“Oh,yuck,” I said.
It was made of insects. Drifted up against the edge like sand, their reflections had flown or crawled out of the gaze of the mirror and then stopped. I saw beetles and moths, crane flies and mosquitoes, butterflies with scalloped wings, all of them jumbled together in a chitinous pile of gray.
(I’m not afraid of bugs, let me be clear. I have administered both scorpion and centipede venom to myself to document the effects. I have even worked through my fear of spiders. But the effect of the whole pile, lying motionless, was both unnerving and sad.)
Javier took his belt knife and hooked it under the curved tail of a hairy desert scorpion, lifting it up. It dangled there like a strange piece of jewelry, apparently dead.
No, not dead. Notawake,according to Grayling. Whatever that means.
They were densest on the path, probably because the flying insects used the gap between trees, but there were bodies all along the mirror edge. Not just insects either. I saw a swallow belly down on the ground, wings outstretched, tail a sharp scissor shape against the dirt. The area nearest the flowering sage was littered with frozen hummingbirds.
Even knowing that they weren’t dead, that they were just mirror-stuff, not real birds, I still found it a tragic sight. I reached down and picked one up. What would happen if I stepped into the light? Would it come alive for a brief moment and take flight from my hand?
I stretched my hand out into the beam of light, and the hummingbird turned brilliant. Green feathers bloomed along its back, and its head lit up with a hundred shades of iridescent pink. I almost gasped at the sight.
But that was all that happened. It still lay limply in my hand, the sharp needle of its beak stretched out across my palm. I carefully folded down its wings, but it didn’t react, or move, or breathe.
Of course. It’s just a reflection without its creator. It can’t do anything on its own.Except… I’d brought the book through the mirror, hadn’t I? And it had been a real book on the real side, at least for a few minutes. Would the hummingbird be real, too?
I took out a handkerchief and wrapped it carefully before putting it in my pocket. I had to know. Purely scientific curiosity, I told myself. It had nothing to do with how sad the stiff little reflections were, how cold and gray when they should be living jewels.
And there are just somanyof them.
I forced myself to think objectively. Of course there’d be a great many of them. How often would insects wander into a reflectionout in the desert? In fact, given that the mirrors had been installed at least thirteen years ago, when the king had brought his bride to Witherleaf for her honeymoon, that meant…
“They dissolve eventually,” I said out loud. “Theymust. This proves it.”
Javier looked from his scorpion to me and back again. “You’re going to have to explain that one to me.”
“Look. There’s a couple of inches of insects here, right? But how many insects fly through here every day? Their bodies would drop right here. This is, what, a week’s worth of accumulation? Maybe less? Do you know how many bugs there are in the desert?”
“I suspect you’re going to tell me.”
“Alot.” I nodded my head furiously, hoping to somehow impress the sheer quantity on him. “Somany. This might only be one night’s worth. But the mirrors have been here for years, right? So there should be… I don’t know… drifts of dead bugs as high as your head.”
“… Vivid,” he said, setting down his scorpion.
“So that means that the reflections should eventually disintegrate!” I beamed at him.
“That’s good?” asked Javier.
“Well, if you don’t like the thought of dead people standing around mirrors for all eternity.”
He went a little green. I gave him a moment to recover himself, then stepped over the line of color.
There was nothing much of interest in the gardens, other than the unsettling drift of insects. The little pocket garden where I had found Snow had a line of mirrored tiles behind the statue of the woman, which split around her into two fans of color. They were about five inches on a side, but so subtly placed that I hadn’t noticed them in the real world. I wondered how many other mirrors were hidden around the villa. I might have passed one a dozen times a day and never even noticed.
Javier studied the area closely, looking for signs that someonehad been here recently, but if they had, they had not been accommodating enough to leave any tracks.
“The apple was probably tucked up behind the statue,” I said. “No one would have noticed it there, and she could have just reached through and picked it up.”
“We could break the mirrors,” Javier suggested. “But that will almost certainly put the poisoner on their guard.”
He looked at me expectantly, and I realized that I was supposed to decide.Me? Why? I distill things and dose people with charcoal, I don’t run spy campaigns.But of course Javier was my bodyguard, and by some bizarre alchemy, having a bodyguard meant that you were nominally in charge of them, as long as you didn’t try to send them away.
“I have no idea what we should do,” I said. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”
Oddly, that didn’t seem to bother him. He nodded. “You can’t unbreak a mirror,” he said. “We’ll leave it for now and do it later if we must.”
