The Iron Thorn

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 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