The Nightmare Garden

14 The Fate of Thorn

FOR THE LONGEST of heartbeats, I simply stared at Tremaine. It couldn’t be. There was no way he could have found me again after Jakob had killed himself.

Well, my mind whispered, there was no way Jakob could have survived for any length of time aboard the sub, and he did that.

Casey stared at Tremaine, slack-jawed, but she stayed crouched protectively over me. “Who in the hell are you?”

“I think Aoife can tell you,” Tremaine purred. He extended his hand and put it on my cheek. “I think she’s even been dreaming of me. Is that right, Aoife?”

I swatted weakly at his hand. It was all the energy I could muster. “Don’t you dare touch me.”

Casey shrank back a step, staring at Tremaine still. “Is he …”

“Get away, Casey,” I said. My voice sounded faint, feeble. I felt the same—I couldn’t have moved even if I’d had the chance to stab Tremaine in the heart where he stood.

She hesitated, and I gritted my teeth, tasting blood. “Go,” I snarled.

Casey backed up a step, her gaze never leaving Tremaine. “I’ll go get help,” she said softly, then turned and bolted down the corridor.

I rotated my heavy, dizzy head to look Tremaine in the eye. “What do you think you’ll do when you have me? What more could you possibly need? I broke the Gates, is that it? Are you looking to fix what you started now, and be a savior?”

“I already am a savior,” Tremaine said. “I woke the queens, you know. I broke Draven’s curse. And I used you, darling of the Brotherhood, to do it, which makes me not only a hero, but a clever hero.” He touched my face again, his sharp white nails scraping narrow lines in my skin. “And now I believe that I’ll be able to do whatever I want to do with you, Aoife, because we both know you can’t stop me.”

Tremaine took me by the hand, almost gently. His skin was cooler than the icy air around us, and it shot a bolt of nausea straight to my core. “It’s time to come back, Aoife.” He leaned down and whispered to me in the voice of a wind across a vast, empty wasteland of ice. “You are half in my world, you know. Your blood is half Fae. Did you really think getting away from me would be as easy as pretending you’re human?”

I glared up at him. In that moment, I wasn’t scared of Tremaine, only infuriated that he’d outsmarted me yet again. “I’d hoped it would be, you glassy-eyed monstrosity.”

“Hope isn’t a real thing, Aoife,” Tremaine said. “It’s a lie that desperate souls cling to as comfort.”

“You would know, wouldn’t you?” I snapped. “You’re full to the brim with lies.”

Tremaine just smiled in return, a smile that said he’d already won.

The world began to fall away around me, and this time I was moving, moving with the raw power of the hexenring, the Fae magic that bent space and time the same way Tesla had when he’d made the Gates. I wanted to scream, but nothing came out, not even air.

I fell, and then snapped back to myself on a white marble floor, choking, with blood gushing from my nose. The pain in my shoulder and the numbness in the rest of my body were gone, and I was gasping for breath. My nose still gushed, but now the droplets landed on fine marble instead of rough-carved ice, and the light around me was mellow and amber, oil lamps rather than aether. “Of course,” I sighed, watching my blood stain the stone under my knees. I was back in the Thorn Land. It was the last place in all the worlds I wanted to be, so of course I’d landed here. It was just my rotten, nonexistent luck.

“I’ve waited a long time to be standing here with you,” Tremaine said, sweeping his arm to take in the whole of the area.

This hexenring, rather than an arrangement of mushrooms or rocks as Fae rings usually were, was carved directly into the stone underneath me. I stood up, feeling the blood trickle down my face, but I didn’t move. I knew from experience that I needed Tremaine’s permission to leave the ring.

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.

The same kind of silver jewelry ran up both ears and sat in her delicate white eyebrows as she raised them in displeasure at my insolence. “Tremaine,” she said, and though we were at least twenty feet away and she wasn’t shouting, I heard her bell-clear. She beckoned with one talon-tipped finger. “Bring her here.”

Tremaine shoved me forward, hissing, “When the queen calls, you obey.”

It was the last thing in the world I would have done willingly, but having been commanded, I walked to the end of the dais, drawing the stare of every Fae in the cavernous room. Whispers went up among them, but I focused on the Winter Queen. Those terrible eyes never blinked, not once. Her lips were the only color on her face, stained to the exact red of blood. When her silver-crowned tongue darted out and licked a spot of the color away, I realized that at least some of it was blood.

Fear was something I was getting used to pushing away, to be felt later, when I could deal with it on my terms. But I couldn’t push this away. What I felt looking at the Winter Queen wasn’t like a cut or a scrape but a mortal wound.

I’d never felt such a vibration rolling off a living creature—if Octavia was alive. She didn’t look it, not really. Something was filling up the beautiful vessel sitting before me, making it walk and talk and gesture, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was only renting the space, not inhabiting the flesh.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Aoife,” Octavia said. One slippered foot poked from under her voluminous, airy white, black and red skirts. The foot shoved a silken floor pillow toward me. “Sit.”

This seemed more like exposing my throat as if I were a vulnerable animal than sitting, but I did as she said. I didn’t want to find out what would happen if I was openly defiant.

The pillow silk felt cool, and the marble against the backs of my legs nearly burned with cold. I looked up at Octavia, who was even more terrifying from this vantage point. “I know what you said, but I have to ask: are you going to kill me?”

“Kill you!” she exclaimed, and let out a laugh like the croaking of a crow. “Why would I do such a thing?” She looked at Tremaine. “You haven’t been nice, have you? You’re never nice.”

“Aoife is only a changeling, Your Majesty,” he said. “I’m not required to be nice.”

“She’s a beautiful present, is what she is,” Octavia said. “And you’ve done well by bringing her here. But if you lay a hand on her again, Tremaine …” Her perfect, frozen face moved into a frown that made her look like a wild animal. “I won’t be happy. Do you understand?”

Tremaine tensed, leaning away from her anger. “Yes, madam.”

All at once, she was back to being regal and expressionless. “Good.”

I watched the exchange, fascinated. So there was something Tremaine was afraid of, someone he had to take orders from. I didn’t blame him for his fear—Octavia would be intimidating no matter what the context, never mind when she was perched on her throne like a carrion bird atop a tombstone.

Octavia turned to me once more. “My dear, you must be calm. You saved my life, and I have no intention of harming you in return. Contrary to the stories, my sister the Summer Queen is the one who keeps changelings as pets.”

I must have frowned, because she let out another laugh. “Oh, you didn’t know that, did you? Yes, the Summer Court builds wonderful things that gleam and glitter in the sun. But to do that you need silver and gems, and to get them you need slaves.” She gestured at the room. “Do you see one goblin—pardon me, Erlkin—enslaved here?”

“No,” I said softly, not knowing where this conversation was going, but fairly sure it was nowhere pleasant.

Tremaine rapped his knuckles against the back of my head. “No, Majesty,” he snarled. “Show some bloody respect to your betters.”

I whirled on him, furious, but Octavia beat me to it, rising to her feet with a sound like a dozen crows taking flight. “Enough,” she growled at Tremaine. “Your temper is your undoing. Every time.”

Tremaine scrambled back, dipping his head. “Forgive me, Majesty. I was only thinking of your position.”

I saw my chance to perhaps buy myself a little goodwill with the queen, here where Tremaine was cowed and couldn’t smirk or talk over me. “I know Tremaine told you I broke the Gates on my own,” I said. “That I screwed up when I destroyed the Engine and sent the power to Thorn to break your curse.” I stood as well, even though Octavia towered over me when she was upright. If I was going to meet my fate, it would happen while I was standing. “But I didn’t know,” I said. “And all I know now is that if they aren’t fixed, soon the Proctors will have control of the Gates, and complete supremacy over all the Iron Land. They’re already figuring out how to use them. How long until they start trying to conquer Thorn? As it is,” I said, realizing that this, more than anything, might get me out of Thorn, “any of your people, your creatures who come through the cracks, will be trapped there.”

Octavia raised one of those almost invisible, perfect eyebrows, but she didn’t make a move to shut me up, so I kept talking. From the corner of my eye, I saw Tremaine’s face heating to crimson with rage, but I ignored him. Octavia was my chance to get out of the Thorn Land unscathed.

“Permanently,” I rushed on. “Forever. The Proctors and the Brotherhood of Iron used to work together, and if another Storm happens, it’ll unite them again. They’ll close the Gates for good and trap whoever is still there, and the creatures of the Mists besides. Your hexenrings won’t work, because the Proctors are smart enough to lace all their vulnerable spots with iron. Your people wouldn’t be able to travel anywhere. You’d have Thorn and Thorn only.” I stopped, my heart thudding, and waited for Octavia to either rip my throat out or pass her judgment.

Octavia cut her eyes to Tremaine. “Truth?”

“Of course not!” Tremaine sputtered. “Majesty, nothing of this nature is certain. The problems with the Gates, the issues we’ve had casting hexenrings, they’re almost certainly aberrations that can be fixed.” He jabbed a finger at me. “Besides, I know for a fact this little half-blooded bitch lies as easily as she breathes.”

I glared at him. Nothing he said could touch me now. I’d taken the leap off the cliff, and I’d either fly or fall. Name-calling didn’t matter.

“This ‘half-blooded bitch’ saved my life,” Octavia snapped at Tremaine. “She saved all of Thorn from devastation. Or have you forgotten so quickly the very wheels you set in motion?” She pointed one of her bony fingers at him. “And when you talk of half-bloods, Tremaine, you are talking of the offspring of my dear sister. The loss of whom, as you know, I mourn every day. I look harshly on those who would criticize her.”

“You can’t only take the word of this—” Tremaine started.

“I am the queen!” Octavia jumped from the dais in a fluid motion and advanced on Tremaine, who scuttled backward faster than any bottom-feeding ghoul exposed to light. “And you, while loyal, are nothing more than a servant. Do you understand me, Tremaine? You got Aoife to help us, and therefore you are responsible for what she’s wrought.”

Abruptly, she turned from Tremaine and moved toward me, folding her arms and looking almost conciliatory. I just stayed as still as possible, the way I would have if I’d been faced with a hungry wolf.

“Are you telling me the truth, Aoife?”

I willed my voice not to shake. “Yes.”

“And I suppose,” Octavia said, running one of those talons down my cheek, “that you wish something in return for setting things right.” Before I could jerk away, she moved again, mounting the dais and settling back on her throne. Her movements were so liquid, it was like watching water flow under ice. “Name it, then,” Octavia said, tapping her nails against the bone arms of her throne. “All the knowledge of Fae and Thorn is at your disposal. One thousand years of magic and wisdom. I won’t have it destroyed and sealed off like a tomb. Name your price.”

I shut my eyes. I wanted to sob with relief, but I had a feeling that here, the tears would only freeze against my face. If this didn’t work, I’d likely die. I’d be just another Gateminder who’d played against the Fae and lost.

Strangely, I wasn’t afraid. I knew this was how it had to be, deep down and with certainty. I was more upset that I’d never see Dean again, never get to tell Conrad I was sorry for how our relationship as brother and sister had faltered, never get to thank Archie for trying to protect me, even if he’d done it in the most backward way possible.

I swiped at my eyes and then faced Octavia. “I want the location of the nightmare clock.”

Octavia tilted her head but didn’t speak. For once her face wasn’t impassive, and I got the idea I’d shocked her, if such a thing was possible. “And why, pray,” she said, “does a sweet half-blood girl need such a horrid thing as the dreamer’s great gear?”

“I need it to fix the Gates,” I said. “Stop the leaks, stop the disasters. Tell me how I get there.”

Octavia grinned at me. “You’re the Gateminder, Aoife. You figure it out.”

I did what was anathema to every screaming instinct then. I turned my back on Octavia, on Tremaine, and started to walk. I cringed with every step, waiting for the blow or the bolt of magic, until I reached the door; then I turned around. “I guess we don’t have a deal.”

“Wait a minute,” Octavia said, her voice echoing down the room. “You don’t just get to walk out of here, Aoife. The Fae can find you anywhere. Your blood calls to us.”

She came to me, across the throne room, and I watched her advance the way I imagined a mouse felt watching a hawk swooping down. “You have something I want, it’s true,” she said. “But then, I have something you want. Plus, you’re my prisoner until I say otherwise. So, Aoife, here are my terms.”

She reached into a pocket in her dress and pulled out a photograph. It was a tintype of a human, and I gasped when I saw the face, faded and water stained but so familiar.

“My sister, Nerissa,” said Octavia as I stared at my mother. She was young there, flowers in her hair, far too young to have even met my father yet. “And my terms: The nightmare clock for my blood. Your blood. You and your mother will return to the Thorn Land once you’ve fixed the Gates. I get my sister back, I get my Gateminder, and you get to know you didn’t destroy that filthy, smoke-ridden iron world you insist upon calling home.” She tucked the photograph away again. “It’s a good exchange, Aoife. Take it.”

I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Nerissa …? She was full-blooded Fae? It was possible. She and Octavia had the same narrow faces, the same burning gazes. Octavia was fair and Nerissa was dark, but it was possible … Same father, different mothers? How had I not known from Tremaine that Octavia and Nerissa were related? Because if you had known, you’d never have done as he asked, the maddeningly logical part of me whispered.

Tremaine appeared at Octavia’s shoulder, smirk firmly back in place. “Good effort, Aoife. But your human half is always going to get in the way of striking a true bargain.”

I ignored him. I couldn’t let Tremaine lord it over me that I’d lost again. There were more important factors to consider. I wasn’t leaving Thorn unless Octavia let me—that much was plain. There wasn’t a machine here that I could trick into getting me home. My Weird was useless. Draven would kill Dean, my mother would be devoured by the wreckage of Lovecraft, and the rest of the people I cared about would fall under martial law put in place by the Proctors as the Storm slowly encroached upon the rest of the world. People like Rasputina couldn’t fight back, even with the Crimson Guard’s acceptance of magic. The world would wither and die like poison fruit.

Or I could accept Octavia’s offer, and then nothing would happen to any of them. The same uneasy balance would exist between Proctors and Brotherhood, humans and Fae. The world would go on exactly as it was. All I had to do was take myself out of the equation, agree to become Octavia’s servant and return with my mother. It wasn’t the choice a Gateminder would make, but in that moment, I wasn’t a Gateminder. I was Dean’s love, I was Conrad’s sister, I was Archie and Nerissa’s daughter. I was a half human who cared about the Iron Land even though it was sometimes dark and desperate beyond compare.

Octavia’s voice pulled me back. “Well, Aoife?”

When I thought about it, it wasn’t a hard choice at all. “I won’t fight you,” I said. “You can have me and my Weird, to do with as you like. But the only way you’re getting Nerissa is if you tell me how to find the clock and send me back to do what needs to be done to stabilize the Gates.”

Octavia looked upward, clearly thinking. It was like being regarded by a hungry, unblinking owl. “Very well,” she said at last. “And of course I can trust you, because if you attempt to void our deal, there will be nowhere you can hide from us. Closed Gates, open Gates, we will find you, Aoife Grayson, and we will pick the flesh from your bones if you betray us.”

I raised my chin. Octavia had to think she didn’t scare me, though the opposite was true. If I was going to spend my time in the court of the Winter Queen, it wasn’t going to be as a pet. “You can trust me. Unlike you, I know what that word means.”

Octavia gave another croaking laugh. “Good. As for the nightmare clock, the mad inventor Tesla didn’t just build Gates between physical realms. He started the Storm, and it will end with him.” She snapped her fingers. “Tremaine, take her back to the hexenring.”

He dragged me out of the room, his mouth set in a grim line. I hadn’t seen Tremaine angry often before, but it had always led to explosive results. “I bet you think you’re terribly clever for pulling that little stunt, ratting me out. Rest assured, when you’re back in the fold, I’m going to teach you some manners.”

I jerked my arm from his grasp and stepped into the hexenring on my own. After hearing Octavia’s revelations, after being taken from the Bone Sepulchre, I was worn out. I didn’t have the capacity for any more emotion. “I’ll never be afraid of you again,” I told Tremaine as my body began to separate from my mind, the awful vertigo of magic sinking its claws into me once again. It might not always be true, but after what had happened, I couldn’t let him think he’d won. “I’ve seen what else is out there. You’re nothing.”

Tremaine laughed, throwing his head back. “I’ll be everything to you, Aoife. You’ll see, when you return. If I can’t take the Winter Throne as a regent, then marrying its heir will do nicely.”

I stared at him, feeling a chill when I realized that he’d once again managed to outmaneuver me, but then the magic of the hexenring took me and I was flying. I caught the brief, dreamlike flashes of the other places, dark and light places, bloody places and empty places, before I landed back in the same corridor of the Bone Sepulchre from which I’d left.