The Iron Thorn

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.”