“But didn’t she wake you up?”
The reflection sniffed. “Yes, by pouring blood down my throat! Can youimagine? And then has the nerve to tell me that she wants me to take the place of theotherme out there, by methods I shudder to contemplate, so I can dance to her tune, thank youverymuch.” She rolled her eyes. “I told her to go away while I thought about it, and she hasn’t bothered me since. Though little Snow was kind enough to bring this for me.” She ran her hand down the blanket fondly.
“Sorry,” I said, “can you go back—what were those methods you shudder to contemplate?”
“I hardly like to say,” she said. “Incidentally, young man, there’s a secret stair behind the wardrobe. I’ve never had to use it, but I believe it comes out somewhere in the wine cellars.”
“I’d really like to know what she said,” I said, while Javier grabbed the wardrobe and began tugging it away from the wall. “It could be important.”
“Mmm.” Mirror Sorrel pressed her lips together. “She said that I’d be eating the other Sorrel’s heart. My ‘rival’s heart’ is how she put it. And she didn’t even ask if I would, shetoldme that I’d be doing it. I think not.” She sniffed again. “I don’t know if that’s murder or suicide, but I want no part of it.”
“Oh,” I said weakly, while more things jostled into place insidemy head.To wake up, drink blood from the real world. To exist in the real world without fading away, eat your opposite’s heart.It made horrible fairy-tale sense. And what would you do, to live outside the mirror, in the color and warmth, instead of the mirror’s eternal cold and gray?
I was honest enough to admit that if I were a reflection, woken by the Queen, I might look on the real world with enough envy that I would think one woman’s death was a small price to pay. Maybe that was how the Queen held her subjects, with the promise that they would someday eat their counterpart’s heart and be free of the mirror-world forever.
But the Queen had figured without the will of Lady Sorrel’s reflection.
“You are very—ethical,” I said. “And strong.”
“Never could abide organ meats anyway. Now go! They’ll be pounding on the garden door soon enough.”
“Will you be all right?” Javier asked.
“We’re remarkably hard to kill over here,” Mirror Sorrel said, lifting a dark gray hand. I started to ask about that, but Javier had my arm and was tugging me toward the doorway behind the wardrobe.
The door was concealed in the wainscoting, so we had to drop to our hands and knees to enter, but once inside, it was a cramped but walkable passage, ending in a flight of stairs. Javier pulled the wardrobe back against the wall as far as he could and closed up the door. We went down the stairs hunched over, trying not to bang our heads on the ceiling.
“What a remarkable woman,” Javier said softly.
“On both sides of the mirror.”
The stairs hit a landing and a hairpin turn. This must have been a servant’s stair once, in the original building.
“So how does eating someone’s heart fit in with your theory of humors, not magic?” asked Javier.
I tried not to bristle. It was a good question. “The heart is theseat of the sanguine humor. Perhaps the mirror-folk are lacking in the sanguine humors, which is why blood awakens them. A whole heart might strengthen them enough to pass through.”
“Makes sense.”
It was my turn to grunt. It was a good theory, but it didn’t explain a few key facts, like why Mirror Sorrel would have to eat her counterpart’s heart specifically. Scand would have been poking holes in it like no one’s business.
Javier’s next question was the one that took me by surprise. “Do you think Snow is real?”
“I… don’t know. No, the mirror-food makes her sick, so Ithinkshe is real? And if she wasn’t, she’d have had to eat… her own… heart…”
She was cutting our daughter’s heart out.
Ask Rose to button up her coat and she’d have to stop and look at it to see where the buttons were… Then she started getting lost in a castle she’d lived in all her life. It was as if she’d forgotten which way the hallways went…
“Oh hell,” I said. “Princess Snow is real. But her sister Rose wasn’t.”
CHAPTER 26
It made sense. It made awful sense. If the real Rose had gone through the mirror, the Mirror Queen could easily have captured her, cut out her heart, and fed it to her reflection. I wondered what had motivated her. Was it an experiment to see if it would work? Surely the Mirror Queen had tested it beforehand. I’d have been feeding mirror-roosters their own hearts for weeks before I tried it on anything bigger, but I had no reason to think that the Mirror Queen was terribly rigorous about experiment design. Perhaps she’d simply wanted a cohort on the other side.
Hell, maybe it had been maternal affection. Perhaps the Mirror Queen wanted her children to have that world full of light and warmth just as much as she wanted it for herself.
Regardless, the mirror-Rose had gone through into our world to take her counterpart’s place, but everything would have been backward. Buttons, hallways, letters… An adult might be able to hide that, but not a nine-year-old child.
