The rooster’s cage was empty, except for a tail feather left on the floor. There was no chime-adder to shake its bells as it moved. Of course, there was no mirror for them to be caught in. The room seemed colder without them, even though I knew that neither one of them particularly cared if I existed. My glassware had become a graphite sculpture, leaving soft but complicated shadows behind it. I drew my fingertip down the curve of the big retort flask, wondering if it was properly hollow or solid all the way through. I wasn’t going to break it to find out. Properly blown glassware is expensive. Not expensive like mirrors, but…
Glassware.
Wait.
I should have been looking at my reflection in the glass. Distorted, yes, a fish-eye view of my face that mostly meant looking up my own right nostril, but a reflection nonetheless.
Except that there wasn’t one.
“It’s notanyreflection,” I muttered to myself. “But why? What’s the difference?”
The mirrors in my room were glass with a silver backing. If it wasn’t the glass, was it the silver?
Where could I find something silver?
In an estate like Witherleaf, silver cutlery was usually kept in the serving pantry. I wasn’t sure where that was, so I headed for the kitchen.
As soon as I opened the door, the creeping dread I’d been pushing down rose up and caught me by the throat.
The kitchen was empty, except that it wasn’t.
There were no people in it, thankfully. But the tables were covered in knives and cutting boards heaped with gray lemons, the big stewpot hung over the gray logs, and a round splodge of gray dough rose like a mushroom on the side table.
Far more than anywhere else I’d been, this room looked as if the inhabitants had just put down everything they were holding and vanished into thin air.
“Well,” I said hoarsely. “I’m probably lucky that the knives aren’t levitating in midair.” It seemed that gravity still worked, even if on the other side of the mirror, the utensils would all be in use, blades flashing as they chopped.
I went around the central table. My shoulder blades itched as if expecting a blow. Even though there weren’t any human reflections standing here, I could almost feel the people around me, as I passed through them like a ghost.
I gave in to nerves and looked over my shoulder. Nothing moved.See, nothing there.
… Hang on.
There were two balls of dough now. And there were no more whole lemons, only neat halves arranged along the board.
The roomwaschanging to match the real world, but apparently it took a while to catch up.
“Ha!” Another puzzle piece falling into place, and my enthusiasm eclipsed my dread again. As above, so below, apparently. (Not thataboveandbelowseemed like the right description, butas real, so mirrordoesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.) Things here matched the real world as well as they could, unless you deliberately manipulated something on this side.
There were two more doors a little farther down the hall. One was a regular pantry. Bins of potatoes and shelves of jars filled most of the available space. There was no way to tell what was in the jars, and I didn’t feel like sampling to find out. I took a potato, though. If it turned strange and silvery, I could be absolutely certain that the apple really had come from here, and that it wasn’t just a very peculiar variety.
There were no apples in the first pantry. Which said something, though I didn’t know what.
The next door opened to the serving pantry. I picked up a pie server and turned it back and forth, but there was no reflection. So either the silverware wasn’t real silver, or silver by itself wasn’t enough to make an opening from the real world.
Maybe it was the specific combination of silver and glass. Or, depending on how many of Witherleaf’s mirrors came from the queen’s dowry, it might even be something unique to the mirrors from Silversand.
What bizarre alchemical concoction are theymakingover there?
I wanted to go outside and see how the wider world fared, so I retraced my steps and cut across the courtyard to the terrace. When I opened the door to the short entryway, I was greeted by unexpected spots of light on the wall.
What on earth…?
They looked almost like the sort of dapples you see when sunlight filters through leaves. I reached out my hand, and the light crossed my fingers, bringing unexpected warmth with it.
I had to squint at the opposite wall for a moment. The lack of colors made the shape hard to read. A fish? Maybe? I remembered that there had been something on the wall when I’d come here before, a large piece of artwork. I’d barely glanced at it, scurrying after the king as I was.
Itwasa fish, I decided, a mosaic fish made of dozens of small tiles. I had no idea what the species was, if it was even meant to be a real animal and not, say, a stylized representation of Saint Trout. Most importantly, scattered among the ceramic tiles were chips of mirror the size of my thumbnail.
