The Nightmare Garden ic-2

by Caitlin Kittredge

  * * *

  My father was quiet at breakfast, holding his head in his hands. Valentina was by contrast unusually sharp and impatient for someone who prided herself on decorum. She slammed a coffee cup down at Archie’s elbow, and he winced.

  “Do you have to?”

  “Your own fault,” she returned, and went and sat at the other end of the table. Conrad raised his eyebrow at that, then went back to sulking over his notebook. Dean and my father were engaged in some kind of glaring contest, and Bethina was focused on her food. Only Cal seemed to be in a good mood.

  “Say, Valentina,” I said in a voice that was gratingly perky to my ears. “I’m a bit bored. I was wondering if I could use the library on the Munin to do some reading.” I widened my eyes in innocence. “I wanted to ask permission, after yesterday, of course.”

  “Sorry, no,” Valentina said. “I have more important things to do today. You’re just going to have to entertain yourself in the house with the others, where we can keep an eye on you.”

  “Good grief, Val,” Archie snapped without looking up. “This isn’t a reform school. Just let her go get some books that don’t insult her intelligence. If she stays on the Munin and doesn’t wander around, she’ll be fine.”

  “Oh, of course,” Valentina said, and the acid in her tone could have etched the teacup she was holding. “Because you have the final say in all things, Archie, don’t you?”

  “As far as the people at this table are concerned, I do,” Archie said.

  “Right,” Conrad said, pushing back from the table. “I’m going … somewhere else.”

  “Yeah,” Cal said hurriedly, also jumping up. “Thanks for breakfast, Miss Crosley. I mean, Mrs. Grayson. Uh … I mean … just thanks.”

  Bethina took that as her cue to start clearing plates, and Dean pulled out his pack of Lucky Strikes, practically waving them under Archie’s nose before he went out to the back steps to smoke one. I rolled my eyes.

  “Looks like it’s just you and me, then,” Valentina said in the same tone she’d used on my father. “Let’s get you fixed up with something a girl like yourself finds stimulating.” She snatched my hand and practically dragged me outside and to the Munin.

  I had prepared this lie carefully, so that it would practically drip sincerity. “I am sorry about yesterday,” I told her as we climbed the ladder into the main cabin. “I really didn’t mean any disrespect.”

  “Aoife, I’m just going to say this once,” she told me when we were inside. “Because I’m not your mother, and not trying to be, but I am older and I’ve been around. From what I’ve seen these past few days you’re a sweet, bright girl. You don’t want to waste yourself on somebody like Dean Harrison.” She flipped the switches in the main cabin to turn on the aether lamps and then folded her arms, looking for all the world like a miniature, younger version of one of my professors at the Academy. “You want to wait for someone who’s marriage material. Lifelong material. Don’t sell yourself short just because a boy gives you a wink and a smile. I’ve seen too many smart girls take that route and end up stuck in the mud.”

  “You’re not married,” I said, feeling reflexive anger when Valentina insulted Dean. She didn’t know him, and she’d admitted she didn’t know me. Four days didn’t qualify her to give me parental advice. “And don’t worry about filling in for my mother. You’re barely old enough to be my big sister.” I knew it was mean, but she’d fired the first volley.

  Valentina smiled, a tired and sad smile. “I know that your back will get up no matter what I say about that boy. But maybe in a few months or years you’ll realize I’m not just trying to be a snob. I want to help you.” She went back to the ladder to the outside. “I have mixed feelings on marriage, but I do believe that were things different, did we not lead these lives, I would marry Archie. In a heartbeat.”

  She sounded sincere, her face softening and her voice dropping, and looked so happy at the prospect that for a moment I felt almost guilty about what I was going to do. Almost. It seemed Valentina could be your best friend one minute and then in the next instant be as cold and hard as the brass that kept the Munin’s hull intact. I knew I couldn’t predict which Val I’d be getting, and after a lifetime as a charity ward, with new families and new mothers every few months, I couldn’t trust someone like that.

  “So, when you worked with the Brotherhood,” I said, deliberately pulling down a stack of blue cloth–covered boys’ adventure novels and trying to act casual, “did you use this ship for traveling and battles with eldritch creatures and things?”

  Valentina laughed softly. “It’s not as exciting as you’d think. A lot of chasing, a lot of frustration and dead ends. A lot of time cooped up with musty books, learning the lore. The only exciting part was combat training. I liked that.”

  “But some excitement in the field, surely? It sounds a lot better than the Academy,” I said. If Valentina wanted to talk about the Brotherhood, I was happy to encourage her.

  Valentina went over to a map of the world painted on the wall, in the spaces between the bookshelves and curio cabinets, and traced her fingers over it. “Oh, yes,” she said. “It’s a wondrous life. If you have the strength for it.”

  While she wasn’t looking, I grabbed a few books from the section of the library filled with handwritten volumes and shoved them under my coat. They were what I had come for—the diaries of the Brotherhood members, whose knowledge was compiled into the vast Iron Codex, the go-to guide for fighting things like the Fae. Hundreds of diaries, like Archie’s and like mine, collected into a single volume. That volume was watched over by the Brotherhood. These were the next likeliest place to look for the knowledge I needed—about both the Brotherhood and the nightmare clock, if it existed at all outside of the sort of fear-tinged whisper it had caused in my father.

  “Thank you,” I said loudly to Valentina, holding up the adventure novels. “This should keep me.”

  “Good,” Valentina said. “Let’s run along, then. I’ve got a busy day.” We got as far as the ladder to the lower deck before she turned, blocking my way like a little blond fireplug. “Are you going to give them back?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?” I said, heartbeat picking up to a frenetic pace. Just because Archie was a bad liar and not as perceptive as he liked to think when it came to me didn’t mean I should have assumed the same of Valentina. She was sharp. “The dress and shoes? You said they were for me to keep.”

  “Don’t insult both of us,” Valentina said. She reached out and undid the buttons on my jacket. The books slid to the floor, making soft plops on the carpet.

  “Now what?” I said, refusing to drop my eyes.

  “You want to tell me why you’re poking in my father’s journals, for a start?” Valentina said, folding her arms.

  I bent down and picked up a book, brushing off the cover. “Nobody will tell me what I need to know,” I said bluntly, passing it back to her. “And when nobody will help me, I’m used to helping myself.” I raised my chin, refusing to be cowed.

  “Helping yourself to other people’s things, more like it,” Valentina said. She put the books back where they belonged and then gestured to one of the chairs in the reading nook. “Sit.”

  I did, knowing that anything else would just rile her more and make her more likely to report what I’d done to Archie. “My father lied to me,” I said. “I asked him a simple question and he wouldn’t tell me the truth, so what am I supposed to do besides find the answers on my own?”

  “Maybe I wouldn’t have lied if you’d asked me,” Valentina said. “Ever think of that?” She sat and folded her hands. “What did he lie to you about?”

  “The nightmare clock,” I said plainly. “I asked him what it was and he said he didn’t know. That was a lie.”

  I got the same reaction from Valentina that I had from Archie. She twitched, but the freezing of her expression and the stiffening of her posture were identical to Archie’s. “Where did you …,” she st
arted.

  “I had a bad dream,” I said, and left it at that.

  Valentina sighed. “Yes, he lied. But I don’t blame him for not wanting to give you crazy ideas,” she said. “Not at all.”

  “You both know what it is,” I insisted. “What is so horrible that you have to keep it from me?” I sat up straighter. “I’m not a little kid. I can handle the hard truth.”

  Valentina sighed, then ran her hands over her face. “Only the Brotherhood is supposed to know—at least, as far as the Iron Land goes.”

  She traced lines on the fine inlaid wood of the table between us. “Imagine that Thorn and the Iron Land and the Mists—all of them—are spokes in a wheel, and in the center of the wheel …” She sighed. “This is just a theory, mind, and it has a lot of holes. But some people believe that at the center of the wheel is a place that isn’t entirely whole—an in-between place. A place made of dreams, which no Gate or magic can access—only the people who have the abilities to make dreams real, the ability to travel between the other worlds that have Gates and such.”

  “People with the Weird?” I guessed.

  Valentina was far from maintaining her usual composure. She looked strained, as if every word were being drawn from her under duress. Her pretty round face crumpled with frown lines, making her look a lot less angelic. “Yes, people with the Weird,” she continued quietly. “In this dream place, these same people believe that there exists a machine, a machine that can grind the fabric of space and time and remake it—can permit time travel, cross-world travel, the ability to transport things, or people, from one place to another, in time as well as space. Can spin the spokes on that wheel so that they rest in any order the clock chooses. It’s a clock that measures off dreams, and nightmares, and everything else. Anything you imagine, it can be. It’s different for everyone who sees it. So the Brotherhood scholars believe.” She leaned back and sighed. “Of course, a lot of the same people who believe the nightmare clock is real believe the Great Old Ones will return to the Iron Land from the stars and that you can summon the dead to do your bidding with Erlkin rituals, so, you know, for them, time travel and transporting yourself across the vast dimensions of space must not seem so far-fetched.” She waved a hand in a circle. “Crazy as bedbugs in a burning mattress, most likely.”

  “But it does exist,” I said, excited. My dreams weren’t just madness and poison. Somewhere out there, the dream figure was seeing me—dreaming of me? I wasn’t sure—while I dreamed of him. He was reaching out to me, trying to save his small slice of world from what had happened when the Gates ruptured as I was trying to save mine. Those figures outside his dome would scare me, as they’d clearly scared him. I didn’t know why he couldn’t fight them off, but I thought of how helpless I’d be in the jaws of a Fae like Tremaine. Perhaps it was the same for the dream figure. And he had in his possession a device I was going to use to send myself to the moment when this had all gone wrong, and stop it from happening.

  “Of course not,” Valentina said, much too quickly. “At least, not in my opinion, it doesn’t. I mean, the Gates are real. Tesla made them, and the Erlkin built theirs, and the Fae enchanted their hexenrings. That’s science as much as it is sorcery. It’s tangible. But a place that exists between sleeping and being awake? That you can only dream yourself into? A device that can turn whoever uses it into a virtually unstoppable time traveler? That’s a fairy tale.”

  She was a better liar than my father, but the way she practically ran back to the house and slammed the door behind her told me that if Valentina didn’t believe that the nightmare clock actually existed, she at least worried that it might.

  9

  The Weight of Blood and Bone

  I SPENT THE AFTERNOON trying to compose an entry in my journal about what had just happened with Valentina, then crumpling the pages one by one and tossing them across my bedroom to land in a corner like a drift of downed birds.

  I was almost relieved when someone knocked at the door, and I opened it to see Archie and Conrad. “Oh,” I said. I’d been hoping it was Dean. Even if we couldn’t slip away to the Munin, he would have been someone to talk to.

  “Don’t get too excited,” my father said dryly. He looked me up and down. “Get changed and meet us down at the beach steps,” he said. “Pants and a blouse—something you can get dirty.”

  I cocked my head, confused. “What are we …,” I started, but my father was already walking away, that stiff-legged stalk I’d noticed he adopted, the one that warned all before him to get out of his way.

  “What’s happening?” I asked Conrad, catching him by the sleeve before he could follow. “No idea,” he said, and tugged free of me. His face was a thunderhead, which made me think he did know, but I figured if something was upsetting Conrad maybe it wouldn’t be so bad for me. We were getting more different, in every way, but rather than dwell on it, I changed and hurried down to the beach steps to meet my father and brother.

  Conrad stood with his hands shoved in his pockets, wind whipping his hair back and forth. Archie stood a little way off, smoking, but he extinguished his cigarette when he saw me. My steps slowed, but I forced myself not to look nervous, even though my stomach was in fits.

  “All right, you two,” he said. “It’s time both of you learned how to handle yourselves. Aoife showed me her Weird, but it’s obvious she can’t hold her own in a stand-up fight. So you, Conrad—let’s see what you’ve got.”

  I let my gaze rove between Archie and my brother.

  Conrad’s face had flushed, two bright flowers in his cheeks that had nothing to do with the wind. “You want me to what, do a trick?”

  “I want to see your Weird,” Archie said evenly. “If there’s a problem there, then there’s a much bigger problem with this whole plan. If we’re going back into the city in a few weeks to take another crack at finding survivors, I need you both in fighting form.”

  Of course I’d wondered when I’d found out Conrad had used slipstreamers to get himself into the Mists. I’d wondered when he hadn’t offered to open the Gate back to the Iron Land. But he had to have a Weird—he was the firstborn Grayson of our generation, the only son. Heck, my father was only Gateminder at all because his older brother, our uncle Ian, had died young. I didn’t know how I was able to manipulate the Gates. There hadn’t been time to really think about it when the Proctors had chased us, or when Tremaine had been watching me, threatening to hurt my family. I might have thought of myself as a Gateminder in my lighter moments, but I wasn’t really sure what I was.

  But either both of us were Gateminders or Conrad had been skipped and it was me. Had always been meant for me.

  I wrapped my arms around myself and prayed that Conrad was just a late bloomer.

  “There’s no problem,” Conrad said evenly, but all his muscles were tense. He looked like he did right before he was going to fight somebody, a kid at school who’d made a remark or a foster sibling who’d gotten too pushy with me. I sincerely hoped he and Archie weren’t about to come to blows, because then I’d have to jump between them, and nobody wants to break up a fistfight between members of their own family.

  “Then do it.” Archie took a step closer to him. “Show me, son.”

  Conrad looked at the ground, looked back at Archie. Veins stuck out in his neck and at his temples, and his face turned crimson. I took a step toward him, to try to calm him down, but he beat me back with a glare.

  Archie sighed and then went over and patted Conrad on the back. “That’s enough. Don’t hurt yourself.”

  Conrad let out his breath in a rush, white mist meeting the freezing air. “I can’t do it, all right?” he shouted. “I’ve waited and waited and tried every damn thing—fire, water, wind, even machines, like Aoife—and I can’t do it. I’m useless.”

  He stormed past us and back toward the house. I ran after him without thinking. “Conrad, wait!”

  I caught him by the arm as he reached the steps, and he shook me off. “Why should
you care?” he growled. “You’re the one he wants, aren’t you? You’ve got the gift.”

  I reminded myself he was angry and probably didn’t mean it as cruelly as it came across. I grabbed his arm when he tried to run off again, harder. “You think this is a gift?” I whispered. I could barely hear myself over the wind. “Conrad, all it means is I have something in my blood that can kill me, that can split my skull apart if I try to control it, and that makes me a target for everyone in the Thorn and Iron Lands who wants a pet Gateminder. It doesn’t make me better. It doesn’t make me not your sister. Forget about what Archie thinks. You’re my family. You’re the only one I’ve known until now.” I stopped talking, but held on. I wanted the distance between us to stop. I wanted this painful chasm of bad feeling and resentment to close.

  Conrad snarled for a moment, looking for all the world as if he was going to slap me across the face, but then he collapsed, wrapping his arms around me so tightly I couldn’t breathe.

  I hugged him back, as hard as I could. Relief flooded through me. This was the Conrad I knew, the one I’d grown up with.

  I realized amid my pounding heart and the wind that Conrad was saying something to me, and I pulled back to listen. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so, so sorry, Aoife.”

  “For what?” I said, confused. “Neither of us has been very nice lately, but that’s not—”

  “No.” Conrad tugged my scarf down. I flinched when he touched my scar but squeezed his hand between my own.

  “It wasn’t your fault. The iron madness—”

  “Nothing will make my attacking you all right, Aoife,” he said. “Not the fact that I was crazy, not the fact that I’m in remission. Nothing will make this mess with me making you come find me all right. Just let me say I’m sorry.”

  I dropped his hand and nodded, pulling off my scarf on my own. “I forgive you, Conrad.” After everything that had happened, the words that had once stuck in my throat at merely thinking them came without any effort at all.