The Nightmare Garden

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