Page 35 of Hemlock & Silver

Morning came on like an unearned hangover. I opened my eyes, closed them again, put my arm over my forehead, and moaned softly.

“Everything’ll look easier after a cup of tea,” said the maid.

I cracked one eye open again and saw the mass of devouring hair. Was tea preferable to death? Possibly. As a scholar, I was obligated to research the matter. I grunted something.

Tea, fortunately, did not seem to enrage the apple the way dinner had. I drank two cups and decided that since I was alive, I might as well stay that way.

I guiltily asked the maid to have the bath filled, then soaked myself in it until the odor of dried sweat was gone.

Even surrounded by the smell of lavender, I couldn’t stop thinking about the apple.

How was Snow getting a mirror-apple? Even if someone was leaving it out for her, why was she eating it?

After the night I’d spent, I wasn’t sure that I was ever going to eat food again, let alone strange apples.

And was her illness really entirely from eating the mirror-apples? Could it all be explained by malnutrition?

I rubbed my temples. I had a dull headache brought on by… well, take your pick, really. The tea had erected walls against it, but it was creeping under them like water eroding the foundations.

Well, no help for it. Things to do today. I sat up, reaching for a towel, and my eyes trailed across the small mirrored tiles on the wall.

A figure was standing in the doorway directly behind me.

I whirled around, clutching the washcloth to my chest and sending a flood of water splashing over the side of the tub.

There was no one there.

I stared at the doorway for much longer than necessary to determine that there wasn’t anyone standing there.

I thought I’d seen someone—the maid?—but the figure, in that half-second glimpse, had looked taller and much paler, though still dark-haired.

I looked back to the mirror, then the real doorway again. Both remained resolutely empty.

“You’re getting paranoid,” I muttered. It was no different than when you are walking around at twilight and a coatrack suddenly becomes a sinister figure.

Your mind fills in dozens of details in that half second, until you can almost see the gleam of the knife—and then the moment passes, and the shadows become friendly again, and you realize that you nearly fled in terror from your father’s second-best coat.

“Right!” I said, and pushed myself to my feet.

Water streamed down my body, and I left wet footprints on the tiles.

The desert air did more to dry me than the towel did.

I left the bathing room, and the thought crossed my mind that on the other side of the mirrored tiles, a version of me stood motionless and just out of sight, her skin gone to cold gray clay.

That she had followed me here across the desert, standing silently for hours, until a mirror snagged my reflection and pulled her close.

It was a strange squirmy thought, like an earthworm wriggling against my hand. “Right,” I said again, a little less confidently. “Time to get to work.”

The rooster greeted me with an attempted crow. (Young roosters, much like young boys, have to grow into their voices.) It came out as a high-pitched err-earrrrr-ooooh? He seemed to realize that it wasn’t satisfactory and settled down to sulk.

“You tried, buddy,” I said. “I’m just glad you’re feeling well.” I had managed a small piece of toast, in very slow stages, accompa nied by another gallon of tea. The apple was clearly not completely out of my system yet.

I fed the chime-adder—the stable boy had come through so spectacularly that I had had to sneak several mice out to the gardens and release them—and found some willow powder for my headache. Aaron and Javier were following up on the apple, which meant that it was up to me to follow up on the mirror.

I spent the next several hours roaming the villa, looking for the one-eyed cat.

It is very likely that the staff’s opinion of my sanity dropped significantly in that time.

The only person who knew anything about the beast’s habits was my faithful stable boy, who said that he sometimes saw the cat walking on the wall around the kitchen courtyard and jumping up on the roof for a nap in a shady patch under the eaves.

Unfortunately, the cat wasn’t there at the time.

I was eventually reduced to wandering the gardens, calling, “Here kitty, here kitty, here… obnoxious kitty who knows exactly what I’m saying, damn it, we need to talk…” At least one gardener heard me and asked delicately if I should really be out in the sun without a hat.

After all that, I returned to my workshop in despair and found the cat stretched out on his side on my worktable, with the jar of willow powder smashed open on the flagstones underneath.

“You!” I said. “I’ve been looking for you!”

The cat blinked lazily at me but said nothing. Fear blossomed deep in my gut that he didn’t actually talk and I had been hallucinating the whole thing, probably because of the apple.

Still, if you find yourself in an upside-down world, all you can do is plow forward and obey the internal logic as best you can. “I accidentally brought a book back from the mirror-world. And then it fell apart into dust.”

“Yes,” said the cat, “they do that.”

He did talk. I leaned against the worktable, feeling slightly damp with relief, and shoved down all the questions about how he talked, at least for the time being. “Does it work the other way? Am I going to dissolve?”

“Real things generally don’t dissolve.” He sat up and stretched, his body bending into a long fishhook shape. “Always the questions with you. Don’t humans ask each other how they’ve been?”

“You’re right,” I said, chastened. “I’m sorry. How have you been?”

Another slow stretch, the other way this time. “Well,” he said afterward, while I waited impatiently. “I have been well .” His tail flicked and hit another jar, this one full of one of my reagents. He turned to look at it as if it had personally offended him.

“I think I figured out how I got into the mirror,” I told him excitedly. (If you’d told me a week ago that I’d be thrilled to be talking to a cat, I would have suspected you of taking any number of herbal poisons with interesting side effects.) “I ate an apple that came from the other side.”

One ear twitched in my direction. “How unwise.”

I grabbed a dustpan and set to work cleaning up the broken glass. “I was extremely sick last night. Is it likely to do anything else? And will it wear off?”

I looked up from the floor as I said it, so that our faces were briefly level. One golden eye blinked slowly, then he gave a vast, full-body shrug and turned his attention back to the reagent jar.

“But listen,” I said, when it became obvious that was the only answer I was getting. “This apple. The book I took out on accident fell apart in fifteen minutes. The apple lasted for hours. Why? What’s the difference?”

The cat hooked his paw behind the jar and tapped it a few times, moving it toward the edge of the table.

“Stop that!” I said, snatching it up before he could knock it to the floor. I received an offended look for my rudeness, but nothing more.

“Do you know why?” I asked finally.

Sunbeams through the window gilded the edges of his fur and turned his ears to red stained glass. “Mirrors,” he said, after lengthy contemplation, “are strange.”

I waited over a minute for a follow-up, which was not forthcoming. “That’s it?”

He sat down with his back to me and began to clean one delicate paw.

“You were so helpful the other day,” I said, exasperated.

“I felt helpful,” the cat said. “I don’t feel particularly helpful today.”

“What if I got you a saucer of cream?”

“Then I would drink it,” the cat said, between licks.

“ Then will you feel more helpful?”

“Unlikely. I am not a dog. I do not perform for treats.”

I wanted to tear my hair out. “Then I won’t get you any cream.”

“In that case,” said the cat, transferring his attention to the other paw, “it is highly unlikely that I will feel helpful anytime soon.”

I gripped the edge of the table and reminded myself that screaming would be counterproductive. “Listen, cat—err—oh hell . Do you have a name?”

“I have many names,” said the cat.

“Do you have one that you would like me to call you?”

“Mmm.” A bit of fur caught under one claw required his attention. “His Gloriousness, God-King of the Deserts, Lord of Rooftops, Kin of Mirrors, Heir to the Mantle of Harar, He Who Treads the Serpent’s Tail, Whose Claws Have Scarred the Bark of the Great Tree.”

I put my head in my hands. “That… is a lot.”

He did not dignify this with a response.

“I was thinking of something… er… shorter. Like Stormy. Or, um, Mouser.”

His Gloriousness twisted his head around and gave me a look more venomous than the caged adder.

I leaned against the table. The cat, after a short pause, went back to cleaning his paws. I waited. If he was waiting, he didn’t show it.

After about five minutes of this, I realized that I was trying to outwait a cat and gave up. “Your Gloriousness,” I said, trying to remember, “God-King of… um… the Deserts, Lord of… Lord of Rooftops…”

I got most of the way through my straggling recitation when he stretched and said, “I have occasionally found the name Grayling useful.”

Strangling the only being who understands the mirror would be counterproductive. Yes. Very… counterproductive. No sense asking why he was like this. He was a cat. If cats were helpful, they’d be dogs.

I had always been more of a dog person.

“Grayling, then,” I said.

He curled his tail neatly over his toes and looked up at me with an expression of bland innocence. “Now, I believe that there was some mention of cream?”