Page 78 of Hemlock & Silver
The sun was high overhead, but the thought made my skin prickle with cold. “It would get in hands like that eventually,” I admitted. “There would be no way to keep it secret. Not when we’d be stationing guards inside mirrors.”
“Exactly. If we tell the king, we have to realize that we’re telling the world.”
“It might only work with mirrors from Silversand?” I asked plaintively.
“Then Silversand becomes the target of every army on earth.”
Cicadas whined their long descending note. I could see heat shimmers on the horizon, blurring the distant farms.
“We used to talk about it,” I said slowly, “my tutor, Scand, and I. If you discovered a poison that could kill hundreds of people all at once, something you could put in a well or a waterway, say, would it be better to tell everyone so that people could try to find a cure, or to tell no one so that evil people couldn’t use it, but risk someone else discovering it later?”
“What did you decide?”
I pressed my lips together. “When I was sixteen, I wanted to tell everyone. I thought that we could solve everything just by piling more knowledge on it. Now…” I leaned back and studied the hard turquoise bowl of the sky. “I would only share the knowledgeif I had already found the cure, I think. Cures are… not easy to find.”And I am surprised that Saint Bird does not send lightning to strike me down for the sheer depth of that understatement.
“What’s the cure for this?” Javier asked.
“Break all the mirrors, I suppose. Or at least make sure none of them are large enough for a person to fit through. Who’d have human-sized mirrors after this?”
He was already shaking his head. “Someone could still get in if they had a set of properly sized mirrors with them. You get a long narrow mirror, pass it through the existing mirror, set it down, pass the next one through the first one, and so on until it’s big enough to fit through. Any mirror bigger than your hand ought to work.”
He was right, of course. Mirror glass was, what, a quarter inch thick? If someone hung a four-inch mirror on the wall, all you needed was a mirror three inches tall and three feet long. Slide that through and you could put a mirror three feet tall and six feet long through that, and then an assassin could walk through as easy as you please.
“Hell, all you’d need would be a mirror bigger than the point of a crossbow bolt, come to that,” Javier added.
I winced. He’d thought it through, more than I had. Even though I’d long since had the belief that I was the smartest person in the room knocked out of me, it was humbling. “You’re right,” I said. It hurt that he was right. I’d known that I couldn’t publish, but I had always planned to tell Scand, at least.
“Three can keep a secret,” I said heavily, “if two of them are dead. And we’re past three already.”
“And one of them’s a twelve-year-old royal heiress. I know.” Javier shook his head. “And we don’t know how many people the poisoner’s told. Lady Sorrel—if itisLady Sorrel—could have dozens of people working for her.”
“To say nothing of who discovered it in the first place. It might all be moot.” I worried at the end of my braid with my fingernails.“Saint Adder’s mercy, I’m not cut out for this. I putter around my workroom and shove charcoal down throats and occasionally up asses. This is all…” I made helpless gestures with my hands, trying to encompass the size of everything and the size of me in proportion.
Javier snorted. “You thinkyou’renot cut out for this? I’m a mere guard.”
“There’s nothingmereabout you,” I shot back.
An indescribable expression crossed his face, and then he was holding my eyes again, a little bit too long.
Saints, this isnotthe time. Not with everything else going on. And anyway, you hardly know the man.
I knew him before I fell through the mirror,I argued with myself. That felt like it had been years ago. In fact, it had only been, what, three, four days?
If this goes on for a full week, I may drop dead of sheer anxiety.
“Well,” said Javier, finally breaking away, “we should, uh, probably go investigate Lady Sorrel’s chambers and see if we can find anything incriminating.”
“Right.” It was good to have the next step to focus on, a simple task, not the whole tapestry of who knew about the mirrors and how much the world would change if more people found out. “Let’s get that out of the way.”
CHAPTER 21
The coolness of the mirror-world was a shock after the heat of the day. I unbolted my door and reached for the doorknob, but Javier stepped in front of me. “There’s a chance she’s out there now.”
“She’s what, seventy? I think I can probably fend her off.”
“Can you fend off a poisoned knife?”
“Can you?”
