Chapter 11
Aurea
The sound of a thousand cracking mirrors still echoed in my bones.
I stumbled back toward the village, the three small mirrors pressing against my ribs, humming a silent, triumphant song.
Each step back toward the apothecary made them chime louder, as if proximity to their destination amplified their voice.
Morning light cut sharp angles through the village streets, and everywhere I looked, people swept glass from doorways, muttering prayers against whatever had caused the breaking.
I pulled my hood lower and quickened my pace.
The apothecary's door stood ajar. Through the gap, I glimpsed Melora's shoulders as a rigid line above the workbench, her knuckles white around the pestle as she ground something with punishing force. The sharp, clean scent of crushed vervain cut through the dust, a ward against unwanted visions.
I pushed inside.
"Don't." Melora's voice came flat and hard, her back still turned. "Whatever excuse you've prepared, whatever explanation you think will make this acceptable…don't."
Glass glittered on the floor like frost. The great copper still wept from a spiderweb of cracks in its belly. Every bottle on the shelves was fractured yet whole, their contents throwing a thousand splintered rainbows across the walls.
"I found them." I pulled the mirrors from my cloak, setting them carefully on the scarred wooden table. They continued their wordless song, harmonizing with something deeper—the shop itself, perhaps, or the fragments of broken glass that littered every surface. "The pieces I hid."
Melora's grinding stopped. Her fingers went white around the pestle.
"You found what you hid." Not a question. "And you spoke your name. Your full name. The one I spent years helping you forget."
"You knew."
"Of course I knew." Melora turned at last, and her face held the exhaustion of someone who'd been awake all night, fighting battles no one else could see.
"Who do you think helped you hide those memories in the first place?
Who mixed the tinctures that let you sleep without dreaming?
Who—" Her voice cracked. "Who held you while you screamed his name and begged me to let you die rather than forget him? "
The air rushed from my lungs. Melora's words, begged me to let you die, struck a place so deep inside me it didn't feel like memory, but a fresh wound. My hand shot out, fingers gripping the scarred edge of the table to keep from falling.
"Then why—"
"Because you were a child." Melora's hands shook as she set down the mortar.
"You were burning yourself alive from the inside out with power you couldn't control.
" As she spoke, I felt a phantom heat against my skin, a memory of overwhelming force.
I touched my arm, and a flash of memory hit me, the feeling of that power, the heat. I gasped.
"The binding…"
Melora's eyes darted to my hand. "The binding you attempted? Gods, child, do you have any idea what you almost did? What you almost became?"
"Show me."
The words emerged before I could stop them. I pulled out the chair across from Melora and sat, placing both hands flat on the table. The rip in my left glove was a gaping mouth, silver winking from the darkness beneath.
"Show me what I am."
"No." Melora backed away. "The mark…if anyone sees them—"
"They're already spreading." I peeled back the torn leather, exposing the silver vines that wound from my wrist to disappear beneath my sleeve.
They pulsed with their own light, casting strange shadows that moved independent of any light source.
"Every time I use the power, they grow. So either you tell me what they are, or I'll find out myself. "
Melora's gaze fixed on the exposed marks. "You don't understand. Those aren't just tattoos or magical scarring. Those are binding marks. Royal binding marks. The kind the Mirror Queens used to—" She stopped, pressing her lips together.
"To what?" My voice was a raw whisper.
"To chain gods."
The singing mirrors went silent.
I looked down at my exposed wrist, at the vines that seemed to breathe against my skin. "I wasn't trying to chain him. The letter, the one I left myself, it said the binding was meant to merge us. To let him exist in both realms."
"And you think that's different?" Melora pulled out her own chair, sinking into it like her bones had turned to water. "You think giving someone no choice but to be bound to you forever is anything other than a chain made of prettier metal?"
"I was trying to save him." The words sounded defensive to my own ears, even though I didn’t have any memory of him or the events that lead up to the binding.
"You were trying to own him." A hot flush of shame burned up my neck.
Own him. The accusation settled in my gut, heavy and cold as a stone.
Was that what it was? Had my love been nothing more than a cage?
"Oh, you called it love. Called it sacrifice.
But those marks tell a different story. They're shaped for possession, child. For keeping."
My right hand went to my still-gloved left arm. Beneath the leather, the marks throbbed in time with my frantic pulse, a hungry, living thing. "Then why didn't it work?"
"Because he loved you too much to let you complete it.
" Melora's expression softened slightly.
"Whatever else that creature in the mirrors might be, he stopped you from finishing the binding.
The backlash should have killed you both.
Instead, it shattered you, your memories, your power, even pieces of your soul scattered to keep you alive but separate.
And him..." She gestured at the cracked mirrors around us.
"Trapped deeper than before, neither fully in his realm nor able to leave it. "
The basin on the corner table drew my attention. I stood, walked to it with deliberate steps. The water within reflected my face in fractures, the cracks in its copper bowl creating a kaleidoscope effect.
"I need to see them. All of them."
"Aurea—"
"I need to know what I was willing to become." I set down the empty basin and began filling it from the pitcher, each pour of water sounding too loud in the morning quiet. "If I'm going to face whatever comes next, I need to understand what came before."
I sat on the low stool beside the basin and slowly pulled off my right glove. The leather stuck where dried blood had sealed it to my skin. When had I bled? Finally, it came away with a sound like tearing paper.
The marks began at my fingertips.
Not vines, I realized now, but script. Ancient words in a language that predated the kingdom, each letter formed of living silver that moved beneath my skin like mercury.
They spiraled up my fingers, across my palm, wrapped around my wrist in delicate chains of meaning I couldn't quite grasp.
When I turned my arm, they shifted, rearranging themselves into new patterns, new words, new bindings I'd written into my own flesh.
My left glove came off easier, revealing the mirror image of the right, but these marks were different.
Darker. Where the right arm's marks looked like promises, the left looked like demands.
They climbed higher too, disappearing beneath my sleeve, and when I pushed the fabric up, I found them spreading across my shoulders, down toward my heart.
"Royal binding marks." Melora's voice came soft, resigned. "The Mirror Queens could write contracts into reality itself. Make the universe acknowledge their will as law. But the price—"
"Was usually their life." I finished, remembering suddenly a passage from one of the forbidden texts. "They burned through their own souls to power the bindings."
"Usually." Melora stressed the word. "But you found another way. You were going to use his power and yours, twisted together, feeding each other in an endless loop. It would have worked, too. If the realm itself hadn't rejected it."
I reached toward the basin, then stopped. My fingers hovered over the water's surface, and in the reflection, I saw them covered in silver fire. Not memory. Not imagination. The marks were responding to proximity to the water, to the potential for reflection.
I pressed one fingertip to the surface.
The world tilted.
Bile rose in my throat. The world was water and air, up and down, a nauseating fold in reality. I fought the urge to pull back, gritting my teeth and pushing my fingers deeper.
My hand passed through the reflection.
Not into the water.
Through it.
Into the space beyond where water became mirror and mirror became doorway. The workshop existed there too, but wrong, reversed and slightly off, as if someone had tried to copy it from memory and gotten the proportions just slightly incorrect.
In that reflected workshop stood Silvyr.
He was more solid than I'd ever seen him in dreams or visions. Almost real. Almost there. His fingers pressed against his side of the reflection, matching mine exactly.
"Don't." His mouth shaped the word, but the sound came from somewhere deeper, resonating through the silver marks on my arms. "Not yet. You're not strong enough."
I wanted to argue, but the marks were burning now, spreading up my arms in visible tendrils. I watched them write themselves across my skin. New words, new bindings, new promises, none of which I remembered making.
A sharp, percussive bang on the shop door ripped me back into my own skin. I gasped, yanking my hand free with a sound like tearing silk. The reflection shattered back into mere water, Silvyr gone.
"Open in the name of the Crown!"
Melora went rigid. "The messenger. I sent word that you were indisposed, but—"
Another knock, harder. "This door opens now, or we break it down."
I grabbed for my gloves, but they were ruined, torn and bloodstained. The marks on my arms glowed through the fabric of my sleeves, impossible to hide.
"The storage room." Melora grabbed my shoulders, pushing me toward the back. "Go, now—"