Page 39 of Hemlock & Silver

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “He’ll disappear if he gets reflected somewhere else.

I haven’t watched one long enough to see if they fade away eventually.

I don’t know if the mirror just doesn’t work fast enough to keep up with moving things or if there’s something special about living things.

Well, living animal–type things. Plants show up just fine, but that might just be because they’re so much slower. Although—”

The servant winked out. There was nothing so dramatic as a flash of light, even though it felt like there should have been. Maybe there was a flash of gray. Would we even be able to tell?

Javier bit back a curse and took a step backward, as if teleportation might be contagious.

“I think that means he found another mirror,” I said.

The lines around his mouth deepened. “Is it any mirror here, then?”

I shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. Every one I’ve seen so far?

The maid told me a lot of them came from Silversand, so it may only be those specific mirrors.

I haven’t had a chance to really look at anything but the ones in my bedroom and privy.

I’d feel weird walking into other people’s rooms to look at their mirrors, even if it wasn’t in the real world. It feels like spying.”

“Can you step through any one of them?”

“I think so? I haven’t been able to test it. I can put my fingers through smaller mirrors, and it seems likely that they’re back in the real world, but I couldn’t exactly fit my entire body through them.”

His frown turned to a scowl. “If so, it would be an extraordinary tool for an assassin.”

I blinked. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

He went back to the railing and leaned against it, looking down into the silent courtyard.

I joined him, the rail a cold bar across my elbows. “But isn’t it amazing?”

Javier looked at me, then away, a smile ghosting across his lips. Even that lit up his face and made him briefly handsome. “Yes,” he admitted. “It’s pretty amazing.”

I could feel myself beaming.

After a long moment, he asked, “Do you really think the whole world is in here? If we walked to Four Saints, would we find the whole city empty like this?”

Empty except for gray people clustered around the mirrors , I thought, but didn’t say. “I think it’s likely.”

“Couldn’t it just be this building?” I detected a plaintive note in his voice. As calm as Javier seemed, apparently the idea of an entire mirror-world was a lot to take in.

“Afraid not. I went outside earlier, and the desert’s there.”

“And it looks like…?” He swept his arm in a broad arc, indicating the cold, gray galleries. “All of it?”

“Yeah. And there’s the apple, too.”

“Eh?”

“The apple had to come from somewhere. I didn’t find any in the kitchen, so where did Snow get it?”

“Maybe one of the people in the king’s retinue brought an apple here and she got hold of it somehow?” He shrugged. “If all mirror-food has the same effect, then it could have been anything, couldn’t it? A mirror-sandwich would work just as well.”

“Y-e-e-e-s…” I said slowly. He wasn’t wrong, exactly, but I had a feeling there was more to it than that.

Gut feelings aren’t very scientific, but they’re often the result of a lot of observations that you don’t know that you’re making, so I wasn’t ready to discount mine entirely.

Still, I didn’t have any way to argue the point.

Javier lapsed back into brooding silence for a few moments, then seemed to come to some decision. “I’m on shift in half an hour,” he said. “How can we find out if an assassin could come through any mirror in the villa?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” I said. “We’ll test it in my washroom.” I pushed open the door to my mirror-bedroom and waved in the direction of the washroom. “I’ll go out into the real world. You put your hand through the mirror in there, and if it comes through, I’ll see it, and we’ll know it works.”

He nodded. I stepped out of the silver and was slightly relieved to see that no one else had turned up in the interim. Explaining everything to Javier was draining, and he didn’t seem nearly as thrilled by it as I was.

I heaved a sigh. Nobody’s ever excited by the right things, I thought mournfully.

Javier’s reflection was already in the washroom mirror. I turned and looked over my shoulder involuntarily, even though I knew he wouldn’t be there. The reflex was just too strong. Like just this morning, when I had taken a bath and seen someone, and turned—

Except there wasn’t anyone there that time. It was a trick of the light. Not everything you see out of the corner of your eye is real.

I stepped to one side so my mirror-self wouldn’t be blocking the looking glass on the other side. If Javier had to jostle my gray shadow reflection out of the way in the mirror-world, I wasn’t sure what would happen to me here. One experiment at a time.

He reached toward the mirror, and for a moment nothing happened. I pointed to my face and closed my eyes. I opened them again in time to see him close his eyes and push his hand forward.

His fingers emerged from the glass.

“It worked!” I said. I reached out and clasped his hand, giving it a quick squeeze.

His eyes snapped open again. An expression crossed his face for just a moment, but long enough for me to drop his hand as if I’d been burned.

Disgust. It had been pure, lip-curling disgust. He hid it quickly, pulling his hand back, but I’d seen enough. Through the mirror, Javier had looked like a man standing knee-deep in pig shit.

What the hell was that? I squeezed his hand, I didn’t kiss it. It was friendly, that was all.

I mean, yes, fine, I had been excited to share the mirror-world with him.

And sure, it’s hard to stay stiff and professional with someone who has draped a bathrobe around you while you’re sick and who immediately jumps between you and a perceived threat.

And maybe I was secretly glad that it had been Javier who found me out, because he kept his mouth shut and, let’s face it, wasn’t bad looking.

But I’d barely moved to the oh, hmm, you’re interesting, aren’t you?

stage of attraction. I wasn’t expecting him to fall to his knees and swear undying fealty to me.

I would have been horribly embarrassed if he had.

But he didn’t need to look so revolted that I’d touched him.

Javier emerged from the main mirror a moment later. “It worked, then,” he said.

I nodded coolly, not trusting myself to speak.

He was holding one hand up, palm cupped. “I found something odd on the floor,” he said. “I think it may be from the real world.”

Surprise loosened my voice. “Oh? What is it?”

“I’m not sure.” He reached out and decanted the object into my hand. I made sure that our fingers didn’t touch, and then I saw what it was and stopped thinking about that at all.

It was small and white, and I recognized it immediately.

It was a violet pastille.

I sat down on the bed with a thump. “Snow,” I said numbly.

“She’s been here.” My memory skittered through the last few days like an insect, before settling on the night that I’d sensed an intruder in the room and seen a pale figure watching me.

And—shit—I’d even thought that their hair was pale, like Snow’s, hadn’t I?

I’d blamed it on the moonlight, but the reason it had been that color was because it had been Snow all along.

Which meant, of course, that she’d seen my undignified tumble out of bed and the saints knew what else. She could have been watching me at any time. Hell, she’d been watching me for so long, at one point, that she’d actually brought a snack . She could even be—

Get a hold of yourself. She can’t be there right now, because Javier was just in the mirror. Yes, all right, it’s a little unsettling… a lot unsettling… to realize that a twelve-year-old has been staring at you at night, but there’s no need to panic.

“Anja?”

I blinked up at him. “She’s been watching me. She’s been coming in here and watching me through the mirror.”

Javier absorbed this information, then reached out and gripped my shoulder. Despite my earlier misgivings, the solidity of that grip reassured me. “We can fix this.”

“Can we?”

I could cover the mirrors, but presumably anyone could just reach through and push the fabric aside. I’d either have to move to a room with no mirrors at all, which might not be all that easy in a house outfitted by the princess of a mirror-making kingdom, or sleep in my workroom.

Javier cocked his head, gazing into the distance while he thought. “You said that things you change in there stay changed, right? If you move something, it stays moved?” I nodded. “So if you lock a door, it should stay locked, correct?”

This was true. If I hadn’t been too busy feeling mortified, I’d have realized it myself. “Of course. I’ll just go lock the door. You’re right, I’m just…” I put a hand to my face. My cheeks were hot. “It’s. Um. Upsetting. To realize you’ve been spied on.”

Javier nodded. He helped me through the mirror as courteously as if it were simply a high step, then watched while I closed the chamber door and locked it. “Hopefully that will stop her.”

I grunted.

“She can only be coming through at night,” he offered, as we returned to the real world. “During the day, she is surrounded by an army of maids.”

This was true, and it raised the question of where she’d gotten the apple in the first place.

I mentioned this to Javier, who shrugged.

“Whoever it was could have simply left it inside the mirror in a place where she could pick it up, correct? If it was somewhere out of the way, perhaps around a corner, she would only have to reach a hand through.”

“Right,” I said. “They don’t have to be left in the real world, do they?”

He grunted, then glanced toward the balcony. “It’s getting late. I need to report for duty. You should stay out of the mirror until I can return.”

“What? Why?”

“It could be dangerous.”

I folded my arms, annoyed. “I’ve been in and out of it dozens of times since I found it.” Which was an exaggeration, but close enough. “I know more about it than you do.”

“It could still be dangerous.”

“How? There aren’t even any real people there. Except Snow, and I think I can take her.”

“Snow and whoever is poisoning her.”

I ran into his words like a kitten into a wall. Right. The poisoner. Them.

Until he’d said something, they hadn’t been real in my head.

They were a placeholder, an idea you read about, like the hypothetical patient who takes the hypothetical poison and suffers the hypothetical symptoms. I knew that someone must be getting the mirror-food to Snow, but since I knew nothing about them, I had filed them mentally into the same box.

It hadn’t occurred to me that they could be out and about in the mirror-world the same way that I was, and if they encountered me, they might have a very good reason to wish me harm.

“… Huh,” I said.

Javier had the decency not to look smug. “On the bright side,” he said, “if we can catch sight of them in there, we’ll know who it is.”

I wasn’t quite willing to yield all access to the mirror-world. “If I do go in, I’ll stay in this room,” I said.

He clearly wanted to argue the point, but then glanced at the balcony again—or rather, I suppose, at the position of the sun—and sighed. “Fine.”

“Are you going to tell Aaron?”

“What? Saints, no!” He seemed startled by the suggestion.

“I love Aaron like a brother, but he could no more keep a secret than he could fly. And the fewer people who know about this, the better. Now I really must go. I’ll come back as soon as I’m off shift—no, damn it, that’s at midnight. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

He gave me a very slight bow, and went off to report for whatever it was that bodyguards did when they didn’t have a body to guard. And I stared at the pastille in my hand and thought about Snow watching me and shivered.