Page 105 of Hemlock & Silver
Javier frowned. “Let’s check her room. It’s possible she just wanted some time to herself.”
“I hope that’s all it was.”
Snow’s room was the villa in miniature, full of people running around, looking into the closet and under the bed as if she’d somehow been invisible the previous dozen times.
“She’ll turn up,” Nurse said, a tower of calm amidst the chaos. She didn’t look terribly pleased to see either of us, but given what had happened the last time, I couldn’t blame her. “She slips out sometimes, but she wouldn’t just run off.”
“When did you last see her?” Javier asked.
“Ah—well—”
“She was using the necessary,” one of the maids spoke up, pointing to the privy door. “But she didn’t come out, and when I opened it, she wasn’t there no more.” She had an East Counties accent that thickened on every word, until by the end, there wasn’t anrto be found.
“She must have slipped out when you weren’t looking,” said Nurse sternly.
I swung open the door to the privy. Two things struck me simultaneously:
The first was that someone had hung a mirror on the back of the door, which was profoundly bizarre. Who wanted to watch themselves crap? It was tall and rather thin, and I couldn’t have fit through it, but someone as skinny as Snow… Yeah. I knew exactly where she’d gone.
The second thing that struck me was that the floor was littered with apple cores.
I bent down slowly and picked one up. The remaining fragments of skin were silvery. The flesh beneath had only just begun to brown.
A shadow blocked the light. Javier looked down at me, and his eyes looked like I felt. “How many?” he asked.
“Five,” I said.
His grunt sounded like a man taking a mortal wound. “What was she doing?”
I stood. My heart was thudding as if I’d taken a dose of adder venom. “Enough to push an adult through. She’s gone to kill the Mirror Queen.”
CHAPTER 28
“Kill her?” Javier asked, as I threw things into my medical bag that would probably do no good at all. “Won’t pushing her through the mirror mean she’s alive over here?”
I shook my head. “Not without the heart. She’ll fall to dust, like all reflections do, but she can’t come back. There’s no one on this side to cast her reflection again. She’ll just be gone.”
It was clever, in its way. I wouldn’t have thought of it, but clearly Snow had. Fortunately I’d given up counting the number of times I’d been outwitted by a twelve-year-old in the last week. It would have been too depressing.
Five apples. She might last until she took a drink or ate real food, but not long after that. Hell, I wasn’t sure she’d last even that long. She’d had a convulsion after two, albeit a mild one. Five…
There was no cure for any of it, but I packed my medical bag as if there might be. The broken glass had been cleaned from my mirror, so we went up to the empty room on the second floor, pretending to be looking for Snow there, and went through the silver.
It was quiet again, deceptively quiet, as it always was. We were still outnumbered. I’d had an idea, for what little it was worth. The mirror-gelds seemed well inclined toward us. Perhaps that would stretch a little further. Or I’d offer them as many mirrors as they wanted and hope that tipped the balance.
Before we’d stepped through, I’d sent Javier to the stables while I packed. He’d come back with his sword and a rope. Once mirror-side, we tied it to the balcony and went down. (I will spare you the details of me going down a rope. It was horrible, I burned my hands and laid down red lines on my thighs, it probably would have hurt less if I’d just jumped, etc.)
We hurried to the mirror-geld pit, and I knelt on the edge. I didn’t want to shout loudly enough to be heard inside, but I needed to summon the mirror-gelds, so I wound up yelling as softly as possible. “Hello? It’s me! I need your help again! Hello?”
There was a horribly long silence, and I was starting to think we should hide somewhere for fear of the guard patrolling, when I saw a gray head poking out of one of the holes. It turned and writhed upward, clinging to the wall, and trained a hundred blank eyes on me. Not ours. This one seemed to collect eyes without faces attached.
I lifted one hand and waved, which felt ridiculous. It stared at me for a while longer, then waved back with one arm out of dozens, and went back down into its hole.
Damn it. Had it just been saying hello? Did it realize I needed to talk to another one? I cupped my hands around my mouth, preparing to yell again, when I heard snapping and muted applause. A moment later, our mirror-geld (and wasn’tthata thing to be thinking?) crawled out of its tunnel and came scurrying up the wall toward us.
“Hi,” I said, when it had its head over the edge. “I, uh, need a favor. Another favor.”
It held out a dozen pairs of arms, palms up.
