The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [101]
“You do what I ask and I will answer you one question,” Tremaine said as we cleared the pines and entered a low heath, heather scraping my legs. “That is the bargain. Say yes. Or say nay, and I’ll return you to your home and never trouble you again.”
I stayed quiet for a moment. What would Conrad or Dean do? They’d bite the bullet. They’d do what needed to be done. “I suppose I don’t have any choice,” I said, slogging on through the peat. Tremaine stopped striding and looked at me. He reached out a hand and put it on my shoulder. When we touched, I felt a deadening prickle down my arm, like I’d rolled over on it in my sleep.
“There is always a choice, Aoife. But often it is between the jaws of the beast and the doorway to death. This is fact, and I cannot change it.”
It wasn’t a debate for me, not really. I didn’t even want to hesitate. Tremaine held the answer I’d sought so fervently. I was one simple indulgence away from finding my brother.
I sucked in a breath. “Fine. Show me what you have to show me.”
“This way,” Tremaine said. “Over the hilltop. They’re not far.”
Tremaine was a silent man, and his countenance forbade any effort to spark a conversation, so while we crossed the heath I busied myself with memorizing the details of my journey through the Land of Thorn.
Trees with blue leaves waved in the distance, a grove on the unbroken rolling hills of heather, pricked only by stone tors. The sky darkened slowly, like an oil lamp spending the last of its fuel. Everything smelled different, overpowering. The same mountains I’d seen from the hexenring loomed larger now, a bit like the Berkshires of my home, but they weren’t. The Land of Thorn was as alien as the surface of the moon. You could taste it in the wind and see it in the bend of the horizon. It was beautiful, in a cold, frightening sort of way, like staring at a solar eclipse for just a split second too long, so that your eyes dazzled.
“Almost there,” Tremaine told me, ending my plodding through the heather. “We’re passing through a singing grove.” He removed his goggles and handed them to me. “The agony trees sing the memories of those who’ve passed before and cloud your senses. Wear these.”
“How can they do all that?” I demanded. “They’re just trees.”
“Aye, and the dryads who call the trees home exude a power that can sway you to their side for the rest of time. Would you like that, child? To put down roots here?”
I snatched the goggles and strapped them to my face. They were too large and pressed painfully against my cheekbones. But through the blue glass I saw things very differently.
The trees were alive, arms and hands reaching for me with a delicate hunger as we passed through. Even the wind had a shape, and bore a laughing, dancing rivulet of tiny things with fangs.
“Blue is the color,” Tremaine said. “The color of truth. Keep the goggles. Use them if you venture here on your own.”
“Don’t worry,” I whispered. “I never will.”
“So you say now,” Tremaine murmured. The trees knotted and formed an archway, dying and overgrown with fungi and vines. The dryad who crawled headfirst down the trunk was emaciated, her barky body and vine-twisted hair dry and wilted.
“Everything is so bleak,” I said softly, because it seemed as if speaking loudly would break the delicate balance of this grayed place.
Tremaine lifted a curtain of ivy and ushered me farther into the grove, as the agony trees moaned and sang around us. He looked just the same through the blue glass, his face pale and his teeth sharp as ever. Tremaine wasn’t hiding himself from my gaze. He wasn’t setting out a lure—the ice-sculpture beauty was his true face. That worried me far more than the sweet and seductive song of the trees. If Tremaine’s cruel visage was his true one, I 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