Page 52 of Hemlock & Silver

My captors brought me down the hallway, to the pair of suites reserved for the king and queen.

Another waking reflection stood in front of them, a woman this time, opening the doors as we approached.

The armored man was at my side, his sword still out, holding my elbow in one mailed hand.

The one still nursing a sore foot was prodding me along with the point of a sword in my back.

We stepped through the double doors. “Healer Anja, Your Majesty,” said the armored man, in his flat, distant voice.

On the king’s side, this had been a waiting room of sorts, longer than it was wide, with several comfortable couches. On this side, there were no couches, only a single chair at the far end. As close to a throne room as one could manage, given the circumstances.

In the chair sat the Queen.

She was wearing a scarlet dress that stood out like blood on burnt ground, and her skin was shockingly white. Her eyes looked black. As I went closer, driven by the sword prodding the small of my back, I realized that they were mirror-stuff gray. So was her hair.

Snow sat at her feet, leaning against the Queen’s legs.

Oh, I thought, and so many things were suddenly falling into place that I couldn’t grasp them all at once. Oh. I see now.

“Healer Anja,” said the Queen. Her voice had the same flat quality as my captor’s. “Snow has told me so much about you.”

I didn’t answer. My eyes were flicking from Snow’s face to the Queen’s and back, seeing the resemblance, remembering the little portrait of the sweet-faced chestnut-haired woman in Snow’s room.

The queen is dead, I’d said to Snow, and I hadn’t been wrong. But the queen’s reflection, by some terrible alchemy, lived on.

Five paces from the chair, my guard pulled back on my elbow, and I stopped. I could already feel the bruises forming under his fingertips.

“You did well, pet,” said the Mirror Queen, stroking Snow’s hair. She wore white gloves. Snow turned her face a little, into her mother’s leg. Her mother’s reflection’s leg. Oh Saints, what have I gotten myself into?

“Nothing to say?” the Mirror Queen asked. Her lips were very red.

“Ceruse,” I said.

She seemed faintly nonplussed. “What?”

“You’re wearing ceruse. But not mixed with egg white, because there’s no cracking.” I licked dry lips. “I assume it’s to cover the mirror-gray color. But everyone knows that it’s dangerous now, so you must not have to worry about lead poisoning.”

A line formed between her eyes. “After all the time you’ve spent chasing your tail through my realm, all you can talk about is my makeup?”

The gauntlet dug a little deeper. I lifted my chin. “I don’t know what else to say, Your Majesty.”

Those red lips curved upward. “Aren’t you going to beg for your life?”

I considered this. “Sure, if it’ll do any good. Will it?”

“No, but it might be amusing.”

There really wasn’t anything to say to that. I studied Snow instead. Her face was expressionless, but her eyes were screwed tightly closed.

“I have to go back,” she said in a small, childish voice. “They’ll come looking soon. I had to lock myself in the bathroom, and Nurse will think I drowned.”

“Yes, of course.” The Mirror Queen bent down, and for a moment, their hair mingled, white and gray together. She kissed Snow on top of her head, and Snow bounced to her feet.

“Tell me, pet,” said the Mirror Queen, “do you think you can put the healer’s reflection through the mirror?”

Snow scowled, studying me like a buyer at a slaughterhouse. “Too big,” she said. “Even Lady Sorrel’s still too big. But maybe soon.”

“I know you’re trying, pet. Just keep eating your apples.” The Mirror Queen nodded graciously, and Snow scampered away. I heard the door close behind me, and the Mirror Queen’s smile grew wider and lost some edge of restraint that I hadn’t realized was there.

“Is that why you’re feeding her the apples?” I asked. “Because you think it’ll help her push things through the mirror?”

“Oh, it does,” the Mirror Queen said. “She’s already done some quite extraordinary things.” She tapped one gloved finger against her lips. “Of course, it would be helpful to have you as well. A healer appointed by the king has so much leeway, doesn’t she?”

Not enough to matter, apparently. I grunted. Javier would have been proud of that grunt.

“I suppose I’ll just have to settle for the old lady who runs the place.”

“Mmm.” I looked down at my feet and wiggled my toes in my sandals, trying not to show my alarm.

If Lady Sorrel was under her control, she’d have a great deal of power with the king.

Would she tell him about the mirrors? It would be ironic if Javier and I had worked so hard to keep anyone from learning the secret and then the poisoner told him outright.

I wonder how she’s controlling the reflections. Bribery? Some kind of power she has?

The Mirror Queen sighed. “I don’t get much new conversation here, you know. I was hoping you’d provide more.”

“Fine. Why aren’t you dead?”

Her smile grew into a predatory thing, revealing black teeth and gums. People say smiles like that are catlike, but I couldn’t imagine a bigger contrast than scruffy Grayling and the Mirror Queen. “You still haven’t figured it out, have you?”

“Apparently not.”

She posed. It was very clearly a pose, very considered—a woman enjoying her audience. “Shall I tell you a story, Healer?”

I shrugged.

“There was a woman,” the Mirror Queen began, “once upon a time…”

I wished that I had the nerve to demand to sit, but the guard’s hand on my arm wasn’t letting go. I listened.

“There was a woman, once upon a time, who loved her own reflection. I think perhaps she was a very lonely girl, and so she made her reflection into a companion and spoke to her and imagined the girl in the mirror speaking back. Children do such things, and mostly they grow out of it.” The Mirror Queen’s red lips thinned a little.

“This one did not, and her parents cared only that she was alive and might be married to advantage someday. Her womb was useful to them; her mind was not. Perhaps she knew that, because she did not stop speaking to her reflection. When she grew up, the woman in the mirror grew with her, always agreeing, always present, and the woman’s love for her grew greater and greater.

In the end, she would not take her meals unless she was in front of the mirror, and she would not sleep unless her reflection slept as well. ”

“That seems inconvenient,” I offered.

“It was terribly dangerous,” said the Mirror Queen, “although she didn’t know it.

Occasional, incidental contact, it does little enough harm.

But the woman gave her reflection too much attention, too much emotion, day in and day out.

When she married, for a little while, it might have been different.

She loved her husband, and he was kind to her, but he was a king first and a husband second, and he was often busy.

So she turned back to her old familiar friend in the mirror.

” Dark teeth flashed again, shocking against the ceruse skin.

“Everyone around her thought that she was a little mad, of course.”

I could picture it all too clearly. A lonely young woman in the throes of an obsession that drove away anyone who might befriend her.

If not for Scand and my sisters, I might have walked the same path myself.

By the grace of Saint Adder, I had been able to turn my obsession into something useful. The dead queen had not been so lucky.

The living Queen was still speaking. “And then one day, the woman cut herself, only a little, only a nick, and her hand shook, and the smallest drop landed on the lips of the woman in the mirror.”

She paused then, striking another pose, her gloved hands spread on one knee. I had a feeling that I wanted to know the rest of the story, so I gave her what she clearly wanted. “And what happened then?”

“It was the most incredible thing. Her reflection woke up.”

You’ll know if you meet a waking one, Grayling had told me, with extraordinary understatement. It seemed unlikely that a single drop of blood on glass had actually been the cause, but perhaps there was some other mechanism at work.

Or maybe it really is magic, and you don’t know as much as you think you do.

“She woke up?” I prompted.

“Oh yes. Most of the mirror-folk are no more awake than your shadow at your heels. But she woke, and she learned, and bit by bit, she began to covet what the woman had and she did not. She began to resent the words that the woman said for her. It was not enough that the reflection had no voice, but to be forced to parrot every insipid thought that entered the woman’s head…

oh, she grew to hate that most desperately of all.

” The Mirror Queen’s eyes had narrowed, and while she was still performing, there was an echo of dark emotion underneath.

If I’d doubted that this was a story about herself and the dead queen, I didn’t now.

“It took some time to make a plan and to put it into action. In the end, she wrote notes to the woman and left them in the mirror for her to find. The woman was delighted, of course. Her only friend was alive and wanted to speak with her? She could barely contain her joy. So the reflection taught her the way through the mirror and brought her to the other side.”

I had the feeling that a lot was being glossed over there, but I didn’t want to interrupt the Mirror Queen when she was in mid-flow.

“The reflection confronted the woman there, in the mirror. Not that it was much of a confrontation. The woman was weak and rather silly. How could she have been anything else, given how she’d been raised?

But her reflection was strong and hungry, and she wanted the world on the far side of the silver, the world full of warmth, the world that goes on even when there is nothing to reflect it.

” She sat back in her chair and very deliberately struck another pose.

“What do you think, Healer? Can you blame the reflection for coveting what the woman had and she did not?”

“No.” I think I would have answered that way even if I hadn’t been held in place by a large man with a sword. “No, I can understand that. You wanted to take her place on the other side, didn’t you?”

“Can you blame me?”

And the more mirror-food Snow ate, the more she could bring back from the mirror. That was how the Mirror Queen had planned to take the real queen’s place. I tried a different tack. “No. But what you’re doing is killing Snow. Her body can’t take much more of this.”

The Mirror Queen made a careless gesture. “She’s managed before. Children are stronger than you think.”

“A child is already dead.”

The Queen’s lip rose in a soundless snarl, an ugly look that she smoothed away almost immediately. “That weak, stupid little woman. Who would have thought she had it in her?”

“Please,” I said, knowing the words were useless. “Please stop using Snow. I’m sure there’s some other way.”

She scoffed. “Do you think we haven’t seen you poking around here, trying to figure out how everything works?

I let you do that. I thought you might discover something I’d missed, but no.

I made those experiments years ago, and far more besides.

I have done things you can’t even imagine. And now I am doing what I must.”

“I could help you—” I began, but the Mirror Queen was already shaking her head.

“You could, but you won’t. Do you think I’m a fool, Healer Anja? The moment I let you go, you’d keep yourself out of the mirror, and Snow with you.”

I had no answer for that, because she wasn’t wrong.

The Mirror Queen nodded. “Fortunately, I have a use for you on this side, Healer Anja. Guards, take her away.”