Caitlin Kittredge - The Nightmare Garden

He extended his hand and smiled. It was a smile of cold, dead places and white bones, polished to points, that speared me and pinned me to the spot. “Welcome to the court of the Winter Queen, Aoife. She’s been waiting to show you the gratitude she owes you for freeing her. We all have.”

I left the hexenring with the greatest reluctance. Staying in the vortex of magic so strong it bent space and time was preferable to getting one bit closer to Tremaine.

I only took his hand because I didn’t have a choice. I fought off a shiver, and he just grinned wider. Tremaine knew exactly the effect he had on me, and delighted in it. I wanted to smash his perfect face in when he looked at me like that.

To distract myself from my anger and growing fear, I examined my surroundings. The court of the Winter Queen was solid, gleaming marble veined with bronze and gold and scarlet. I swore the walls were pulsing, like a living thing, and that the floor was vibrating beneath my feet with the steady lub-dub of a heartbeat. Of course, it could also have been my spinning head and the residual effects of the shoggoth venom in my shoulder getting stirred up. At least here in the Thorn Land, there was no toxicity, no iron madness to plague me. Which was fortunate, because I’d need every speck of my brains to outsmart Tremaine and whatever new scheme he had in mind.

As we walked, snow—actual snow—drifted through the air around us, and the only color came from sprigs of holly growing directly from cracks in the walls and the red berries adorning the heads and clothing of some of the passing Fae. The other Fae were skinny and wan-looking, bones jutting out underneath their richly dyed woolen clothes. Their lips were white, their veins standing out beneath the skin; they looked like some of the victims of the camps I’d seen lanternreels of when the war ended. The poisoned sleep of the queens had taken its toll on the Thorn Land and the Fae.

Only Tremaine looked fat and healthy. He was a shark among tadpoles, and I wasn’t surprised. He was the consummate survivor. Looking at the other Fae in comparison eased my panic a bit, though. They weren’t frightening. They were more pathetic than anything else.

“Why did you bring me here?” I asked Tremaine. “I did what you wanted,” I insisted, when he only gave me another maddening, cryptic smile. “I woke up the queens. And I ripped the Gates to shreds doing it. I’m guessing I’m here to clean up your mess. Am I right?” I risked a sidelong glance as we walked down the endless, curving hallways and caught the full brunt of Tremaine’s glare.

“How do you think Thorn existed before the Gates, you simpleton?” he snapped. “We passed freely between worlds without any sort of gadget. We had the power. Not the Erlkin, and certainly not anyone with human blood in them. We were the shining people, Aoife, and the last thing I want is for the Gates to be repaired. Now stop trying to fish information out of me. Your attempts are ham-handed at best.”

I stopped and returned his glare. Tremaine might be frightening and terrible, but I was through with his game of pushing me around for his own amusement. “You’d think you didn’t learn anything from the Iron Land. Like it or not, when you woke up the queens, you fractured something between our two worlds. The Proctors have already found a way into the Mists. How long do you think it will be before they use the broken Gates to come here?” I put my hands on my hips, not budging, and refused to look away from him.

Tremaine bared his teeth in anger for a split second. “I’ve been alive much longer than you,” he said. “Men have tried to breach Thorn before, and they have failed. This so-called fracture is a side effect of breaking Draven’s mechanical curse, nothing more.”

“You and I both know that’s not true,” I insisted. “You wouldn’t have sent Jakob to try and kidnap me back if it were. You wouldn’t have risked coming into the stronghold of the Brotherhood.” I jabbed my finger into the blue velvet lapel of Tremaine’s jacket. “You wanted a destroyer and you got one. It’s only going to be a matter of time before another Storm, unless we put the Gates back to how they were.”

Tremaine reached forward and grabbed me by the chin, squeezing hard enough that he wrung a whimper from me. I forced myself to stay still, to not struggle. Then, just as abruptly as he’d grabbed me, he let go and brushed the hair out of my eyes with an almost tender gesture that made me recoil. “Or perhaps you’ll simply stay here, and I won’t have to take the blame for a thing,” he said softly. “After all, I am not the half-breed who destroyed the Gates. In Thorn, you’ll age faster than a full-blooded Fae, but you’ll be alive long enough to see everyone in your precious, wretched Iron Land grow old and die while you still look the same. So don’t cross me, Aoife. And give up this ridiculous talk of fixing the Gates.”

He took me by the arm and we started walking again, approaching a pair of white doors in which there was carved a great tree, leafless and dripping with icicles, which were diamonds set into the marble, glittering as faintly as far-off stars. At the base of the tree sat two carved white wolves, and at the top was a dove, pierced with an arrow, a single droplet of blood, picked out in rubies, resting on its breast.

“The Winter Court,” Tremaine said, as if that would tell me everything I needed to know about what lay beyond the doors.

They swung back, pulled open by two girls who looked about thirteen years old, though who knew how old they were, really. Fae aged at an infinitesimal rate compared to humans, or even to half-bloods like Conrad and me. The girls wore identical blue dresses, of a type about eighty years out of style. Fine corsets with the whalebone exposed trimmed their waists so they looked like bare branches themselves, as if they’d sway with every breeze. Heavy blue velvet bell sleeves hung from their slender arms, and their skin was so white I could see every vein, every bone, in sharp relief. The white of the flesh was beyond corpse pallor—it was otherworldly. That fit—this was not my world.

Tremaine urged me forward, toward a dais at the far end of the room. It was not the showy spectacle I’d come to expect from the Fae, but a simple raised platform carved from a solid block of marble, etched with bare branches and dead vines migrating down to a litter of rust-colored fallen leaves gathered around the base, which crackled and crunched as emaciated Fae walked about the room. From the stone platform rose a throne woven from long, curved bones and crowned with the three-inch pointed teeth of some predatory animal. I stared, unable to look away. Atop this vicious creation, on a pale blue silk pillow, sat the small, fair-haired figure I recognized as Octavia—the Winter Queen.

When I’d last seen the queen, lying in her cursed glass coffin, she’d looked around my age, but with her eyes open she looked like some sort of alien creature, eyes ancient and fathomless as a piece of meteorite. She had the same unearthly skin as the girls, and hair so fine it looked like spun wire. It trailed from a high pompadour to hang down her back in a long braid woven with some sort of thorny vine. Her crown was more bones, bones and blackened teeth that were not pointed, but rather, looked human. I elected to stare just behind her instead of looking at that unearthly oval face for one more second. If I stared into the queen’s eyes much longer, I knew I’d simply start screaming, as mindless as anyone locked in a madhouse.

She raised one delicate hand and beckoned me closer. Her nails were pure white and clawlike. Her teeth, like Tremaine’s, were needles, and a droplet of silver sat on the end of her tongue when she smiled wide at me. Her tongue was shockingly red in comparison to her complexion; the whole effect made me think of a sleepy predator that had just woken and scented blood. My blood. I didn’t move—there was no way I was getting closer than I absolutely had to.