Chapter Twenty-Eight Strange Reflections
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 quite me.
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 a bit disturbing.
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. ”
“I don’t care. Also, dream ichor probably doesn’t stain.”
“Good point.”
He gathered me up in his arms again, rather more carefully this time around. “I missed you.”
I closed my eyes and rested my chin on his shoulder.
Soon after, we walked through the corridors hand in hand, both of us reveling in the presence of another person after so much silence.
It wasn’t long before we were telling each other about everything that had happened since we last laid eyes on each other.
I let him know about my imprisonment, the siege, and the spinning wheel.
He didn’t remember much after Kit had blown him into the tree; he had dim recollections of walking back to the castle, and he’d been here ever since.
Wherever “here” was. I wasn’t convinced we were trapped together in a shared dream.
Everything was far too consistent and logical.
The mirrors stayed what they were, and Sam was what he was.
There was nothing like the tooth tunnel or the amorphous dream lover, and I didn’t feel at risk of suddenly becoming naked.
That took my thoughts in the direction of the possible benefits of getting naked, if I was fated to be trapped in this place with Sam forever.
Surely “the bride is wandering for eternity in an endless maze” would be a good reason to cancel a wedding.
A wedding that had to have been on shaky ground already, after the groom had thrown me into a dungeon.
But I refrained from ripping anyone’s clothes off.
For the moment.
We stopped to watch a scene play out in one of the floor mirrors.
A rooster that somehow resembled Sam, a cat that had my eyes, a hound with Clem’s hangdog look, and a donkey (that looked like a donkey) were trying to play musical instruments, most of which were not well designed for hooves and paws.
I winced as the donkey decided the best way to get a noise out of a violin was to stomp on it.
The strangest of the stories always seemed to appear in the mirrors on the floor for some reason.
“Mirrors, mirrors all around,” I said. “We are lost. Can we be found?”
Nothing changed in any noticeable way. On the floor before us, the animals scared a group of robbers out of a cottage. Either these weren’t the sort of mirrors that could answer questions, or they thought they were already answering.
“Are you certain we’re not dead?” Sam asked.
“No.” If I put Jonquil’s experience aside, the theory had some compelling aspects. It’s the most likely outcome for a coma that lasts for more than a few days, and death curses are as common as sleep curses. “But if this is the afterlife, it certainly isn’t anything I expected.”
“What did you have in mind? Castle in the clouds? The big rock candy mountain?”
My sister had explained it as a sort of blank nothingness, like the silence that comes when you close a book. I’d always found that depressing. “Maybe not those, but also not”—I gestured around—“this.”
“I see what you mean.”
“But on the bright side, even if we are dead, it isn’t necessarily irreversible.”
Sam turned to give me a questioning look. “It isn’t? I was under the impression that ‘irreversible’ was part of the definition.”
“Not always. Especially if it’s the result of a curse. What’s done unnaturally can generally be undone in the same way.”
“But I wasn’t cursed. I bashed my skull against a tree.”
“I…suppose that’s true, yes. Although, I mean, Kit’s breath isn’t exactly natural, but is that what killed you? If it killed you. Or was it the blunt force trauma that resulted from it? I’m not sure how that would count.”
Such is the irrational and disorganized nature of magic. You could never be certain which way it would go in a situation like this.
Sam watched cat me, rooster him, and the other animals celebrate their victory in the robbers’ house. Eating the dinner that had been left on the table, drinking ill-gotten fine wine, and making merry. “So if we broke the curse, it’s possible you might vanish from this place while I remained.”
“It’s possible,” I agreed. “But it doesn’t matter, does it? We have no idea how to break the curse, anyway.”
“We could…try the traditional method, couldn’t we?” He blushed. “It’s nothing we haven’t done before.”
I paused. Would that work?
I had always assumed curse breaking was another effect of True Love’s First Kiss, which was no longer available to the two of us.
But was I absolutely positive that was the case?
I remembered my earlier doubts about true love having formed between strangers who had never spoken.
And for that matter, I recalled instances of curses being broken by other, let’s say, kiss-adjacent methods.
One woman had woken up from an enchanted sleep when she gave birth to twins.
Remember how I said necrophiliac princes are the worst? Yeah.
But that did imply first kisses might not be the only way to break a spell. Perhaps our second one would work.
Or would work for me.
“That could end up trapping you here,” I said. “Alone. Forever.”
“You’d rather we both stayed?” He spread his arms wide, toward the endless, silent mirrors.
The scene below us had changed. Now I was a hot coal leaping out of a fire, landing next to a piece of straw that resembled Sam and a bean that looked like my sister Calla. You’d think it would be difficult to tell who was meant to be who, but it wasn’t subtle. The bean had Calla’s nose.
They came to a river and tried to cross. It didn’t go well. The straw caught fire, and the coal fell in the water, going out with a hiss. The bean split in two and had to be rushed to surgery, but it ended up fine. Hurray for the bean.
“Would it be so bad, if we never escaped?” I asked. “We’re not going to starve. And we’d always have someone to talk to.” Although doing anything naked together would, unfortunately, also be precluded under this plan. There was too much chance it would count as kiss adjacent.
He looked down, thinking it over.
In the mirror, I was a bird in Sam’s mouth.
He swung an axe at me and cut off his own head.
Then Sam was my magic cook pot, but I didn’t know how to make him stop cooking, so I drowned the whole world in porridge.
Other scenes followed. I don’t know how many.
How long did we stand there without speaking, in that place without time?
Sam turned his gaze to me again. “You said an army of monsters has gathered. They’re trying to murder my sister and my cousin and my friends. Even if Jack’s been a bit of an arse lately, she’s still my sister.”
I nodded slowly. “Your fiercest champion.”
“Yes. If we can go back, we need to. And if you can go back alone, I want you to. Help them. Please.”
I couldn’t think of any way to argue. Or rather, I couldn’t think of any argument I was willing to make. None that weren’t selfish compared to what Sam was begging me to do.
“All right,” I said quietly. “If that’s what you want. All right.”
Sam put his hands on my shoulders and took a final long look at me, his eyes tracing the contours of my face.
Then he leaned forward and kissed me.
I had thought my eyes were open, but I found myself opening them anyway.
I spent a moment disoriented—I’d been standing up, and now I was lying down. But I was still being kissed, a pair of parted lips pressing firmly against my own.
“Sam?” I tried to ask, but it came out more like “Srrgm?”
The face in front of mine pulled away.
“I honestly wasn’t sure that would work,” Angelique said with a tired smile, sitting back on her heels. “Welcome back to the world of the living.”