The Mirrored Shard ic-3

by Caitlin Kittredge

  The Mirrored Shard

  ( Iron Codex - 3 )

  Caitlin Kittredge

  Aoife Grayson must face death to win back Dean — the love who was ripped from the Iron Lands of the living when he was shot in the arctic north. But getting to the Deadlands is something that Aoife can't do on her own. And if she can find a way there, Tremaine would surely never allow it. He has sworn to keep her in the Thorn Lands, the fairie home of her mother, Nerissa. But Aoife is determined to find her way out. And she has no trouble if that means she has to kill Tremain and his queen to do it.

  The Mirrored Shard

  (The third book in the Iron Codex series)

  A novel by Caitlin Kittredge

  I have harnessed the shadows

  that stride from world to world

  to sow death and madness

  .…

  —H. P. LOVECRAFT

  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,” Ner
issa 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 tha
t 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.