The Iron Thorn

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.