But to break it, I’d had to touchit.
I heard shouts, questions, but they seemed to be coming from a great distance.
And then I stopped hearing anything at all.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Strange Reflections
I couldn’t say how long I’d been wandering through the maze of mirrors.
They lined the walls, ceiling, and even the floor, broad rectangles of glass fitted snugly one after another, separated only by their thin golden frames. The corridors branched, split, and dead-ended at random intervals. The difficulty of spotting the twists and turns was exacerbated by the occasional clear pane of glass that I smacked into face-first. Which was, I thought, just plain mean.
Counting my footsteps proved useless as a way of determining how much time was passing—no matter how hard I concentrated, the numbers looped, became meaningless, and vanished from my head. There seemed to be no time in this place. Or it was outside of time.
Once upon a time, a woman found herself trapped in the once upon a time.
At least I didn’t become hungry or thirsty no matter how far I walked—a good thing since there was nothing to eat or drink.I likewise did not become fatigued or feel any need for rest, so I strode on and on without ever sleeping.
When I grew bored of calling for help, I switched to muttering grumpily. Then I sang snatches of every song I could remember. When I at last fell silent, no other voice took the place of my own, and I had nothing left to do but gaze into the mirrors as I passed.
At first, there was nothing much to see—only my own image repeating endlessly into the distance. My hair was a long, tangled snarl. My clothes had seen better days. And the scabbed-over bite mark on my cheek was doing me no favors. After some unknown number of turns, however, the mirrors began to reflect someone else. Someone not quiteme.
She looked like me. Or, rather, they looked like me, for there was a different version in every pane. There was a Melilot in a fancy ball gown, pink and blue with leg-of-mutton sleeves. A Melilot in tattered rags. A Melilot in a gleaming suit of armor. A Melilot in a dress dripping with so many diamonds the cloth could not be seen. My hair showed up straightened, braided, long, short, and once shaved off, leaving me smoothly bald. I saw a Melilot with scars like Jonquil’s at her neck and wrists. A dead Melilot, her flesh half-decayed from her bones. An empty mirror where I thought, perhaps, I had never been born.
“If you’re trying to disturb me,” I remarked to a reflection with sharp teeth, curved claws, and backward-facing feet, “you’re going to have to do better than that. An ogre once took me to see his collection of human skeletons in amusing poses. He was very proud of it. It was a family heirloom.”
As if in response, a mob of angry strangers stepped into the frame and began poking at sharp-toothed me with torches and pitchforks. My mirror image opened her mouth wide and leapt on one of them, tearing his throat out with a spray of blood. She was remarkably nimble for someone with feet pointed in the wrong direction.
All right, so it was abitdisturbing.
From then on, the mirrors stepped up their game; instead of reflecting me as I wasn’t, they showed me scenes from lives I had never lived. Down one set of corridors, I watched my stepmother cast a dish of lentils into the fireplace and command me—her mouth moving silently—to count them while she and my sisters went to a party. Then my birth mother, somehow turned into a tree, gave me a makeover. In a different passage, I saw myself and all twelve hunters sneaking off to an underground kingdom to dance the night away. Around a turn, Gervase was giving me the freedom of the entire castle except for one forbidden room with a temptingly locked door. Familiar stories. But none of them my own.
I saw myself sent off to marry a monster. A prince. A queen. A bear. I saw myself severing the head from my sister Jonquil’s dragon, forcing her to act as my servant, and claiming her bride, Gnoflwhogir, as my own. At the end of that hallway, I sat on the obsidian throne of Skalla, wearing a dress the color of midnight and sipping something far too red from a bone-white cup. I don’t know how long I stood staring at that image. I’d like to say it was entirely in horror, but some small part of me was fascinated as well. Here was a Melilot who’d never again be forced to kneel before her stepmother.
Eventually I backed away and chose a different route, passing through a long gallery of Sams and me—or would that be Sams and mes? Samses and meses? There was a Sam slaying a deer and cutting out its heart so he could pretend it was mine. Next to it was a Sam taking an axe to a spider wolf that was dressed in an old-fashioned nightgown and sleeping cap. I wasn’t even in that mirror, unless the unsightly bulge in the spider wolf’s abdomen meant something I didn’t care to think about.
Sam as my captive; Sam as my captor; Sam capitulating, capricious, capable, captivating…
“I wish you were really here,” I murmured at the mirrors.
One of the Sams, green masked, turned to look at me sharply. “You can talk?” he asked.
My jaw dropped open. “Sam?”
“This is amazing!” he said, bouncing on his heels in excitement. “You’re the first voice I’ve heard in…” He stilled, his brow furrowing. “Can you hear me? Can you respond? Or are you another kind of…” He motioned his head toward a mirror where he knelt before a me reclining on some kind of chaise lounge made of skulls. Neither of us was wearing very much.
I stepped forward and reached out a tentative hand to his face, more than half expecting to touch nothing but cold glass. Instead, I felt warm, solid flesh. He inhaled a shuddering breath.
“You’re real,” I said, amazed. “How are you—Eep!” I had no breath to say anything further because he’d wrapped me in his arms and squeezed me tight.
“You’re here. You’re really here. I thought I’d never, ever—” He paused and drew back, loosening his hold enough for me to inhale. “Wait. Are you dead? Because I’ve been wondering if I might be dead.”
“I don’t think so.” I’d considered the possibility. But this wasn’t the way Jonquil had described death. She had, naturally, spent some time dead when she was decapitated, and she’d never mentioned a maze of inaccurate mirrors. “The last I heard,” I told Sam, “you were only unconscious.”
“Oh. Am I…dreaming, then? I suppose that’s reassuring. But does that mean you’re nothing but a dream?” He looked rather put out by the idea.
“No.” I shook my head. “I’m here. I’ve been cursed. I’m not sure exactly how. Eternal sleep is pretty standard, though. So if you’re dreaming, maybe I…stepped in with you, somehow?” I glanced at his hands, which were resting on my hips. “Um. Not that I mind, but there’s ichor on my clothes, among other things, and you’re most likely getting it all over you.”
