Except that there was only one world inside the silver, and onereflection breaking into a thousand versions of herself, and the mirror-world tried to keep up, splitting that reflection into more and more selves, like a piece of meat cut into thinner and thinner slices…
The woman vanished, presumably as the real one changed out the towels in the washroom. But notallof her vanished this time. I jumped back, startled, as the bands of eyes and hands and fractions of a face calved away from emptiness and crashed to the floor.
I expected them to turn to dust, the way that mirror-stuff did in the real world. But they lay on the ground like slabs of clay from a frustrated sculptor, and then the hands reached out and went creeping over the floor, dragging sections of arm behind them. The faces lay tumbled across each other, in a pile that blinked and twitched and moved, the corners of mouths working madly as if in pain.
Two hands met in the center of the floor. They circled each other, then hooked their thumbs together and stood up on their fingers, swaying against each other like drunken spiders. Together they lurched across the floor, their gait growing rapidly more confident, until they reached the pile of broken faces. Half a mouth, attached to a cheekbone and a single eye, bit on to one’s fingertip. The spidery hands stopped, then began twisting and turning, until they could heave the half face up between them. The gray eye blinked.
No. No, that isnot right.That shouldnotbe a thing that happens.I backed up, looking around wildly for something to climb on, as if I were a silly child frightened by a stray mouse.
Something touched my foot. I looked down and saw another of the hands up against my sandal, the fingers feeling blindly across my toes, as if trying to figure out where they were and what they might be touching.
It was too much. I let out a horrified squawk and kicked it away. The hand dropped to the floor like a deformed spider, the fingers still flexing as it fell. I did not stay around to see if it survived thefall, but scrambled and leaped over the flailing mirror-stuff and lunged out of the mirror so fast that I didn’t remember to close my eyes.
“Oh, Miss Anja!” The maid came out of the washroom, her arms full of towels. “I didn’t hear you come in. I’m just finishing up.” She smiled at me, while her hair eagerly enveloped one of the hand towels.
“I just got in,” I said, breathing heavily through my nose.
She paused, her smile fading. “Are you all right? You seem out of breath.”
I just watched you split into pieces, and those pieces are still crawling around on the floor half an inch of glass away. One of your hands just tried to latch on to me. And I can’t explain any of this to you because I’ll sound completely crazy.
“I’m fine,” I said, clearing my throat. My voice came out almost normal. “Everything’s fine.”
CHAPTER 20
“A mirror-geld,” Grayling said. “A small one, by the sound of it. The parts will all fuse together if you leave it long enough.”
To give the cat credit where it was due, he hadn’t played games when I’d come running for him. I’d spotted him in the shadow of the roof and hissed his name and he came down immediately, alerted by some note of panic in my voice. I met him behind the courtyard wall, frantically whispering what I’d seen.
“You didn’t warn me about those!”
Grayling rolled his good eye. “I would think thatanyonewith sense would know not to get between two mirrors.”
“No, we don’t.” I thought of those games we’d played as children and shuddered. How many mirror-gelds had my sisters and I created? Had our faces all landed together in a twitching pile, our hands crawling unheeded along the bedroom floor? We’d done it for a lot longer than the maid had. The sheer mass of splintered reflections must have been enormous.
Hell, one time Isobel had flipped up her skirt and mooned the mirror, and we’d laughed until Catherine threw up. I didn’t know whether to laugh hysterically at the thought of her bare ass on the pile of fragmented body parts, or maybe just throw up myself.
And these things melded together somehow? I imagined the hands I’d seen lurching along, dragging hundreds of faces behind. Hundreds ofourfaces.
“It was horrible,” I whispered, trying to keep my voice low enough that the kitchen staff wouldn’t hear. “How long before they stop moving?”
Grayling gave me an almost pitying look. “What makes you think they stop?” he asked, and with a flick of his tail, he was gone over the wall.
I had arranged to meet Javier in the garden, in an open area as far from listening ears as possible. The hummingbirds had retired and hawkmoths had taken their place at the flowers. The sky overhead was a blaze of copper and blood.
I looked up from a hawkmoth to seetwofigures walking toward me. Javier and… Aaron?What? Why? Did he tell Aaron after all?If he had, I was going to be rather annoyed that he hadn’t talked to me about it first.
“Hello, Healer Anja,” Aaron said, grinning broadly.
Javier caught my eye and gave a tiny negative shake.Ah. I see.
“So, is it your turn to play bodyguard instead?” I asked, hoping that I wasn’t contradicting anything Javier had said earlier.
“No, I just came along to see what Javier was doing. Do you reallyneeda bodyguard out here?” Aaron glanced around the garden, clearly noting the total lack of assassins.
“Not a bodyguard, exactly, but I like to have someone on hand in case something gets me.”
“… gets you?”
