Page 62 of Hemlock & Silver

“Kill her?” Javier asked, as I threw things into my medical bag that would probably do no good at all. “Won’t pushing her through the mirror mean she’s alive over here?”

I shook my head. “Not without the heart. She’ll fall to dust, like all reflections do, but she can’t come back. There’s no one on this side to cast her reflection again. She’ll just be gone.”

It was clever, in its way. I wouldn’t have thought of it, but clearly Snow had. Fortunately I’d given up counting the number of times I’d been outwitted by a twelve-year-old in the last week. It would have been too depressing.

Five apples. She might last until she took a drink or ate real food, but not long after that. Hell, I wasn’t sure she’d last even that long. She’d had a convulsion after two, albeit a mild one. Five…

There was no cure for any of it, but I packed my medical bag as if there might be. The broken glass had been cleaned from my mirror, so we went up to the empty room on the second floor, pretending to be looking for Snow there, and went through the silver.

It was quiet again, deceptively quiet, as it always was.

We were still outnumbered. I’d had an idea, for what little it was worth.

The mirror-gelds seemed well inclined toward us.

Perhaps that would stretch a little further.

Or I’d offer them as many mirrors as they wanted and hope that tipped the balance.

Before we’d stepped through, I’d sent Javier to the stables while I packed.

He’d come back with his sword and a rope.

Once mirror-side, we tied it to the balcony and went down.

(I will spare you the details of me going down a rope.

It was horrible, I burned my hands and laid down red lines on my thighs, it probably would have hurt less if I’d just jumped, etc.)

We hurried to the mirror-geld pit, and I knelt on the edge. I didn’t want to shout loudly enough to be heard inside, but I needed to summon the mirror-gelds, so I wound up yelling as softly as possible. “Hello? It’s me! I need your help again! Hello?”

There was a horribly long silence, and I was starting to think we should hide somewhere for fear of the guard patrolling, when I saw a gray head poking out of one of the holes.

It turned and writhed upward, clinging to the wall, and trained a hundred blank eyes on me.

Not ours. This one seemed to collect eyes without faces attached.

I lifted one hand and waved, which felt ridiculous. It stared at me for a while longer, then waved back with one arm out of dozens, and went back down into its hole.

Damn it. Had it just been saying hello? Did it realize I needed to talk to another one?

I cupped my hands around my mouth, preparing to yell again, when I heard snapping and muted applause.

A moment later, our mirror-geld (and wasn’t that a thing to be thinking?) crawled out of its tunnel and came scurrying up the wall toward us.

“Hi,” I said, when it had its head over the edge. “I, uh, need a favor. Another favor.”

It held out a dozen pairs of arms, palms up.

I chose to take that as an inquiry. “The Mirror Queen—um, that’s the bad woman here. I don’t know if you know her—”

The mirror-geld’s nod was sharp and furious. Its many mouths dragged down at their mismatched corners in anger.

“Right. She’s stolen a child from the other world.

Well, it’s complicated. But she’s been using this child as her link to the other world, and…

” Oh hell, did the mirror-gelds even know there was another world?

No, I had to assume they did; we were out of time and had been for at least two hours. “And we’d like her back.”

The mirror-geld cocked its head to one side. If it had been a human, it would have been thinking. Saints, I’d been halfway hoping that it was a rescuer of humans in need and would leap at the chance, but maybe not.

Javier spoke up abruptly. “The swords the guards are carrying come from our world. If she has this child, she’ll be able to get more and wake more soldiers to use them.”

The mirror-geld reared back a little, and the angry faces grew even worse. Those with teeth began to gnash them. It definitely didn’t like that. I remembered how the guard’s sword had chopped into its side. Maybe real metal did more damage than mirror-metal somehow?

It turned then, gave a single emphatic snap into the pit, and crawled up over the edge and toward the front of the villa. I blinked. I’d been hoping it would wait outside a balcony, maybe as some kind of escape plan, but this was different.

This looked like it was going to war.

It made an imperious gesture at the double doors, and we hastened to open them. There was no guard, which I was grateful for, but which had me worried. The mirror-geld gestured to us to go forward. Javier drew his sword and entered the villa. I followed, then looked back over my shoulder.

The mirror-geld began to squash itself down, then went wriggling forward. Hands and faces began to extrude through the doorway, length after length, like malformed living clay.

I had to look away. It’s not polite to be sickened by people who are doing you a favor.

Javier paused just before entering the courtyard. “There’s a good chance the sentry will see us once we enter,” he whispered.

I nodded. The mirror-geld couldn’t nod, since it was crammed into a tiny space, but it made shooing gestures. We obeyed.

Javier was about three steps into the courtyard when the voice from the third floor shouted, “What the— Intruders! ”

The mirror-geld surged forward. I heard the snap of side tables being reduced to matchsticks and the crunch of paintings dragged from the walls. Then I heard a quiet, heartfelt, “Oh, fuck,” from overhead and the sentry began shouting, “Mirror-geld! Mirror-geld! ”

We ran up the stairs, but apparently not fast enough, because hands picked us up from behind, and our monstrous ally carried us up as fast as a horse could trot.

It grabbed the railing in a dozen places to pull itself up, and at least one place splintered, but that didn’t slow it.

That much flesh in motion had a horrible inexorable quality to it, like a landslide somehow thundering up a hill.

I had the nasty feeling that if the hands dropped me, I’d be crushed before it was even able to stop.

“There!” I said, pointing toward the Mirror Queen’s chambers. It, too, had double doors, but they were smaller than the ones out front, and I had no idea how small the mirror-geld could make itself. Had we brought the creature all the way here, only for it to be unable to join us?

“We can open it…” I began, “… or not,” as the creature ripped the doors off their hinges.

Five people stared up at us, their mouths open in shock. Two guards, one servant, the Mirror Queen—and Snow.

“Snow!” I shouted. “Snow, you…” And there I stopped, because I had been so focused on finding her that I had no idea how to continue.

The Mirror Queen wasn’t holding her prisoner.

She wasn’t shackled to a wall or pinned by the guards.

She was standing next to the Queen, looking as shocked as everyone else.

Had I been wrong about why she was here?

Gray hands pushed us into the room, and the bulk of the mirror-geld hit the doors with a sound like raw meat being thrown on a board. Only part of it fit. Cracks appeared in the gray, running up toward the ceiling, and gray plaster dust rained down from the ceiling like ash.

“ What is the meaning of this?” shouted the Mirror Queen, drawing herself up.

Even with the strange muffling of the mirror, it was a very impressive shout, with just the right amount of rage and what are you doing here, you grubby peasant scorn.

Evil she might be, but the Mirror Queen was royalty to her fingertips.

Unfortunately for her, when a hundred gray hands are clawing their way through the door and the walls are shaking, shouting doesn’t actually do much.

Her maid shrieked and bolted. Sensibly. The guards, less sensibly, drew their swords and charged toward the mirror-geld, though it must be said, they didn’t charge particularly fast.

My only plan was to get to Snow before she collapsed. She was still upright, so maybe I had time to get the charcoal into her after all. I dodged around the guards, which only partially worked. One of the two broke away to stop me.

However relieved he was to be facing a human, not the mirror-geld, he had reckoned without my bodyguard. Javier leaped between us, and the enemy’s sword slid off his with a snarl of steel. I hesitated, almost fatally, thinking of Javier’s ribs.

“Go, go !” he snapped, retreating before a flurry of blows. “I’ll hold him!”

Hold him he did. The guard undoubtedly wanted to follow me, but Javier offered him a choice between me and keeping his head, and he sensibly opted for the latter.

I shot a glance past them and saw the second guard, the big one in armor, slashing at the mirror-geld.

Gray hands littered the floor, but their loss didn’t seem to be slowing the creature down.

It hit the wall with another foundation-shaking thump.

“Stop,” said the Queen. Her voice cut through the sounds of battle like broken glass through flesh. Everything parted around it. Even the mirror-geld froze, though its severed hands twitched and crawled about the floor nonetheless.

The Mirror Queen’s skin was arsenic white, and her dress was as red as the drop of blood that slid slowly down Snow’s neck, from the point of the dagger pressed against the girl’s throat.

Too slow. This whole time, I’d been too slow. Both Snow and the Mirror Queen had been one step ahead of me, and now I couldn’t even cross a single room in time.

“Now,” said the Mirror Queen quite calmly, “you are all going to leave here. At once.”