Page 57 of Hemlock & Silver

It made sense. It made awful sense. If the real Rose had gone through the mirror, the Mirror Queen could easily have captured her, cut out her heart, and fed it to her reflection.

I wondered what had motivated her. Was it an experiment to see if it would work?

Surely the Mirror Queen had tested it beforehand.

I’d have been feeding mirror-roosters their own hearts for weeks before I tried it on anything bigger, but I had no reason to think that the Mirror Queen was terribly rigorous about experiment design.

Perhaps she’d simply wanted a cohort on the other side.

Hell, maybe it had been maternal affection. Perhaps the Mirror Queen wanted her children to have that world full of light and warmth just as much as she wanted it for herself.

Regardless, the mirror-Rose had gone through into our world to take her counterpart’s place, but everything would have been backward. Buttons, hallways, letters… An adult might be able to hide that, but not a nine-year-old child.

And then Nurse told the queen. Our queen, on this side. And she must have realized at once what had happened. That her own daughter had been replaced by this simulacrum from the other side.

There are plenty of stories of changelings out there, and they’re generally used to explain why a child is suddenly behaving badly, or getting sick, or acting peculiar. It can’t be my child. My child is normal and healthy, so this one must be a stranger.

Poor dead queen. The first person in history to believe that her child was replaced by a doppelganger and actually be correct.

I wondered why she’d tried to cut out mirror-Rose’s heart. A twisted sense of justice? A desperate belief that maybe if she could get the heart out, she could feed it to Rose’s body and wake her again?

It must have been far too late for that. The real Rose was probably in a shallow grave somewhere near the mirror-palace. Both Roses lost, killed by their mothers from the other side of the silver.

I explained this to Javier, who listened gravely. “Have I missed anything?” I asked, when I was done. I was hoping that maybe there was some place where my theory unraveled, something that proved it was only a monstrous flight of fancy, not cold truth.

“One thing.”

“Yes?”

“We’re here.” Javier waved to a door set low in the wall.

“Oh, thank the saints.” I pressed back against the wall and let him go by me. He pulled the door open with a squeak of hinges—I winced at the sound—and then let out a curse.

The door was apparently as well hidden on the far side as it was at the top. So well hidden, in fact, that someone had stacked barrels against it. All we could see was curved wood and a metal stave.

Javier tried to push it out of the way and got exactly nowhere. “There are too many of them,” he said grimly. He started to lie down on the stairs to push with his legs, but I had images of his abused ribs on stone and stopped him.

“I’ll try it. And if you say I’m not strong enough, I will punch you in the kidneys.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Unfortunately it didn’t matter that I was bigger than most women. I could have been muscled like a blacksmith and that barrel wouldn’t have moved. By the angle of the curve, it was one of the big wine casks, and there were probably two or three more stacked on top and alongside.

In the Red Feather Saga, the secret passages always come out somewhere convenient. I was beginning to suspect that the dialogue wasn’t the only thing that was unrealistic.

“Do we go back?” I asked.

Javier pulled a face. “I guess it’s that or try to kick the barrel open. And then the next one that falls on top of it, and the next one after that.”

“That seems like it would take a lot of work,” I said doubtfully.

“But who’s going to be waiting for us at the top? I doubt Lady Sorrel can convince them we simply vanished into thin air.”

With fine dramatic timing, there was a thud from the distant top of the stairwell. We both looked up.

“Well,” I said. “That doesn’t— eerk !”

There was a scraping noise from the wall, and before my ears had finished registering it, hands grabbed me and yanked me backward.

A lot of hands. My first disjointed thought was that there must be at least five people holding me and where had they come from?

I was carried ten feet back along a passageway, my feet no longer touching the ground.

“Anja!” Javier came pounding after me, his eyes wide. Over his shoulder, I saw something gray come scuttling down from the ceiling, where it had been nearly invisible. It touched something on the wall, and there was another scraping noise as the opening to the secret stair closed up.

The hands set me down. Javier grabbed me and pulled me to him, one hand slapping at the absence of a sword at his side. He swore. I turned and looked at my kidnapper, already half knowing what I’d see.

It was a mirror-geld. Dozens of times larger than the one I’d seen before, a thicket of arms and grasping hands.

The ones at the bottom had palms flat against the ground, like feet.

The passage we were in was only about four feet wide, but it was at least twelve feet high, and the mirror-geld more than filled it.

It looked squashed against the sides, and I saw more hands braced against the walls.

“Oh. Shit,” Javier said, forming each word clearly and distinctly.

The wall of hands parted vertically, like mandibles opening, revealing dozens of faces.

Only a few were intact. The rest had been pieced inexpertly together, broken mouths fitted against bridgeless noses, skewed and mismatched eyes, all of them wedged against each other like bits of shattered pottery reassembled by a madman.

With horrifying synchronicity, every face squinted down at us.

“There’s another one behind us,” I said.

I had gone past terror into a kind of frozen calm.

I was dead. I was utterly and unbelievably dead.

The arsenic was drunk, the hemlock eaten.

There was no point in screaming about it now.

All I could muster was a vague regret that my family wouldn’t have ashes to put in the spirit house.

“That’s… that’s one of the things you talked about,” Javier said. “Before.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t realize.”

“It wasn’t this big.”

“It’s going to eat us, isn’t it?” Javier asked, sounding as calm as I felt.

“Yeah, it is.” Our hands found each other and gripped tight.

The small, scuttling mirror-geld went by, clinging to the wall above our heads.

We both ducked instinctively. I say small, but it was easily as long as I was tall.

It had feet like a gecko, if geckos had human hands instead of toes.

Each hand spread its fingers, digging into irregularities in the stone.

It occurred to me that Javier had seen the mirror-geld grab me, and yet he’d run toward it, not back. With no time to think, he’d still run toward a monstrous horror to save me.

How could you not love a man like that?

The mirror-geld raised its hands in a wave, folding some inward like an insect’s legs. We flinched back. But each inward hand only raised an index finger and held it over a face’s lips.

Quiet? It wants us to be quiet? But why—

Footsteps clattered down the secret stair. I heard the sound of something knocking on wood, and the head of the Queen’s guard said, “What the devil?”

Oh. That’s why.

We stood there in absolute silence, Javier, the mirror-gelds, and I. They didn’t seem to breathe, and we tried not to. There were two guards, judging by the sounds, and every time one moved, it sounded as if they were standing directly behind me.

Whatever’s between us isn’t actually stone. Plaster, maybe. I suppose that’s the beauty of the mirror-stuff, it all looks the same.

Finally a disgusted voice said, “Well, they didn’t get out this way,” followed by footsteps going up, followed by silence.

All of us sagged with relief, even the big mirror-geld. The arms lowered, and the faces relaxed, their eyelids drooping.

Then it drew itself up, putting its hand-feet more firmly under it, and began to move backward. It made beckoning gestures with a dozen arms as it went.

I looked at Javier. He looked at me. We had uttered some variant of now what do we do? so many times that neither of us needed to say it out loud.

“No idea,” he said.

“Me neither.”

We followed the mirror-geld, but we didn’t let go of each other’s hands.

The passage widened gradually as we walked, its edges becoming softer and more organic looking, a tunnel rather than a hallway.

The mirror-geld widened as well, and I realized just how compressed it had been.

It slumped downward and out to the sides, forming a shape rather like a caterpillar, if a caterpillar were nine feet tall and six feet wide.

The hands that enclosed the faces were overhung by a bulky mass of mirror-flesh, seamed together in a patchwork of undifferentiated flesh, studded with dozens of eyes.

It looked like a head of sorts, although Saint Adder only knew if it kept a brain there or if it even needed a brain.

And how would it get a brain anyway? You’d have to take one out and hold it up between two mirrors, wouldn’t you?

(Granted, I’d removed brains before, in the course of dissections, but I didn’t go waving them at mirrors afterward.)

It must have taken years to grow to that size, if it was only made of parts that fell off between two mirrors.

And the fact that the individual bits hadn’t dissolved meant…

what? That they were fundamentally different than a regular reflection?

That they stayed alive if there were enough of them squished together? That the process somehow woke them up?

It seemed unlikely that I was going to stay alive long enough to find the answer.