Page 88 of Hemlock & Silver
“Please,” I said, knowing the words were useless. “Please stop using Snow. I’m sure there’s some other way.”
She scoffed. “Do you think we haven’t seen you poking around here, trying to figure out how everything works? Iletyou do that. I thought you might discover something I’d missed, but no. I made those experiments years ago, and far more besides. I have done things you can’t even imagine. And now I am doing what I must.”
“I could help you—” I began, but the Mirror Queen was already shaking her head.
“You could, but you won’t. Do you think I’m a fool, Healer Anja? The moment I let you go, you’d keep yourself out of the mirror, and Snow with you.”
I had no answer for that, because she wasn’t wrong.
The Mirror Queen nodded. “Fortunately, I have a use for you on this side, Healer Anja. Guards, take her away.”
CHAPTER 24
The guards walked me down to the lower levels, to the servants’ quarters, and selected a door. I saw a shiny bolt attached over the outside, a bit of striking real-world color over mirror-stuff. The one in front opened the door, and the one behind prodded me with the sword again.
I took two steps through the doorway and let out a scream that they could probably hear in Four Saints.
A centipede made of hands and fractured faces scuttled from the corner of the room toward the bed, running on dozens of individual fingers. Eyes blinked wildly from the thing’s back, and most of a face opened its mouth in a silent shriek.
“M-mirror-geld!” I squawked, frozen in place, as it ran beneath the bed.
The armored guard sighed, pushed me aside, and got down on one knee to peer under the bed. He nodded, pulled out his own sword, and made a quick stabbing motion, then dragged the blade out with the mirror-geld impaled on it. It writhed and squirmed, halves of mouths grimacing in apparent agony.
I shrank away as he approached, and he smirked and waved the creature at me, driving me away from the door and farther into the room. The finger legs were held in more mouths, teeth biting into the stumps, with lips that twisted in place. One opened, and the finger it held fell to the floor, making me squawk again.
The guard stomped twice on the severed finger, reducing it to a smear of gray paste, then stalked out, still carrying his grisly prize. The door slammed behind him, and I heard the scrape of the bolt being thrown.
I threw myself at the door in a panic. It rattled slightly. I did it again. It rattled again.
Calm down. Think. The mirror-geld’s gone. The bolt isn’t going anywhere.
I took several deep breaths and tried to calm my racing heart. No mirror-geld. That was good. I was a prisoner. That was less good. Panicking wouldn’t help either way.
Think like a chime-adder. Cool. Quiet. Snakes aren’t really cold-blooded, they simply adapt to their surroundings. You have to adapt to yours, that’s all.
The room itself was small, with a simple bed, a wardrobe, a washbasin, and a chamber pot. It took me a moment to nerve myself up to open the wardrobe, which was empty of both mirror-gelds and useful items.
And then, of course, there was the door. By my calculations, I would have worn my shoulder down to bone long before I damaged the wood enough to get through.
This must be an unused room. Otherwise the owner’s things would be here. Maybe that’s why they chose it as a cell.
They hadn’t searched me. I patted down my pockets and found my penknife, my notebook, and a flat, cloth-wrapped bundle.The mirror!
I pulled it out with shaking hands. Would it work here? Could you use a mirrorinsidethe mirror? What would happen?
When I was thirteen and doing my first experiments with flasks and burners, Scand had said that any chemistry experiment has three outcomes. “Either what you want happens, nothing happens, or it explodes.”
(As it turned out, there was a fourth option, namely ‘it turns into a tarry black sludge and ruins a test tube,’ but Scand had claimed that was just a subset of nothing happening.)
“Right,” I muttered. “Three outcomes.” Either nothing happened, or I’d have a working mirror, which I could put my hand through and hopefully unlock the door, or…
The thrashing limbs of the mirror-geld filled my brain.Right. What you want happens, nothing happens, oryouexplode.
I gritted my teeth and yanked the wrappings off.
Absolutely nothing happened.
No light. No blaze of color. On the bright side, no dozen extra faces falling off my head.
