The Iron Thorn (28 page)

“I’m so very sorry,” I said, jumping up and grabbing a handkerchief from the clothespress for Bethina’s bleeding nose.

“ ’S not really your fault, miss,” she said around the cloth. “I ran to shake you awake, and that was foolish. You sounded like you was being tortured—are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I lied, one I’d repeated innumerably. I twitched back the curtains and was startled to see it was light. I’d dreamed away the darkness, and the morning was silver and woven with mist.

“Didn’t sound fine,” Bethina said. She examined the blood-spotted handkerchief and made a face.

“I’m sorry I hit you, Bethina, really I am,” I told her, wrapping my arms around myself as my sweat went cold in the unheated room. “It was just a silly nightmare.”

The Mist-Wrought Ring

I
N THE DAWN
, I decided to go walking. I needed to leave the confines of Graystone and shake off the lingering touch of the dream.

The wardrobe yielded a wool skirt and jumper, as old and out of fashion as the red dress, but I added them to my boots and cape to ward against the morning chill.

No one else was awake, except Bethina cooking breakfast in the kitchen, so I left by the main door and walked around the foundation of the house.

Graystone’s estate was larger than I’d imagined, the stone walls of the borderlands disappearing to the vanishing point in every direction as I left the house behind and started down the long slope of the back garden. Oak trees bent over the path, their twisted limbs black against the dove-wing sky.

Mist was my constant companion. It wandered among
the trees, slithered over the ground, wrapped the day in solitude and silence.

The path ended a few hundred yards from the rear of the house, at one of the swaybacked stone walls that veined the landscape. I climbed over the boundary of a forgotten farm field, a ley line traced in moss and rock.

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.