Page 25 of Hemlock & Silver
“And here is your room,” the maid said, pushing open the door.
I stepped inside and swore involuntarily.
The maid’s eyes went wide. “Is there a problem, mistress?”
“No, no,” I said. “I just wasn’t expecting anything so… err…extravagant.”
“His Majesty said that you were to be treated as an honored guest,” said the maid, and dropped a curtsy in my general direction.
Through the door was a room rather larger than the one I had at home, and my father, as I’ve mentioned before, wasnota poor man. The floors were tiled in simple red saltillo, but to make up for this restraint, they were covered in the sort of intricate rugs that take years off a weaver’s eyesight. The bed was an enormous four-poster, draped with airy silk hangings, and the chest at its foot was so deeply carved that I was surprised it didn’t fall apart.
The wall opposite the bed was taken up by an enormous mirror, a good six feet tall and three feet wide, with a gilded frame. I stared at it in mild astonishment. I’d never seen one so large before. Big mirrors are expensive to make.
The maid followed my gaze. “One of the queen’s,” she said, as if that explained everything.
“The queen’s…?”
She nodded. Her hair was making a stealthy play for the cap on her head, and the nod let it gain some ground. “Her Majesty came from Silversand. All the best mirrors come from there. There were dozens of them in her dowry. All the king’s estates have them.”
It made sense. Silversand is a small kingdom to our west, with abundant minerals and not much else. Our desert is all shrubs and small trees and chaparral, but by the time you get to Silversand, it’s nothing but sand and rock. I suppose all that sand is good for making glass.
You’ll laugh, but mirrors make me a bit uneasy. They’re fine during the day, but I’ve never liked them at night. I go out of the way not to look into the ones at home after dark. It’s not rational and probably doesn’t befit a serious scholar, but I just have this instinctive fear that if I look in one, I’ll see something moving that shouldn’t be. A shape behind me, maybe, or a shadow. Which is ridiculous, of course, because if there’s a shape behind me in the mirror, it means that someone is really there, and it’s hardly the mirror’s fault.
Like I said, it’s not rational. I wasn’t looking forward to sleeping across from this one, but I could hardly demand that they redecorate the room for me. I walked up to the glass and studied it. Not polished tin, but glass backed with whatever mirrormakers use to reflect light. (Silver is the main ingredient, but the exact formulations are closely guarded secrets. The mirrormaker’s circle is no joke. Makers who try to set themselves up outside of circle jurisdiction tend to have accidents. One tried to get my father to carry his work once, and Father had categorically refused. The man later moved unexpectedly, in the middle of the night, without telling anyone where he was going. He left all his equipment behind, too, along with some dark stains. You don’t mess with the circle.)
The mirrormakers in Silversand could have taught ours a thing or two. The surface was as clear and smooth as still water. Youcould sell a mirror of half that size for enough to keep a family fed and housed for a year. Abigfamily.
The frame would have been far easier to construct, but was trying to make up for that in sheer baroque enthusiasm. Ornate flowers bloomed at the corners, and leaping rabbits danced along the edges, framed by spirals and curlicues. Saint Rabbit is the patron of fertility and has dominion over the reproductive organs. I wondered if there had been some message in sending such a gift along with a bride or if the woodworker had simply liked rabbits
“Mistress?” the maid said, for what I belatedly realized was the second time.
“Sorry,” I said, turning away. “Distracted. I… err…” I took refuge in honesty. “I’m very tired.”
She smiled. “There’s a washroom in there”—she pointed to a drape—“and the privy through there”—a small door—“and there’s a bathing room through there. If you want a bath, please let us know, and we’ll have water heated and brought up.”
A bath sounded amazing, but it also seemed like a great extravagance in the desert. The basin in the washroom was generously sized and well supplied with towels, and the pitcher of water was still warm. Someone must have started heating it the moment we arrived. I decided to make do.
“If you need anything else, just ring,” the maid said, gesturing to the bellpull. Her lifted arm came into range of the hair, and it leaped for her sleeve. She pushed it back like a deeply resigned animal handler.
“Thank you,” I said. “If I need anything, I’ll let you know.”
She shut the door behind her. I had my robes off before the lock even clicked, scrubbed myself down, and was in bed in less than ten minutes.
In the middle of the night, I got up to use the privy, caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eye, jumped backward, bangedinto one of the bedposts, and finally realized that I had seen myself in the mirror. I slumped backward, heart racing. (See, this is why I don’t like mirrors.)
I eventually recovered sufficiently to make use of the facilities, which were in a small tiled chamber tucked discreetly into the wall. I was gazing into the middle distance when the thought suddenly occurred to me that by not going to see Snow as soon as we got in, we had given the hypothetical poisoner a dangerous opportunity. (No, I don’t know why so many important realizations occur when people are in the privy. For some reason, this topic has gone unexplored by serious scholars, even though the classical mathematician Callixus famously conceived his Third Theorem during the aftereffects of a meal of overspiced beans.)
I tried to think it through. If we assumed that Snow was being slowly poisoned over time, and if they realized that I was here to investigate, would they be driven to a desperate move overnight? A faster poison? A knife?
Oh Saints…
My heart, which had finally settled after the mirror incident, began thrumming again. I pressed a hand to my chest.
Think logically, Anja. You can’t go racing off with your nightgown hiked up around your hips and your ass hanging out. Snow is bound to have guards. And surely the king would have thought of this?
Sure, the king who thinks that putting a guard on food as it comes from the kitchen is sufficient…
Still, what was I going to do? Rush into the bedroom of a girl I hadn’t met, babbling about potential assassins? That would certainly go over well. Hell, we still didn’t even know if itwaspoison.
