“That should pass soon.” I’d tackled my breakfast with great enthusiasm, and the rooster was eating normally as well. “So…”
“So.”
“Now what?”
Javier rubbed the back of his neck. “We need to write the letter to the king,” he said. “Then I’d like to go through the mirror and walk the perimeter of the villa. Maybe it doesn’t actually extend all that far.”
“Sure,” I said. “And if it does go as far as the rest of the world?”
“Then I suppose we’ll deal with that. If assassins can come out of mirrors, no one here may be safe.”
“Assuming that the assassinsknowabout the mirrors. I can’t imagine many people do. Someone would have written a paper about it by now.”
He gave me a look. I gave it right back. Eventually Javier sighed, and his shoulders slumped a little. “I could barely sleep,” he admitted, “thinking of all the terrible things that someone could use this power for. You could bring an entire invasion force straightinto the heart of someone’s city, unless they had an army stationed on both sides of the mirror. This could change the entire world.”
“Only if the world finds out about it,” I said, determined to stay cheerful. “And it’s not like crossing the mountains gets any easier inside the mirror.”
“Crossing the desert does, though,” he said gloomily. “If it doesn’t get hot there, you’d need so much less water. You could just set up mirrors at each watering hole.”
“They’d have to be awfully big mirrors, if you’re planning on getting an army through.”
“There’s that.” He brightened a little. “I’ve never seen mirrors any bigger than the ones here, and a horse probably wouldn’t fit through these.”
“And feeding them the mirror-food would be dicey.” Horses can’t vomit any more than chickens can, and their digestion is so fragile that I’m sometimes amazed they don’t catch fire and explode.
“Right.” Javier nodded. “Letter, then let’s check the mirror. If nothing else, if our poisoner is using the mirrors to get around unseen, they may have left some sign.”
Javier proved skilled at letter writing, by which I mean that he crossed out most of what I’d written. “You’re making a report,” he said, “not trying to impress a courtier. I’ve reported to King Randolph before.”
The final letter simply read:
Your Majesty—
Discovered the poison. Trying to track down the delivery method. Will write as soon as I know more.
—Healer Anja
“Really?” I said, looking down at the message, which was so terse as to border on rude.
“Trust me,” said Javier, already heating up the sealing wax.
I do trust him, I thought, as I sealed the letter. Even if I was still somewhat offended by the look he’d given me earlier, I didn’t think for a moment that he was going to denounce me as a witch. And I had no reason to doubt his skill or dedication as a bodyguard either.
Granted, the fact that he could also pass into the mirror meant that he’d probably wind up on the pyre next to me, which didn’t hurt.
He checked his weapons and nodded to me. Then we both stepped into the silver.
CHAPTER 18
The mirror-door was still locked, which made me feel slightly better about things. Granted there was nothing I could do about the balcony, but I couldn’t see Snow managing the acrobatics required to get up there.
We headed outside to the gardens. “I’d like to check the place where I found Snow with the apple,” I said. Javier grunted. I wondered how many words he was allotted a week and whether he had been going into a deficit with all the talking I’d been demanding.
A sharp dividing line of color ran down the middle of the gardens. I wondered whose mirror was causing it. A bedroom on the second floor, as far as I could tell. Maybe it was Snow’s. Regardless, it threw a wedge of light a long way across the world.
As we approached the boundary, I saw something odd about the garden path. It looked like there was a small gray rise, maybe three inches tall, at the edge of the reflection.Is that a threshold? That’s not there in the real world…
Then we got closer, and I stopped so abruptly that Javier ran into my shoulder.
