Page 87 of Hemlock & Silver
“Mmm.” I looked down at my feet and wiggled my toes in my sandals, trying not to show my alarm. If Lady Sorrel was under her control, she’d have a great deal of power with the king. Would she tell him about the mirrors? It would be ironic if Javier and I had worked so hard to keep anyone from learning the secret and then the poisoner told him outright.
I wonder how she’s controlling the reflections. Bribery? Some kind of power she has?
The Mirror Queen sighed. “I don’t get much new conversation here, you know. I was hoping you’d provide more.”
“Fine. Why aren’t you dead?”
Her smile grew into a predatory thing, revealing black teeth and gums. People say smiles like that are catlike, but I couldn’timagine a bigger contrast than scruffy Grayling and the Mirror Queen. “You still haven’t figured it out, have you?”
“Apparently not.”
She posed. It was very clearly a pose, very considered—a woman enjoying her audience. “Shall I tell you a story, Healer?”
I shrugged.
“There was a woman,” the Mirror Queen began, “once upon a time…”
I wished that I had the nerve to demand to sit, but the guard’s hand on my arm wasn’t letting go. I listened.
“There was a woman, once upon a time, who loved her own reflection. I think perhaps she was a very lonely girl, and so she made her reflection into a companion and spoke to her and imagined the girl in the mirror speaking back. Children do such things, and mostly they grow out of it.” The Mirror Queen’s red lips thinned a little. “This one did not, and her parents cared only that she was alive and might be married to advantage someday. Her womb was useful to them; her mind was not. Perhaps she knew that, because she did not stop speaking to her reflection. When she grew up, the woman in the mirror grew with her, always agreeing, always present, and the woman’s love for her grew greater and greater. In the end, she would not take her meals unless she was in front of the mirror, and she would not sleep unless her reflection slept as well.”
“That seems inconvenient,” I offered.
“It was terribly dangerous,” said the Mirror Queen, “although she didn’t know it. Occasional, incidental contact, it does little enough harm. But the woman gave her reflection too much attention, too much emotion, day in and day out. When she married, for a little while, it might have been different. She loved her husband, and he was kind to her, but he was a king first and a husband second, and he was often busy. So she turned back to her old familiar friend in the mirror.” Dark teeth flashed again, shocking against the ceruse skin. “Everyone around her thought that she was a little mad, of course.”
I could picture it all too clearly. A lonely young woman in the throes of an obsession that drove away anyone who might befriend her. If not for Scand and my sisters, I might have walked the same path myself. By the grace of Saint Adder, I had been able to turn my obsession into something useful. The dead queen had not been so lucky.
The living Queen was still speaking. “And then one day, the woman cut herself, only a little, only a nick, and her hand shook, and the smallest drop landed on the lips of the woman in the mirror.”
She paused then, striking another pose, her gloved hands spread on one knee. I had a feeling that I wanted to know the rest of the story, so I gave her what she clearly wanted. “And what happened then?”
“It was the most incredible thing. Her reflection woke up.”
You’ll know if you meet a waking one,Grayling had told me, with extraordinary understatement. It seemed unlikely that a single drop of blood on glass had actually been the cause, but perhaps there was some other mechanism at work.
Or maybe it really is magic, and you don’t know as much as you think you do.
“She woke up?” I prompted.
“Oh yes. Most of the mirror-folk are no more awake than your shadow at your heels. Butshewoke, and she learned, and bit by bit, she began to covet what the woman had and she did not. She began to resent the words that the woman said for her. It was not enough that the reflection had no voice, but to be forced to parrot every insipid thought that entered the woman’s head… oh, she grew to hate that most desperately of all.” The Mirror Queen’s eyes had narrowed, and while she was still performing, there was an echo of dark emotion underneath. If I’d doubted that this was a story about herself and the dead queen, I didn’t now.
“It took some time to make a plan and to put it into action. In the end, she wrote notes to the woman and left them in the mirrorfor her to find. The woman was delighted, of course. Her only friend was alive and wanted to speak with her? She could barely contain her joy. So the reflection taught her the way through the mirror and brought her to the other side.”
I had the feeling that a lot was being glossed over there, but I didn’t want to interrupt the Mirror Queen when she was in mid-flow.
“The reflection confronted the woman there, in the mirror. Not that it was much of a confrontation. The woman was weak and rather silly. How could she have been anything else, given how she’d been raised? But her reflection was strong and hungry, and she wanted the world on the far side of the silver, the world full of warmth, the world that goes on even when there is nothing to reflect it.” She sat back in her chair and very deliberately struck another pose. “What do you think, Healer? Can you blame the reflection for coveting what the woman had and she did not?”
“No.” I think I would have answered that way even if I hadn’t been held in place by a large man with a sword. “No, I can understand that. You wanted to take her place on the other side, didn’t you?”
“Can you blame me?”
And the more mirror-food Snow ate, the more she could bring back from the mirror. That was how the Mirror Queen had planned to take the real queen’s place. I tried a different tack. “No. But what you’re doing is killing Snow. Her body can’t take much more of this.”
The Mirror Queen made a careless gesture. “She’s managed before. Children are stronger than you think.”
“A child is already dead.”
The Queen’s lip rose in a soundless snarl, an ugly look that she smoothed away almost immediately. “That weak, stupid little woman. Who would have thought she had it in her?”
