Free A Stranger in the Garden by Tiffany Trent

T he first sound Charles heard was rain. It was such a familiar sound that he thought for a moment he was back in the gutter of New London, huddling in rubbish for warmth. Then he realized that he was curled around something knobby and hard—a tree root.
    He worried for a moment that he was in the Forest, that the dryads had somehow enspelled him and brought him here. He searched his memory and remembered Lucy Virulen’s hand slipping from his as he fell through howling darkness toward a door of light.
    We are where I said we’d be.
    The Grue.
    There was a tiny part of him, like a black box shut deep in his mind, that the Grue couldn’t always control. That little part was disappointed. He had hoped if they achieved their aim and opened the door he would be free of the Grue, the magic, everything. He had hoped that he could start anew.
    He shut away those feelings before the Grue could mock him for them, and breathed deeply. Old London. The smells were different than home—loam rather than sewage, wet leaves rather than the burning bone of the Refineries. This place reminded him of the Virulen countryside with its orchards and gardens.
    Kent, to be precise, the Grue said. London proper is now much the same as your home. Though without the magic, of course.
    Charles looked up. He was lying under the spreading branches of an apple tree. Speckled, blushing apples dripped water on him, and he found himself thinking briefly of Saint Newton. The curtain of rain obscured all but the most basic details. He was in an orchard with a gravel path beyond. The chill in the air felt like September.
    He sat up slowly, every bone in his body settling back into place with great pain. He gasped at the sharpness of it. It was as if his skeleton had been unstrung and now was being reassembled.
    It practically was. The Grue snickered. Travel between the worlds isn’t easy on flesh like yours.
    Then why did we do it? Charles asked silently.
    Always so many questions.
    Charles waited. He knew the punishment if he asked more than the Grue was willing to tell. It was always a careful and calculated agony that made Charles wish he’d never had a single thought of his own. It had taken him a long time to learn to hide his thoughts, and he couldn’t always do it well enough.
    The worst thing he could do was demonstrate that he had any will of his own.
    We are here because this is the Gathering Place where long ago I was cast from this paradise. There was the hint of a sneer in the Grue’s voice.
    Charles looked up at the nearest apple, and a strangely passionate longing to pluck it grew within him. But the Grue hungered for other food. It sometimes felt like Charles had eaten the entire world for his master, but it was never enough. He had devoured the Sphinx, the Wyvern hatchlings . . . anything made of myth to satisfy him. But nothing ever did.
    There was only one thing the Grue wanted now. Her.
    Charles had long known that the woman for whom the Grue yearned was someone of such importance that the creature had nearly destroyed an entire world to get to her. He also knew that she had betrayed the Grue and that he longed for revenge perhaps even more than he longed for the sight of her. Everything the Grue had made him do—hoarding power by eating raw myth , killing anyone who got in his way, capturing the Manticore to take her Heart—all had been done for this nameless woman. For the chance to be in her presence again and take revenge.
    But Charles still didn’t know who she was. Her face was imprinted on his memory—a face like starlight, eyes deeper than oceans. He knew that in a time long past, she and the Grue had been lovers. He knew that she had betrayed him during a war and allowed him to be exiled with some of his kin. That was when the Grue had become what he was now—a shriveled homunculus, all his beauty and power stripped down to this horrid, vengeful core.
    “Is there a reason you’re sitting under my apple tree, young