Page 67 of Hemlock & Silver

The mirror-desert was gray on gray, with the sky a soft blue overhead. I shifted my basket to my hip as I climbed the steps to where Lady Sorrel sat.

“I didn’t expect to see you again,” she said.

I sat the basket down. “Are you alone here?”

“It seems so. That dreadful woman is gone, and her guards have all gone running away.” She sniffed haughtily. “Not that they were good company anyway. But they might have left me one of the horses.”

“You might talk to the mirror-gelds,” I suggested. “If you get lonely. They’re… um… intelligent. Sort of.”

She tilted her head and looked up at me skeptically, the exact same way that her counterpart did. That her eyes were solid gray did not lessen the effect at all. “And what, young lady, is a mirror-geld?”

I sat down on the cold chair beside her. “That’s a very good question…”

After she’d listened to my explanation, such as it was, Lady Sorrel said, “ Huh. They sound fascinating. Horrible, but fascinating. Well. If I get lonely, perhaps I’ll go talk to them.

” She gazed at the reflected patch of garden a while longer, then said abruptly, “I don’t mind this.

You’d think I would, but I find whole days go by while I just sit and watch the hummingbirds.

And at night there are moths. It’s very peaceful.

” She pursed her lips. “Not much of my life was peaceful, you know. Not for many years. This feels like a rest, at last.”

I nodded. “I brought you something, in case you get cold.” I flipped open the basket and pulled out a stack of blankets in the most brilliant colors I had been able to find.

A smile spread across her wrinkled charcoal face. “You’re a good girl,” she said, and patted my hand. “Come back anytime.”

After Sorrel, there was only one loose end left. I sat on a bench against the villa wall, where the bougainvillea had grown into a shaded arbor. The shadows lay light and gray along the wall. One of those shadows had a single golden eye.

“Grayling?” I asked quietly, after we’d sat together for a little time.

A thin sigh rippled through my head. He stretched. “More questions, I suppose?”

“Not this time. Or at least, not yet. First I have an answer for you.”

“How novel.” He examined his claws, found one imperfect, and began nibbling at the point.

“I couldn’t figure out how the first person had gone through the mirror,” I said.

“The Mirror Queen couldn’t put anything through.

The real queen ate a mirror-apple, but someone had to have brought it back with them in the first place.

You said the old woman brought the apples through before the Mirror Queen imprisoned her. But how did she get through?”

The cat stopped even pretending to groom himself and watched me, his tail curled around his hindquarters, as neat as an onyx carving of a cat.

“She would have had to eat something from the mirror first herself. It was a chain with no beginning.”

“Perhaps it was magic,” said Grayling.

“Actually, I’m pretty sure it was cat hair.

” I had found little gray hairs all over my robes, impossible to brush off.

“It gets in everything. I found one inside my distilling equipment. Sooner or later, it was bound to get into her food. Then… what? I suppose she passed by a mirror one day, when the Mirror Queen was watching. You knew that the rooster had eaten mirror-food, so there must be some way to tell.”

“You glow,” Grayling said quietly. “Like fox fire.”

I nodded. A thrasher called from somewhere nearby, whit-wheet! The petals of the bougainvillea glowed like fire, even the ones that had fallen and lay dusted like sparks along the path.

“It wasn’t revenge, was it? You were the first link in the chain.”

“Many things can be true.” Grayling closed his eye in a slow blink.

“Don’t delude yourself. I am not a dog, to feel shame, nor a human to feel responsibility.

I am a cat. What I feel is something you will never know.

At best, you might call it ‘tidiness.’ The fur of two worlds was ruffled and needed to be groomed down again. ”

“ Are you a cat?” I asked. “Really?”

He was silent for so long that I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Just as I started to speak again, he said, “I am more a cat than I am anything else.”

Both my eyebrows went up.

He made a thin scoffing sound. “Did you never hear the old tales? The wolf and the fox and the mare that speak to the hero. Did you never wonder where they came from or why they were so much smarter than any other beast?”

“No,” I admitted. “I never did. I think probably I have missed some things, by not listening to fairy tales.”

It cost me a great deal to say that. I wondered if it was more or less than it had cost Grayling to admit that he had been partly responsible for the Mirror Queen.

“There may be hope for you yet, Healer Anja.” It was the first time Grayling had ever used my name. I felt as if I had been given a great compliment, yet I had no idea how to respond.

He stood and stretched again, slow and luxurious, every claw extended and biting into the dust under the arbor.

“Speaking of beasts,” he said, “you may want to take one last trip through the mirror. That ridiculous rooster of yours has been huddled in the coop in your workroom for days, and he’s nearly out of water. ”

I shot to my feet. “Saints! Really? ”

“Mmm.” He leaped up and landed easily on top of the wall. “You and the snake and that guardsman of yours are going back to your city, are you not?”

“As soon as the king gets here. You could come with us, if you wanted.”

He tilted his head, looking down at me. His eye glowed like fire, and a strange little shiver went over my skin.

The thought came to me that the parts of Grayling that weren’t very much like a cat also weren’t like anything I knew or understood.

I licked suddenly dry lips and said, “It seems like the beasts in fairy tales might get lonely, being so different.”

“A mirror-cat is never lonely,” Grayling said.

I shrugged. “If you feel like doing me any more favors, there’s still an old woman on the other side of the silver. I’d feel better if I knew someone was looking out for her.” I paused. “Of course, you’re not a dog, so you probably don’t do things like that.”

Grayling gave me a look that said he knew very well what I was doing. “Humans,” he said. “Always wanting things. Perhaps I’ll wander that way. I make no promises.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to.”

“Until we meet again, Healer Anja.” Then he was gone, and the last I saw was the flick of a gray tail tip vanishing over the wall.

The world came slowly back into existence around me. I heard the thrasher calling again, and the fallen bougainvillea petals continued to glow, if less brightly than a cat’s eye.

There isn’t a Saint Cat. The story goes that when all the beasts of heaven banded together and overthrew the pitiless gods, the cat was nowhere to be found.

He had been down on earth, and when the beasts asked him why he hadn’t joined the battle, he laughed and told them that no cat anywhere came when he was called.

I wondered where that forgotten beast of heaven would be now. I suppose that wasn’t very scientific of me.

I sighed. One thing scientists do know is that there are mysteries that will never be solved in our lifetimes.

Perhaps not for a thousand lifetimes to come.

Scand always said that was part of the point.

What good is life, if there’s nothing left to discover?

And I had the mirror-gelds to investigate still.

I was on fire with curiosity to know more about them, strange as they might be.

And there was Javier, of course. Maybe it wouldn’t work out. Maybe we’d find that if we weren’t fighting for our lives, we didn’t have much to say to each other.

Maybe we’d be happy beyond our wildest dreams.

I went to collect my rooster, my snake, and my love, and to discover what happened after that.