The Mirrored Shard Read Free

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 builtfanciful 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.
    Never mind that if it weren’t for me, Thorn would have been just as it was when I’d first met Tremaine: a dying land without a queen, due to a curse wrought by a particularly clever and vindictive human, Grey Draven. But Draven was the Fae’s prisoner now, and the balance between the Lands had been restored. To the satisfaction of the Fae, anyway.
    Handing Draven over and breaking the curse had bought me a little freedom to roam the Winter Court. No matter what my mother thought, there’d once been an Aoife who was meek and polite and would have never dreamed of defying her mother and running off. But she was long gone.
    I liked the new Aoife. She was more like the me I’d always wanted to be, the me who did things and took charge and wasn’t afraid. Or at least pretended she wasn’t, though her hands shook against the dead bolt meant to lock herself inside.
    “Going somewhere?”
    I let out a scream, and my pack, stuffed with everything I’d brought from the Iron Land, tumbled to the dusty stone floor.
    Queen Octavia glided into the sliver of moonlight streaming through the grime-caked windows. In broad daylight she could scare you speechless. At night, in theglow of the moon, she was a spectral entity, terrifying beyond measure.
    Her pointed teeth flashed as she grinned. “Tell me, Aoife—are you a little human spy?”
    I forced myself to look somewhere other than her face—at her brass-ribbed corset, worked with spikes that rode atop her breasts like guns at the prow of a battleship; at her thin, paper-white arms, which bore even paler scars in swirling patterns; at her skirt, which was more tatters woven with crow feathers than fabric; at the cat-skull pendant against her throat.
    Anywhere but at her eyes. Fae have dead silver eyes that will drown you as surely as a black, bottomless pool.
    “No,” I whispered.
    Octavia gestured. Outside, a colony of bats that lived in the hollow trunk of one of the great, ancient trees lining the courtyard took flight, black blood droplets for a moment against the canvas of the moon’s face, and then winked out. “Is this place not to your liking? You want for nothing.”
    “I want to go home,” I blurted, deciding that when the Queen of Winter catches you out, all you can do is be honest and not curl up in a ball on the floor and scream.
    “Home? But this is your home, child. You are Fae.”
    “I’m a changeling,” I said. “And you might tolerate it in my mother, but we