“Precisely. Now, we have about four minutes until he’s back within earshot, so I am leaving. You can come with me or not, as you like.” He strolled back out the door. We hurried after him. Javier shot the bolt on the door so that if the guard didn’t check, there’d be no reason to think we’d escaped.
I looked down the hall to the landing and winced at the thought of trying to sneak out past the patrolling guard. Grayling was almostmirror-gray himself, but Javier and I stood out like rabid dogs at a wedding reception.
To my relief, Grayling led us to another servant’s room instead, across the hall and one up. There was a bolt on this one as well, but it wasn’t locked. We scooted inside, and I was astonished to seeactualblankets on the bed, an entire nest of them in shades of dull blue and brown, thick enough to ward off the cold. “Someone was here?” I whispered.
“It can’t be Snow,” Javier said. “I don’t know how she’s getting away from her maids as often as she is.”
This squared with my thoughts. For someone so hedged about with watchers, she was certainly skilled at escaping them, but actually sleeping here?
“Did you think Snow was the first?” Grayling asked. “She started with someone else. An old woman, a little dotty, who trusted the image of the Queen in the mirror.” His voice was light and bored, but his tail flicked as he spoke. “There were so many mirrors in the king’s palace that even an old servant woman had one. And the queen’s reflection needed someone to carry her apples through to this world.”
He leaped onto the washstand and leaned over, his tongue flicking out. I saw an inch of water in the basin—real water!—and lunged for it as if… well, as if I’d spent most of a day without any water.
It tasted like ambrosia. I didn’t even mind that Grayling had been drinking out of it.
“Quiet,” Grayling said, lifting his dripping chin from the water. “Guard’s coming.”
We fell silent. Javier pressed his eye to the crack between door and jamb and watched. I strained my ears and heard the click of bootheels coming… pausing… then going back the other way, just as my heart had begun to sink.
“Give him five minutes,” Grayling said, his thin voice sunkento a whisper (and how did that work, when his mouth didn’t move and it seemed to be in our heads?). “Then we’ll go.”
“Why are there so few of them?” Javier asked, after a lengthy pause.
“Waking them up isn’t as easy as all that.”
I frowned. “Howdoesshe wake them up?”
“Blood from the vein,” said the cat.
We both stared at him. “What?” I said. “How would that…? It’s justblood.”
“They don’t bleed when you cut them,” Javier volunteered. “It’s all just solid black inside. The one guard didn’t fall down until I’d chopped off enough of his calf that it couldn’t hold him up.”
“Yes, but…” I put my hand to my forehead. “Blood isn’tmagic. It’s just a fluid in your body, like urine or bile.”
“Blood is exactly as magic as mirrors,” Grayling said. “I wouldn’t begin to speculate about urine or bile.”
“Maybe it’s the nutrients,” I muttered. “Could you use a strong broth instead?”
Claws swiped my ankle, and I yelped. “I do not like to repeat myself,” said the cat. “I particularly do not like to repeat myself forhumans. It is blood from the vein that wakes a reflection, not bile or broth.”
“Sorry,” I said. “You’re the expert.” I certainly hated it when amateurs walked in and started giving me their opinion on how I could cure rabies with two quarts of brandy and a raw onion. (The recipes varied wildly, but there was always alcohol and always,alwaysan onion.) Here I was doing it to Grayling. “I didn’t mean to be rude. I’m just so confused.”
“Hmmph.” He looked up at me from one golden eye, exactly like an old man looking over his glasses. “Very well. The Mirror Queen, awakened, had an idea of how to wake the others. But for that she needed blood. And once she had Snow and the queen, she no longer needed the old woman to bring things back and forth through the mirror. So she overpowered her and drew her bloodto wake the first of her personal guard, then imprisoned her in the mirror-world to keep bleeding her as needed.”
His thin voice grew thinner and sharp as a papercut. “She was no one, and nobody missed her. Except an old one-eyed cat that she’d pulled out of a pond once.” He turned his head and began savagely grooming his shoulder, not looking at either of us.
“Oh, Saints. Grayling…” I reached out a hand to him, then pulled it back, reading the warning signs. “I’m so sorry.”
“That’swhyI tried to keep you fools from wandering about in here in the first place. If the Queen catches you, she’ll bleed you dry to wake more reflections. But no, humans know better. Humansalwaysknow better.” His tail lashed twice.
“If you’d told me why—” I started to say.
“You’d have listened? You’d have stayed out of the mirror completely? You wouldn’t have said, ‘Oh no, we have to save the little mewling human kitten, so let’s go through the mirror and meet the Queen and see if we can talk things out’?”
I opened my mouth and closed it again.
“That’s what I thought,” Grayling said.
