“We’ll see about that,” I growled, scooping the mirror up and holding it before me. I wanted to get this over with. Something that seemed to be made of tongues was throwing itself at its cage door so furiously that I worried about the lock. “Mirror, mirror in my hands, show me where the castle stands.”
The mirror made a frustrated noise, and a perfect, clear image of the castle formed in the glass, snow coating the battlements and heraldic flags snapping in the wind. Not quite what we needed, but at least I’d managed to make it work. I lay the mirror at my feet.
“Mirror, mirror on the floor,” I intoned, “show us to the castle’s door.”
“This is humiliating,” it grumbled as pictures unspooled across it. At first my face appeared, just like an actual reflection, before the image swooped away from me, down the stairs, out the door, and into the woods, as if the path were being viewed by a bird in flight.
I tried to commit it to memory, making note of the direction and any landmarks I could see. The route veered from the stream, tracing a straight line through the heart of the woods. It was difficult to tell how long a journey it wouldbe.
“I think I might be able to get us there, from that,” Sam said.
“If not, we can check again along the way.” I gathered up the protesting mirror, and I grabbed a handful of papers as well. “Let’s take whatever evidence we can.”
Sam picked up the rest of the notes. It would definitely be easier to use those as our proof than to bring one of thesorcerer’s creations back with us. Even the little ones were too much of a risk. The old king, I remembered, had died of a poisonous bite. I had no wish to meet the same fate.
We hurried out, the cries of the monsters vanishing into silence the moment we left the secret chamber. I hoped when I returned, it would be to tear the whole place down.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Welcoming Committee
The skies remained clear, and the next leg of our journey was noticeably easier without a blizzard blowing into our faces. Shuffling through the deep snow made it an exhausting hike, nonetheless. I hadn’t eaten in so long I’d stopped being hungry—never a good sign. Foraging seemed pointless. Little would be available, and even less would be visible, thanks to the previous day’s storm.
More dangerous still, now that we’d traveled away from the stream, we had no ready source of fresh water. Snow makes a poor substitute—it draws heat from your body and ends up doing more harm than good. I considered attempting to turn into a puddle so Sam could drink from me, but he found the idea unsettling. I tried to reassure him that the water wouldn’t turn back into my organs in his stomach, but that somehow only made things worse.
My sore throat had been growing more painful by the hour. And despite the cold, I had broken out in a fevered sweat. My hands shook. I wasn’t able to hold them steady.
We were both somewhat buoyed, however, by the knowledge we were headed toward warmth and a meal. Traveling in a straight line was impossible in the dense forest, but we recalibrated our position with the looking glass whenever we worried we were getting off track. It provided this help unwillingly. Even more so since we were forced to put it in a variety of undignified positions in order to supply appropriate rhymes. (“Mirror, mirror on wet leaves, point us to the castle’s eaves,” and so on.)
Unfortunately, I had no luck in tricking it into telling us anything about its master, no matter how clever my attempts. I was particularly proud of “Mirror, mirror in the air, show your master in their lair,” but Sam made me stop after that because I’d flung the mirror as high as I could, and he’d only just managed to catch it before it hit the ground. He rightly pointed out that a broken mirror wouldn’t do us any good. We had to travel for the next mile or two with a looking glass insulting my intelligence, virtue, and parentage—the last of which grew increasingly improbable the longer the tirade continued. But I would have considered that a small price to pay if my ploy had worked.
Toward the end of the day, a final check of the mirror showed the castle less than half an hour’s walk ahead. Tired, thirsty, ailing, and frozen as I was, I picked up my pace in anticipation.
Then an arrow thudded into a tree trunk scant inches from my face.
I was so surprised that I didn’t scream, only stumbled to a halt, blinking in bewilderment.
“Clem!” Sam shouted. “What the hell?”
Three masked hunters stepped out from the shadows of trees like ghosts appearing from thin air. One—Clem, presumably—had her bow nocked, with the arrow trained on me. The other two could have been any of them.
“Hello, witch,” the one in front greetedme.
“Sorceress,” I corrected automatically, my voice hoarse and cracking. If I’d been given three guesses as to which hunter this was, I’d have said Jack for all of them.
Her eyes, hard and sharp as a pair of nails, locked on me as unwaveringly as Clem’s arrow. “Come back to assess the damage? I think you’ll find it wasn’t as much as you hoped.”
“What are youtalkingabout?” Surely Jack didn’t still imagine I’d been the one behind the assassination attempts? Not after I’d rescued them.
But other than Sam, I realized, no one could have known for certain I’d done that. Everyone else must have been left baffled by the appearance of the lake and their sudden transformation. If a month ago, Jack had thought I brought the stone giants upon us, she’d been given no reason to change her mind.
The three hunters watched me in tense silence. Silence that could snap at any moment into something dangerous.
“Look,” I said. “I can explain—”
“Are you all daft?” Sam stepped in front of me, cutting me off. “Clem, put your bow down.”
Clem’s aim adjusted by a fraction of an inch. “Git oot th’ way, Sam,” she answered. “Till this gits sorted.”
