Chapter 12
Aurea
The carriage wheels ground against frozen ruts, each jolt sending fresh pain through my spine.
I pressed my shadow-silk gloves against my thighs, fighting the urge to peel them off and examine how far the marks had spread since morning.
The fabric clung to my skin, a second layer of flesh that seemed to drink the magic thrumming through my veins, leaving my own skin feeling tight and cold beneath.
Outside the window, the landscape shifted from the familiar snow-draped fields surrounding Melora's apothecary to something harder.
Stone walls replaced wooden fences. Cobblestones emerged from beneath the snow, scraped clean by constant traffic.
The air itself grew heavier, weighted with smoke from a thousand chimneys and the particular exhaustion that clung to cities like fog.
A wagon rumbled past, heading away from the capital. Canvas covered its cargo, but the shape beneath was unmistakable, rectangular, flat, the size of a man standing with arms spread. Mirrors. Dozens of them, judging by how the wagon's axles groaned.
Another wagon followed. Then another.
I leaned forward, pressing my face closer to the window. The glass fogged with my breath, but not before I counted six wagons in the convoy, each loaded with covered mirrors. Even from this distance, the magic in my veins registered only a void, a hollow ache where a reflection should be.
"Driver." I rapped my knuckles against the small sliding panel that separated the cabin from the driver's bench. "Those wagons, where are they taking the mirrors?"
The panel slid open a fraction. The driver's weathered face appeared in profile, his attention still fixed on the road ahead. "Disposal sites outside the city limits, miss. Been running convoys all week."
"All week? Why now?"
His shoulders tensed. "Incidents, miss. Best not to speak of it."
I leaned forward. "Incidents involving mirrors?"
The driver's shoulders went rigid. He didn't answer, just clicked his tongue at the horses.
"My family has... an interest in the glass trade," I lied, the words tasting like ash. "Any disruption to the supply is a concern."
The driver's jaw worked as if chewing something bitter.
"This isn't about supply. This is about what's looking back.
The kind of thing that leaves folk dead or mad.
Started three days past, mirrors waking up all over the capital.
Showing things that weren't there. Or maybe showing things that were there but shouldn't be seen.
" He clicked his tongue at the horses, urging them faster.
"Crown ordered every mirror in the city removed, special permit or no. Even the sealed ones."
A cold knot formed in my gut. Three days ago. The day I'd first heard his voice. The two events were linked; I knew it with a certainty that stole my breath. How many people had looked into their forbidden reflections and seen something that broke them?
"There's an inn ahead," the driver continued. "We'll rest the horses there before the final push to the palace. Twenty minutes, no more."
The inn materialized from the gathering dusk like something conjured, weathered stone walls, timber beams black with age, windows that glowed amber with firelight but reflected nothing.
Even the sign hanging above the door had been carved from wood rather than painted on metal.
No surface here could throw back an image.
The carriage rolled to a stop in the courtyard. My boots hit the frozen ground with a crack, ice fracturing beneath my weight. The air tasted of coming snow and chimney smoke, with something else beneath, a metallic tang that made my shadow-silk gloves tighten against my marks.
"Twenty minutes, miss." The driver busied himself with the horses, deliberately not looking at me.
I crossed the courtyard, needing distance from the suffocating confines of the carriage. Movement. Space to think before the palace walls closed around me.
My gaze snagged on a puddle.
It spread across a depression in the cobblestones where the ice had melted and refrozen, creating a surface smooth as glass.
The sky reflected in it was wrong, too bright, with stars that shouldn't be visible in the fading afternoon light.
Stars arranged in patterns I recognized from dreams, from memories that tasted of silver.
The puddle rippled.
No wind touched it. No vibration from passing carts. The ripple came from beneath, as if something pressed against the underside of the reflection.
I glanced around. The driver faced away, absorbed in checking the horses' hooves. The inn's windows showed only vague shapes moving inside. I was alone with the impossible puddle and its impossible stars.
A hand broke the surface.
Not emerging from the water, emerging from the reflection itself. Fingers too long, too pale, with scales catching the light where knuckles should be. Then an arm, then shoulders… my breath caught in my throat.
Silvyr pulled himself partially free, but stopped at the waist, as if the puddle's edge formed an impenetrable barrier.
His shape wavered, flickering between man and serpent with each labored breath.
Scales traced his jawline, disappeared, returned.
His hair moved like liquid silver, defying gravity and logic equally.
"You shouldn't be here." The words left my mouth before I could stop them.
"Neither should you." His voice echoed strangely, as if coming from very far away or very deep beneath something. "Yet here we are, drawn together like a moth to a silver flame."
I dropped to my knees beside the puddle, not caring that the ice soaked through my dress.
This close, I could see how much effort his manifestation required.
Sweat, or something like it, beaded on his forehead.
His edges blurred and sharpened with each heartbeat, as if he couldn't quite decide what shape to hold.
"You're weaker here. In the mortal realm."
He laughed, a humorless sound. "Observant. Without a proper mirror, without an anchor, I'm barely more than intention and desperate hope."
"Then why risk it?"
"Because you're riding into a trap, and I'm fool enough to care."
The marks beneath my gloves flared hot. I pressed my palms against my thighs, willing them to quiet. "The court summoned me. I can't refuse."
"The court summoned you because they know what you're becoming." Silvyr's form solidified slightly, fear lending him focus. "Every mirror in the capital screaming your name? They know that means a Mirrorwalker's power is awakening. They want to bind you before you realize what you can do."
"Bind me how?"
"Marriage. Magical contracts. Memory alteration if you resist." His hand reached toward me, stopping just short of breaking the puddle's surface tension. "Or execution, if they decide you're too dangerous to control."
"You don't know that."
"I know the court. I've watched them for centuries through their mirrors, seen how they handle threats to their power.
" His form wavered, scales spreading across his throat.
"Help me escape this prison, and I'll restore every moment they stole from you.
Every memory, every piece of power, every truth about what you are. "
The offer hung in the frigid air, a perfect, terrible thing.
"That's your bargain?" I kept my voice level despite the way my pulse hammered. "My help for my memories?"
"Our memories," he said, his voice dropping so low it was barely a whisper. "I lost pieces too, when the binding failed. Pieces of us."
I studied his face, what I could see of it through the constant shifting between forms. Beautiful and terrible, familiar and foreign. The boy from my dreams aged into something that wasn't quite a man.
"Tell me why I forgot, and I'll consider it."
"You already know why." His fingers curled against the reflection's surface. "The binding would have killed you. I made a choice. Your life over your memories. I'd make it again."
"That wasn't your choice to make."
"Wasn't it?" The serpent emerged stronger now, scales replacing skin along his arms. "You were young, burning through your own soul to save me. What should I have done? Watched you die for a curse that was never your burden?"
Heat built behind my eyes. Not tears, I couldn't give him tears, but something hotter, angrier. "You should have trusted me to know my own limits."
"Your limits?" A laugh tore from him, the sound of something beautiful shattering.
"You had no limits when it came to saving others.
You would have burned yourself to ash if it meant—" He stopped, his form solidifying as he fought for control.
"It doesn't matter now. What matters is that you're walking into the same court that destroyed your mother, your bloodline, everyone who carried the Mirror Queen's power. And you're doing it alone."
"I'm not alone." The words came out before I could think them through. "You're here."
Something shifted in his expression, surprise, hope, and wariness tangled together. "A shadow in a puddle isn't much protection."
"Tell me about the Crimson One." I ask, remembering the note that I had seen scrawled in my own handwriting on one of the pages I’d hidden in my mattress.
For some reason it felt important to know who the Crimson One was before I made it to the palace, before the Crown made me bend the knee and submit to whatever it was they wanted from me.
The change was immediate. Silvyr's form contracted, becoming more serpent than man in an instant. "How do you know that name?"
"I don't. That's why I'm asking."
He glanced around despite us being alone, as if speaking the name might summon its owner. "The Crimson One was the Mirror Prince before me. My... predecessor, you might say. He's what happens when love becomes obsession, when desire becomes hunger."
"He's like you? Trapped between realms?"