Caitlin Kittredge - The Mirrored Shard

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.

“Have fun,” Octavia hissed in my ear, then turned and stalked back to the staircase, her long blue and silver robe kicking up dust and the shells of dead beetles.

The door slammed and I heard a bolt click into place. I took a few deep breaths to calm myself, to stave off anger more than panic. I didn’t know why she’d left me here, any more than I knew what was inside the cage, and I had no doubt that my confusion was part of Octavia’s plan. Fae loved to leave you off balance. It was how they tricked you.

“You look like I feel.” The voice was low and raspy, but I felt an instant spark of recognition. The cage was largely held in shadow. I stepped closer and squinted through the fist-sized holes in the mesh.