Caitlin Kittredge - The Mirrored Shard

TIME MOVES DIFFERENTLY in the Thorn Land. The Fae, the pale, secretive natives of the place, live for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and time to them means practically nothing.

I wish I could share the carelessness of the Fae. I really do. But I can’t, because time is the one thing I don’t have.

Since my mother and I had returned to Thorn—her willingly and me less so—all I could do was watch the sun rise and set, the shadows grow short and wither away at dawn before their teeth grew long again at dusk. Watch, and wait, and think. About what I’d left behind in the Iron Land, the place of men, the place I’d called home until a few weeks? months? before.

I’d left my brother, our human father, my friends and my entire life. I’d left behind the bad, too. The iron rule of the Proctors, who feared beings like me—changelings, half Fae. If I’d stayed I would have been locked up for the rest of my life, if I was lucky.

But the bad was far outweighed by my greatest loss, something I felt like a hand pressing on my chest every single moment of every single interminable day.

Dean Harrison. The boy I loved. He was gone, dead and gone. Because of me. Because he’d loved me too, and tried to help me, and the people who helped me ended up like Dean, or worse. I bore that weight too, and I feared that before long it was going to crush me. I felt Dean’s loss behind my eyes, squeezing out tears. In my throat, which silenced all but necessary conversation; in my stomach, which churned if I even thought about food. What’s the point? a treacherous little voice would always whisper. Dean is dead. Dead because of you .

I’d come to the Thorn Land with my mother because she’d promised that things could be different here. Here, where magic lived alongside the grass and trees and Fae, she’d promised that I could get Dean back.

But then time had gone by, and my mother, my mad mother, seemed to forget. It only made the weight grow heavier, and now, as I sat across from her at a table laid with the best food the Winter Court had to offer, I felt something akin to a burning hot coal in my chest. I resented her for what I’d had to do to keep her from the Iron Land, where the iron infected her blood and made her insane. Eventually, if I returned to what I knew—my home in the Iron Land, my father, my friends—I’d travel the same road. Staying in Thorn was the only way to remain sane, but the choice to come here and be safe hadn’t been mine, this time. I hated that my mother had acclimated so quickly to life in the Winter Court while I struggled. I hated that she was sitting there acting like nothing was wrong, and finally I’d reached my breaking point. I slammed my fork down.

My mother didn’t react, except to raise one eyebrow. “Eat your supper, Aoife.”

I stared at my plate, too furious to do anything except grit my teeth in frustration. The food in the Thorn Land was exotic, and even if I hadn’t been sick with worry about the people I’d left behind, I doubted I could have stomached it. I was used to simple things.

My mother sliced off another piece of pheasant and popped it into her mouth. Once she’d chewed and swallowed, she pointed at me with her fork. “You’re getting too skinny. You need to eat something.”

“Mother,” I said. The word still tasted foreign, even more so than the food. I’d called her Nerissa my entire life. We’d never been like other mothers and daughters, and I’d tried not to let that bother me, though when I thought about it, it cut me deep.

“Yes, Aoife?” she said, setting down her fork.

“How much longer are we going to do this?” I asked.

“What’s ‘this’?” she said, with the coy expression I’d grown to hate while she lived in the madhouses of Lovecraft, my home city. The expression that said she knew exactly what I meant but was going to make me say it out loud. I forced myself to stay calm, pressing the tabletop with the tips of my fingers. I no longer needed to do math in my head to keep the creeping thoughts, whispers and paranoia of iron madness at bay, but I did the calculations anyway so I could stay calm. I’d learned pretty quickly that yelling at my mother only made her close down. If I wanted answers, I’d have to be the good daughter tonight.

“Dean,” I said bluntly. “You promised me that we’d help Dean, and every time I’ve brought it up since we came here you’ve refused to talk about it. You promised me, Mother. Why won’t you do what you said?”

“I don’t think I promised you anything,” my mother said in a voice that was infuriatingly calm. “I told you there was a way you might be able to see him again. But it’s a dangerous road, Aoife. Upon further thought, it’s not something I want my daughter involved in. Contacting the dead is an activity best left to those with nothing at stake.”

“It’s not your choice,” I whispered. The tears came, and I didn’t even try to stop them. I put my hands over my face and sobbed, my shoulders heaving and my breath coming in hot, razor-laced gasps. I had nothing if I didn’t have Dean. Nothing I wanted, anyway. Just an eternity in the cold embrace of Thorn, with nothing to look forward to except more eternity. The thought made me cry even harder.

“Oh, Aoife.” My mother hurried around the table and wrapped her arms around my shoulders, rubbing my back through the thin cotton shift that passed for clothing among the Fae. “Don’t cry, darling. It will be all right.”

“No.” I sniffled. “No, it won’t.” Nothing would be right again, until I’d found Dean, told him how sorry I was and tried to undo the fate that had befallen him. Until then, there would just be the inexorable weight, forever crushing me.

“I know I wasn’t there for you,” Nerissa whispered. Having her so close was foreign, but I didn’t fight it. I’d wanted my mother to hold me and tell me everything would be all right for so long I tried to take it whenever I could get it.

Nerissa pressed her chin into the top of my head. “I’m sorry. But I can’t in good conscience let you see Dean again, Aoife. You have no idea what contacting the dead entails.”

“Then tell me.” I swiped at my eyes. My emotions came on like thunderstorms—rapid and drowning—and then they passed and I was merely numb again, as I had been ever since he’d died.

“I’m not afraid, Mother,” I told Nerissa. Some of what I’d seen in both Iron and Thorn, the particulars of the gift given to me by my father’s side of the family, to bend reality and pass between the two, had driven any residual fear of the unknown from me nearly a year ago.

“I know you’re not,” my mother whispered against my hair. She smelled like lilacs, sweet and summery. “But I am, Aoife. I’m so scared for you. You’ve seen a little, but you have no idea what’s in the shadows out there.”

“I don’t care,” I said stubbornly. “I want Dean. I need him.” I needed him like air or water, like blood in my veins. His absence was slowly but surely killing me.

“It’s not even foolproof,” Nerissa said, dropping her hands when they failed to soothe me. “I heard—mind you, heard , as in heard a story—that when a soul is taken before its time, another soul, a living soul, can touch it and make it remember that it’s not supposed to be dead. There’s a story of a man whose love was taken away by the god of the underworld, and he went after her and led her away from death.”