The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [91]
He stood as I did, and far exceeded my height. I wasn’t petite, but I also wasn’t large, even for a girl. The stranger was long and lank as a contrail left behind in the sky by a zeppelin, a pale column with powerful shoulders and hands that said they would catch and break me if I ran. “I said that you might leave the hexenring,” he replied. “I said nothing about the manner in which you could do it.”
Stiff all at once, I took a long, careful step away from the noxious-looking mushrooms. “Who are you? What have you done to me?”
The stranger leaned close, as if I were a small child who needed a basic principle of physics explained to her. Silver-rimmed goggles with blue glass lenses dangled around his neck. The strap disappeared underneath his pale hair, long and straight as the rest of him. His hands were arrayed to the first knuckle with silver rings, and I saw the twitch of tattoo ink where his cuffs and bracers pulled back from his bony wrists. “I’ve already warned you, young lady, that ‘who’ is not the proper question.” He stepped over the toadstools carefully, big boots flattening the grass. “But you may call me Tremaine. Seems rude and unbalanced, otherwise—I know so much about you.” Whatever that meant. I had a feeling I was supposed to cower again and beg. He had another thing coming.
The pale man extended his hand, the rings giving off a dirty-water gleam in the clouded light. “Take my hand and you can leave the ring safe and sound.”
“I don’t want to touch you,” I said frankly. Tremaine showed a crop of teeth, white and jagged as a shark’s.
“And why is that, child?”
I kept my eye on his hand, the same way I’d watch a belly-crawling ghoul pup on the riverbank. “I don’t trust you.”
Tremaine’s pale silver eyebrows quirked. “You’re not as vacant as you appear at first blush, then.” His long skeleton’s fingers drifted across the back of my palm and I whipped my hand out of reach, burying it in my pocket. Tremaine’s eyes narrowed.
“Listen well, Aoife Grayson. The hexenring is a place of great power; every second you spend in it, time passes on the outside tenfold. Here, in the Thorn Land, and in your cold, sad little iron world as well. You’ve dawdled away a decade while you stand there quibbling with me over trust or the lack of it.”
My stomach dropped like a stone. He must be lying. Must be. But I detected no lies in his marble face, no deceit in the set of his scornful mouth. I couldn’t speak for a moment, and I thought, truly, that I would break down and lose all composure. “Ten years? I’ve been in this ring ten minutes.” A person could no more bend time than he could bend a spoon with his mind.
And yet my father reached out to me from a magic book and told me he could light viral creatures on fire with his mind.
“I don’t believe you,” I told Tremaine, and felt fairly sure that was the truth.
Tremaine laughed again; this time it sounded like knives sharpening. “It was a figure of speech, child. Perhaps ten years was hyperbole, but know that time is slow around vortices of enchantment just as it is around the vortices of your dead stars. Lift up your skinny fawn legs and come with me before we’re both ancient. Time is what I simply don’t have.”
When I didn’t move, Tremaine snapped, “Take my hand, girl!” His brows drew together and his visage was so fearful that I thought even Grey Draven and the Proctors would have recoiled. I certainly wasn’t going to argue the point with him.
I took Tremaine’s hand, and it was cold and bloodless—smooth. The pale stranger might have been constructed entirely of leather and brass, for all the life I felt pulsing through him.
He dragged me with him, and we cleared the toadstools as one. Tremaine dropped my hand the moment we were standing on the free soil,