The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [123]
Tremaine passed his fingers against the hollowed spot and gave me a smile so sharp I felt it against my throat. “This is where the head rests during the full moon, you know. There is a hole in the ceiling and in their final moment, one may view the cold fire of our stars.”
“Dreadful machines,” I murmured, my stomach turning over. “That seems to be your hallmark.”
Tremaine’s smile dropped off. “You weren’t defiant last time we spoke. I prefer that.”
“This is what you get,” I said, sticking out my chin. It had started as Dean’s gesture, but I’d adopted it as my 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