I’d survived for fifteen years by learning how to make my face a blank slate, and I did so now. I kept my hands clamped in fists. It was either that or shake apart, and I wouldn’t show weakness.
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 v
ortices 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.
The Iron Thorn Page 21