Page 47 of Hemlock & Silver

“A mirror-geld,” Grayling said. “A small one, by the sound of it. The parts will all fuse together if you leave it long enough.”

To give the cat credit where it was due, he hadn’t played games when I’d come running for him.

I’d spotted him in the shadow of the roof and hissed his name and he came down immediately, alerted by some note of panic in my voice.

I met him behind the courtyard wall, frantically whispering what I’d seen.

“You didn’t warn me about those!”

Grayling rolled his good eye. “I would think that anyone with sense would know not to get between two mirrors.”

“No, we don’t.” I thought of those games we’d played as children and shuddered.

How many mirror-gelds had my sisters and I created?

Had our faces all landed together in a twitching pile, our hands crawling unheeded along the bedroom floor?

We’d done it for a lot longer than the maid had.

The sheer mass of splintered reflections must have been enormous.

Hell, one time Isobel had flipped up her skirt and mooned the mirror, and we’d laughed until Catherine threw up. I didn’t know whether to laugh hysterically at the thought of her bare ass on the pile of fragmented body parts, or maybe just throw up myself.

And these things melded together somehow? I imagined the hands I’d seen lurching along, dragging hundreds of faces behind. Hundreds of our faces.

“It was horrible,” I whispered, trying to keep my voice low enough that the kitchen staff wouldn’t hear. “How long before they stop moving?”

Grayling gave me an almost pitying look. “What makes you think they stop?” he asked, and with a flick of his tail, he was gone over the wall.

I had arranged to meet Javier in the garden, in an open area as far from listening ears as possible. The hummingbirds had retired and hawkmoths had taken their place at the flowers. The sky overhead was a blaze of copper and blood.

I looked up from a hawkmoth to see two figures walking toward me. Javier and… Aaron? What? Why? Did he tell Aaron after all? If he had, I was going to be rather annoyed that he hadn’t talked to me about it first.

“Hello, Healer Anja,” Aaron said, grinning broadly.

Javier caught my eye and gave a tiny negative shake. Ah. I see.

“So, is it your turn to play bodyguard instead?” I asked, hoping that I wasn’t contradicting anything Javier had said earlier.

“No, I just came along to see what Javier was doing. Do you really need a bodyguard out here?” Aaron glanced around the garden, clearly noting the total lack of assassins.

“Not a bodyguard, exactly, but I like to have someone on hand in case something gets me.”

“… gets you?”

I had him now. Sometimes being me has its advantages.

“There are a great many venomous things in the desert,” I said.

“A great many. Chime-adders, diamond rattlevipers, the desert coral snake, and the beaded lizard—I don’t actually expect to see that last, since they’re mostly found farther west, and we’re too far south for timber rattlevipers—and that’s just the reptiles.

Then there’s the scorpions, both the big ones, which aren’t terribly venomous, and the little bark scorpions that will make you regret you’ve ever been born.

And that doesn’t get into the desert centipedes, which—”

“Saints, don’t mention the centipedes.” Aaron shuddered theatrically. “There was one as long as my hand in my shoe once. My foot swelled up like a melon.”

“—plus sundry other insects, like assassin bugs, which would love a garden like this.” I stood up from the rock I’d been sitting on and brushed my skirt off. “And of course there’s the spiders, including two varieties of widow and—”

“I retract the question,” said Aaron, holding up both hands. “And I will now retract myself, because my skin is crawling. Javier, if you survive the horrors of nature, I’ll see you later.”

Javier grunted. I tried to look disappointed. Aaron retreated, shaking his head.

“That was neatly done,” Javier said, once the other guard was out of earshot. “I tried to dissuade him, but he was bored and wanted to stir something up.”

“Stir something up?”

Javier coughed and found a nearby bush fascinating. It was antelope milkweed, which genuinely is fascinating—you can make a poultice that reduces the swelling of snakebites—but I suspected that wasn’t the reason. “He, uh, is wondering if we, uh…”

He trailed off. “‘We, uh’?” I prompted.

“Bodyguards and their charges spend a great deal of time in close quarters,” Javier said, still staring at the milkweed. “It’s, uh, something of a cliché that some of them will… uh.”

“Ohhh.” I could feel a blush starting. Aaron thought that? Shouldn’t Javier have set him straight? “ That kind of… uh. But of course you and I aren’t… uhh-ing. At all.”

“Right,” said Javier. “No uh.”

“Right. Glad we cleared that up.”

Javier cleared his throat. “How did speaking with Snow go?”

I drew a blank. “Snow?”

“This morning?”

“Oh. That.” My conversation with Snow had been an age of the earth ago, in a time when I didn’t know about mirror-gelds. “Um. Badly, I think.” I recounted what she’d said. Javier leaned against a waist-high stone and listened.

“‘Tell me where she’s keeping my sister’?” he repeated, after I had finished. “What does that mean?”

“Either she’s convinced herself that her sister is still alive, or someone else has convinced her of that, or…

I don’t know.” Snow had not struck me as particularly delusional, but it’s not like you can tell from the outside.

Plus, she was twelve . “Maybe something to do with souls? Surely they would have put her ashes in a spirit house.”

“I know they did,” said Javier. “I was part of the funeral procession.”

“You were?”

“They turned out most of the palace guard for it. And there was someone stationed there for a month, to keep anyone from stealing ashes.”

I grimaced. Disgusting, but of course there was always someone. “I suppose it could be something convoluted related to that. But we still don’t know who ‘her’ is. Anyway, look, that’s not the most important thing…”

I told him about the mirror-geld, leaving out only the bits about Grayling. I was going to have to tell him, I knew that, but it sounded so utterly unbelievable that I was hoping Grayling would be present for the conversation so that my bodyguard didn’t think I’d cracked under the strain.

When I had finished, Javier said, “Huh!” almost explosively. He looked curious more than horrified. (Yes, I was conscious of the irony.) “Are the parts still there?”

“I haven’t looked.”

He slid off the stone. “Then we should do that.”

The mirror-geld was gone. Javier even looked under the bed and behind the towels. I sagged against the wall in relief. “They must have fallen apart,” he said. “I don’t know where else they could have gone. And the door’s still locked, so they didn’t leave that way.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that the horribly animated severed limbs could perhaps work a doorknob. I thanked him for the mental image.

“All part of my job.” One corner of his mouth crooked up, and I wondered that I’d ever thought him humorless. Or possibly he was like most of the healers I knew and his humor grew in proportion to the direness of the situation. Certainly the amount he talked did.

“Could they have gone over the balcony?” I asked.

“You tell me.”

The railing had balustrades holding it up; it wasn’t a solid piece. I supposed the hands could have crawled there. I shuddered at the thought and was glad when Javier went through the doors first.

The mirror-desert was even grimmer at sunset.

The red sky, cut with black, gave the scene a dreadful quality, like looking down into some bleak, forgotten hell.

If the mirror-stuff had reflected even a little of the red, I think it might have been less disturbing.

Then it would have just looked like weather.

The stark gray under that blaze of bloody light was so clearly unnatural that it dragged at the eyes, while the mind struggled to make sense of it and failed.

There were no severed limbs and faces lying on the ground below, which was a relief, and also not something that I’d ever had to worry about before.

Maybe they had just dissolved. It was entirely possible that Grayling would just run when he saw them, the same way that I had, and he was too…

too cat to admit that he didn’t know what happened afterward.

We turned away from the red sky in mutual unspoken agreement.

“We’ll have to start checking the other rooms soon,” Javier said. “The poisoner’s bound to be in there somewhere.”

“Tomorrow, then.” He didn’t press me to do it tonight, and I was grateful, and slightly resentful for being grateful. I knew he was humoring me because he hadn’t seen the mirror-geld and had no idea just how horrific they’d been.

We parted at the door. I took shameful advantage of my status as a guest, had the tub filled with hot water, and soaked in it while reading the Red Feather Saga.

The heroine’s cousin had just found a secret door in the house seized by her evil uncle when he’d stolen her inheritance.

She was making what I felt was an excessive fuss about it being full of spiderwebs.

Spiders, feh. You should see mirror-gelds.

Grayling was already on the bed when I got in. He flicked an ear at me but didn’t open his eye. “I know, I know,” I said, contorting myself so that I didn’t disturb him. For a small cat, he took up an ungodly amount of space. “Ear mites. Good night.”

I think he said, “Good night,” but I was mostly asleep by then, so it’s possible I dreamed it.

“Oh dear…” Lady Sorrel tutted at me during lunch the next day. “You’ve gotten quite a sunburn.”

I had? I had been avoiding the mirrors so determinedly that I hadn’t noticed. I pressed a fingertip into my forearm and watched the mark turn bright white against red. All that roaming around looking for cats had clearly taken its toll.