Page 33 of Hemlock & Silver

“Saints have mercy!” I said aloud, staring at the mirror-book. I’d managed to bring an object back through the mirror. I hadn’t expected that. It hadn’t even occurred to me to try.

I looked over at the real book. It was still there. In the mirror, the nightstand was empty.

Strange as it may sound, this felt more like magic than entering the mirror had. The world in the mirror was different, foreign, almost dreamlike. This was real and solid and out here in the real world as I knew it.

The mirror-book was no longer partly gray, but it was not quite identical to the real one.

There was a silvery sheen to it, not quite reflective, like a thin coat of oil.

It also opened on the wrong side. I flipped to a random page, and the letters were indeed backward, which delighted me.

The pages themselves had the same sheen, like onionskin. It reminded me of something.

My eyes kept flicking to the mirror, drawn to the gap on the nightstand like a missing tooth.

What did it mean, if you could bring things out of the mirror?

Books, clearly, would be difficult, given that they were backward, but what about other things?

There were always medicines that were in short supply.

Suppose you could double them at a stroke?

I leaned against the wall for what must have been a quarter of an hour, my mind racing. Put a mirror in a granary and you could double food production… Reproduce objects like rugs that take so much time and labor to create…

Hell, if I wanted to be crass, bars of gold don’t care what direction they face.

The book twitched in my hand.

I would like to say that I set it down calmly, as befitted a priceless object of scientific study. Actually I jumped, squawked, and flung it aside as if it were an insect. A moment later, I realized that it hadn’t been a twitch, it had been the book crumbling away.

I watched in dismay as it fell apart. Have you ever seen a log in a fire that has burned completely to ash but retains its shape until you touch it?

Then it simply falls apart—and that’s what the book did.

Bits of silvery grit dripped onto the carpet as the rectangle became an irregular lump, and then the lump itself dissolved.

The ash twinkled in the lamplight, then it, too, faded away into nothing.

So much for bars of gold.

Now, why had that happened? Perhaps things from the mirror couldn’t exist in our world for very long? It made a kind of sense—not a scholarly, scientific sense, but a wonder-tale sense. There’s always a creature who pays you in gold that dissolves when dawn comes.

I told myself that wasn’t rational and that I didn’t believe in magic. Magic was just a way of waving your hand and saying, Because I said so , like an adult who was tired of a child asking, Why? You didn’t need magic if you were willing to put in the hard work of finding the answer.

Well. I was not the best or brightest student, I was never prone to great leaps of intellect, but I was never afraid of putting in the hard work.

Afraid, ha! I was dying to learn more. However much the maid in the mirror had unsettled me, I wanted to go back. Except…

I looked down at my empty hands, where not even a trace of ash remained. Did that mean that if I stayed too long in the mirror-world, I’d turn to dust myself?

I swallowed hard. How long would that take? I’d spent maybe ten minutes in the mirror-world each time. The book had lasted a good fifteen minutes. Would I have more or less time than a book?

How could I even test that without dying?

It occurred to me that I could probably use a rooster, the same as I did for poisons, but that felt wrong.

Saving someone’s life was one thing. Shoving a bird into an alternate dimension to fall apart into dust while I timed it from outside just didn’t feel right. Maybe I could use an inanimate object?

So many thoughts swirled through my head, along with a stomach-clenching fear that I’d only just avoided disintegration, that I did the only thing I could think of to do. I took a nap.

Go ahead and laugh, but intense feelings and intense thinking are exhausting.

And frequently when I wake up, my thoughts are clear and I’ve realized something.

I drew the curtains closed, stripped off my robes, and curled up under the blankets, hoping that an hour or two of sleep would clarify the extraordinary events of the last hour.

And in fact, they did. I woke up just as the sun was going down, and remembered that there was someone who knew a great deal about the mirror-world. More than I did, anyway.

I just had to find the cat.

I thought of all the places that a small gray cat could hide at dusk. Then I thought of how I would appear scouring the villa at night, looking for said cat. Then I stared at the ceiling for a few minutes, and then I tugged the bellpull and asked that dinner be sent up to my room.

When the tray arrived, I barely noticed what was on it.

I had stopped staring at the ceiling and was now gazing out over the gardens and into the distance, wondering how many mirrors it took to reflect the sky.

If someone in the villa had left their hand mirror aimed at the balcony, would that account for one of the wedges of blue I’d seen?

Or could it have been someone much farther away?

If a mirror at the port was aimed toward Witherleaf, and a mirror here was aimed toward the port, would we provide each place’s reflection with blue sky?

Scand would have been the person to talk to.

Optics and reflections and the various behaviors of light were his great passion.

He was long retired now, of course, staying on the estate my aunt managed, writing messages for people who weren’t comfortable with their letters, and serving as a scribe when my aunt needed something formal drawn up.

The rest of the time, he puttered around in his shed, shining light through prisms into rainbows and bouncing them off mirrors and the saints knew what else.

I itched to send him a letter, but I had barely picked up the quill before I set it down again.

Of course someone was going to be reading my mail.

If they’d set guards on my home to keep me from being hired by the king’s enemies, they certainly weren’t going to let me send letters unsupervised.

And anything I wrote would sound as if I had gone utterly mad.

At best they might think it was a code of some kind, and then they’d probably arrest Scand.

I was just wondering whether I could ask him to make the long journey here when my stomach lurched and the back of my tongue tensed up in the peculiar way it does when you’re about to be violently ill.

I clamped my hand over my mouth and lunged to the privy, where I was, indeed, remarkably ill. Whatever dinner had been, it was determined to vacate the premises.

Clutching the edge of the carved seat, I waited grimly through the next spasm. I hadn’t felt nauseated leading up to it. I didn’t feel under the weather. Was it possible that I’d been poisoned?

Of course you’ve been poisoned, you absolute ninny! You ate that damned apple not three hours ago!

Saints have mercy, in the excitement of the mirror, I’d nearly forgotten the apple.

The strange, chill apple. The apple with the silvery sheen on its skin. A sheen that looked just like the onionskin gleam on the mirror-book, and a chill that felt almost exactly like the cold prickle when I pushed my hand through the mirror.

Sweet Saint Rabbit, was that apple from the other side of the mirror?

Another spasm wracked my guts. It wasn’t pleasant. When that finished, I pressed my sweating forehead against the cool tiled wall. Was this the cause of Snow’s illness? It hadn’t reacted to my tests, but would it?

What if it’s just a normal apple, but from the other side?

Could it be that the apple wasn’t precisely poison, but reacted badly with food from our world?

You were fine until you ate something else, and then you were sick?

And the sickness could conceivably taper off, as the apple left your system, until you ate normally for a day, just as Snow did, and then… then what? Then she ate another apple?

I didn’t have much time to contemplate this before the next round of festivities struck.

When you are in the business of poisons, as I may have said before, you learn quite a lot about vomit.

In the course of testing things on myself, I’ve done it a number of times.

(Also, there were several parties in my youth that I prefer not to remember.) There is the quick and efficient ridding yourself of a substance, after which you feel better; the drunken misery where one clings to a spinning chamber pot and prays for death; and the which-end-is-it-going-to-be game of chance that is food poisoning.

And then, of course, there is the kind that practically turns you inside out, trying to shake loose any organs that aren’t nailed down. That was what I was experiencing now.

The stomach is sacred to Saint Sheep, although some claim that it’s actually sacred to Saint Fish in His Trout aspect.

If you’re making a pilgrimage to ask for help with an ulcer, you’ll probably want to hedge your bets and visit shrines to both.

If you’re puking your guts out, though, who you pray to is entirely up to you.

(If you’re drunk, though, you invoke Saint Rabbit, who is the patron of, among other things, debauchery.)

“Saint Trout, have mercy,” I begged. “Saint Adder, look kindly upon the health of your… your…” I blanked out on what I was for a moment. “Faithful. Right. Look kindly upon the health of your faithful.”

Look, I never said I was a good worshipper.

“I’m not going to die,” I told myself. “I’m not. Snow’s been eating these for months now. She hasn’t died.”

Although she could have built up an immunity over the last three months…