“Yes, of course you did. I said I’d only come if you wanted me from now on, and I meant it. Anyway, I dropped everything I was doing—”
“Wait, what had you been doing?” I asked. “Why did you need to redirect a river?”
“Because if I gave the river spirit her waterfall back, she’d agree to give me the casket of gold dust I needed to trade the bridge troll for the magic goatskin that a woman made of twigs—”
“I get the idea. Go on.”
“So I went home and told Liam that your intended husband was a horrid villain—”
“He wasn’t!” I interrupted. “Isn’t.”
“Yes, he is,” the mirror said. “Beastly person. He stands in the way of my master’s triumph.”
I frowned at it. “You’re biased.” Vaguely rude images swirled within the depths of the reflection.
“It was a fair assumption at the time,” Liam said. “Anyway, when Calla let me know what was going on, I told her we would need the seven-league boots, so we went and borrowed them from your mother.”
“Stepmother,” I corrected him. “How long did it take you to pry those out of her?”
Calla shrugged. “Not long. I just told her I wanted them, and she handed them over. She didn’t even ask why.”
I opened my mouth, and then I closed it again without speaking. Remember my trip across the plain of ice, where my hair froze to the ground every night? Before I went, I’d spent a full hour begging my stepmother for those boots. She’d saidno.
“You planned to use the boots to get to Tailliz?” I asked, rather proud of the fact I’d said it calmly instead of yelling something incoherent and profane.
“No,” Liam said. “Only one of us would have been able to come that way. But I thought we might want to have them on hand if you ever ended up fighting a magic bird in the woods.”
A sliver of sea appeared far ahead of us, a thin line of blue-gray interrupting the endless expanse of green and white. I strained to catch sight of the castle, but I couldn’t make it out yet.
“They came to Gnoflwhogir and me next,” Jonquil said, “and told us you were in trouble, so I offered them a ride to Tailliz on dragonback.”
“And I offered my sword”—Gnoflwhogir drew the weapon in question and waved it threateningly—“so I could stab whoever needed stabbing.”
Jonquil ducked as the tip of the claymore passed uncomfortably close to her head. “We flew to Tailliz as quickly as possible, pausing only for the usual reasons—battles against air pirates,gryphons, that sort of thing. When we arrived at the castle, though, it was under heavy assault.”
“We weren’t sure which side we should be on, at first,” Callasaid. “Neither was anyone else. The monsters threw rocks at us, but when we approached the castle, the guards tried to shoot us full of arrows.”
“You did make your approach on a dragon,” I reminded her.
Jonquil sniffed. “That’s no reason to be rude. I was about to blast everyone with dragon fire, but then a masked fellow in green hopped up onto the ramparts and asked if we were your sisters. I said yes and demanded you be set free from the dungeon, and he said you weren’t in the dungeon anymore and asked if we could please go find you. Then he said, ‘Here, use this,’ and he threw the magic mirror at us. Nice throw—a hundred feet at least.”
“It wasn’t nice at all,” said the mirror. “I might have cracked against the stones. I might have fallen into the sea.”
“He threw it?” I asked. “You’re sure? It wasn’t, say, blown on a sudden wind or fired out of a bow somehow?”
“Definitely a throw,” Calla replied. “Overhand, like a spear toss. Why?”
My breath caught, and something in my chest clenched tight. Sam. Sam was awake. Sam was alive. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want Calla and Jonquil to trade their Look a third time.
“We dodged and weaved our way out of the battlefield,” Calla continued when I stayed silent, “and landed in the woods. We decided we should give the mirror to Liam because he’s the cleverest. But although he asked question after question, using every rhyme he could think of, it refused to show us anything.”
“Mirror, mirror on my knee,” Liam murmured. “Mirror, mirror by my boot. Mirror, mirror in the mud.”
“My humiliation,” the mirror said, “knows no bounds.”
“I was in an invisible room,” I told them. “I don’t think it was able to see me until I got out.”
Calla nodded, startling awake the goldfinches. “That makes sense. From our end, it looked like you weren’t anywhere inexistence, and then suddenly you popped into being and were attacked by a bird. Liam figured out exactly where you were—”
