Page 55 of Hemlock & Silver

“Grayling!” I yanked the door open, and he strolled in, tail held high, as if he staged single-pawed rescues every day. I went to one knee next to him. “I will get you so much fish.”

“Yes, you will.” He gave my knee a proprietary cheek swipe.

“This is the cat you were talking about?” Javier asked.

“Good to know my reputation precedes me.”

Man and cat stared at each other. “You can’t be a cat,” Javier said finally. “Cats aren’t smart enough to talk.”

Grayling cocked an ear at me. “Who’s this tower of wit?”

“Grayling, this is my friend Javier. Javier, this is my friend Grayling. Could we save the discussion of comparative intelligence until we’re out of here?”

“That’s probably wise,” Javier said. “But how did you get past the guards? Shouldn’t they have heard that?”

“There aren’t any,” Grayling said. “Haven’t you figured it out, Mister Cats-Aren’t-Smart? She’s only got four servants in total, and one’s her maid. One guard is with her at all times, one does a patrol…”

“And I made sure the third one isn’t walking anywhere soon,” Javier said. “So we’re just a stop on the patrol.”

“Precisely. Now, we have about four minutes until he’s back within earshot, so I am leaving.

You can come with me or not, as you like.

” He strolled back out the door. We hurried after him.

Javier shot the bolt on the door so that if the guard didn’t check, there’d be no reason to think we’d escaped.

I looked down the hall to the landing and winced at the thought of trying to sneak out past the patrolling guard. Grayling was almost mirror-gray himself, but Javier and I stood out like rabid dogs at a wedding reception.

To my relief, Grayling led us to another servant’s room instead, across the hall and one up.

There was a bolt on this one as well, but it wasn’t locked.

We scooted inside, and I was astonished to see actual blankets on the bed, an entire nest of them in shades of dull blue and brown, thick enough to ward off the cold. “Someone was here?” I whispered.

“It can’t be Snow,” Javier said. “I don’t know how she’s getting away from her maids as often as she is.”

This squared with my thoughts. For someone so hedged about with watchers, she was certainly skilled at escaping them, but actually sleeping here?

“Did you think Snow was the first?” Grayling asked.

“She started with someone else. An old woman, a little dotty, who trusted the image of the Queen in the mirror.” His voice was light and bored, but his tail flicked as he spoke.

“There were so many mirrors in the king’s palace that even an old servant woman had one.

And the queen’s reflection needed someone to carry her apples through to this world. ”

He leaped onto the washstand and leaned over, his tongue flicking out. I saw an inch of water in the basin—real water!—and lunged for it as if… well, as if I’d spent most of a day without any water.

It tasted like ambrosia. I didn’t even mind that Grayling had been drinking out of it.

“Quiet,” Grayling said, lifting his dripping chin from the water. “Guard’s coming.”

We fell silent. Javier pressed his eye to the crack between door and jamb and watched. I strained my ears and heard the click of bootheels coming… pausing… then going back the other way, just as my heart had begun to sink.

“Give him five minutes,” Grayling said, his thin voice sunken to a whisper (and how did that work, when his mouth didn’t move and it seemed to be in our heads?). “Then we’ll go.”

“Why are there so few of them?” Javier asked, after a lengthy pause.

“Waking them up isn’t as easy as all that.”

I frowned. “How does she wake them up?”

“Blood from the vein,” said the cat.

We both stared at him. “What?” I said. “How would that…? It’s just blood .”

“They don’t bleed when you cut them,” Javier volunteered. “It’s all just solid black inside. The one guard didn’t fall down until I’d chopped off enough of his calf that it couldn’t hold him up.”

“Yes, but…” I put my hand to my forehead. “Blood isn’t magic . It’s just a fluid in your body, like urine or bile.”

“Blood is exactly as magic as mirrors,” Grayling said. “I wouldn’t begin to speculate about urine or bile.”

“Maybe it’s the nutrients,” I muttered. “Could you use a strong broth instead?”

Claws swiped my ankle, and I yelped. “I do not like to repeat myself,” said the cat. “I particularly do not like to repeat myself for humans . It is blood from the vein that wakes a reflection, not bile or broth.”

“Sorry,” I said. “You’re the expert.” I certainly hated it when amateurs walked in and started giving me their opinion on how I could cure rabies with two quarts of brandy and a raw onion.

(The recipes varied wildly, but there was always alcohol and always, always an onion.) Here I was doing it to Grayling.

“I didn’t mean to be rude. I’m just so confused. ”

“Hmmph.” He looked up at me from one golden eye, exactly like an old man looking over his glasses.

“Very well. The Mirror Queen, awakened, had an idea of how to wake the others. But for that she needed blood. And once she had Snow and the queen, she no longer needed the old woman to bring things back and forth through the mirror. So she overpowered her and drew her blood to wake the first of her personal guard, then imprisoned her in the mirror-world to keep bleeding her as needed.”

His thin voice grew thinner and sharp as a papercut. “She was no one, and nobody missed her. Except an old one-eyed cat that she’d pulled out of a pond once.” He turned his head and began savagely grooming his shoulder, not looking at either of us.

“Oh, Saints. Grayling…” I reached out a hand to him, then pulled it back, reading the warning signs. “I’m so sorry.”

“That’s why I tried to keep you fools from wandering about in here in the first place. If the Queen catches you, she’ll bleed you dry to wake more reflections. But no, humans know better. Humans always know better.” His tail lashed twice.

“If you’d told me why—” I started to say.

“You’d have listened? You’d have stayed out of the mirror completely? You wouldn’t have said, ‘Oh no, we have to save the little mewling human kitten, so let’s go through the mirror and meet the Queen and see if we can talk things out’?”

I opened my mouth and closed it again.

“That’s what I thought,” Grayling said.

The Mirror Queen wanted to bleed me to wake up reflections? I pictured it, being trapped in the mirror-world, dragged out occasionally so they could milk my wrist the way I milked the chime-adder’s fangs… Dear sweet Saints. I shuddered.

“She has more guards back in the city,” Grayling added. “Or else I would have broken my human out there. But she could only take so many with her across the desert.”

“Did you follow the Queen here?” Javier asked. “From Four Saints?”

“Didn’t have much choice, did I?” Another tail lash.

“Cold and hard and dry, the whole way, and the only water what I stole from their horses. She bled for each of those horses, too. The Queen had been going slowly, because there was only so much blood left in the old woman’s body, but she woke five horses in a single night to follow Snow here.

” He shook his head, his ears flat against his skull.

“The Queen brought the woman here, hoping she’d regain her strength, but it was too late.

She died waking Sorrel’s reflection, and the guards threw the body in the pit outside. ”

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

“I should have checked the stables,” Javier said. “If we’d seen the horses, we’d have known something was happening. I shouldn’t have put it off.”

Grayling rolled his good eye. “If I’d known I was going to set off such a spate of apologies, I’d never have said anything. The past is as dead as yesterday’s dinner. Now let’s get moving, shall we?”

Grayling assured us that the guard’s usual circuit took him out the front door to check the pit, then around the garden and back through. He strolled out the door with his tail up, while Javier and I slunk after.

“What is that pit?” I asked.

“Mirror-geld work,” Grayling said. His tail fluffed a little as he spoke.

“There was one hiding in the cell earlier,” I said. “One of the guards killed it.”

“They like hidden places,” the cat said, “and no, he didn’t. You can’t kill them, only disassemble them for a time. This world is rotten with them.”

I shuddered, remembering the way the one had squirmed on the end of the sword.

We reached the end of the hallway. The courtyard was empty. Javier scanned it, then nodded, and we went forward. “We’ll have to find another mirror,” I said. “The one in the empty room we used before should work—”

And then the guard who had been sitting on the third floor above our heads, invisible until we were actually in the courtyard, shouted, “ Intruders! ”

Javier swore. I heard the front door slam and the sound of run ning footsteps. Oh, of course, they’d put the injured guard up high so he could raise the alarm, that makes sense…

Grayling vanished, a gray-on-gray streak. “Go, go!” said Javier, shoving me toward the nearest door. I opened it, and he flung himself after, slamming the door. There was a thick metal bolt on the inside of this one, to my surprise. Who has bolts like that in the villa?

Then I took a few steps down the short entryway, and the room opened up, and I knew.

The room was almost completely dark gray, like all the rooms, except for one thing. A single blanket thrown over a chair, woven in brilliant turquoise and scarlet and gold, blazing like the sun against the mirror-gray.

Lady Sorrel’s rooms. Of course. I could easily imagine why someone with her past would want the ability to lock out the world sometimes. Snow must have stolen the blanket at some point and brought it back here.