Page 42 of Hemlock & Silver

The mirror-door was still locked, which made me feel slightly better about things. Granted there was nothing I could do about the balcony, but I couldn’t see Snow managing the acrobatics required to get up there.

We headed outside to the gardens. “I’d like to check the place where I found Snow with the apple,” I said. Javier grunted. I wondered how many words he was allotted a week and whether he had been going into a deficit with all the talking I’d been demanding.

A sharp dividing line of color ran down the middle of the gardens. I wondered whose mirror was causing it. A bedroom on the second floor, as far as I could tell. Maybe it was Snow’s. Regardless, it threw a wedge of light a long way across the world.

As we approached the boundary, I saw something odd about the garden path. It looked like there was a small gray rise, maybe three inches tall, at the edge of the reflection. Is that a threshold? That’s not there in the real world…

Then we got closer, and I stopped so abruptly that Javier ran into my shoulder.

“Oh, yuck, ” I said.

It was made of insects. Drifted up against the edge like sand, their reflections had flown or crawled out of the gaze of the mirror and then stopped. I saw beetles and moths, crane flies and mosquitoes, butterflies with scalloped wings, all of them jumbled together in a chitinous pile of gray.

(I’m not afraid of bugs, let me be clear. I have administered both scorpion and centipede venom to myself to document the effects. I have even worked through my fear of spiders. But the effect of the whole pile, lying motionless, was both unnerving and sad.)

Javier took his belt knife and hooked it under the curved tail of a hairy desert scorpion, lifting it up. It dangled there like a strange piece of jewelry, apparently dead.

No, not dead. Not awake, according to Grayling. Whatever that means.

They were densest on the path, probably because the flying insects used the gap between trees, but there were bodies all along the mirror edge.

Not just insects either. I saw a swallow belly down on the ground, wings outstretched, tail a sharp scissor shape against the dirt.

The area nearest the flowering sage was littered with frozen hummingbirds.

Even knowing that they weren’t dead, that they were just mirror-stuff, not real birds, I still found it a tragic sight. I reached down and picked one up. What would happen if I stepped into the light? Would it come alive for a brief moment and take flight from my hand?

I stretched my hand out into the beam of light, and the hummingbird turned brilliant. Green feathers bloomed along its back, and its head lit up with a hundred shades of iridescent pink. I almost gasped at the sight.

But that was all that happened. It still lay limply in my hand, the sharp needle of its beak stretched out across my palm. I carefully folded down its wings, but it didn’t react, or move, or breathe.

Of course. It’s just a reflection without its creator. It can’t do anything on its own. Except… I’d brought the book through the mirror, hadn’t I? And it had been a real book on the real side, at least for a few minutes. Would the hummingbird be real, too?

I took out a handkerchief and wrapped it carefully before putting it in my pocket. I had to know. Purely scientific curiosity, I told myself. It had nothing to do with how sad the stiff little reflections were, how cold and gray when they should be living jewels.

And there are just so many of them.

I forced myself to think objectively. Of course there’d be a great many of them.

How often would insects wander into a reflection out in the desert?

In fact, given that the mirrors had been installed at least thirteen years ago, when the king had brought his bride to Witherleaf for her honeymoon, that meant…

“They dissolve eventually,” I said out loud. “They must . This proves it.”

Javier looked from his scorpion to me and back again. “You’re going to have to explain that one to me.”

“Look. There’s a couple of inches of insects here, right? But how many insects fly through here every day? Their bodies would drop right here. This is, what, a week’s worth of accumulation? Maybe less? Do you know how many bugs there are in the desert?”

“I suspect you’re going to tell me.”

“A lot .” I nodded my head furiously, hoping to somehow impress the sheer quantity on him. “ So many. This might only be one night’s worth. But the mirrors have been here for years, right? So there should be… I don’t know… drifts of dead bugs as high as your head.”

“… Vivid,” he said, setting down his scorpion.

“So that means that the reflections should eventually disintegrate!” I beamed at him.

“That’s good?” asked Javier.

“Well, if you don’t like the thought of dead people standing around mirrors for all eternity.”

He went a little green. I gave him a moment to recover himself, then stepped over the line of color.

There was nothing much of interest in the gardens, other than the unsettling drift of insects.

The little pocket garden where I had found Snow had a line of mirrored tiles behind the statue of the woman, which split around her into two fans of color.

They were about five inches on a side, but so subtly placed that I hadn’t noticed them in the real world.

I wondered how many other mirrors were hidden around the villa.

I might have passed one a dozen times a day and never even noticed.

Javier studied the area closely, looking for signs that someone had been here recently, but if they had, they had not been accommodating enough to leave any tracks.

“The apple was probably tucked up behind the statue,” I said. “No one would have noticed it there, and she could have just reached through and picked it up.”

“We could break the mirrors,” Javier suggested. “But that will almost certainly put the poisoner on their guard.”

He looked at me expectantly, and I realized that I was supposed to decide.

Me? Why? I distill things and dose people with charcoal, I don’t run spy campaigns.

But of course Javier was my bodyguard, and by some bizarre alchemy, having a bodyguard meant that you were nominally in charge of them, as long as you didn’t try to send them away.

“I have no idea what we should do,” I said. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

Oddly, that didn’t seem to bother him. He nodded. “You can’t unbreak a mirror,” he said. “We’ll leave it for now and do it later if we must.”

I nodded. There was an ache in my chest, and I didn’t know why. It felt a little like fear.

We left the garden and continued on our circuit of the villa. Off to the left, I could just make out the barn that held the non-cream-producing cattle. It occurred to me that if I went down the road to the barn, all the stalls would be empty.

Unless there are cow reflections left standing around. But how often do cows encounter a mirror?

Javier passed with little more than a glance.

“Too many people coming and going,” he said, when I looked at him askance.

“You’d be gambling that no one would ever have a mirror on them when they went out to the stables and that they wouldn’t happen to notice that the reflections didn’t match up.

It’s possible, and we can check it later, but I wouldn’t do it. ”

“Where would you hide out?” I asked, slightly amused. “If you were a diabolical poisoner.”

“If I had a base of operations on this side, I would want it to be somewhere that no one would wander through on accident. So either concealed outside or in a private room inside.”

“I’d think inside would be more likely,” I said, as we resumed trudging around the perimeter.

“It is, but I want to rule this out before we go opening random doors.”

We kept going. There was a low embankment on the southeast side of the villa, where the ground had been leveled before building. I followed Javier up, watching my footing. Mirror-stones turned as easily underfoot as real ones.

“What the hell is that ?” Javier stopped so abruptly that I nearly ran into his back.

“What? What are you…” My voice dried up. One more step up the embankment and I saw what he saw.

A few years ago, my father had gone out to inspect a quarry that someone was trying to sell him, and I’d gone with him.

Five or six miles out of town, there was a small city of tents, and then a vast crater hewn out of the earth, hundreds of yards across, with a single road spiraling down into the pit.

I remember standing on the quarry’s edge and thinking how strange it was, how obviously man-made, not like canyon walls at all.

The pit at our feet was not as wide as the quarry had been, but much deeper.

The desert simply fell away into steep walls that went down and down for…

well, for a long way. The mirror-walls might have been stone, but they were the same featureless gray as everything else, and I didn’t trust my ability to distinguish depth.

I definitely wasn’t going to jump in, anyway.

My first thought was that I couldn’t possibly have missed something this size. My second was that I hadn’t looked out any windows on this side of the villa, so why would I have seen it at all?

“I take it this isn’t here in the real world?” I asked.

“It is not.”

“Ah.”

The pit was roughly circular, and I thought it was about a hundred feet across.

There was no spiral road, but nevertheless, I couldn’t shake the memory of the quarry.

“Someone had to make this,” I said. “Otherwise it would have just filled back in to match the real world. I think.” I started to lean out over it, and Javier’s arm was in front of me like a bar.

“Please don’t do that.”

“I’m not going to fall in.”

He closed his eyes briefly. “Please. For my nerves.”

“Well. If it’s for your nerves…” I stepped back.