Page 53 of Hemlock & Silver

The guards walked me down to the lower levels, to the servants’ quarters, and selected a door. I saw a shiny bolt attached over the outside, a bit of striking real-world color over mirror-stuff. The one in front opened the door, and the one behind prodded me with the sword again.

I took two steps through the doorway and let out a scream that they could probably hear in Four Saints.

A centipede made of hands and fractured faces scuttled from the corner of the room toward the bed, running on dozens of individual fingers. Eyes blinked wildly from the thing’s back, and most of a face opened its mouth in a silent shriek.

“ M-mirror-geld! ” I squawked, frozen in place, as it ran beneath the bed.

The armored guard sighed, pushed me aside, and got down on one knee to peer under the bed. He nodded, pulled out his own sword, and made a quick stabbing motion, then dragged the blade out with the mirror-geld impaled on it. It writhed and squirmed, halves of mouths grimacing in apparent agony.

I shrank away as he approached, and he smirked and waved the creature at me, driving me away from the door and farther into the room.

The finger legs were held in more mouths, teeth biting into the stumps, with lips that twisted in place.

One opened, and the finger it held fell to the floor, making me squawk again.

The guard stomped twice on the severed finger, reducing it to a smear of gray paste, then stalked out, still carrying his grisly prize. The door slammed behind him, and I heard the scrape of the bolt being thrown.

I threw myself at the door in a panic. It rattled slightly. I did it again. It rattled again.

Calm down. Think. The mirror-geld’s gone. The bolt isn’t going anywhere.

I took several deep breaths and tried to calm my racing heart. No mirror-geld. That was good. I was a prisoner. That was less good. Panicking wouldn’t help either way.

Think like a chime-adder. Cool. Quiet. Snakes aren’t really cold-blooded, they simply adapt to their surroundings. You have to adapt to yours, that’s all.

The room itself was small, with a simple bed, a wardrobe, a washbasin, and a chamber pot. It took me a moment to nerve myself up to open the wardrobe, which was empty of both mirror-gelds and useful items.

And then, of course, there was the door. By my calculations, I would have worn my shoulder down to bone long before I damaged the wood enough to get through.

This must be an unused room. Otherwise the owner’s things would be here. Maybe that’s why they chose it as a cell.

They hadn’t searched me. I patted down my pockets and found my penknife, my notebook, and a flat, cloth-wrapped bundle. The mirror!

I pulled it out with shaking hands. Would it work here? Could you use a mirror inside the mirror? What would happen?

When I was thirteen and doing my first experiments with flasks and burners, Scand had said that any chemistry experiment has three outcomes. “Either what you want happens, nothing happens, or it explodes.”

(As it turned out, there was a fourth option, namely ‘it turns into a tarry black sludge and ruins a test tube,’ but Scand had claimed that was just a subset of nothing happening.)

“Right,” I muttered. “Three outcomes.” Either nothing happened, or I’d have a working mirror, which I could put my hand through and hopefully unlock the door, or…

The thrashing limbs of the mirror-geld filled my brain. Right. What you want happens, nothing happens, or you explode.

I gritted my teeth and yanked the wrappings off.

Absolutely nothing happened.

No light. No blaze of color. On the bright side, no dozen extra faces falling off my head.

I looked into it and saw my own reflection looking back. I touched the surface, and it was only cool glass.

… Huh.

Wait, if my reflection is in this mirror, but I’m in the mirror-world, does that mean there’s another mirror-world past this one? And another past that and another past that?

When we’d stood between two mirrors as kids, was that infinite line of reflections bouncing back and forth a vision onto infinite silvery worlds?

Had we made mirror-gelds not just here, but in each one?

Or would I have to take two mirrors into this world and stand between them to make a mirror-geld in the next?

I took a deep breath, rewrapped the mirror, and put it away. This wasn’t helping, and I was getting a headache from contemplating too much infinity. Better I should see if I could unscrew the door hinges with my penknife.

As it turned out, no. I managed to strip the screwhead nicely, whereupon I did what I’d been wanting to do for hours now, and burst into tears.

There was no light. There was no dark. Time passed, presumably, but I had no way to measure it.

All I could do was sit on the edge of the bed and get colder and colder.

The obnoxious thing was that it wasn’t actually that cold.

It was miles away from freezing. But the mirror-stuff didn’t ever warm up; it just pulled the heat out of you, hour after hour.

And without any water, you’d be amazed how fast you die of exposure, even above freezing.

There was water, after a fashion. The basin was full of dark, oily mirror-water. Sooner or later I’d be thirsty enough to drink it. It probably wouldn’t kill me. If the Queen had wanted me dead, she could just have had her guards kill me.

It’s not as if she has to worry about how to dispose of my body.

Everyone will think I’ve vanished without a trace, except maybe Javier.

I sighed. Blessed Saint Adder, Javier. When he couldn’t find me, he’d know I’d gone into the mirror, even though I’d said I wouldn’t.

Would he guess I’d had a reason? Would he come after me?

A small, treacherous hope bloomed at the thought, which was immediately crushed by the large boot of guilt.

One man against however many guards the Queen had?

I’d only seen three, but she could have dozens stashed in out-of-the-way rooms. We hadn’t gotten anywhere near searching the guard barracks or the barns just down the road.

I took off my outer robe and folded it to sit on, in hopes that the heat would leach away a little more slowly.

Normally if you want to stay warm, you want some kind of platform, so you have a layer of air in between your bedding and the ground.

But when the blankets might as well be the ground, that didn’t help much.

What I really need is a hammock made of real fabric. Then if I had enough real layers, I could probably survive for quite some time. So all I need is a large piece of real fabric and two anchor points… Hmm, I could probably use the bedposts, if I had something to tie it off with…

And while I’m wishing for things, I would like a battering ram to knock the door down.

I sat. When I got too cold, I stood up and walked around, swinging my arms, trying to generate heat. I wondered if I’d survive a night of sleep.

I was doing another circuit of the room when the door opened and they shoved Javier through.

I let out a squawk. The door slammed. Javier fell onto his knees, then his face.

“Javier!” I dropped next to him. “You’re here! But what happened ?”

He groaned. “Worst charge,” he mumbled, still facedown. “Gonna staple myself to you.” He tried to prop himself up on one forearm and hissed. One eye was already swelling shut.

“Look, it wasn’t intentional.”

“Yeah.” He took a deep, wincing breath. “Saw the broken mirror. Figured something happened.”

“Someone decided they wanted me back over here and dropped a mirror over my head.” I slid my arm under his. “If you can get up, I can get you onto the bed.”

“Fine… I’m fine…”

Judging by the hissing through his teeth, he was not actually fine, but I managed to haul him up onto the bed, where he fell on his back. “Ahhh… that’s better. Saints.” He put a hand to his black eye. “I chopped one of them in the leg. They weren’t happy. There was some kicking.”

I began unlacing his jacket. He looked down and managed a weak smile. “First you get me in bed, and now you start undressing me…”

“Checking your ribs,” I told him tartly.

“If one’s broken, you could puncture a lung.

” (Mind you, if one was broken, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

You were supposed to bind ribs tight, I think?

Not for the first time, I regretted that I hadn’t paid more attention to medicine that didn’t involve poison.)

There were marks darkening across his body, but none of the ribs moved weirdly when I touched them. That seemed good? Maybe?

“It was mostly the kidneys,” he said. “I’ll be pissing blood for a while.”

I grimaced. That sounded bad. Also completely beyond my ability to fix. “I have no idea what to do about that,” I admitted.

“Not much,” he said. “The cold sheets feel good. Just give me a minute.”

“Take your time. We’re not going anywhere.”

He squinted at the door. “Where are we?”

“Maid’s room.”

“Can we break down the door?”

“No.” I couldn’t, and I was pretty sure Javier shouldn’t be slamming into doors with potentially damaged ribs. “The hinges aren’t coming unscrewed anytime soon either.”

He grunted. It was the resigned well, shit grunt. That seemed to pretty well cover the situation.

I fussed with my outer robe and Javier’s padded jacket, trying to make something for him to lie on so that he didn’t keep losing heat to the mattress.

Also, if I was fussing over that, I wasn’t thinking about the fact that Javier had come after me and now he was probably going to die along with me.

All because he’d walked in on me being careless with the mirror.

No, I definitely didn’t want to think about that. If I did, I might start crying again, and that would be utterly humiliating, so I wasn’t going to do it, and that was final .

“Anja?” said Javier. “Anja, it’s all right. I’m not going to die of this. I’ve been hurt a lot worse. I’ll be fine. Don’t cry.”