The Nightmare Garden ic-2

by Caitlin Kittredge

  With that cheerful thought ringing in my head, along with a dozen considered and discarded plans to find information about the clock, I managed to fall asleep, but too lightly for any dreams except the dark things, writhing and twisting through an empty, starless sky.

  * * *

  The next day, I was woken by a white-clad servant. He gave me breakfast in my room, and soon after, Casey appeared. After I’d dressed in more brand-new clothes, smart trousers and a black jacket this time, we went together to a sort of laboratory, just a long table and a few microscopes and other scientific instruments arranged along the wall.

  Crosley and a panel of stern-faced men waited for me. A single chair sat before the table, and in front of me was a machine with a variety of needles for scratching data onto a roll of paper.

  The other end of the machine had wires running out of it, and one of the anonymous men taped two of the electrical leads to my temples. They were cold, and I flinched, but I tried to act as if everything were all right.

  “It’s just for a few readouts,” Crosley assured me, placing his hand on my shoulder. “We need to quantify your Weird scientifically.”

  I turned to look at him. “Did you do this to my father?”

  “Of course,” Crosley said smoothly, not missing a beat. “All Gateminders go through these tests when they ally themselves with the Brotherhood of Iron.” His grip tightened, his nails digging in beneath my collarbone just a fraction, and I bit my lip. Don’t react. Don’t give him any reason to doubt you.

  I sighed, trying to focus on my Weird. There was virtually no metal in the Bone Sepulchre, and my headaches and the shadows I glimpsed from the corners of my eyes had all but ceased. That, at least, was a relief. “What am I supposed to do for these tests, then?” I asked Crosley.

  He took his pocket watch off the fob and placed it before me. “Can you wind it?” he asked. “Destroying things isn’t terribly useful in the long run, Aoife. The best weapon is one that you can carefully aim and fire.”

  “Is that what I am to you?” I asked him, examining the watch. It was heavy, gold-plated, overdone. Much like Harold Crosley himself. “A weapon?” That was a stupid question. I already knew the answer.

  “It’s what we’d like you to be,” Crosley said, with that clasp on my shoulder that was becoming all too familiar. “We’re not the Proctors, Aoife. We won’t force you to do anything. But we’d very much like you to choose to use your gift for the good of all, not just the few the Proctors deem worthy.” He leaned down as if to share a secret. It was a ploy that hadn’t worked on me when I was eight, and it didn’t work now. I was actually a bit insulted that he’d patronize me so. Maybe I’d overdone it on the simpleton act.

  “Wind the clock, Aoife,” Crosley murmured. “Use your Weird for us. Show me that you’ll use it for the Brotherhood and be the loyal soldier your father refused to be.”

  That was it, I realized. I had to tell the truth now, and then I could lie with impunity. I had to let the Brotherhood see the full extent of my skill with my Weird, and then I would be home free, because if they knew what I could do, they’d think they owned me, that only they could keep me from another event like the Engine. They’d believe that I was being honest with them, and I’d be free to do what needed to be done.

  I put my fingers on the edge of the table and slid them forward so the tips just touched the pocket watch. My Weird gave a tickle, an itch I couldn’t quite reach. The watch was complex, and I breathed in and out, shallower and shallower, focusing on the mechanism that would make the tiny hands spin backward. The only time I’d managed this was with my father, and then I hadn’t been a virtual prisoner, being stared at like a curiosity by a cadre of men who could keep me locked up indefinitely. The pressure didn’t help.

  After one tick, two, three, four, the hands finally stopped. After another breath, they began to run in reverse, my Weird sending the gears spinning back and back until they stood at exactly midnight.

  More. I had to do more. I had to show them the earth-shattering power waiting in the dark places of my mind.

  The watch was spinning so fast now it vibrated on the table, and I picked out each individual gear and cog as my Weird flowed, not a trickle now but a flood, one that could drown me if I let it have too much more rein. I could feel every bit of clockwork in the place now.

  I was the machine. And the machine was me. Just as it had been in Lovecraft.

  The glass face of the clock cracked open and the hands went flying, embedding themselves in the far wall. I picked it apart piece by piece, until every bit of the watch was turning around my head, spinning of its own accord.

  As quickly as it had come, the flash flood of power vanished, as I knew it would. My control wasn’t that good yet.

  The gold case dropped to the floor, smoking, and a few heartbeats after that I lost my grip on the clockwork and it too fell, raining gears and brass.

  Murmurs, and an excited but subdued round of applause broke out among the Brotherhood members. My mind still itched, and I felt the familiar trickle of blood from my nose. The needles on the machine I was hooked to danced wildly. “I’d like to be excused,” I told Crosley. My head was spinning, I was sick to my stomach, and I was not going to faint in front of these men if I had any say.

  “Of course, of course,” he said, and rang for Casey to take me back to my room.

  “You’re bleeding,” she said, but made no move to offer me a handkerchief or a rag. I wiped the blood on my sleeve, where it stood out damp and dark.

  “I’ll live,” I said. The walls of the Bone Sepulchre wavered in front of me. The ice appeared to shimmer in the low light, and with the way my head was pounding, I wasn’t sure I could make it out of the room. I scrabbled against the slick walls, vision blurring, and Casey caught me.

  “Whoa!” she said. “You don’t look so good, Aoife. Are you all right?”

  My shoulder began to throb again, ten times worse than it had on the submarine. Tears squeezed from my eyes, and I saw that they were red when they landed on the backs of my hands.

  “This is wrong …,” I choked out, my tongue feeling too large for my mouth. My heart kicked into overdrive with fear, and it exacerbated the pain in my shoulder. Hot pain, searing pain, bone-deep pain that clutched at every bit of me, held me and didn’t let me go.

  The sensation of falling gripped me as well, beyond the pain, the displacement of gravity acting on my stomach, and then the vertigo of being in two places at once, neither quite here nor there.

  Fae magic. The kind that could rip me from one place to the next as quickly as I breathed.

  I braced myself to land, but when I opened my eyes, I was in the same spot, standing just outside the door of the library, heart pounding and my breath coming not at all.

  The Fae magic hadn’t reached out to grab me, but had thrust another figure into my path.

  Tremaine smiled at me, his pointed teeth gleaming silver.

  “Hello, Aoife. You have no idea how glad I am to catch up to you.”

  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 h
eart 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.