The Mirrored Shard

1 The Empty Room

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.”

“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.

“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.

“Excuse me?”

“That expression. That hate. I’m glad to see you haven’t lost that.”

A hand flashed out and wrapped around mine, and I jerked involuntarily, the hot flush of shock pulsing through me. The grip was strong, and when I looked down I saw that the flesh was the sort of pale that skin becomes when it sits too long in the dark and damp, veins standing out like road maps. The nails tipping each finger were shredded and bloody, and the knuckles crusted with dirt.

“I’m just glad to see you, Aoife,” Grey Draven hissed. “Glad to know you’re as miserable as I am.”

“I …” I stopped trying to talk. I’d hoped to never see him again. Honestly, I’d thought the odds were good that Draven was dead, tortured for Octavia’s amusement. I’d never expected us to be having a conversation, certainly. Draven stared at me with glee burning in his eyes.

“Don’t look so alarmed. This is what happens when you don’t behave like a good little pet. Nothing compared with what happens when the queen’s in one of her moods. Care to see the scars?”

I jerked my hand free in disgust. Draven’s fingers left red marks around my wrist. Even half-starved and caged, he was still strong. And even crazier than when I’d last seen him. I didn’t see this ending well, for either of us.

“Leave me alone,” I whispered. “Don’t talk to me. We have nothing to say to each other.”

Draven laughed. He sounded like a frog trying to talk. “I don’t bear you any ill will, Aoife. You did exactly what I would have done. You protected yourself, and you got your revenge.” He coughed, a deep, wet rattle that revealed sickness dug far into his lungs. The air was cold against my skin, and I could hear water dripping off the stones. “It’s my own fault I let myself be outsmarted by a teenager.”

“How long has Octavia kept you down here?” I rubbed my arms against the cold. If her plan was to lock me up with Draven as punishment, it was working. One might hope their mother would notice they were gone and raise a fuss, but only if one didn’t have Nerissa for a parent. I doubted she’d notice until she got irritated with me for something and didn’t have anyone to yell at.

“Always,” Draven said. “Unless I’m trotted out at parties for her courtiers to view, or tortured by that pale-faced horror Tremaine for her amusement. Always in the dark.” He coughed again, and I saw blood fleck his lips. “Always.”

“I saved her life,” I snarled, angrier than ever at Octavia. “I broke your curse, and she puts me down here with you like I’m no better than a prisoner.”

“You stupid child,” Draven said. “You are a prisoner. Even worse, you’re a prisoner who doesn’t know it. You think everything will be fine as long as you stay out of the queen’s line of vision. But sooner or later you’ll be in this cage with me. And then I’m not going to be so understanding about you putting me here.”

“You’re so generous,” I muttered. I knew, though, deep down, that he was right. My time in Octavia’s good graces was limited. I had to get out of here, and out of Thorn, before it expired entirely.

“I’m nothing of the sort,” Draven said. “Maybe I’m just curious as to why you’re still here, the girl who has the power to bend worlds together as if you were folding paper.” He raised a finger when I opened my mouth to retort. “Either you don’t have the nerve to make a run for it, or you’re waiting for something. So which is it?”

“Why do you care?” I said. Draven grinned at me—that same grin, tinged with insanity, that I’d had nightmares about since the first time I’d run afoul of him, back in Lovecraft.

“Because if you’re waiting for something, there are only a few things. Your mother is happy as a crazy little clam here in the Thorn Land, and your human family has gone on without you just fine, so it must be … the dead kid? Dean?”

I turned away from him, partly so he wouldn’t see my tears and partly so I wouldn’t reach through the mesh and wring his neck.

“You don’t want to talk to me about Dean.”

“Oh, but I do,” Draven said. “I know that someone must have told you there are ways to visit the dead. My research, shall we say … outside … of the norms of the Proctor laws told me plenty. And I bet your dear old dad knows all about it.”

I snorted. As if my father would ever discuss that sort of thing with me.

“Not Dad, then. Mother.” Draven hit the bars as if he’d just solved a great mystery. “Your mother told you how to reach the Deadlands and now you’re darting off to rescue Dean.”

“Why do you care what I do or don’t do?” I said wearily. Draven made me tired. Nothing was ever direct with him. There was always an angle, always a scheme.

“Ah,” he said. “Mother didn’t tell you, then. You’re just running off half-cocked, as usual.”

I gritted my teeth, hating that I was so transparent to someone like Draven. “I asked you why you care,” I snarled. “You hate me. Why do you care if I run off and get myself hurt?”

“Because, Aoife,” he said, “you’re my ticket out of here, and if you want to get to the Deadlands, I can help with that. But only once we’re safely back on human soil.”

I stared at him for a long time, and he huffed. “I know the way, Aoife. It’s not very hard. All I want in return for the information is a ride out of here. Even someone as scatterbrained as you can realize that’s a good deal.”

“I hate you,” I told him, turning my stare to a glare.

“Good,” Draven said. “Then the feeling’s mutual. But you don’t want to stay under the yoke of the Fae, and neither do I.”

“Even if I did trust you and take you with me—and I don’t trust you,” I said, “I’ve never used a Fae Gate. I can’t just plop us back into the Iron Land. We could end up anywhere.”

“Anywhere’s better than that silver-eyed bitch’s torture room,” Draven said.

I considered for several heartbeats. My mother wasn’t telling me anything, and she never would—she was even more stubborn than I was. If I did manage to make it home, my father would likely have the same reaction. He’d want to keep me out of danger. He’d want me to move on with my life, and carry my grief like a stone on my back. That was how my father coped with his sadness over my mother, so why, in his eyes, should I be any different?

Draven was untrustworthy, that much was apparent, but he was also a survivor. When he wanted something, he’d make any deal, with anyone.

I walked to the ring of keys hanging on a hook by the stone steps and came back to Draven. I held up the keys, yanking them back as he snatched for them through the bars. “Don’t make me regret this,” I said, “or I’ll send you through a Gate to somewhere so black and cold you’ll never crawl out.”

“Done,” Draven said as I unlocked his cell. He burst out with surprising speed for somebody the pale, sickly color he was. Then he grabbed my arm. “Let’s go.”

We were back up the steps before I managed to break free of his grasp. “Stop!” I hissed. “You can’t just run out of here.”

Draven looked at me, his lips compressed to a thin line. “Don’t make me take you out of here as a hostage,” he said. “Because if I have to hold a sharp object to your neck to get free, I will. The queen needs you. She doesn’t want you dead.”

“I do want to leave, all right?” I said. “But the halls are patrolled and the hexenring is out in the open. We’ll never make it if we just bolt.”

“That’s the difference between you and me,” Draven said. “I don’t care if I make it or not. Anything is better than here.”

He banged loudly on the door, and then looked at me. “Call to be let out,” he said. “Call or I’ll throw you down those stairs.”

I knew he wouldn’t hesitate to carry out his threat. Draven never made a threat he wasn’t perfectly prepared to act on, and that scared me. He was as ruthless as Octavia. In a different world they probably would have been good friends.

“Let me out, please!” I shouted, not needing to fake the fear in my voice. “I’m sorry, Octavia. Please let me out.”

Nothing happened, so Draven banged and I yelled for a good five minutes. At last a small voice penetrated the door. “Aoife?”

“Nerissa?” I said.

“Aoife, what on earth?” I heard her fumbling with the door and grumbling to herself. “How could you sneak out and go running around the court at night? Don’t you know it’s not safe? You don’t have the sense of a kitten, Aoife, you know that?”

The door swung open, and I tried to get between my mother and Draven. Pure panic drove me. I didn’t know what he’d do to her. He was desperate, and desperation makes people crazy.

He knocked me forward. I slammed into Nerissa, and we both tumbled to the ground. Draven’s hands were instantly on my collar, lifting me off my feet. He was strong, and I was smaller than I’d been when we last met. I’d barely eaten since arriving in Thorn.

“Sorry, Mommy,” he said as Nerissa blinked up at us, not understanding. “But I need to borrow your darling daughter. I promise I’ll keep her in good health.”

“Aoife!” Nerissa screamed, trying to catch my ankle as Draven dragged me down the corridor.

I looked back at her. “I’m sorry,” I managed to say before we were around the corner and gone. The agonized look on her face was like a knife to the gut. She thought I’d betrayed her, not because Draven had caught me but because she knew if I’d gotten caught out of our rooms, I’d been planning to run away in the first place. I just hoped I lived long enough to tell her I was sorry, that it couldn’t be any other way. And I hoped she’d be able to forgive me.

Draven and I made it to the hexenring, where a solitary Fae soldier stood watch, nodding to sleep.

The ring itself was made from nothing more than luminescent mushrooms that glowed softly against the blackened grass. A dead tree, branches reaching skeletal fingers to grasp the moon and cradle it, drooped over the mushrooms, and the guard leaned against it, humming under his breath.

“Stay here,” Draven said, crouching low.

I tried to stop him, but he came up on the soldier before I could do anything, and wrapped an arm around his neck, cutting off his air supply. I heard the man gasp and struggle for a second, before a crack like a twig snapping echoed in the still night air.

The soldier dropped in a heap, and Draven stood, chest rising and falling rapidly.

“It’s been a while since I got my hands dirty,” he said. He pointed to the ring. “Your turn, Aoife. Show me what you can do.”

I walked to the ring, careful not to crush any of the mushrooms. The part of me that was connected to the Gates, the pathways that linked one world to the next, came to life and lit up behind my eyes.

Draven stood with me and put his hand on my shoulder. His eyes clouded and he frowned, no doubt feeling the gut-wrenching pull of the magic that linked the Gates to the fabric of the universe.

“What is that?”

“Gates slow down time,” I said. “You get used to it.” I didn’t tell him that if you lingered too long inside a hexenring you could lose years, decades even. I figured that was best kept to myself.

Draven’s grip became a vise, grinding the bones of my shoulder, and I gasped in pain. “Get moving,” he growled in my ear. “I never want to see this muddy hellhole again.”

I opened up my mind, and there was no resistance before the Gate rushed in to fill it.