Oh Saints, what am I supposed to do now?
I couldn’t tell the king the full truth, obviously. I’d do Snow no good if I got locked up in an asylum. If I were gone, that would leave this mysteriousshefree rein.
Well, at least we’ve figured that much out. Whoever is bringing Snow mirror-food is female. That has to narrow it down.
A servant girl walked down the hall and gave a quick, startled smile when she saw me. I watched her walk away. Surely she was too young to be poisoning the king’s daughter, and why would she even want to? For that matter, I had no proof that the poisoner was anyone staying at Witherleaf, or at least, not staying in the real world. For all I knew, they could have come from elsewhere and were living in the mirror-villa, watching us through the reflections.
I jumped up, suddenly paranoid. There were the small mirrored tiles that I’d seen here and there, but how manyhadn’tI found? Javier had mentioned assassins, but what about spies?
For that matter, Snow herself had been spying on me, and while she hadn’t done anything, it was still… well, it wasweird. Evenif Javier was being paranoid about the assassin thing, there are just not that many situations where I want to be watched in my sleep by a twelve-year-old girl.
Actually, being spied on while I was awake wasn’t that much better.
Calm down,I told myself firmly.You’re panicking, and that never helps anything. You know there can’t be mirrors in the main hallways because you’d have seen the colors when you went through the mirror- villa.
That was true. There were incidental mirrors in some of the smaller passageways, but it seemed like there were more in the garden than inside the villa itself. That only left the ones in my room and, of course, the tiles in my bathroom.
Was there something I could do to prevent anyone from using those? Locking the door should help at night, in theory, but what about the rest of the time?
What I really needed was some way to check if there was anyone around me in the mirror-world. Which was easier said than done, of course.
How could I watch what happened in the mirror-world? There were only a few mirrors on the estate that I could actually fit through. Lugging one of those around with me didn’t seem workable. (What was I going to do, have Javier and Aaron follow me around, carrying it between the two of them? It’d get broken before the first hour was up, and we could kiss any hope of keeping things subtle goodbye.)
Although…
I tapped my finger against my lips. I didn’t need towalkthrough it, I just had to be able toseethrough it. That only required a mirror large enough to put my face through and open my eyes. It didn’t even have to fit over my entire head—if it was mobile, I could literally just turn in a circle and see if Snow’s reflection suddenly popped up.
I turned around, retraced my steps, and went downstairs to ask the housekeeper if I could borrow a hand mirror.
The hand mirror was easily acquired. Unlike the big, dramatic mirrors from Silversand, this was a plain wooden frame with a handle and a small square set into it. The maker’s mark was from Four Saints, which was oddly comforting. I went to my room and dropped the hand mirror on the nightstand for later use, then sat down at the desk and tried to figure out what I was going to do now.
Sadly, I hadn’t had any great epiphanies when I heard a light knock at the door.
I jumped up and stepped into the mirror. Even if it was just the maid, I didn’t have the energy for a conversation right then. If it was Nurse coming to ask what exactly I’d said to her charge, then Ireallydidn’t have the energy.
The familiar cold tingle washed over me as I passed through the silver. A moment later, the maid with the carnivorous hair entered the room. (She had told me her name that first night, and I promptly forgot it in the haze of exhaustion. Then I’d been distracted by a lot of other things, and now it would be too awkward to ask.)
I sagged against the wall, relieved, then straightened up hastily, rubbing my arms against the cold. Ihadto remember to bring a coat next time, or they’d find me frozen to death on the… hmm, actually they wouldn’t find me, would they? I’d just be bones quietly decaying in a corner of the mirror-world, unless Javier came through and dragged my bones back to the real world.
I wondered how many missing people who seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth had found their way through the silver instead?
What a happy thought. I’m so glad that I had it.
The maid straightened up, fluffed the pillows, and turned herattention to the nightstand. I watched the half-and-half gray reflection reach out and pick something up in her hands.
Everything suddenly went ghostly. I don’t know how else to describe it. The section of the room in the band of mirror-light went strangely insubstantial. Objects sprouted haloes that doubled and tripled their sizes, like visual echoes. And the maid…
Half of her, unseeing, turned the object this way and that, apparently admiring it. The other half, the gray half, began to shudder and jitter back and forth. Something erupted from the back of her head, a band of flesh like a sharp-edged tumor, and then another one beside it and another, and then she turned even further and her face broke into two pieces that slid along each other until one eye was half an inch above the other one, and then one of those pieces broke and she had three eyes and then it broke again and again—
The maid tossed the mirror onto the bed and went to get fresh towels.
The haloes faded from around the mirror-furniture, though it took a moment. The mirror-woman didn’t snap back so quickly. Her reflection dragged to the edge of the mirror, out of the light, then stood shuddering in the grayness, a tragic and monstrous figure with a dozen faces layered over her head like a succession of blocky-edged masks. She swept her head slowly from side to side, her neck sagging under the weight, and lifted an arm with a dozen hands to touch it.
I had stopped breathing some time ago.Why…? How…?
The mirror. She picked up themirroron your nightstand and angled it to catch the other mirror’s reflection.
We had done it a hundred times as kids, though our mirrors were much smaller than the enormous one on the wall. You held two mirrors at just the right angle and saw yourself reflected infinitely, the angle changing just a fraction every time, and when you moved, a thousand versions of yourself moved with you.
