Page 48 of Hemlock & Silver

“I’ve got a lotion that works wonders,” Sorrel said. “Come with me.”

Her private rooms were exactly like I would have expected, had I given the matter any thought.

Richly colored fabric lay on every surface, rag rugs covered the floors, and the seats were so deeply upholstered that when I sat in one, I sank down at least an inch.

The furniture seemed to be mostly dark wood, but I caught only glimpses of chair legs and footboards under piles of fabric.

The only exception was an armoire that looked large enough to sleep three, provided they were all good friends.

“Now, let’s see…” Sorrel said, going to a small sideboard while I craned my neck, taking in the colors. She picked up a small jar, unstoppered it, sniffed, and put it back down. “Not that one… not that one…”

The sideboard was covered in little jars and bottles, like a vanity table. Except there was no mirror.

In fact, looking around, I couldn’t see a single mirror anywhere. And now that I looked at it, that fall of cloth against the wall wasn’t a hanging; it was clearly covering something tall and rectangular.

She turned back to me with a smile on her face, and I blurted out, “There aren’t any mirrors in here.”

Her smile fixed in place like a butterfly pinned to a card. “Ah,” she said. “No.”

I stared at her, this pleasant, charming woman who had been the mistress to a royal madman.

Could she be the person that Snow had been talking about?

It made no sense, but I’d given up on people making sense.

And she was here and Snow would trust her.

But why would she want to poison a twelve-year-old girl?

Revenge for Bastian’s death? Or maybe the mercury got to her, too, and she went mad in a much colder way?

Or maybe she actually poisoned him , and now she’s… I don’t know, keeping her hand in?

I studied the ranks of bottles and vials on the vanity. If I hadn’t known about the apple, I’d be very suspicious right now. Granted, Lady Sorrel didn’t fit my idea of a black widow—not nearly enough husbands—but she might have her own motives that I knew nothing about.

Oblivious to my thoughts, she sank down into a chair opposite mine, the lotion bottle forgotten in her hand.

“Bastian never liked them,” she said. “Sometimes he thought that his enemies were watching him through mirrors. It was the poison talking, of course.” She made a small, aimless gesture with her free hand.

“Even after he was gone, I didn’t feel like surrounding myself with them.

I used a little polished tin thing for checking my makeup.

Then, of course, Randolph married and had his honeymoon here, and she brought all those mirrors as a gift… ”

“There are a lot of mirrors here,” I said cautiously.

“So many. It showed how wealthy the bride’s family was. And the queen loved mirrors. She’d have had them up on every wall if she could. I’m told you can hardly turn a corner in the palace without meeting yourself coming and going.”

Damn it, I didn’t want to suspect her. I liked her. More than anyone here, except maybe Aaron and Javier.

“The servants think that it’s vanity,” Lady Sorrel said, with a laugh that was both amused and unutterably weary.

“They think that I’m afraid that if I have mirrors about me, I’ll suddenly realize that I’m old.

As if I couldn’t tell without that.” She lifted a hand like the claw of some great bird, the knuckles ridged and the tips swollen around the nail, then let it drop again.

“Though you do forget sometimes, I admit. In my head, you see, I’m the same person that I always was.

I see old friends and think, ‘But how did that happen? How did they get so old?’”

I smiled at that. Sorrel smiled back, then her smile faded. “I don’t know. Perhaps I’m going as mad as poor Bastian. But the mirrors in this house feel dangerous now.”

“Dangerous?” I asked. How much did she know? Was this a warning or a confession?

“Mmm.” Lady Sorrel turned the bottle over in her hands.

Her hands trembled, but her grip was still sure.

“Perhaps all mirrors could be dangerous. Most of them aren’t, I imagine.

These, though…” She gestured toward the shape with the cloth hung over it.

“I haven’t trusted them since before the queen died. ”

“What do you think is wrong with them?”

She studied me for a long, long moment, and I actually saw the moment that she decided she’d said too much.

“Nothing, I’m sure. An old woman’s fancies.

Perhaps I really am afraid of growing old and I’m trying to pretend I’m not.

” She rose to her feet and handed me the bottle.

“Use that on your skin twice a day, my dear, and maybe by the time you’re my age, you won’t end up quite as wrinkled as I am. ”

I thanked her and left, my stomach already beginning to knot with dread.

“Lady Sorrel?” Javier asked. He sounded like he was about to protest, then reconsidered. “Well. I suppose it’s possible.”

“The timing fits,” I said gloomily. “Damn it, I liked her. And don’t tell me that bad people often go out of their way to be likable, because I know that, and it doesn’t make it any less awful.”

“By those standards, you’re definitely a good person,” Javier muttered.

“Thanks.” I wanted to glare at him, but I didn’t, because it wasn’t his fault he’d been assigned as a bodyguard to someone with all the grace and tact of a charging water buffalo.

He was stuck with me. However much I feared the king’s displeasure, the royal guard had to have it much worse. I settled for scowling at my shoes.

We were in the open part of the gardens again.

Cicadas screamed overhead, and locust trees cast filamented shadows across the ground.

I sat on the bench, and Javier stood beside me.

To a distant observer, we were healer and bodyguard, nothing more.

Certainly not two people discussing sedition against the lady of the manor.

Leather creaked as Javier shifted his feet. “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“It’s fine,” I said wearily. “I know what I’m like.”

“You’re not unlikable, though. You’re just blunt. And stubborn. And you want to be right.”

I sighed. “You sound like my sister. She used to say that once I knew I was right about something, I’d club people over the head with it rather than let it go.”

“You’re dedicated to the truth. That’s not a bad thing. And you’re passionate about lots of things.”

“That doesn’t help.” I shook my head. “It turns out that very few people want to listen to a treatise on the long-term effects of lead poisoning whenever they pick up a bottle of sweetened wine.”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

I looked up, startled. He was looking at me intently, and I felt a flush start to creep along my skin. I had to remind myself that this was the same man who had given me a look of such disgust only a day or two ago.

A bird whistled overhead— whit-wheeet! —and startled us both. I looked away hurriedly, and Javier tried to pretend that he hadn’t just grabbed for the hilt of his sword.

“Anyway,” I said, clearing my throat. “Do you really think Lady Sorrel could be the one behind all this?”

Javier shrugged helplessly. “I’ve never actually spoken with her. I’m attached to the king’s household, and normally I go where he goes. I can tell you that everyone who works here thinks highly of her, but that doesn’t mean anything. If I was going to be evil, I’d treat the staff very, very well.”

I tried to picture Javier being evil and couldn’t quite manage it. I suppose there are evil people who are solid and reliable and even-tempered, but either you don’t meet a lot of them, or they hide being evil remarkably well. Either way, I imagine they pay their staff quite handsomely.

“How can we figure it out?” I asked. “I suppose I could ask Snow, but I’m not sure she’d tell me.”

“We could search her rooms in the mirror,” Javier suggested. “See if there’s anything incriminating. If she’s got a bushel of apples hidden there, for example.”

“That’s a good idea.” I rubbed my forehead. “Saints. What do we tell the king if it does turn out to be her? Will he even believe us?”

A frown creased the edges of Javier’s mouth. “We’d have to show him the mirror-world.”

The heaviness of his tone surprised me. “I thought we’d have to do that anyway?”

Javier was silent for a moment too long.

“You don’t think we should tell him,” I said.

He didn’t meet my eyes. “I keep thinking how dangerous this could be. As soon as they figure out how, everyone will be making as many mirrors as they can. It’ll become an arms race.

And everything—everyone—will need twice as many guards so that they can be stationed in the mirror-world as well.

We’d be opening another battlefront across the entire world.

” He rubbed a hand over his scalp and looked suddenly old, not merely a man in his late thirties but ancient, with the weight of history looming over him.

“King Randolph is a good man and a good king, but what if this gets in the hands of someone like Bastian the Demon?”

The sun was high overhead, but the thought made my skin prickle with cold. “It would get in hands like that eventually,” I admitted. “There would be no way to keep it secret. Not when we’d be stationing guards inside mirrors.”

“Exactly. If we tell the king, we have to realize that we’re telling the world.”

“It might only work with mirrors from Silversand?” I asked plaintively.

“Then Silversand becomes the target of every army on earth.”

Cicadas whined their long descending note. I could see heat shimmers on the horizon, blurring the distant farms.

“We used to talk about it,” I said slowly, “my tutor, Scand, and I. If you discovered a poison that could kill hundreds of people all at once, something you could put in a well or a waterway, say, would it be better to tell everyone so that people could try to find a cure, or to tell no one so that evil people couldn’t use it, but risk someone else discovering it later? ”

“What did you decide?”

I pressed my lips together. “When I was sixteen, I wanted to tell everyone. I thought that we could solve everything just by piling more knowledge on it. Now…” I leaned back and studied the hard turquoise bowl of the sky.

“I would only share the knowledge if I had already found the cure, I think. Cures are… not easy to find.” And I am surprised that Saint Bird does not send lightning to strike me down for the sheer depth of that understatement.

“What’s the cure for this?” Javier asked.

“Break all the mirrors, I suppose. Or at least make sure none of them are large enough for a person to fit through. Who’d have human-sized mirrors after this?”

He was already shaking his head. “Someone could still get in if they had a set of properly sized mirrors with them. You get a long narrow mirror, pass it through the existing mirror, set it down, pass the next one through the first one, and so on until it’s big enough to fit through.

Any mirror bigger than your hand ought to work. ”

He was right, of course. Mirror glass was, what, a quarter inch thick?

If someone hung a four-inch mirror on the wall, all you needed was a mirror three inches tall and three feet long.

Slide that through and you could put a mirror three feet tall and six feet long through that, and then an assassin could walk through as easy as you please.

“Hell, all you’d need would be a mirror bigger than the point of a crossbow bolt, come to that,” Javier added.

I winced. He’d thought it through, more than I had.

Even though I’d long since had the belief that I was the smartest person in the room knocked out of me, it was humbling.

“You’re right,” I said. It hurt that he was right.

I’d known that I couldn’t publish, but I had always planned to tell Scand, at least.

“Three can keep a secret,” I said heavily, “if two of them are dead. And we’re past three already.”

“And one of them’s a twelve-year-old royal heiress. I know.” Javier shook his head. “And we don’t know how many people the poisoner’s told. Lady Sorrel—if it is Lady Sorrel—could have dozens of people working for her.”

“To say nothing of who discovered it in the first place. It might all be moot.” I worried at the end of my braid with my fingernails.

“Saint Adder’s mercy, I’m not cut out for this.

I putter around my workroom and shove charcoal down throats and occasionally up asses.

This is all…” I made helpless gestures with my hands, trying to encompass the size of everything and the size of me in proportion.

Javier snorted. “You think you’re not cut out for this? I’m a mere guard.”

“There’s nothing mere about you,” I shot back.

An indescribable expression crossed his face, and then he was holding my eyes again, a little bit too long.

Saints, this is not the time. Not with everything else going on. And anyway, you hardly know the man.

I knew him before I fell through the mirror, I argued with myself. That felt like it had been years ago. In fact, it had only been, what, three, four days?

If this goes on for a full week, I may drop dead of sheer anxiety.

“Well,” said Javier, finally breaking away, “we should, uh, probably go investigate Lady Sorrel’s chambers and see if we can find anything incriminating.”

“Right.” It was good to have the next step to focus on, a simple task, not the whole tapestry of who knew about the mirrors and how much the world would change if more people found out. “Let’s get that out of the way.”