The Iron Traitor

Page 27

So, logical conclusion: we weren’t in the Nevernever.
Where were we?
The ground under my feet was hard, though I couldn’t see what I stood on due to the thick gray mist coiling around my legs. In fact, I couldn’t see anything except mist and fog, swirling around us in eerie patterns. There were no lights, no shadows, no glimpses of trees or buildings or anything through the writhing blanket of gray. There was no sound, either. Except for the four of us and one gremlin perched on Kenzie’s shoulder, there didn’t seem to be anything alive out there at all. I felt like I’d been dropped into a vacuum.
I looked to Keirran for an answer, and he sighed.
“This,” he stated, his voice echoing weirdly in the gloom, “is the Between.”
I stared at him. “Care to say that again? The Between? We’re between Faery and the real world right now. How is that possible?”
“It’s not difficult,” Keirran said quietly. “The knowledge of going Between has been lost over centuries, but...the Forgotten know how to do it. Leanansidhe, too, though she keeps to her mansion most of the time.” He rubbed an arm, looking embarrassed. “I...sort of picked it up when I was with the Lady.”
I nodded. “That’s why no one has been able to find you,” I guessed. “Because you haven’t been in the Nevernever or the real world. You’ve been here, in the Between.”
“Please don’t tell anyone,” Keirran said, holding my gaze. “When this is all over, when Annwyl is safe, I’ll explain everything. I’ll go back to Mag Tuiredh and face whatever punishment the courts want to throw at me. But I can’t stop now. And I can’t let anyone else know where I am or what I’ve been doing. Promise you won’t tell my parents, Ethan. Not now.”
“Why?” I asked, genuinely curious. “I’ve spoken to Meghan—she just wants to talk to you. You’re not in trouble, unless you’ve done something we don’t know about.”
“It’s not that.” Keirran raked a hand through his silver hair. “My parents are the rulers of the Iron Court, and what I’m trying to do now is forbidden. The other courts would only see me and Annwyl breaking the ancient law, and they’d call for my exile or something similar. I don’t want to put my parents through that, even if they wanted to help. This has to be all on me.” He looked away. “Besides, by the time they could figure something out, it would be too late. Annwyl would be gone.”
“I am standing right here, Keirran,” Annwyl said, sounding angrier than I’d ever heard before. Her green eyes flashed as she stared the prince down. “And I did not ask you to save me if it meant bargaining at the goblin market, making deals that could get you killed and running away from the Prince Consort of Mag Tuiredh. You did not ask me what I felt about this plan—you just disappeared without telling anyone.”
“Kind of like another jackass I know,” Kenzie added, making me start.
“What? Hey, this isn’t about me,” I protested, holding up my hands. Kenzie, however, wasn’t listening. Her arms were crossed, and even Razor, watching me from her shoulder, looked peeved. My heart sank. In all the excitement and running for our lives, I’d forgotten that Kenzie and I were fighting. It appeared she had not.
“You’re no better than Keirran, you know that, Ethan?” Kenzie stated, causing the prince to blink at her, too. “Taking off with Annwyl, leaving me behind? And after we made all those plans to do this together. Did you think I’d be okay with that?”
“Kenzie, you were sick!” I argued. “You just got out of the hospital. There was something after us and...” I trailed off. By the look on Kenzie’s face, she was seriously unimpressed. “I just wanted you to be safe,” I finished quietly.
“You don’t get to decide that, Ethan,” Kenzie said. “God, you sound just like my parents, my teachers, my doctors, everyone! What have I been saying all this time? If I’m going to die, I want to do it on my terms. I don’t want people constantly protecting me, telling me what I can and cannot do, ‘for my own good.’” Her eyes narrowed. “I trusted you. I thought that you, at least, would get me.” She swiped a hand across her eyes. “You promised me you’d stay, that you wouldn’t leave just because They were out there. What happened to that?”
A noise, somewhere out in the mist, interrupted us.
Everyone stopped talking and became very, very still. Even Razor, buzzing in distress on Kenzie’s shoulder, froze, his huge ears pricked and alert.
The noise came again, a soft crying sound, accompanied by a faint slither that raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Keirran motioned us to stay silent, and we listened as the thing, whatever it was, dragged itself over the ground, crying and babbling in a low, raspy voice. I never saw it through the mist and coiling fog, and I really didn’t want to. After countless seconds, the thing moved on, its voice growing fainter and fainter, until the fog swallowed both the creature and the noises, and we were alone once more.
I took a deep, steadying breath, realizing my hands were shaking, and glared at Keirran. “What the hell was that?” I whispered.
“Someone, or something, who’s become lost in the Between,” Keirran replied in an equally low voice as Razor gave a weak, garbled buzz and leaped to his shoulders. “Time and space don’t really exist here, and sometimes fey or humans become stuck between the worlds and can’t find their way out again. So...they wander. For eternity.”
I shuddered. “Then maybe we should get out of here.”
He nodded. “Follow me.”
The eerie landscape continued, an endless plateau of mist and fog, shrouding everything in gray. It never let up enough to see the surroundings, but one time I nearly walked into a stone archway that loomed out of the mist. Frowning, I peered around and could just make out the ruins of some strange castle, crumbling and ancient. It seemed out of place, surrounded by complete nothingness. I mentioned this to Keirran.
“It’s an anchor,” he replied, glancing back at the towers as they vanished from sight behind curtains of fog. “Abandoned, by the looks of it, but was once tied to the mortal realm. The Between is constantly shifting, but if you have a tie to the real world, something that exists in both places, you can shape the spaces Between into whatever you want.”
“Like Leanansidhe’s mansion,” I guessed. Keirran nodded.
“Or you can use the Between to slip between the mortal realm and the Nevernever, without a trod. No one does it, because they don’t know how to part the Veil, and because if they become lost for even a moment, they’ll wander the empty spaces forever.”
“How do you know all this?” Kenzie asked, surprising us. She’d been unusually quiet up until now, barely looking at me. I figured she was still furious at my abandonment but was trying to focus on the larger problem at hand. Keirran hesitated, then said in a quiet voice:
“The Lady told me.”
Annwyl flinched and drew away from him. Razor hissed, and I glared at the back of his neck. Keirran noticed all our reactions and sighed, looking out into the mist.
“I know,” he murmured. “And I know what you’re thinking. You have every right to be angry. That night in the throne room...” He closed his eyes. “Ethan, I never apologized to you. My actions that night were inexcusable. I don’t know why you’d even come for me, after what I did.”
Annwyl frowned, looking at him strangely, and he shrank even further. “What happened when you were with the Lady?” she asked. “What did you do, Keirran?”
“Nothing.” I broke in before he could reply. “It was a misunderstanding. I barged into the throne room, the Lady’s guards attacked and I got kicked around a bit. Keirran stepped in right before they would’ve killed me.”
That wasn’t the whole truth, of course. I left out the part where, when the four heavily armored knights had attacked, I’d yelled at Keirran to help me out, and...he hadn’t. He’d just stood there beside the Forgotten Queen, watching me get my ass kicked. Watching as they almost killed me. I remembered the look on his face as I’d fought for my life—cold, blank, impassive—and it made me very nervous. I’d seen that same look tonight, in Mr. Dust’s back room. That dark, icy stranger hadn’t gone away; he was still here.
I didn’t know why I was defending him now.
But the look Keirran gave me was neither cold nor impassive; it was just relieved. Suddenly, he paused, gazing thoughtfully at a portion of mist that looked identical to everything else in this place. “The Veil is thin here,” he announced, running a hand through the air, like he could push it aside. “And I don’t sense my father anymore. I think we’re safe.”
He lifted a curtain of mist away, and I could abruptly see the real world through the gash: a New Orleans street and a familiar building on the corner, orange lamplight flickering beside the doorway. Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop.
The sidewalk was deserted as we stepped out of the Between into the real world again, the streets empty and still. I checked my watch, frozen at 12:12 a.m., waiting as the numbers flickered and reappeared as 3:48 a.m. Better than I could’ve hoped. With the screwy time differences between Faery and the real world, we were lucky this whole crazy adventure happened in the same night.
“Where to now?” Keirran asked, looking at me. I rubbed tired eyes and tried to get my brain to function.
“Home,” I said. “Back to my town. Guro is the one who can help us.”
“The human we met before,” Keirran said. “Your master. Are you certain he can help?”
“He said he’d be willing to try. And he’s the only one I can think of.”
The Iron Prince nodded, looking weary. “I’ll try anything. I hope you know what you’re doing, Ethan. All right...” He glanced at the spot where we’d walked out of thin air, then raised a hand again. “Let’s go.”