“Cats don’t talk.”
“I know that, too.”
“So this Grayling’s obviously not a cat.”
I paused with my mouth hanging open. That was not where I had expected the conversation to go. “Um… I’m pretty sure he’s not a dog?”
Javier pinched the bridge of his nose. “Imean, he’s clearly a shape-shifter or a sorcerer or something like that. Not a cat.”
“What are you talking about? Shape-shifters don’t exist.”
“Neither do talking cats. Neither do otherworlds inside the mirror. But here we are anyway.”
I scowled at him. Here we were again. “You’re talking about magic. I don’t believe in that. It may be that eating the mirror-food provides the body with a fifth humor. And like a lock and a key, only those with the fifth humor can pass through the mirror.” I had been working on this theory in the back of my mind, and it was definitely not ready for public consumption yet. “In any event, I am sure there is a completely reasonable explanation.”
“Yes,” he said, with exaggerated patience, “and the reasonable explanation is that it’smagic.”
“So maybe Grayling’s a magic talking cat! If we’re going to start using magic to explain things, why not that, too?”
I was bitter and annoyed, and I sounded like it, and it only helped a little when Javier stopped, thought, and finally said, “Okay. I have to give you that one.”
The problem was that I didn’t know how Grayling worked, and I hadn’t been trying to figure it out. Granted, I had a lot on my mind. But the mirror-world was so alien and fascinating that I’d mostly been trying to get informationfromGrayling, notabouthim.
Also, let’s be honest, he was a bit of a bastard.
“Anyway,” I said, “I’ll introduce you as soon as he shows up again. Whenever that is.”
“You can’t find him?”
“Cats don’t come when they’re called.” I held up a hand. “At one point, he said something about some reflections being awake. I didn’t follow up on it because I was still trying to figure out if I was going to turn to dust if I spent too long on the other side. But a reflection that moves and apparently thinks… that’s got to be what he meant.”
Javier grunted. After a minute he said, “If it’s awake and moving around, what happens if the original walks in front of a mirror?”
“That… is a very good question, actually. I suppose the reflection would get yanked back to that mirror?”
“So if you were using a reflection of yourself to guard something, you’d have to be careful not to walk in front of any more mirrors.”
“Assuming that you know your reflection is walking around without you and youwantthat to be happening. We still don’t know how or why the reflections wake up, though.” I thought of my reflection wandering around the villa without me and got a nasty little shiver along my spine.
“If this reflection’s original is working with our poisoner, he wouldn’t want to be too far away, I imagine. Otherwise, if he accidentally reflected in a mirror, his reflection would have to walk all the way back here. So either he’s in the villa, or camped out in the desert nearby, or…” He trailed off.
“Or being fanatically careful about mirrors coming near him.”
My mind flashed to the covered mirror in Lady Sorrel’s rooms. What had she said?Bastian never liked them. Sometimes he thought that his enemies were watching him through mirrors.
No, no, that had been decades ago. Surely that wouldn’t have any bearing on what was happening with Snow.
Surely.
Unless Lady Sorrel was using her reflection to creep around the villanowand avoiding mirrors was essential…
I rubbed my temples. “And we can’t check for signs on the other side of the mirror without having armed men after us.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
The silence dragged like a stick through mud. “So…” Javier began.
“… What do we do now?” I finished.
