Wire in the Hawthorn
Augusta
The last horse of the day kicked her in the thigh, and Augusta Carrow thanked him for it.
“That’s fair,” she told the big bay, setting his hoof down on the barn floor. “I’d kick too, if a stranger spent an hour at my feet.”
The gelding blew hard through his nose and turned his head to look at her. He had four new shoes, a clean trim, and the expression of a horse who planned to remember this.
“He likes you,” said Mrs. Mabry from the doorway. She was eighty-one and still wore her late husband’s barn coat with the sleeves rolled four times. “He bit the last man.”
“He thought about biting me.” Augusta pulled off her leather apron and rolled it around her hoof knife. “Then he thought better.”
“Your daddy used to say horses can smell a liar.”
“Daddy said a lot of things.”
Mrs. Mabry pressed two folded twenties into her hand and held on a second too long. Augusta knew that grip. Since February, half the county had been holding on to her a second too long. At the feed store. At the post office. At the church supper she had left early because one more casserole would have broken something in her chest that she was not ready to break.
“You eat tonight,” Mrs. Mabry said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“That’s a farrier’s yes. It means nothing.”
Augusta laughed, because the old woman was right, and carried her tools out to the truck.
The truck was a white Ford older than she was, with a shoeing rig welded into the bed. Anvil, gas forge, a rack of steel shoes sorted by size, a box of nails, rasps, nippers, and a magnet as big as a fist for finding lost nails in the straw. Her father had built the rig the year she turned nine, the year he first let her hold a hammer over a hot shoe. Twenty years of iron rode in that truck bed. Most days she could not lower the tailgate without hearing his voice.
Strike where it’s soft, Gussie. Not where it’s easy.
She drove home with the window down.
It was the last week of October, and the ridges had gone the color of rust and old pennies. The road climbed out of the valley in long, lazy turns, past the dark Baptist church and the shut-up fruit stand, until the pavement ended and the gravel began. Carrow Hollow sat at the very end of the gravel, folded between two ridges like a secret somebody had stopped telling.
Halfway up the hollow, she noticed the silence.
The woods were never quiet in October. There should have been crickets, a late whippoorwill, a raccoon arguing with the trash cans. There was nothing. Even the wind had stopped. The fog had come down off the ridge early and stood among the trees, not drifting, just standing, as if it were waiting to be let in.
Augusta turned the radio off. The silence got worse.
On the dashboard, her father’s old police scanner crackled.
She kept it because he had kept it. Mostly it gave her fender benders and loose cows and the dispatcher’s sighs. Tonight it clicked three times, short and sharp. A pause. Then one long electronic pulse, like a held breath.
Then nothing.
That was not the dispatcher. That was not any traffic she knew.
She slowed at the mouth of the old logging road that ran up the back of her land, and her headlights caught a shape that did not belong.
A pickup truck. Dark green, almost black, backed deep into the laurel where nobody would see it from the road. No plates. Someone had brushed pine needles over the tire tracks, but they had done a lazy job of it.
Augusta stopped and sat with the engine running.
Hunters, she told herself. Poachers after a buck. Some fool from the city who thought no plates made him clever.
She got out anyway.
The truck was empty and locked. Its hood was cold. In the mud beside the rear tire lay a black plastic cable tie, cut clean through. She picked it up. Stamped into the square head was a small white symbol: a circle split down the middle by a single straight bar.
She had never seen it before. It made the back of her neck go tight.
She put the tie in her jacket pocket and looked up the logging road toward the head of the hollow, where the spring was.
Don’t go up to the spring after dark, Gussie.
Her father had said it the way other fathers said don’t play on the highway. Never a reason. Never a story. Just the rule, the same as the horseshoes he had nailed over every door of the house, heels up, to hold the luck in. Every door but one. The barn had never had a shoe. When she asked him why, at ten years old, he had looked at the empty space over the barn door for a long time and said, The barn doesn’t need one.
He had been dead eight months. She was twenty-nine years old. And something on her land had made the whole forest hold its breath.
Augusta took her flashlight and her fencing pliers from the truck. Her father’s shotgun stayed home in the hall closet, because the only thing she had ever hit with it was a mailbox.
She went up.
The spring sat in a ring of hawthorn trees at the head of the hollow, old and crooked, their branches knitted together overhead. In the middle of the ring stood a gray stone the size of a kneeling man, worn smooth by water, with a hollow cupped in its top where rain collected. Her father had called it the Kneeling Stone. As a girl, she had believed it was a giant who had knelt down to drink and forgotten to get up.
Tonight there was smoke in the hawthorns.
It smelled wrong. Not wood smoke. Something sharper, like a struck match and burned hair.
Augusta pushed through the last of the laurel and lifted the flashlight.
A man was kneeling beside the stone.
He was caught in a snare. Black wire looped around his right wrist and dragged his arm toward an iron stake hammered into the ground. A second loop crossed his ribs and pinned him to the same stake from the other side. Wherever the wire touched his skin, it smoked. The skin beneath it had gone dark and blistered, and from the edges of the burns, thin black lines spread out under the surface like cracks in ice.
He lifted his head into her light.
He had black hair to his collar, with one streak of silver at the left temple. His face was long and stern and white with pain. A scar ran along the left side of his jaw. His eyes were gray, the clear gray of creek water over slate, and they did not look surprised to see her.
And his ears ended in points.
Augusta stood very still.
“Turn around,” the man said. His voice was low and rough, with an accent she could not place. “Walk back the way you came.”
“You’re on fire.”
“I am aware.”
“Who did this to you?”
“Men who will come back before moonrise.” He breathed through his teeth as the wire hissed. “If they find you near me, they will not ask your name before they decide what to do with you.”
He said it flatly, without drama, the way she would tell a client that a horse had a cracked hoof. A fact. Nothing more.
Augusta looked at the wire. Then at the stake. Then at the black lines crawling up his forearm.
“Hold still,” she said, and knelt.
“Do not touch it.”
“It’s wire.” She set the jaws of the fencing pliers against the first loop. “I’ve been holding iron since I was nine.”
The wire was thicker than fence wire and braided from three strands. It took both hands and all her weight. The first strand parted with a sharp crack. The second. The third. The loop around his wrist sprang loose, and he made a sound low in his throat that she would remember for a long time.
She peeled the wire away from his skin. It came free with a soft tearing noise. Her own palms, callused and crossed by an old white scar on the left one, felt nothing but cold metal.
He was staring at her hands.
“You hold it as if it is nothing,” he said.
“To me it is.” She moved to the loop across his ribs. “Breathe out. This one’s going to hurt.”
“Everything is going to hurt.”
“Then breathe out anyway.”
He did. She cut. The loop fell away, and he folded forward over his knees, shaking. Augusta caught his shoulder before he went face down into the spring. He was heavier than he looked and burning hot through his coat. The coat itself was dark gray wool, long and fine, stitched along the cuffs with silver thread in a pattern of thorns.
Nobody in this county owned a coat like that.
“I’m Augusta Carrow,” she said, because her mother, before she left, had taught her to tell people her name before she touched them. “This is my land.”
Something moved across his face. It was not surprise. It was more like a man hearing a bell he had been waiting for, and not liking the sound of it.
“I know whose land it is,” he said.
“And you are?”
“Brannoc.”
“Just Brannoc?”
“Tonight, yes.”
She pulled the flashlight closer. In the burns, under the blisters, small black flakes glittered like pepper. Iron. The wire had been shedding into him.
“There’s still metal in you,” she said. “That’s why the black lines are spreading. Can you walk?”
“If I must.”
“You must. I can’t carry you a quarter mile.”
He looked at the hawthorns, at the dark beyond them, at the stone. For a moment his gaze rested on the top of the Kneeling Stone, and she saw something there she had never noticed in twenty-nine years. A square black nail head, as wide as a silver dollar, driven deep into the gray rock where the rain hollow had been.
The little pool in the hollow was dry.
“They poisoned it,” Brannoc said quietly, to no one.
“Poisoned what?”
He did not answer. He got one foot under him, then the other, and leaned on her harder than she suspected he wanted to.
The house was closer, but when they came out of the trees and the porch light reached them, Brannoc stopped dead.
“Not there.”
“I’ve got a first aid kit in the kitchen.”
“There is iron over your door.”
Augusta looked at the house. At the horseshoe nailed above the kitchen door, heels up, rusty with thirty years of weather.
“There’s iron in my whole truck,” she said.
“I felt it from the road.”
She thought of the empty space over the barn door. The barn doesn’t need one.
“Barn, then,” she said.
The barn was dark and smelled of hay, leather and old mule. Parson, her father’s one-eyed mule, put his head over his stall door and squinted at them. Parson hated everybody. He had bitten the vet twice and the preacher once.
He stretched his neck toward Brannoc and pressed his gray nose against the man’s good shoulder, soft as a dog.
Augusta stared.
“Old friend,” Brannoc murmured. He did not say whose.
She got him into the tack room and down onto a pile of clean horse blankets. In the yellow light of the single bulb, he looked worse. Sweat stood on his forehead. The black lines had passed his elbow.
“Stay,” she said. “I’m getting the kit and my magnet.”
“Your magnet.”
“For the iron in your skin. Do you have a better idea?”
He closed his eyes. One corner of his mouth moved, very slightly. “No.”
She ran to the house. Kit from under the sink, tweezers, clean towels, a bottle of iodine, the big shoeing magnet from the truck. She filled the kettle and set it on the stove before she remembered she could not carry boiling water and everything else at once. She left the kettle. She ran back.
The barn door was open wider than she had left it.
Two men stood inside, between her and the tack room.
One was tall and broad through the shoulders, with brown skin and dark hair tied back in long braids, holding a black bow with an arrow already on the string. He did not aim it at her. He did not need to. His eyes were amber, like a dog’s eyes in the dark, and they followed every move she made.
The other was slender and pale, with gold hair that fell to his shoulders and a face full of freckles. He wore a coat like Brannoc’s, with the same silver thorns at the cuffs. A thin silver cuff curved along the point of his left ear. He was smiling at her, warm and easy, as if they had met at a church picnic.
“Good evening,” the smiling one said. “We’ve come for our captain. We would much prefer to do it politely.”
Behind them, in the tack room, Augusta heard Brannoc laugh once, low and tired.
“Put the bow down, Rhun,” he said. “She is the one who cut me loose.”
Three at the Barn Door
Brannoc
The mortal woman pulled iron out of him one flake at a time, and Brannoc let her.
She knelt beside him on the horse blankets with her sleeves pushed past her elbows. Her forearms were strong and freckled with small white scars, the marks of sparks from a forge. Her dark gold hair was braided tight and pinned under a faded cap. She held the great black magnet a finger’s width above his burned wrist and moved it slowly, and the flakes rose out of his blistered skin like iron filings in a schoolroom trick.
Each one left a clean, bright pain behind it. Each one also took a little of the poison with it.
The black lines in his arm had already stopped climbing.
“Hold still,” Augusta said, for the fourth time.
“I am holding still.”
“You’re holding your breath. That’s different.”
In the doorway, Sorrel laughed. “Oh, I like her.”
“You like everybody,” said Rhun from the barn door, without turning around. He stood in the gap with his bow, watching the dark yard and the road beyond it, still as a post.
“I like everybody a little. I like her a lot. She talks to him the way he talks to us.”
Augusta glanced up. “And who are you, exactly?”
Sorrel swept a bow so deep that his gold hair brushed the straw. “Sorrel, of the Night Court, warden of the Kneeling Stone, a fair harper, a poor swordsman, and entirely at your service. The brooding one at the door is Rhun. He is a much better swordsman and does not play anything at all.”
“Sorrel,” Augusta repeated. “That’s a horse color.”
“Is it?”
“Reddish brown. Like a chestnut, but lighter.”
He looked delighted. “Then I am named for something you love. That seems a good start.”
Brannoc watched her decide not to smile, and fail by half.
He had expected many things in the last two weeks. Hunger. Cold. The iron wire. Men with machines that clicked in the dark. He had not expected Augusta Carrow kneeling in her barn with a magnet, frowning at his skin as if it were a cracked hoof she fully intended to save.
He should have.
He knew more about this woman than she would have liked. He knew the sound of her truck on the gravel and the hour she usually came home. He knew she whistled when she was angry and hummed when she was sad. He knew whose daughter she was, and what that man had asked of him, and how badly he had already broken it simply by letting her cut him free.
Truth had edges. Brannoc had lived a long time, and he had learned to walk along them without bleeding.
He did not tell her the rest.
“What are you?” Augusta asked. She did not look up from his wrist. “All three of you. Say it plain.”
“Fae,” Brannoc said.
“Like fairies.”
“Not like anything you have seen on a lunchbox.”
“I haven’t seen anything on a lunchbox with ears like that.” She lowered the magnet. “How do I know that’s true?”
“Ask me to lie.”
She considered him. Then: “Say the sky is green.”
Brannoc opened his mouth. The words sat behind his teeth, solid and impossible, like a stone he could not swallow. Nothing came out.
Augusta sat back on her heels.
“We cannot lie,” Sorrel said gently. “It is the single most inconvenient thing about us. We can be silent. We can choose what to say. But we cannot say what we know is false.”
“So if I ask you a question, I get the truth.”
“You get a truth,” Brannoc said. “Ask carefully.”
She studied him for a long moment. He made himself meet her eyes. They were brown, warm as oak, and far too sharp.
“All right,” she said. “Careful, then. What is that stone up there?”
“A door.”
“To where?”
“Home. A realm called Tenebris. Our High Lord rules the Night Court there, and the Night Court keeps the crossings in these mountains. Most are wide and loud and watched by many. The Kneeling Stone is a small one. A footpath, not a road. The three of us have kept it for longer than your county has had a name.”
“And the nail in the top?”
The air in the barn seemed to cool.
“Two weeks ago,” Brannoc said, “men came up your logging road at night with a machine that clicks. They drove a forged iron nail into the heart of the stone. Every crossing needs an anchor, Augusta. The stone was ours. The iron killed it. The door closed. We have been on the wrong side of it ever since.”
“You can’t go home.”
“We cannot go home, and we cannot send word that we are trapped. They set snares. Tonight I walked into one.”
“What do they want?”
“Us,” Rhun said from the door. “Alive.”
Augusta turned. “Why alive?”
Rhun did not answer. After a moment Brannoc understood that he did not know, and did not want to guess out loud.
“I do not know why,” Brannoc said. “I do not intend to learn it from the inside of one of their trucks.”
She was quiet for a while. She cleaned the burn on his wrist with water from a jug and painted it with something brown that stung like wasps. Then she sat back again.
“Why my land?”
He chose his words the way a man chooses footholds on ice.
“The stone was here long before your house.”
That was true. It was also a door closed in her face, and he watched her feel the shape of it without knowing what it was.
“In three nights,” he went on, before she could ask again, “the Wild Hunt rides through these mountains. When it rides, the Veil grows thin along every ridge for a hundred miles. If the nail were gone by then, the stone might wake.”
“Might.”
“Might.”
“And you can’t pull it yourselves, because it’s iron.”
“You have seen what iron does to me.”
She looked down at his wrist. Then at her own hands. He saw the thought arrive in her face, clear and dangerous, and he saw her set it aside for later. She was a woman who finished one job before she began the next.
“The black lines are still in your ribs,” she said. “I need better light. And hot water. And my good tweezers, which are in the house.”
“The house has iron over the door.”
“Then I’ll take it down.”
Sorrel’s smile vanished.
Brannoc said, more quietly than he meant to, “You should know what you are doing before you do it.”
“Then tell me.”
“A house is a door like any other. Your iron says stay out. If you take it down, you must still ask me in. And once you have asked, I may come back.”
“Do you want to come back?”
He could not lie.
“Yes,” Brannoc said.
She pried the horseshoe off the kitchen door with the claw of a hammer. The old nails screamed in the wood. She set the shoe on the porch rail, far down at the end, and turned to him.
“Come in, Brannoc.”
He stepped over the threshold, and the house received him.
It was a small sensation, like warm water closing over his feet. He had not crossed this threshold in twenty-two years. He had forgotten how it felt to be wanted somewhere with walls.
The kitchen had barely changed. That was the worst part. The blue table. The yellow curtains with the coffee stain. The calendar from the feed store still turned to February, because nobody had found the courage to turn the page.
Augusta saw him looking at it.
“My father died in February,” she said. She pulled a chair out from the table and pointed at it until he sat. “His heart. He was out in the forge, and then he wasn’t. I found him in the morning.”
Brannoc knew exactly how the man had died. He had been there, under the hawthorns, when Hiram Carrow sat down against the Kneeling Stone with a hand pressed to his chest and said, Don’t you dare tell her, Brannoc. Not yet.
He did not say so. It was not his story to spend.
“I am sorry,” he said, and that was also true.
She boiled water. She set a work lamp on the table and bent it low over his ribs. She cut away the ruined shirt under his coat without asking, then stopped, scissors raised, and asked.
“Yes,” he said.
Her fingers were rough and warm and absolutely steady. She found the last flakes of iron with the magnet and the tweezers and dropped them, one by one, into a saucer, where they rattled like seeds. Twice she glanced at his face. Twice he looked away first, which had not happened to him in centuries.
The pain was fading. In its place came something worse: awareness. The lamp heat. Her breath against his skin. The small crease between her brows when she concentrated.
He was in very serious trouble.
Outside, a light swept across the yellow curtains.
Augusta lifted her head. Gravel crunched. An engine idled, then stopped. Out in the dark, from the barn, came a single low whistle, like a night bird. Rhun’s warning.
“Truck,” she whispered.
“Green,” Brannoc said. “No plates.”
She did not waste a breath. She pulled him up by his good arm and pushed him into the pantry, between the flour sacks and the shelves of her father’s canned peaches, and shut the door on him. Through the narrow gap at the hinge, he watched her sweep the bloody shirt and the saucer of iron into a drawer. She turned off the work lamp and put the kettle back on the stove.
A knock came at the kitchen door. Three polite raps.
She opened it.
The man on the porch was ordinary in every way, and that was what made Brannoc’s skin crawl. Middle years. Gray windbreaker. A cap with no name on it. A clipboard under one arm, a flashlight in his hand. He smiled the way men smile when they have already decided you will do what they ask.
“Evening, Miss Carrow,” he said.
He knew her name.
“Help you?” Augusta said.
“Name’s Haskett. I’m with a survey crew, working under contract with the county. I’m sorry to bother you so late.” He did not sound sorry. “We’re looking for a man. Tall. Dark hair, with a streak of white on one side. He’s hurt. Burns on his right wrist. He’s dangerous, ma’am. A lot more dangerous than he looks.”
“Haven’t seen anybody like that.”
“You’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
Haskett nodded, slow and friendly. His flashlight drifted down, idle, across the clean linoleum.
It stopped on a single drop of black blood, shining between her boots and the pantry door.
