The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [92]
I would have been offended, but I was too relieved to feel my panicky, frantic sickness ease, as if an invisible creature had removed its claws from my neck.
Tremaine smirked. “I trust it’s more pleasant out here?”
My face went hot at having to admit he was right. “I thought you were tricking me,” I murmured.
His smile vanished. “Not yet, child. Trickery comes when I make you a bargain you’ll sore refuse.”
I decided to let his rambling go for the moment. A more important question niggled at my mind. “Before … you called this the Thorn Land.”
Tremaine spread his hands to indicate the rough red moor we stood upon. “And so it is.”
Bethina’s words, and my father’s writing, rushed unbidden to my thoughts. The tall pale men. The Kindly Folk.
His encounters with the Land of Thorn.
“You’re one of them,” I blurted, truth making my own words tumble out too quick. “Kindly Folk. You knew my father.” I kept the rest of my thoughts from rushing out—the Land of Thorn existed, the Kindly Folk existed, the magic that flowed through my Grayson blood existed.
There was no fairy story here. It was all real, all bleak as Nerissa’s story of the princess abandoned in the high tower, never to be rescued because men no longer believed she existed. Magic, the Weird, the strange visits my father made to this land.
All of it was my secret now, because if I told anyone what I’d seen here, or that I believed it, they’d lock me away before I could say “blueprint.”
“You knew him.” I jabbed my finger at Tremaine. “You knew him and now he’s gone. What did you do?”
Tremaine tilted his head, like he was listening to music on an aether frequency I couldn’t discern. I was struck once again by his eyes. I’d seen the same eyes on madmen, sick with tuberculosis from the terrible drafty conditions of the madhouse. Their bodies were wasted and their minds shredded, but their life force blazed in their eyes like open flame. They were most dangerous then, because they had nothing left to lose by dying.
“I do indeed know Archibald Grayson,” Tremaine agreed at length. “And now I know you. Anything else is beside the point.” He turned his back on me and began to walk uphill, along a small deer trail that cut through the stubby brush growing on the moor. “Keep up, child. Like I said, we haven’t much time.”
I hastened to follow him, because it was follow Tremaine or be left behind. The Kindly Folk hadn’t wanted to hurt my father. What they did wish of him, I had the sinking feeling I was about to find out. “Time for what?” I called to Tremaine’s back.
“No ceaseless questions,” he ordered. “Walk. I must have you back to the hexenring by sunset.”
“You know, you shouldn’t prohibit questions and then invite them with cryptic nonsense,” I told him, annoyance overtaking caution. That was the counterweight to my practiced outer calm—my mouth was never steady and never circumspect. The words rushed out, and the trouble followed.
Tremaine sucked in air through his awful teeth. “I do so wish the boy had come back. You, miss, are a frightful chatterbox.”
Startled, I broke into a run to pull myself even with Tremaine’s long strides. “Boy? Wait! What boy?”
Before Tremaine spoke, to reveal or deny some new information about my brother, he stopped walking, his eyes searching the sky. He checked a spinning dial in the brass of his bracers, fed by gears that were in turn attached to spikes that seemed to implant themselves directly into his wrists. The puncture sites, which I’d mistaken for tattoos, were blue and swollen. The gears began to tick, faster and faster, as cloudy blue liquid fed itself through a return system within the gauntlets. Tremaine grimaced as he examined the dial, worked in a crystal unlike any I’d ever seen. “Iron damn this day,” he murmured. “I hope you’ve got a fast step to go with that quick tongue, child.”
Instead of asking what and risk his ire again, I followed Tremaine’s gaze skyward.
The mist thickened and curled around us, only this time it was stained yellow-green