Page 66 of Hemlock & Silver

“Come have a seat,” Nurse said, waving us toward chairs. Her room was smaller than mine, but it had a neat little sitting area.

We sat. Nurse perched on the edge of her own chair. When we’d first met, I’d thought of her as rabbitlike, but now she reminded me of a bird.

A surprisingly large number of birds will attack snakes to drive them out of their territory. Snakes eat eggs and baby birds, so it makes sense, but that’s still always struck me as a terrible kind of courage in a tiny ball of feather and bone.

“I suppose you know why we’re here,” I said.

Nurse smiled a little. “I have a fairly good idea, but suppose you tell me?”

I couldn’t blame her. No sense in incriminating herself if it turned out that I’d only come to ask about the weather. “You were working for the Mirror Queen,” I said.

Javier gave a startled grunt, but Nurse ducked her head like a child caught at mischief. “I suppose one of the servants saw me carrying that mirror?”

I shook my head. “No, actually. I assumed it must have been Snow. It wasn’t until later that it occurred to me that she probably wasn’t strong enough and certainly not tall enough to drop a mirror that size over my head.

That would take an adult. A fairly tall adult.

Even then, I wasn’t sure. It was Javier who put me on the right track. ”

“I did?”

“He did?”

“You said that you didn’t know how Snow kept slipping out when she had all those people watching her.

At the time, I just thought, ‘Eh, twelve-year-olds are slippery.’ But they aren’t.

Not to that extent, anyway. Unless somebody is helping them.

Somebody who could order the maids out of the room or send them off on errands. ”

“She didn’t know,” Nurse said. “She’s a clever child, but not as clever as she thinks.”

“That makes two of us,” I said dryly. “Because there’s no way that she could have gotten sick so frequently without someone watching every morsel of food that went in her mouth. And who better to do that than her devoted Nurse?”

“I had no choice,” Nurse said. “You know that.”

“I don’t, actually. Why were you letting her poison herself?” I kept my voice light and calm, despite a strong urge to shake the woman until her teeth rattled.

Nurse gave me an incredulous look. “Because she’d die without it! Haven’t you figured that out?”

I gaped at her. “What?”

“She’s a mirror-child. If she didn’t eat mirror-food, she’d waste away to nothing. It was hard enough on her as it is, before you people started coming in, prattling about illness and poisons.”

“But she isn’t,” I said. I knew she wasn’t. What lies had the Mirror Queen told Nurse? “She’s from here. It was Rosie who…”

Something clicked inside my head. It wasn’t the last piece of the puzzle—probably I’d never get the last pieces, since they were all too scattered now—but it was enough. “Saints. You were helping the Mirror Queen because you felt guilty that Rosie died.”

Nurse’s composure cracked, and she wiped at her eyes.

“It was my fault. I told the queen—I didn’t know about the mirrors then—and she killed them.

I nearly killed myself. But then she came to me in the mirror.

I thought I was going mad. And she held up a note, a backward note.

” She wiped her eyes again. “I’ve never been easy with my letters, so it took me forever to read it. ”

“What did it say?” Javier asked.

Nurse gulped. “It said, ‘My child is dead.’” She pulled out a handkerchief with trembling hands.

“She knew it was my fault. I thought she was the dead queen’s ghost haunting me at first, but she explained.

The real Snow was dead, too—the queen had killed her first, poor mite—but she sent her daughter over here to take her place.

And since Rosie was stabbed in front of the mirror, the Queen in the mirror, she had to…

she was only a reflection, she couldn’t stop it…

so she murdered the real Rose with her own hands…

I had to help her.” Nurse looked at me with eyes like broken glass.

“Two children were already dead because of me. But I could save this Snow.”

She broke down and buried her face in her hands.

I looked at Javier helplessly. I wanted to say, Now what do we do?

but that had become a joke, and this was not a joke, this was a woman crushed under the weight of guilt for something that had never been her fault to begin with.

Javier clearly had no answers, because he was gazing at Nurse with horrified pity.

The Mirror Queen had wrapped Nurse up in a chain of lies and regrets that I couldn’t even begin to unpack. I didn’t even try. “The Mirror Queen is dead,” I said bluntly. “Did you ever go through the mirror yourself?”

Nurse looked up, her face as crumpled as the handkerchief. She looked confused. “Go through how? It was her magic that did it.”

“Right.” Thank the saints, we don’t have to figure out how to stop her from talking. If she tries, they’ll assume she’s gone mad with grief. I hated to sentence her to such a fate, but damned if I knew what else to do.

Nurse buried her face in the handkerchief again, her shoulders shaking.

“Snow will be fine,” I said. “She’s… err… adapted to the food on this side. The mirror-food was just slowing it down, so she could still go… errr… home.”

The silent sobs slowed. “Truly?” whispered Nurse. “She’ll truly be all right?”

“Truly. I… err… tested some samples.” (What samples and what I’d possibly test for, I had no idea, but the point was to reassure her with the mystique of a healer doing Important Healer Things. It works sometimes, and it was working now, thankfully.)

She whispered a prayer of thanks and pressed the wreckage of the handkerchief against her mouth. After a moment, she said, “Maybe it’s for the best. That poor woman. She never got over any of it. Maybe she’s happier now.”

“I’m sure she is,” I said. I wasn’t sure if she was talking about the Mirror Queen or the real one, and I decided it didn’t matter.

I rose to my feet before she could ask any inconvenient questions.

“I think, perhaps, it’s best if Snow—this Snow—makes a clean break with the past. You should go home. I’ll make it right with the king.”

Nurse swallowed hard but nodded. Probably she thought that I could make trouble for her.

Probably she was right, though I had no intention of doing so.

“I’ll pack tonight,” she said. “The supply wagon comes tomorrow. I can ride out on it.” She straightened up a little, and some of the tension in her face eased as she realized that I had no intention of denouncing her.

“Yes. I’ll be glad to go. I miss my family. And I’m so tired.”

“You deserve a rest,” I said firmly, and we showed ourselves out.

“Are you sure about this?” Javier asked in an undertone. “She did drop a mirror over your head so you’d be captured.”

“I doubt she knew anything about the blood or the hearts. And what am I going to do? Demand restitution?” I was fairly sure that Nurse received a royal pension and wasn’t in poverty.

I was also sure that a single chest of goods from one of my father’s ships was worth more than she saw in a year.

“I don’t think she’s going to do it again. ”

He nodded slowly. “So now what do we do?”

I snorted. “We wait for the king to arrive, shower us with praise, then get the hell out of here and go home.”

“I suppose you’ll go back to being a healer.”

“I suppose you’ll go back to being a guard?”

He grunted. After a moment, he said, “I may be done with guard duty. I’m too old for this. You’ve seen my ribs.”

“Yeah.” We had made our way, without really thinking about it, down to the garden, to the stone bench where we’d met so often. There was a gardener working in the distance, but we were well out of earshot.

“You know,” I said, sitting down, “sometimes healers go into pretty rough neighborhoods.”

“I’ve seen some of those neighborhoods. It fills me with dread that you’d go galloping through one without an army at your back.”

“I never gallop,” I said, with dignity. “But it had occurred to me that maybe a bodyguard wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

“Had it, now?” He raised one eyebrow.

“They might have to stay at the house. Or at least near it. I could get called out at any time of day or night.” I shrugged. “Of course, you’re done with guard duty. Maybe I’ll ask Aaron—”

“You will do no such thing, ” Javier growled, and kissed me, while hummingbirds buzzed furiously around us both.