Page 50 of Hemlock & Silver

“They weren’t dressed like our guards. And the one who almost caught us was wearing metal armor.” I must have looked blank, because he made a sweeping gesture down his body. “Look. The king’s guard generally wears quilted gambesons like this, yes?”

I nodded.

“Because you don’t wear metal in the desert, unless you want to cook yourself alive. But those guards are. And that armor was fitted, so wherever he came from, he was used to wearing it.”

“I bow to your expertise,” I said. “So they came from somewhere else, and either they came through the mirror or they carried armor with them and put it on here.”

“So there should be a real armored man somewhere around here,” Javier said. “But I certainly haven’t seen one.”

I massaged my temples. “What if there isn’t a real one?”

“Doesn’t there have to be? Reflections don’t come from nowhere.”

“No, but I think they might be awake,” I said.

A line formed between his eyes. “ Awake? What do you mean by that?”

I sighed. There was no help for it; I was going to have to explain about Grayling.

“Okay,” I said, carefully watching a corner of the ceiling in case it might have useful advice.

It did not. “This is going to sound utterly mad. I wanted you to… err… accept the mirror-world before I tried to explain this part.”

The line deepened into a chasm that threatened to draw in the eyebrows. “Explain what part?”

“Someone told me that I had to watch out for reflections that were awake.”

“Someone—you mean someone else knows ?” His voice rose on the last word. “Who!?”

“Well… when I fell through the first time, I wasn’t exactly alone…”

To Javier’s credit, he listened to my story without scoffing, though his eyebrows escaped the chasm and began creeping up his forehead instead.

When I finally finished, he gazed at me steadily for an uncomfortable length of time, then said, “You’re right. It sounds utterly mad.”

“I know that.”

“Cats don’t talk.”

“I know that, too.”

“So this Grayling’s obviously not a cat.”

I paused with my mouth hanging open. That was not where I had expected the conversation to go. “Um… I’m pretty sure he’s not a dog?”

Javier pinched the bridge of his nose. “I mean , he’s clearly a shape-shifter or a sorcerer or something like that. Not a cat.”

“What are you talking about? Shape-shifters don’t exist.”

“Neither do talking cats. Neither do otherworlds inside the mirror. But here we are anyway.”

I scowled at him. Here we were again. “You’re talking about magic.

I don’t believe in that. It may be that eating the mirror-food provides the body with a fifth humor.

And like a lock and a key, only those with the fifth humor can pass through the mirror.

” I had been working on this theory in the back of my mind, and it was definitely not ready for public consumption yet.

“In any event, I am sure there is a completely reasonable explanation.”

“Yes,” he said, with exaggerated patience, “and the reasonable explanation is that it’s magic .”

“So maybe Grayling’s a magic talking cat! If we’re going to start using magic to explain things, why not that, too?”

I was bitter and annoyed, and I sounded like it, and it only helped a little when Javier stopped, thought, and finally said, “Okay. I have to give you that one.”

The problem was that I didn’t know how Grayling worked, and I hadn’t been trying to figure it out. Granted, I had a lot on my mind. But the mirror-world was so alien and fascinating that I’d mostly been trying to get information from Grayling, not about him.

Also, let’s be honest, he was a bit of a bastard.

“ Anyway, ” I said, “I’ll introduce you as soon as he shows up again. Whenever that is.”

“You can’t find him?”

“Cats don’t come when they’re called.” I held up a hand.

“At one point, he said something about some reflections being awake. I didn’t follow up on it because I was still trying to figure out if I was going to turn to dust if I spent too long on the other side.

But a reflection that moves and apparently thinks… that’s got to be what he meant.”

Javier grunted. After a minute he said, “If it’s awake and moving around, what happens if the original walks in front of a mirror?”

“That… is a very good question, actually. I suppose the reflection would get yanked back to that mirror?”

“So if you were using a reflection of yourself to guard something, you’d have to be careful not to walk in front of any more mirrors.”

“Assuming that you know your reflection is walking around without you and you want that to be happening. We still don’t know how or why the reflections wake up, though.” I thought of my reflection wandering around the villa without me and got a nasty little shiver along my spine.

“If this reflection’s original is working with our poisoner, he wouldn’t want to be too far away, I imagine.

Otherwise, if he accidentally reflected in a mirror, his reflection would have to walk all the way back here.

So either he’s in the villa, or camped out in the desert nearby, or… ” He trailed off.

“Or being fanatically careful about mirrors coming near him.”

My mind flashed to the covered mirror in Lady Sorrel’s rooms. What had she said? Bastian never liked them. Sometimes he thought that his enemies were watching him through mirrors.

No, no, that had been decades ago. Surely that wouldn’t have any bearing on what was happening with Snow.

Surely.

Unless Lady Sorrel was using her reflection to creep around the villa now and avoiding mirrors was essential…

I rubbed my temples. “And we can’t check for signs on the other side of the mirror without having armed men after us.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

The silence dragged like a stick through mud. “So…” Javier began.

“… What do we do now?” I finished.

He grunted. So did I.

“I’m going to go see what weapons we’ve got available,” he said finally. “And try to squash the rumors.”

“Godspeed,” I said. “I’m going to take a nap.”

I did not get my nap. Javier was gone for perhaps five minutes when there was a pounding on the door. I yelped and jumped sideways, picturing the armored figure hammering the door open, but then I heard a voice call, “Healer! Healer!” through the wood and realized that it was one of Snow’s maids.

Oh Saints, please don’t let someone have been injured and they’re expecting me to fix it… I’ve done enough dissections that I don’t mind blood and internal organs, but I’m generally not expected to put the bits back when I’m done with them. I opened the door with trepidation.

“Healer,” said the maid, panting. She’d obviously run, probably from Snow’s rooms. “It’s the princess. She’s sick. Really sick this time. Nurse sent me. Please.”

“Oh hell,” I said, and snatched up my bag from where it sat next to the desk. I hadn’t expected to encounter any emergencies, but old habits die hard, and I’d set it out anyway. The maid made a grateful face as I swept by her and pounded down the hallway toward Snow’s suite.

The sounds of retching greeted me the moment I entered the room. Snow was kneeling in the bathing room with Nurse holding back her hair.

The older woman’s expression when she saw me was complicated—half hope, half suspicion. I’d upset Snow the last time I was here, but the king trusted me, but, but, but. I went to my knees next to Snow and felt her forehead. She was clammy with sweat and her hands shook on the bowl.

Shit. I knew what questions I wanted to ask, and I also knew that Snow would never answer them with Nurse there.

“Nurse,” I said, never taking my eyes off the king’s daughter, “I need you to bring me a pitcher of water. Not the one in the room. I want you to go to the pantry, pick one at random, go to the well, and have someone pull up a bucket of water. Don’t take your eyes off them while they do it.

Don’t let the pitcher out of your hands, before or after you fill it.

Then bring it up here, and do not set it down until you’re back. ”

Nurse gaped at me. “You don’t think…?”

“I don’t know,” I lied. “But this is the only way I can be absolutely certain that it will be safe, and I don’t want to put anything into her system that has even a chance of being poisoned.”

Nurse straightened her back and nodded to me. “I shall, Healer,” she said, and swept out of the bathing room.

A frightened maid was standing nearby with an armload of towels.

“Don’t hover,” I snapped at her. “Go and build up the fire in the other room.”

That disposed of both potential eavesdroppers. Snow was watching me with haggard amusement. I knew that she knew what I was doing, even if no one else did.

Another spasm wracked her. A moment later, she began to shudder, not quite the same way as before.

Her hands fell off the basin, and her back arched.

I reached for her, holding her upright, and felt the tremors of her muscles.

Then she went limp for a long moment, just long enough for me to panic, then shook herself and bent over the basin again.

Shit. Was that a convulsion? A small one, perhaps.

Oddly, she didn’t seem to have noticed it.

I smoothed back her hair. Her neck was so delicate, the skin so soft that I was almost afraid to touch it.

It was easy to forget that she was only twelve, and then moments like this brought it crashing back.

“How many did you eat?” I asked quietly.

She turned her head to look at me. “Two,” she said, just as quietly. “Down to the core.” I could not tell if she was gloating or confessing. A little of both, I think.

“Two!” Even assuming that she was building up a tolerance, I could not imagine it.

“I can handle two,” she said softly. “I did it once before.”

“Why?”

Snow looked away.

I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself.

Saints, how I wanted to be the sort of person who could hold out their hand and say, I don’t know what the problem is, but I promise I’ll solve it with you .

Someone who radiated trustworthiness, someone that Snow would believe. Someone like Healer Michael.

But I was only myself, and if we were relying on my skill with people to save Snow, she would be dead in the ground before too much longer.

Instead, I told her the truth. Plain and unvarnished. “Much more of this, and you will die. Something will rupture in your throat and you’ll drown in your own blood. I can’t imagine that’s what you want.”

She shrugged, looking down at the basin.

“Please. Tell me what’s wrong and I’ll try to fix it.”

Nothing.

“ Who is making you do this?” I asked. “Is it Lady Sorrel?”

Snow looked up at that, genuinely startled. “ Sorrel? ” she said, sounding twelve again, talking to an adult who had just said something unbelievable. “How would that even work?” Her shoulders shook, though whether from a laugh or an oncoming spasm, I couldn’t tell.

“Who is it, then?” I asked hopelessly. My only theory, destroyed.

Snow slumped against me. I looked down, startled, realizing that her face was now only inches from my ear.

“The queen,” she breathed.

Oh Saints. Maybe there isn’t anyone else. Maybe she really has just gone delusional with grief. I took a deep breath. “Snow, the queen is dead.”

“The queen is dead,” she echoed. That sly, unhappy smile crept across her face again. She knew things I didn’t, even if they brought her no joy. “Long live the Queen,” she added, and bent forward over the basin.