Page 36 of Hemlock & Silver

The cook did not wish to part with the cream.

Despite fierce negotiation, I’m pretty sure that only the aegis of the king’s favor allowed me to succeed.

The only cows out here were stark, bony creatures with protruding ribs and hip bones, like leather sacks half-full of doorknobs.

They lived on things that you’d think were only good for kindling, but they were quite stingy about producing cream.

I returned to find Grayling sitting in front of the rooster’s cage. The rooster had his head down, his neck feathers puffed out to make himself look bigger, and was making an extremely hostile noise. The cat gave no sign of fear, but the last inch of his tail was flicking back and forth.

“ Someone, ” he said, “has fed mirror-food to this beast.”

“That was me. I was testing the apple for poisons.”

“That was…” I couldn’t tell if he was pausing for effect, or searching for a word. “… unwise .”

“Oh?”

He’d said that about me eating the apple, too. I was hoping he’d explain himself and add another scrap to my growing store of knowledge, but he didn’t. Another inch of tail began to flick.

“Won’t it wear off eventually?” I tried.

Grayling sniffed haughtily. “Certainly, if you wait for a year or two.”

“I didn’t know the apple was from the mirror when I did it,” I said apologetically. Inwardly, I was cheering. It won’t wear off right away! “Does that mean you can talk to him now?”

“No. He’s still just a rooster. They aren’t bright.”

“No, they aren’t.” I set down the dish of cream. The tiny clink of ceramic on wood was all that was needed. Grayling turned his back on the rooster—who charged the bars in impotent fury—and leaped up onto the table to devour his tribute.

I watched the rooster, who still seemed unharmed by the apple. “Their brains are smaller than their testicles,” I said absently.

Grayling paused, his tongue still in the cream. “Come again?”

“Roosters. If you dissect them.”

He muttered something that sounded like “figures” and went back to his meal.

He drank it all and licked the dish twice, his small pink tongue scouring away even the memory of cream, then cleaned his whiskers, jumped down from the table, and headed toward the door.

“Will you answer my questions tomorrow?” I asked hopelessly.

“Promises are human inventions,” he said pleasantly, and strolled out, tail held high.

I told myself that this was an opportunity. I was, for all I knew, the first person in history to communicate with a nonhuman intelligence. Alongside the mirror, it was an embarrassment of scientific riches. I should be excited. I should be grateful . I…

Had a feeling that Grayling was going to string me along to get as much cream as possible out of the deal, actually.

“Snakes,” I said to thin air, “are much easier.”

I walked back to my bedroom as fast as I could without exciting comment.

Despite Grayling’s obstinance, he’d told me one very useful fact.

(Two, if you counted that the apple’s effects would last for a year.) Real things don’t usually dissolve.

Granted, I would have appreciated a little more certainty, but I’d take what I could get, particularly if it meant that I could explore more widely beyond the mirror.

The sheer delight of exploration was so intense that my hands shook as I shoved my pen, penknife, and notebook into my pockets.

I felt a pang of guilt at that. I should have been working on how to cure Snow.

And yes, if the apple had come from the other side of the mirror, I was following up on that lead, so it was work, but it certainly didn’t feel like it.

I thought briefly about leaving a note, in case something went wrong, but what could I possibly say?

It wasn’t as if anyone would be able to come after me, except Grayling, who may or may not have been able to read.

Even if he could, would he bother? How useful did my cream-wrangling skills make me?

In the end, I didn’t leave one, simply because if someone found it, they would assume that I had gone mad. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and stepped through into the silver.

The mirrored bedroom looked exactly as it had, fortunately without the frozen shape of the maid. I glanced around once, quickly, then made my way toward the door.

As soon as my candle entered the band of gray, it went out.

I turned to the lamp, planning to relight the candle with it, only to find that the lamp in this world had no flame and gave no light. Huh. That’s odd.

I went back out, relit the candle with a spill, brought both spill and candle through the silver, and took a step into the gray.

Both flames went out simultaneously.

Realizing that I could get very sidetracked very quickly, I set them both on the table for later consideration and went to see if there was enough light to explore.

The hallway looked exactly as it had before. I paused on the threshold, feeling like a swimmer. My bedroom had been shallow water. Not safe, exactly. You could still drown in the shallows, but at least the way out was never far away.

Now I was about to plunge into the depths.

I set my foot on the gray tiles and stepped into the hall.

Nothing terrible happened. I realized I was holding my breath and let it out, laughing at myself. What had I expected? That there were… I don’t know, pits of spikes lying around, as soon as you got away from the mirror?

I glanced over my shoulder. My room was ablaze with light and color, but as soon as I stepped to the side, it was gone. There was no glow of reflected sunlight on the walls, no hints of color anywhere that I could see.

It was strangely unsettling. You know on some gut level how light works, and when it stops working like it should, your body registers that something is wrong.

Looking over the gallery railing, I could see down to the courtyard, the entire villa as dark as if it had been dipped in coal dust. The long galleries, the archways, the many doorways, all dark and lifeless.

No people. Of course, there were no mirrors in the halls—why would there be?

They were fragile and expensive things here, if not in faraway Silversand.

So no reflections would be caught standing in the halls, waiting like lost children for their owners.

That was probably for the best. The dark halls would not be any less unsettling if there were silent figures standing in them.

They must dissolve after a while, I told myself firmly. The alternative did not bear thinking about.

I made my way along the hall to the stairs. The doors were all closed. The archways, with their elaborate patterned tiles, were now dull monochrome. Unless the pattern had been carved or etched into the surface, the far side of the mirror brushed it all away.

From the stairs, I could look up at the sky. It, at least, was still blue, though it seemed dull and faded. I would have expected it to look brighter in contrast to the charcoal villa, but instead it seemed as if the color had been leached away.

There was an angular black scar across the sky, a triangle pointing roughly south.

Realistically I knew that it wasn’t a presence but an absence, the place where two reflected beams from distant mirrors diverged.

But the blackness seemed much more real and solid than the sky itself, and it was hard not to see it as some kind of object.

A massive piece of architecture, perhaps, or a freakishly straight-sided mesa looming over the desert.

I looked down to see if it cast a shadow, then realized that I wouldn’t be able to tell.

There were no truly deep shadows, nor any light sources except the sky.

Everything existed in that strange, sculptural light.

My hands on the railing had only faint shadows underneath them, and the railing itself had only a slightly darker curve along the bottom.

The staircase itself was surprisingly disorienting.

The monotonous color and lack of crisp shadows made it hard to judge the distance between steps.

And it was so quiet . The scuff of my heels on the steps was the only sound I could hear.

This space should have been full of people laughing and talking and working, a bustle of humanity going about its business in the villa.

I could not remember the last time I had heard such silence.

I cleared my throat a few times, expecting it to be disproportionately loud, but the noise was thin and small against the vast edifice of silence.

My excitement was rapidly mixing with fear, which did noth ing to stop the trembling in my hands. It felt a little like the first time I’d fallen in love. I’d been queasy and trembling and excited then, too.

Hopefully this would work out better.

At the bottom of the stairs, Lady Sorrel’s potted agaves stood clustered in one corner.

I bent down and touched one of the less spikey ones.

The thick leaves felt no different than anything else here.

They might as well have been all one with the soil and the pot itself, more like sculptures than anything living.

I took out my penknife and cut a thick leaf free.

The inside was gray all the way through.

I touched the edge, expecting it to be wet, but it was as cool and dry as the railing or the walls.

If I could touch the sky, I imagined it would feel much the same.

The blade of the knife, as I put it away, seemed like a world of silvery color.

So the surface isn’t just a gray patina, then. It’s actually completely made of this mirror-stuff. Huh.

I tucked the leaf into my pocket, wondering how long it would take to fall apart once I brought it back to the real world.

Perhaps, like the apple, it would last for hours.

Perhaps plants lasted longer than books.

Could it be because they were more alive?

Maybe. Or maybe, as Grayling had said, mirrors are strange .