The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [102]
“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