Page 54 of Hemlock & Silver
“I’m not crying,” I informed him, my voice thick with tears. “I never cry in front of strangers.”
“I’m not a stranger,” he pointed out, quite unfairly reasonably.
“Yes, but you shouldn’t be here. The king made you, and I know how you feel about me, and this is all my fault.” I couldn’t stop the sob at the end of the sentence, so I turned away and bit the side of my hand so I didn’t wail like an infant.
Blessed Saint Adder, was this man doomed to be present at every humiliating moment of my life? Retching and sick and sobbing… Maybe I can get explosive diarrhea and round out the set.
I took a deep breath and shook myself mentally.
My chime-adder wouldn’t do this. Chime-adders were slow and calm and deliberate, and as patient as the grave.
Utterly unhampered by sentiment. If our souls come back in other bodies, as some follow ers of Saint Bird believe, I really hoped that next time, I’d get to be a chime-adder.
I wiped my eyes, feeling a little more centered, and then Javier said, “You know how I feel about you?” and blew that all to hell.
“I saw how you looked at me through the mirror, that first day,” I said dully, carefully not looking at him. “You were utterly revolted when I took your hand. I’m sure you forgot I could see you. It’s not how we expect mirrors to work.”
The silence on the other side of the bed got very loud.
I scrubbed my sleeve across my cheeks, feeling the brocade scratch against puffy skin.
“Look, it’s fine. How you feel is how you feel.
You’ve been completely professional the whole time regardless.
I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m just sorry you got dragged into this. ”
“I was revolted,” said Javier carefully, “because when you took my hand, your reflection reached out on my side and actually shoved its fingers through my wrist. I could feel each one going into my skin and passing through the layers of meat and then hitting the bone. It didn’t hurt, but it felt disgusting. ”
“… Oh.”
My sister Catherine had hit me on the side of the face with a bowl once.
(It wasn’t intentional, she was getting it down from the shelf and didn’t see me, and I stepped right into it.) What I remember is a bright flash in my vision and then a moment when the whole world slewed sideways and then snapped back into the proper configuration.
This was like that, only without the flash or the headache. I felt the world shift around me. Javier hadn’t been looking at me at all. Why had I believed that he was?
Because it was easy. Because it was what the voice of despair whispered all the time, whenever my guard slipped enough to listen. I was too big, too loud, cared too intensely about things that no one else did. Of course he’d find me revolting. Some days I found myself revolting.
“Have you been thinking that all this time?”
I blinked. “Ah—what?”
“That I thought that about you.”
“All what time?” I muttered. “It’s been what, four days?” Granted, those four days had felt like forty years, but still.
I heard a long sigh from behind me and turned around. He had propped himself up slightly, his arms folded rakishly behind his head. “Is this why you’re always so grumpy with me?”
“No! Well… maybe a little. But mostly I’m just like that. Mostly.”
“Uh-huh.” He grinned. Javier actually grinned . I’d never seen such a broad expression on his face. “Meanwhile, I’ve spent the last four days assuming you resented being shackled with a guard who wasn’t nearly as clever as you.”
“What? No! You’re plenty clever. And you know all sorts of things about… I don’t know… this kind of thing. Tracking people and dealing with people with swords and all.”
His face fell like a rooster launched off a cliff. “For all the good it’s done us, since we’re currently prisoners of a woman we didn’t realize existed.”
“I wish I knew how the Queen was still alive, when the real one’s dead. I mean, she told me how she ‘woke up,’ but it sounded like a fairy tale.”
“After all this, you don’t believe in fairy tales?”
I scowled. “She thinks a drop of blood on the mirror is what woke her up. How is that possible?”
“I’m here because of a bite of potato. How is that possible?”
I grunted, because I didn’t have an answer. It turned out that grunts were very useful. I’d picked that up from Javier. Eventually we’d probably just be grunting at each other instead of talking. It was a shame that we were going to die, because I would have liked to see that.
Just face it. You’re more than half in love with him already.
I was. I’d been fighting it, but it was hopeless and I knew it was hopeless, and my head was full of too many things, full of Rose and Snow and the dead queen and the living reflection, and this was the worst possible time to think about love, but here I was thinking about it anyway.
That’s humans for you, I suppose. In dreadful danger, with the weight of the world crushing us down, we’ll somehow still find ourselves thinking, I wonder if he likes me?
I didn’t know if that was a great virtue or a mortal failing. Both, maybe. I was pretty sure I knew what Grayling would say about it, anyway.
If I blurted out something like, By the way, I’m falling in love with you, there was a chance that Javier would reciprocate. There was also another, much larger chance that I’d just have succeeded in making the last hours of our lives incredibly awkward. Tough call.
Okay, if the guards come back and it looks like they’re about to stab us, I’ll say it. Then it’ll only be an awkward few seconds, and hopefully I’ll be dwelling on my upcoming death too hard to be embarrassed.
This seemed like a solid plan. I nodded to myself, pleased, and then something hit the door with a scrabbling thud that sounded like a mountain falling.
SKREEEEE- thump!
Both Javier and I jumped. My spine hit the wall, and he actually managed to sit up.
SKREEEEE- thump!
It sounded like something was trying to climb up the door, then falling back down. “Oh Saints,” I whispered. “Not another mirror-geld, please not another mirror-geld…”
SKREEEE… eee… eee… click!
Thump.
And then, a thin, cranky voice that didn’t quite arrive by the ears said, “Bolts are a stone bitch to work if you don’t have thumbs. Don’t make me deal with the doorknob, too.”