The Mirrored Shard (2 page)

“What happened?” I said, swiping at my face to get rid of the last vestiges of tears. I’d die before I’d let any of the Fae see me crying.

“He looked back,” my mother said, her eyes falling. Her face was incredibly sad, and I felt a little guilty for pushing her into this. “He looked back at Death, and he was trapped. Forever. So you see, Aoife, it’s not as simple as contacting Dean’s spirit. You’d have to visit the Deadlands, actually visit, risk your life and your soul. It’s not worth it.”

“It’s Dean,” I snapped, more harshly than I meant to. “Anything is worth it.”

“Please,” Nerissa said, her eyes welling with tears. “You’re my only daughter, Aoife. I can’t lose you again.…”

Before I could tell her that she’d already lost me long ago, when she’d been committed, the door opened soundlessly. I’d have known the spike of pain the presence outside brought anywhere. I’d been bitten by a shoggoth what seemed like an eternity ago, and sometimes the venom still reacted with creatures alien to my blood. Tremaine was about as alien as they came.

“Everything all right in here?” he purred. My mother left me and took her place on the other side of the table. I kept my head bowed so Tremaine wouldn’t see my red face and eyes. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing how much I was hurting. Tremaine reveled in hurt, took pleasure from it like most people did from food or music or dancing. Watching others suffer was his preferred form of entertainment. He was a snake, and I despised him and would until one or both of us was dead and gone.

“Fine,” my mother told him. She took a sip of wine.
Everyone drank wine in the Thorn Land, but its berry scent and cloying taste only increased my urge to vomit.

“Dear Aoife.” Tremaine glided in and laid a hand on my shoulder. “Whatever is the matter?”

I slapped his hand off my shoulder. “Don’t touch me,” I said, my voice monotone. I might have to tolerate Tremaine’s presence, as he was regent of the Winter Court, but I didn’t have to tolerate his cold, pale fingers on me.

“Testy, are we?” Tremaine sighed and shared a look with my mother. “She is at that age. Her human blood is making her difficult.”

“We’re fine,” my mother said. “Thank you for your attention, Tremaine.”

My blood boiled, threatened to vault me out of my chair and force my fingers around Tremaine’s throat, but I stayed where I was. I was afraid of Tremaine. The Fae scared me in a way the Proctors and even my own mind didn’t. They were alien, even though half my blood was theirs. Unnatural, unknowable and tempestuous. Even Octavia, the Winter Queen and my mother’s sister, scared the hell out of me.

Tremaine finally left and my mother let out a long sigh. “Tremaine always was a piece of work. You see why you must give up this ridiculous idea, Aoife?” She clasped her hands over mine. They were as warm as Tremaine’s had been icy. “I know you miss Dean. I know you wish you didn’t have to spend the rest of your life here, but that’s just the way it is. To keep healthy and safe, we must live as Fae now, Aoife. I wish I could have been the mother who prepared you for all this, taught you how to sacrifice, but
I wasn’t, so my job now is to make it up to you. And you must put aside your thoughts of the Iron Land and learn to accept this new life.”

I looked at her, into her calm pale eyes. Mine were green and dark—my father’s eyes. Human eyes. I felt another stone added to the weight, felt the desperation that had been growing since we arrived in Thorn boil over.

My mother could apologize and say whatever she liked, but she was wrong—the Thorn Land would never be my home.

We did what we always did in the evening: my mother sat by the fire sewing or reading aloud from a book in the Fae language, which sounded like liquid silver running over a rock to my ears, and I used Dean’s pocketknife to carve wooden models of the machines I’d hoped to build, back when things were simple and I was an engineering student rather than a half-Fae anomaly.

There was no iron in Thorn, no mechanical devices except those approved by the queens, and no aether, the blue-white fire that powered everything from radios to lamps in the Iron Land. Whittling was as close as I could come to my chosen vocation. Just another reminder that this was my life now, boredom without end.

I tossed the wood aside and it clattered on the stone floor, far from the satisfying crash I’d hoped for.

My mother yawned and shut her book. “I think I’ll retire,” she said, and that was my signal to lay down my knife and announce that yes, I was tired too. We never did anything
separately, were never apart, because she was afraid that a full-blooded Fae might try to harm me. She’d never stated it explicitly, but I saw the fear in her eyes whenever I so much as crossed the room to retrieve a book or a new block of wood.

Tonight, though, I had other plans. “Nerissa,” I said. She flinched.

“I thought we’d at least gotten past using each other’s first names as if we were at a tea party,” she told me.

“I understand you’re protecting me, but you need to do what you promised,” I said. “You need to tell me what I have to do to see Dean again, or I’m going to leave.”

Her book dropped to the carpet with a soft
thunk
and I saw the panic rise in her eyes like a flash flood. I felt horrible issuing such an ultimatum, like the worst kind of defiant child, but it had to be done.

I couldn’t stay here. I’d always known that this wasn’t permanent, safe as I might be. Living in Thorn might actually drive me madder than iron poisoning would.

“You mustn’t …,” she started. “You can’t.”

“I can,” I said. “You know what my Weird is, Mother. My gift. I don’t even need a
hexenring
to leave Thorn.” The Fae system of travel, enchanted rings that spirited the user from place to place, was arcane compared with the mechanical magic of the Gates, interdimensional devices designed by Tesla to travel all the lands one after the other as if they were beads on a necklace. But I didn’t even need mechanics to do it—my gift was creating Gates, and I’d used the knowledge that I could leave Thorn anytime I wanted to keep myself patient and compliant.

But now my patience was at an end. I had to see Dean. And I had to know that my family—my real family, my father and brother and best friend, Cal—were all right.

“To speak that way will get you exactly the wrong kind of attention,” Nerissa hissed.

“Tell me,” I said, raising my voice, “or I’m going to disappear through a Gate right in front of Tremaine’s bug-eyed face.”

“All right!” my mother shouted, kicking the book at her feet. It flew like a dying bird, in a low arc, and hit the wall with a smack before wilting to the ground again. “Stone and sun, Aoife, you are a difficult child.”

I raised my chin and tried to pretend that the words didn’t sting coming from her. That I’d never wished for a mother who tried to be reasonable rather than one who got angry when I did, who was still largely lost in her own world. Wishing for things I could never have didn’t work. I was still human enough to realize that.

“I’m not doing this to spite you,” my mother said. “Believe it or not, I’m doing it because I care about you and I’ve hurt you enough. I won’t contribute to any more disasters befalling you, Aoife. I simply won’t.”

I thought very carefully about how to phrase my next request. “Mother,” I said, “I don’t want you to be angry with me, but that’s for me to decide. My entire life, I’ve had to decide everything for myself, whether I wanted to or not, and because of that I know what I can and can’t do. I—”

But she cut me short. “You
can’t
do this!” she shouted. “You think you’re invincible with that dark blood the Graysons gave you, but this is beyond anything. You can’t
simply have this Dean boy alive again, Aoife—you’d have to visit the Deadlands, and no Gate goes there. Not even one you make yourself.”

With that, she stalked over, snatched up her book and went to the door of her bedroom. “Now, that’s the last I’ll say on the matter,” she snapped. “Go to sleep and stop whining like a little girl who didn’t get a sweet.”

Her door slammed, shutting off my reply, which was for the best. It was hot, and angry, and rude.

I didn’t want the last thing I said to my mother to be in a fight, but it turned out that way.

At least she’d told me what I needed to know—to find Dean, I would have to visit the Deadlands. There was always a way to get somewhere, even if no Gate could reach it. But to find the way, I knew I was going to have to go home.

Sneaking around the Winter Court was actually much easier than sneaking around the estate of my father, Archibald Grayson, or around the Lovecraft Academy. Both had a more restrictive hold on me. The Winter Court was vast and sprawling, old beyond imagining, the original stone blocks of the foundation so worn down they were smooth as glass. I brushed the fingers of my free hand against them while clutching a survival pack with the other. Running away worked much better when you were prepared.

Each queen added something new to the court, but Queen Octavia seemed to be subtracting things, by decay and ruin. She left vast wings of the court to rot and built
fanciful new structures atop already tottering towers. Just the week before, four workers had plunged to their deaths.

I found an empty room down the corridor from my mother’s chambers. We were in the hall that, Tremaine had told me with a sneer, was normally reserved for nobility, ambassadors and great heroes of Fae, with the clear implication I was none of those things and never would be.

Never mind that if it weren’t for me, Thorn would have been just as it was when I’d first met Tremaine: a dying land without a queen, due to a curse wrought by a particularly clever and vindictive human, Grey Draven. But Draven was the Fae’s prisoner now, and the balance between the Lands had been restored. To the satisfaction of the Fae, anyway.

Handing Draven over and breaking the curse had bought me a little freedom to roam the Winter Court. No matter what my mother thought, there’d once been an Aoife who was meek and polite and would have never dreamed of defying her mother and running off. But she was long gone.

I liked the new Aoife. She was more like the me I’d always wanted to be, the me who did things and took charge and wasn’t afraid. Or at least pretended she wasn’t, though her hands shook against the dead bolt meant to lock herself inside.

“Going somewhere?”

I let out a scream, and my pack, stuffed with everything I’d brought from the Iron Land, tumbled to the dusty stone floor.

Queen Octavia glided into the sliver of moonlight streaming through the grime-caked windows. In broad daylight she could scare you speechless. At night, in the
glow of the moon, she was a spectral entity, terrifying beyond measure.

Her pointed teeth flashed as she grinned. “Tell me, Aoife—are you a little human spy?”

I forced myself to look somewhere other than her face—at her brass-ribbed corset, worked with spikes that rode atop her breasts like guns at the prow of a battleship; at her thin, paper-white arms, which bore even paler scars in swirling patterns; at her skirt, which was more tatters woven with crow feathers than fabric; at the cat-skull pendant against her throat.

Anywhere but at her eyes. Fae have dead silver eyes that will drown you as surely as a black, bottomless pool.

“No,” I whispered.

Octavia gestured. Outside, a colony of bats that lived in the hollow trunk of one of the great, ancient trees lining the courtyard took flight, black blood droplets for a moment against the canvas of the moon’s face, and then winked out. “Is this place not to your liking? You want for nothing.”

“I want to go home,” I blurted, deciding that when the Queen of Winter catches you out, all you can do is be honest and not curl up in a ball on the floor and scream.

“Home? But this
is
your home, child. You are Fae.”

“I’m a changeling,” I said. “And you might tolerate it in my mother, but we both know I’m not welcome here.”

“True,” Octavia said. She reached out and brushed her silver-tipped nails across my face. They left tiny, jagged furrows that stung and sprouted pen lines of blood. I touched my cheek and my fingers came away red. “I confess, I do find you curious. I like curiosities. I have a wing full of
them. Two-headed hounds, a man with hair all over his body, a frog that sings in a human voice. But you, Aoife—you are the most curious of all.” She narrowed her eyes. “You’re like a closed box of cogs. I haven’t yet figured out what makes you tick.”

“I lost someone,” I said. “I have to go to the Deadlands and see him.”

“Why?” Octavia looked genuinely confused. “If he is dead, he is dead. His soul can be with you no longer.”

I looked at my feet. I’d changed out of my Fae slippers and dress and into the clothes I’d been wearing when I’d arrived. They were musty and mud-covered but irrevocably human. I needed them, to remind me where I was going. “I have to see him again. To apologize, and to bring him back,” I told Octavia. “It’s my fault he’s dead. It wasn’t his time.”

“Well,” she drawled after a moment, stretching like the reptilian creature she was. “I can’t have you running off. Even if you can rip holes in reality. That is by far the most curious of all my curiosities, and I think you’ll remain right where you are. At least, if you want your mother to stay healthy.”

Octavia gripped my arm before I could protest, and dragged me out of the room and through the corridors. The few Fae still awake stared as they stepped to the side. My stomach lurched as we passed through a half-rotted door, twice as high as me, and started down a set of steps carved to look like skeletons holding up the treads.

“Where are we going?” I ventured. Octavia smiled at me, her teeth more like blades than ever in the low light of this subterranean place.

“I’m practiced at witchery,” she said. “I can make toads trip off your tongue and make you dance like a puppet, but I’ve found that nothing cements a lesson quite so well as a real-life example.”

The room was dark and, from what I could tell, empty. Octavia yanked me to a stop in front of a small black cage. I wasn’t sure what sort of metal it was—it couldn’t be iron, but it appeared strong and the bars were woven to look like a thorn thicket. Probably constructed by Erlkin slaves, the goblin race the Fae caught and forced to work their mines and metal shops so they could avoid contact with anything poisonous.