Page 56 of Hemlock & Silver
I heard the bolt shoot home. A moment later, blows hammered ineffectually on the other side of the door. “That’ll hold him for a while,” said Javier with satisfaction. “He’ll have to go out and up through the garden door. Once he’s gone, we can—”
The blanket moved.
Gray on gray hides a multitude of things. Even old women tucked under blankets. Lady Sorrel’s reflection rose to her feet, pulling the colorful blanket more tightly around herself. “My goodness,” she said, cocking her head to one side. “Do I know either of you?”
“Uh. No. I’m afraid not, Lady Sorrel.” Oh Saints, she’s awake. Blessed Saint Adder, I don’t want to fight her. “You know us—err—over there.” I gestured toward the covered mirror.
Javier followed my gesture, inhaled sharply, and darted toward it. He yanked the dustcover off, revealing—
Nothing.
An empty rectangular frame stood against the wall. He stuck one hand through it anyway, as if hoping there might be a mirror hidden within, then cursed softly.
“I’m afraid I got rid of that years ago,” Lady Sorrel’s reflection said apologetically.
“I never liked mirrors. And no, the irony’s not lost on me.
” She pursed her lips, her wrinkles rearranging themselves in the cold sculptural light.
“Let me guess, you’re on the run from that awful woman who calls herself the Queen, aren’t you? ”
“Yes?” I said uncertainly, grappling with the notion that one of the awakened reflections was not on the Mirror Queen’s side.
Mirror Sorrel nodded. “Dreadful, isn’t she? My Randolph would certainly never have married her, let me tell you!”
“But didn’t she wake you up?”
The reflection sniffed. “Yes, by pouring blood down my throat! Can you imagine ? And then has the nerve to tell me that she wants me to take the place of the other me out there, by methods I shudder to contemplate, so I can dance to her tune, thank you very much.” She rolled her eyes.
“I told her to go away while I thought about it, and she hasn’t bothered me since.
Though little Snow was kind enough to bring this for me.
” She ran her hand down the blanket fondly.
“Sorry,” I said, “can you go back—what were those methods you shudder to contemplate?”
“I hardly like to say,” she said. “Incidentally, young man, there’s a secret stair behind the wardrobe. I’ve never had to use it, but I believe it comes out somewhere in the wine cellars.”
“I’d really like to know what she said,” I said, while Javier grabbed the wardrobe and began tugging it away from the wall. “It could be important.”
“Mmm.” Mirror Sorrel pressed her lips together.
“She said that I’d be eating the other Sorrel’s heart.
My ‘rival’s heart’ is how she put it. And she didn’t even ask if I would, she told me that I’d be doing it.
I think not.” She sniffed again. “I don’t know if that’s murder or suicide, but I want no part of it. ”
“Oh,” I said weakly, while more things jostled into place inside my head.
To wake up, drink blood from the real world.
To exist in the real world without fading away, eat your opposite’s heart.
It made horrible fairy-tale sense. And what would you do, to live outside the mirror, in the color and warmth, instead of the mirror’s eternal cold and gray?
I was honest enough to admit that if I were a reflection, woken by the Queen, I might look on the real world with enough envy that I would think one woman’s death was a small price to pay.
Maybe that was how the Queen held her subjects, with the promise that they would someday eat their counterpart’s heart and be free of the mirror-world forever.
But the Queen had figured without the will of Lady Sorrel’s reflection.
“You are very—ethical,” I said. “And strong.”
“Never could abide organ meats anyway. Now go! They’ll be pounding on the garden door soon enough.”
“Will you be all right?” Javier asked.
“We’re remarkably hard to kill over here,” Mirror Sorrel said, lifting a dark gray hand. I started to ask about that, but Javier had my arm and was tugging me toward the doorway behind the wardrobe.
The door was concealed in the wainscoting, so we had to drop to our hands and knees to enter, but once inside, it was a cramped but walkable passage, ending in a flight of stairs.
Javier pulled the wardrobe back against the wall as far as he could and closed up the door.
We went down the stairs hunched over, trying not to bang our heads on the ceiling.
“What a remarkable woman,” Javier said softly.
“On both sides of the mirror.”
The stairs hit a landing and a hairpin turn. This must have been a servant’s stair once, in the original building.
“So how does eating someone’s heart fit in with your theory of humors, not magic?” asked Javier.
I tried not to bristle. It was a good question. “The heart is the seat of the sanguine humor. Perhaps the mirror-folk are lacking in the sanguine humors, which is why blood awakens them. A whole heart might strengthen them enough to pass through.”
“Makes sense.”
It was my turn to grunt. It was a good theory, but it didn’t explain a few key facts, like why Mirror Sorrel would have to eat her counterpart’s heart specifically. Scand would have been poking holes in it like no one’s business.
Javier’s next question was the one that took me by surprise. “Do you think Snow is real?”
“I… don’t know. No, the mirror-food makes her sick, so I think she is real? And if she wasn’t, she’d have had to eat… her own… heart…”
She was cutting our daughter’s heart out.
Ask Rose to button up her coat and she’d have to stop and look at it to see where the buttons were… Then she started getting lost in a castle she’d lived in all her life. It was as if she’d forgotten which way the hallways went…
“Oh hell,” I said. “Princess Snow is real. But her sister Rose wasn’t.”