Page 95 of Hemlock & Silver
And then Nurse told the queen. Our queen, on this side. And she must have realized at once what had happened. That her own daughter had been replaced by this simulacrum from the other side.
There are plenty of stories of changelings out there, and they’re generally used to explain why a child is suddenly behaving badly, or getting sick, or acting peculiar.It can’t bemychild.Mychild is normal and healthy, sothis onemust be a stranger.
Poor dead queen. The first person in history to believe that her child was replaced by a doppelganger and actually be correct.
I wondered why she’d tried to cut out mirror-Rose’s heart. A twisted sense of justice? A desperate belief that maybe if she couldget the heart out, she could feed it to Rose’s body and wake her again?
It must have been far too late for that. The real Rose was probably in a shallow grave somewhere near the mirror-palace. Both Roses lost, killed by their mothers from the other side of the silver.
I explained this to Javier, who listened gravely. “Have I missed anything?” I asked, when I was done. I was hoping that maybe there was some place where my theory unraveled, something that proved it was only a monstrous flight of fancy, not cold truth.
“One thing.”
“Yes?”
“We’re here.” Javier waved to a door set low in the wall.
“Oh, thank the saints.” I pressed back against the wall and let him go by me. He pulled the door open with a squeak of hinges—I winced at the sound—and then let out a curse.
The door was apparently as well hidden on the far side as it was at the top. So well hidden, in fact, that someone had stacked barrels against it. All we could see was curved wood and a metal stave.
Javier tried to push it out of the way and got exactly nowhere. “There are too many of them,” he said grimly. He started to lie down on the stairs to push with his legs, but I had images of his abused ribs on stone and stopped him.
“I’ll try it. And if you say I’m not strong enough, I will punch you in the kidneys.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Unfortunately it didn’t matter that I was bigger than most women. I could have been muscled like a blacksmith and that barrel wouldn’t have moved. By the angle of the curve, it was one of the big wine casks, and there were probably two or three more stacked on top and alongside.
In the Red Feather Saga, the secret passages always come out somewhere convenient. I was beginning to suspect that the dialogue wasn’t the only thing that was unrealistic.
“Do we go back?” I asked.
Javier pulled a face. “I guess it’s that or try to kick the barrel open. And then the next one that falls on top of it, and the next one after that.”
“That seems like it would take a lot of work,” I said doubtfully.
“But who’s going to be waiting for us at the top? I doubt Lady Sorrel can convince them we simply vanished into thin air.”
With fine dramatic timing, there was a thud from the distant top of the stairwell. We both looked up.
“Well,” I said. “That doesn’t—eerk!”
There was a scraping noise from the wall, and before my ears had finished registering it, hands grabbed me and yanked me backward. Alotof hands. My first disjointed thought was that there must be at least five people holding me and where had they come from? I was carried ten feet back along a passageway, my feet no longer touching the ground.
“Anja!” Javier came pounding after me, his eyes wide. Over his shoulder, I saw something gray come scuttling down from the ceiling, where it had been nearly invisible. It touched something on the wall, and there was another scraping noise as the opening to the secret stair closed up.
The hands set me down. Javier grabbed me and pulled me to him, one hand slapping at the absence of a sword at his side. He swore. I turned and looked at my kidnapper, already half knowing what I’d see.
It was a mirror-geld. Dozens of times larger than the one I’d seen before, a thicket of arms and grasping hands. The ones at the bottom had palms flat against the ground, like feet. The passage we were in was only about four feet wide, but it was at least twelve feet high, and the mirror-geld more than filled it. It looked squashed against the sides, and I saw more hands braced against the walls.
“Oh. Shit,” Javier said, forming each word clearly and distinctly.
The wall of hands parted vertically, like mandibles opening,revealing dozens of faces. Only a few were intact. The rest had been pieced inexpertly together, broken mouths fitted against bridgeless noses, skewed and mismatched eyes, all of them wedged against each other like bits of shattered pottery reassembled by a madman.
With horrifying synchronicity, every face squinted down at us.
“There’s another one behind us,” I said. I had gone past terror into a kind of frozen calm. I was dead. I was utterly and unbelievably dead. The arsenic was drunk, the hemlock eaten. There was no point in screaming about it now. All I could muster was a vague regret that my family wouldn’t have ashes to put in the spirit house.
