Page 41 of Hemlock & Silver

I rolled my eyes. “Fine. Wait here.”

I took myself off to the kitchen, where the cook parted cheerfully enough with a bit of fish.

It was brought in from the coast in a light brine to keep it fresh for three days of travel.

I watched her quick hands slice off a piece, remembering the strangely empty kitchen on the other side of the mirror, imagining what I’d see if I were standing there now.

The fish, first whole, then sliced into bits.

If I moved a piece of it, it would stay moved on the other side.

She used the side of her knife to sweep the cut pieces onto a small plate.

Now, if I had turned one of the pieces sideways, say, but it was still in the path of the knife, would it go onto the plate?

I suspected that it would, but I wasn’t sure.

If I returned the potato that Javier had eaten part of, it wouldn’t just hover in midair as the rest of the potatoes were taken away around it.

An idea struck me, as I pictured the potato. Those who eat mirror-food gain some abilities. You’ve seen it yourself.

And I had told him about the book, how it had fallen to dust in my hands…

“Grayling!” I called, bursting into the workroom. “Is one of the powers taking things out of the mirror-world?”

“Hmmm,” said the cat. “For a human, you’re not completely hopeless.” He eyed the saucer full of fish. “If you expect me to stand up and beg, though, I shall revise my opinion.”

“No, no.” I set the dish down on the table, and he sniffed haughtily at the fish, as if he weren’t going to fall on it and devour it. “But that doesn’t make sense! If you can get into the mirror and get mirror-food, why not just bring things out yourself? Why use Snow?”

“Why, indeed,” muttered the cat, face-first in the fish.

I leaned against the table, thinking. “It must be something that Snow could get at that they can’t. Like… um…” I racked my brain. “Maybe they want Snow to steal something for them? The crown jewels?”

Grayling snorted into his fish.

“Okay, probably not the crown jewels. Do we even have crown jewels? But maybe something like that?” I tried to picture a situation where Snow specifically being able to bring something out of the mirror would be important.

All I could think of was Javier talking about assassins.

If she pulled a dagger out of a mirror at a critical moment…

I listened to the tinny rasp of the cat’s tongue against the saucer. “Could they be hoping to use Snow to kill someone?”

The rasp paused for a moment.

“It’s something like that, isn’t it?”

Grayling finished licking the saucer for any stray memories of fish, then checked his whiskers over for the same thing.

“Grayling?”

“Mmm?”

“If Snow is going to murder someone, you have to tell me.”

He gave me a look somewhere between pity and contempt. “In fact, I do not. I never have to speak to you again if I don’t wish to.”

It was hard to imagine that this was the same animal who had snuggled up under my arm and purred. “But we’re talking about people’s lives ! Saints, what if she killed the king ?”

“A man who has never, to my knowledge, fed me.” He hopped down from the table, then paused and gave me a wry look. “Don’t fluster yourself so. Your human princess is not going to go stabbing people anytime soon. Unlike her mother.”

He sauntered out. I stared down at my basin of glassware, my mind awhirl. Was Snow being set up as an unlikely assassin? Did the cat actually know something, or was he just enjoying toying with me in between free meals?

For that matter, was Grayling actually a cat?

He acted like one, but cats don’t talk and they certainly don’t talk in your head.

I had mostly managed to shove that to one side, figuring that as I came to understand the mirror-world, I’d understand the mirror-cat as well, but that hadn’t happened yet.

“Saints,” I muttered. “Maybe it really is magic.”

Even saying that made me feel dirty. I picked up the sponge and jabbed it into a tube again, watching the built-up grime scrape away from the sides. When it was finally clean and I held it up to the light, I discovered that a gray cat hair had somehow gotten wedged inside.

Javier found me in the workroom, milking the chime-adder’s venom.

“Please don’t get too close,” I said calmly. At home, I locked the door to my workroom when I did this, but there was no lock on the inside of the door here.

Javier froze. I couldn’t take my eyes off the snake long enough to see his expression, but if it was anything like other people I knew, it registered horror, then confusion, then reluctant fascination, usually in that order.

The chime-adder, who had her fangs embedded in a piece of cloth, was mostly registering annoyance, judging by the angry carillon of bells.

I held a polished wood stick against the roof of her mouth, pushing gently against the fangs while venom ran down and dripped into the funnel I’d positioned below.

(Well, most of it got into the funnel, anyway.

There’s always a little that ends up on your hands or the cloth or the tabletop, because liquids are like that.)

“Is that…? Are you…?” Javier stopped and tried again. “Is that poison ?”

“Yep.” (Like I said, there is really no point in being pedantic about venom versus poison in practice.) “I do this once a month or so.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

“Oh no, it doesn’t hurt her at all. She just doesn’t like having her head held. I mean, who would, really?”

“I meant for you, ” said Javier. I didn’t have to see his expression—I could hear it in his voice.

“Oh. Yes, but I’m good at it.”

“I see.”

I finished with the snake, unhooked her from the cloth, and put her back in her cage, dropping the lid on quickly. “There you go, sweetheart. There’ll be a nice mouse for you in a day or two.”

Javier’s face was a study in baffled stoicism. He shook his head slowly while I sealed up the tube of venom, which was already starting to crystallize in the air. “How deadly is that there?”

“This?” I held up the tube. “You could drink it and be perfectly safe, so long as you don’t have an ulcer.

A needle dipped into it and inserted into your flesh would give you some nasty swelling around the site—and it would hurt like the devil—but it certainly won’t kill a healthy individual.

As much venom as is in this tube…” I held it up and did some quick calculations in my head.

“If you could inject it the way that the chime-adders do, it’d kill two, maybe three people.

By pouring it into a fresh wound, I expect you could kill one person, or at least give them the worst day of their lives. ”

His eyebrows were going up.

“Don’t worry,” I said hastily, putting the tube away, “the adult snakes rarely pour all their venom into a bite. It’s not worth it when it takes so long to produce.”

“Good to know,” he said faintly, as I washed my hands.

“How are you feeling?” I asked. He was standing upright and not retching or moaning the way that I had after eating the mirror-apple, but since guards are presumably trained to stand upright without retching, I couldn’t be sure.

“A little queasy,” he admitted. “I skipped dinner. And breakfast. I’m running on tea at the moment.”

“That should pass soon.” I’d tackled my breakfast with great enthusiasm, and the rooster was eating normally as well. “So…”

“So.”

“Now what?”

Javier rubbed the back of his neck. “We need to write the letter to the king,” he said. “Then I’d like to go through the mirror and walk the perimeter of the villa. Maybe it doesn’t actually extend all that far.”

“Sure,” I said. “And if it does go as far as the rest of the world?”

“Then I suppose we’ll deal with that. If assassins can come out of mirrors, no one here may be safe.”

“Assuming that the assassins know about the mirrors. I can’t imagine many people do. Someone would have written a paper about it by now.”

He gave me a look. I gave it right back.

Eventually Javier sighed, and his shoulders slumped a little.

“I could barely sleep,” he admitted, “thinking of all the terrible things that someone could use this power for. You could bring an entire invasion force straight into the heart of someone’s city, unless they had an army stationed on both sides of the mirror. This could change the entire world.”

“Only if the world finds out about it,” I said, determined to stay cheerful. “And it’s not like crossing the mountains gets any easier inside the mirror.”

“Crossing the desert does, though,” he said gloomily. “If it doesn’t get hot there, you’d need so much less water. You could just set up mirrors at each watering hole.”

“They’d have to be awfully big mirrors, if you’re planning on getting an army through.”

“There’s that.” He brightened a little. “I’ve never seen mirrors any bigger than the ones here, and a horse probably wouldn’t fit through these.”

“And feeding them the mirror-food would be dicey.” Horses can’t vomit any more than chickens can, and their digestion is so fragile that I’m sometimes amazed they don’t catch fire and explode.

“Right.” Javier nodded. “Letter, then let’s check the mirror. If nothing else, if our poisoner is using the mirrors to get around unseen, they may have left some sign.”

Javier proved skilled at letter writing, by which I mean that he crossed out most of what I’d written. “You’re making a report,” he said, “not trying to impress a courtier. I’ve reported to King Randolph before.”

The final letter simply read:

Your Majesty—

Discovered the poison. Trying to track down the delivery method. Will write as soon as I know more.

—Healer Anja

“Really?” I said, looking down at the message, which was so terse as to border on rude.

“Trust me,” said Javier, already heating up the sealing wax.

I do trust him , I thought, as I sealed the letter. Even if I was still somewhat offended by the look he’d given me earlier, I didn’t think for a moment that he was going to denounce me as a witch. And I had no reason to doubt his skill or dedication as a bodyguard either.

Granted, the fact that he could also pass into the mirror meant that he’d probably wind up on the pyre next to me, which didn’t hurt.

He checked his weapons and nodded to me. Then we both stepped into the silver.