The Iron Thorn

own. “You can like it or not. If you hadn’t lied about how much time I had, I might be more inclined to behave.”

Tremaine moved around the table, his image blinking in and out like a faulty lanternreel. One moment he was feet from me, the next he loomed up in my vision and his knuckles connected with my face, a sharp backhand slap that echoed inside the domed room.

I stumbled, felt my head ring from the blow and couldn’t believe Tremaine had actually hit me. Dean rushed at Tremaine, but the Folk held up a pale beringed hand.

“You step over that line, boy, and you will disintegrate like so much dust in a storm. Think before you do it, greaseblood. Think very hard.”

Dean pulled his boot back from the line of toadstools. “All right,” he gritted. “But don’t think I won’t pay you in full for hitting her.”

Tremaine turned his back on Dean like he was no more than a mumbling hobo on a Lovecraft street and pulled me up from my hunched position. “Now that I’ve knocked you sensible, Aoife, you need to listen.” He gripped me hard, hard enough to grind my wrist bones. “Come along. There’s a good girl.”

“Dean …,” I said as Tremaine jerked me toward the long grass-woven curtains that served as the door of the dome. I couldn’t leave Dean. Not here.

“This is not for his ears,” Tremaine said. We passed through the curtain and I gasped to find myself back in the lily field.

Under the cold steel moon, the coffins of the queens glowed. The light writhed and caressed the sleeping visage of the Folk girls, an unearthly borealis that turned the flowers and the faces of the queens into something spectral and transparent, an illusion that flickered and flamed and danced.

“Don’t think I enjoyed that,” Tremaine said. “I do not take pleasure in pain.”

My face throbbed, and I could taste a little blood where my cheek scraped my teeth. I swallowed it and didn’t say anything, just glared and hoped Tremaine would melt under my gaze.

“You’ve used the Weird,” Tremaine said. “But you don’t understand it. I tell you now, what you need for my task can’t be found in the shortsighted journal of a foolish man.”

“My father isn’t foolish,” I said. Cold, yes. Unloving, maybe. But never foolish. Tremaine folded his arms.

“Aoife, with respect: you don’t know the man.”

“Well, either way, I can’t do what you ask,” I muttered stubbornly, even though he was right. “You may as well end me now,” I said, and then outright lied. “I don’t even know if I have a Weird.”

“You do, and it is prodigious,” Tremaine said. “Your gift for lying, less so. I’ve seen your Weird.”

“How …” I liked to think that I’d know when Tremaine was spying on me. With his powdery skin and skeleton-white hair, he wasn’t exactly blending into the landscape.

But perhaps he didn’t need to see me to watch me. I didn’t know the full power of the Folk. I shivered, and rubbed my hands together, tucking them up in my sleeves.

“My eyes venture far,” Tremaine murmured. “Even if my body cannot. In both Thorn and Iron. They are all colors, all shapes. Silent eyes on silent wing.” He was smirking at me, and all at once the memory of shattering window glass and the shriek of the ghouls rushed back.

“You sent that thing after me!” I cried. “In the library. And again in the cemetery!”

Tremaine nodded mildly, polishing one of his bracers with his opposite sleeve. “I did send the strix owl, as incentive to defend yourself with your Weird. I don’t know of any cemetery.”

“You almost killed me,” I snarled. “I could have—”

“The poisoned queens sleep eternal.” Tremaine cut through my words with the sharpness of his tone. “In the old times, the shining times, we would gather at the Winnowing Stone and harness its great bounty to awaken the sleepers from their curse. But now no magic borne of the Thorn Land can wake them. This is the truth. This is the curse.” He turned his gaze from the lilies and the coffins. “It falls to you, Aoife, you and your Weird, to find a way.”

I swallowed hard, trying to keep up the toughness I had started with. “I don’t know what you expect me to —”

He reached out and put a hand on my face, cupping the cheek that he had struck. “There was once a great spark in the races of your world, Aoife. But it has extinguished, gone to ash, all but the barest ember. From the ashes of magic has risen the phoenix of the machine. That is what I seek.”

His fingers tightened on my cheek, diamond chips of nails digging against my skin. “My world is dying, Aoife, and by symbiosis yours is as well. Ours is a sudden and violent cataclysm, and yours is a death spiral into the entropy of reason.” Tremaine’s nails drew blood from my cheek. “You are something never seen before, in the history of your bloodline,” he whispered. “You will rekindle the flame. You will cleanse this insidious plague of science by fire.”

I struggled, but he held fast with the desperate grip of a drowning man. “You will awaken the queens, Aoife. And to free my lands from the shackles of so-called enlightenment, I will do what I must.” He leaned in so that our faces nearly touched. “Forcing a stubborn child to do her chores is the least of my reach, Aoife. Continue to defy me and see what else I can send to find you.”

“You’re hurting me,” I whispered. What Tremaine was asking me to do was impossible—my father had said so—but I had a feeling that objections would just get me slapped again. And Tremaine seemed sincere, even his anger born more from the desperation in his eyes than any deceit that I could see.

Releasing his grip, Tremaine wiped the blood away from my skin with the tips of his fingers. “Don’t force me to hurt you worse to convince you of your importance to me, Aoife. Break the curse. Bring light back to both of our worlds.”

“I can’t …” Tears started, stinging the cuts and mingling with my blood. Have you ever seen blood under starlight, Aoife? When it’s black? “I can barely control it,” I said, thinking of the great pressure on my head when I’d slain the ghouls, the pain and cold that had nearly stopped my heart. How was I supposed to break a curse? I didn’t even know how to make my Weird respond unless I was about to be eaten or clawed to death.

“Aoife,” Tremaine sighed. “You have spirit and a certain fey quality that reminds me of my own daughters, may they travel through the Mists unharmed. But these are the darkest hours of my people. If you confound me, you will not appreciate the consequences.”

I was trembling all over, from cold and from plain-faced, ugly fear, but I managed to keep my voice steady, because I was keeping my vow to not show weakness to Tremaine. “And if I do, and still refuse?”

“Why, then,” Tremaine said softly, “the terms still stand: I will come to Graystone and forfeit the lives of Dean and dear Cal. And you will never know Conrad’s fate, and both of us will live to see the end of our species’ existence.”

I looked back at the hut, imagining Dean aging by the year inside the hexenring. Imagining him or Cal lying dead on the library floor by Tremaine’s hand. Of never seeing Conrad again and only having an inkling of his fate through my madness dreams. I shook my head to clear the images.

“Well?” the pale man purred.

I nodded, unable to look into his stone-sculpted face for one more moment. “I’ll do it.”

Tremaine smiled again. I didn’t want to see it, but I could sense it—his thin lips pulled taut, his razor teeth exposed in victory, like a wolf’s.

“I knew you would,” he said. He reached into his coat and drew out a brass bell, muting the clapper with his thumb. “Use this when you’ve done as I asked. Until then … I hope we do not have to meet again. I grow weary of scolding you.”

Tremaine took my shoulder and led me back to the hut and the hexenring where Dean waited. He pushed me over the ring of toadstools and I shoved the brass bell into my pocket. The last thing I saw before the ring closed was Tremaine watching me, the wolf’s smile still on his face.

27 The Enchantment’s End