Page 60 of Hemlock & Silver
“I’m not sure.” He reached out and decanted the object into my hand. I made sure that our fingers didn’t touch, and then I saw what it was and stopped thinking about that at all.
It was small and white, and I recognized it immediately.
It was a violet pastille.
I sat down on the bed with a thump. “Snow,” I said numbly. “She’s been here.” My memory skittered through the last few days like an insect, before settling on the night that I’d sensed an intruder in the room and seen a pale figure watching me. And—shit—I’d even thought that their hair was pale, like Snow’s, hadn’t I? I’d blamed it on the moonlight, but the reason it had been that color was because it had been Snow all along.
Which meant, of course, that she’d seen my undignified tumble out of bed and the saints knew what else. She could have been watching me at any time. Hell, she’d been watching me for so long, at one point, that she’d actually brought asnack. She could even be—
Get a hold of yourself. She can’t be there right now, because Javier was just in the mirror. Yes, all right, it’s a little unsettling… alotunsettling… to realize that a twelve-year-old has been staring at you at night, but there’s no need to panic.
“Anja?”
I blinked up at him. “She’s been watching me. She’s been coming in here and watching me through the mirror.”
Javier absorbed this information, then reached out and gripped my shoulder. Despite my earlier misgivings, the solidity of that grip reassured me. “We can fix this.”
“Can we?”
I could cover the mirrors, but presumably anyone could just reach through and push the fabric aside. I’d either have to move to a room with no mirrors at all, which might not be all that easy in a house outfitted by the princess of a mirror-making kingdom, or sleep in my workroom.
Javier cocked his head, gazing into the distance while he thought. “You said that things you change in there stay changed, right? If you move something, it stays moved?” I nodded. “So if you lock a door, it should stay locked, correct?”
This was true. If I hadn’t been too busy feeling mortified, I’d have realized it myself. “Of course. I’ll just go lock the door. You’reright, I’m just…” I put a hand to my face. My cheeks were hot. “It’s. Um. Upsetting. To realize you’ve been spied on.”
Javier nodded. He helped me through the mirror as courteously as if it were simply a high step, then watched while I closed the chamber door and locked it. “Hopefully that will stop her.”
I grunted.
“She can only be coming through at night,” he offered, as we returned to the real world. “During the day, she is surrounded by an army of maids.”
This was true, and it raised the question of where she’d gotten the apple in the first place. I mentioned this to Javier, who shrugged. “Whoever it was could have simply left it inside the mirror in a place where she could pick it up, correct? If it was somewhere out of the way, perhaps around a corner, she would only have to reach a hand through.”
“Right,” I said. “They don’t have to be left in the real world, do they?”
He grunted, then glanced toward the balcony. “It’s getting late. I need to report for duty. You should stay out of the mirror until I can return.”
“What? Why?”
“It could be dangerous.”
I folded my arms, annoyed. “I’ve been in and out of it dozens of times since I found it.” Which was an exaggeration, but close enough. “I know more about it than you do.”
“It could still be dangerous.”
“How? There aren’t even any real people there. Except Snow, and I think I can take her.”
“Snow and whoever is poisoning her.”
I ran into his words like a kitten into a wall. Right. The poisoner. Them.
Until he’d said something, they hadn’t beenrealin my head. They were a placeholder, an idea you read about, like the hypothetical patient who takes the hypothetical poison and suffers the hypotheticalsymptoms. I knew that someone must be getting the mirror-food to Snow, but since I knew nothing about them, I had filed them mentally into the same box. It hadn’t occurred to me that they could be out and about in the mirror-world the same way that I was, and if they encountered me, they might have a very good reason to wish me harm.
“… Huh,” I said.
Javier had the decency not to look smug. “On the bright side,” he said, “if we can catch sight of them in there, we’ll know who it is.”
I wasn’t quite willing to yield all access to the mirror-world. “If I do go in, I’ll stay in this room,” I said.
