The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [93]
Tremaine took my arm. His grip was stronger than a machine vise. “Get back to the hexenring. Don’t stop and don’t let the mist touch you. If you get caught up in it, they can find you.”
“They?” I squeaked, partly from the pain in my arm and partly from alarm at the preternatural speed of the mist as it enveloped the meadow. I could no longer see the trees, the hills—even my footprints twenty feet behind were obscured.
“This part of Thorn is a borderland,” Tremaine said. “It borders yours—the Iron Land—and it also borders places best left to the imagination. Do you understand?”
I nodded, while the same sharp odor of applewood and rot assailed my nose as when I’d passed through the hexenring. “I understand.” There was no more fear beating its way out of my chest. There was only a cold determination not to fall prey to anything else that skulked on the borders of reality.
“Good.” Tremaine nodded. “Now close your mouth and run.”
I obeyed his words and my own instincts, digging my toes into the springy peat and bearing for the gap in the mist that lead back to the ring. Behind and to the side and all around I heard a scattering of giggles and the flapping of wings. Gears ground in Tremaine’s bracers as he brought up my heel, and a bronze-bladed knife popped free of its confines, nesting into his hand like it had grown there.
“Pay attention to your feet!” he grated when he saw me looking. I wanted to tell him that he needn’t worry—if I couldn’t fight off the bullies in Lovecraft, I could at least outrun them—but the mist was closing in, the corridor back to the ring growing more claustrophobic with every breath that ripped through my lungs.
I reached the hexenring, and Tremaine grabbed my shoulder and propelled me over the hump of toadstools. I stumbled and went down hard, scraping my knee on a rough patch of ground.
“Stand within the ring,” Tremaine panted. “Don’t move.”
The mist was nearly upon us, and I felt something brush wet, sticky fingers through my hair.
Frantic to get the thing away from me, I grabbed air as I stood and swatted around my head.
“Don’t move!” Tremaine ordered. “They’ll see you!” He turned the dial in his bracers, but all I wanted was to make the mist stop touching me, to get the sticky miasma off of my skin and the stench out of my nose.
This time I twisted something in my knee as I dropped. My shoulder hit the earth, my hip and my ribs crying out, and I fell.
I fell and fell still, and kept falling. Sound ripped from my throat, sight from my eyes, my stomach twisting violently as if I were back in the crashing Berkshire Belle.
Just as I was about to black out, I landed. The air wuffed out of me, but when I rolled onto my back and sucked in a great gulp of cool moist oxygen, I saw the apple trees and the rosy morning sky of Massachusetts, welcoming as a warm fire after the flat gray sky of the Thorn Land.
Getting up was a difficulty, and I felt the dozen places where I’d have bruises later. I scrubbed off my cape and skirt as best I could, the red earth of the Land of Thorn falling away and mingling with the dead grass of the orchard.
I had been to the Land of Thorn, and I’d returned unharmed. But not by a large margin.
The fog still curled, but it had faded to lace, revealing the overgrown gardens and the spiky profile of Graystone in the distance.
“I’ll come for you soon, Aoife.” Tremaine’s ghostly voice hissed at me once more before the ring vanished like the vapor it was and I was alone.
“We’ll see about that,” I muttered. There was no one to hear me, but it felt better to be defiant than to cower and wait for the next shock to my system.
Turning back toward the house, I limped as quickly as I could across the uneven ground and up the hill to the kitchen door.
My father knew how to deal with the Kindly Folk and the Land