A taste of silver, p.11
A Taste of Silver, page 11
"The garden," he whispered against my throat. "When you're ready, find the garden where we began. It's still there, waiting."
"Silvyr—"
"Remember what you intended." His hand found mine, fingers interlacing despite their translucence. "Not binding. Unity. Remember that when—"
He dissolved. One moment solid, the next... gone. I knelt alone on the cold stone, arms empty, skin still burning from his touch.
The hall stood silent. The wraiths were gone. The mirrors reflected only darkness and my own kneeling form. But something had changed in me, in the magic singing through my blood, in the very air around me.
I pushed to my feet, nightgown torn and bloodied, silver still dripping from my palm. The wound had already begun to close, knitting together with unnatural speed. I looked at my mother's portrait one last time.
"I understand now," I told those painted silver eyes. "What you tried to do. What you died trying to protect."
The portrait seemed to shift in the lamplight, approval in those familiar features. Or perhaps that was hope making me see things.
I made my way back through the corridors, each step careful and silent. The guard came up the stairs to check on my door just as I slipped inside, the paper sliver still holding the latch open. I removed it, letting the door close properly, then collapsed onto the too-soft bed.
My marks had gone quiet. The silver blood had dried to faint luminescence on my skin. But inside, in the space where my soul resided, something had fundamentally shifted.
I hadn't tried to bind Silvyr. I'd tried to become one with him.
And somehow, despite the failed ritual and lost memories, part of me suspected I'd succeeded.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Chapter 15
Aurea
A guard's sharp knock had dragged me from a fitful, dreamless sleep. A voice boomed through the thick wood, telling me I had a few minutes to dress. Now, standing before the advisory chamber doors, the exhaustion was a physical weight. The wood was carved with battles and harvests, a history scrubbed clean of everything I was.
I pressed my palms flat against it. Beneath my gloves, my silver marks answered the pressure with a faint, silver pulse. I am here. We are here. The memory of Silvyr's fading touch was a fresh burn.
The doors swung inward without a sound.
Twelve faces snapped toward me. They sat at a crescent table like vultures waiting for a verdict. In the center, Prince Aldric sat, his circlet glinting in the light, a cold metal, like a sliver of morning light in the dead of winter. To his right, Magister Drell was a hunched shadow over his books, silver glasses perched on his nose. To his left, Lord Vex leaned back in his chair, but his knuckles were white where his hand gripped his sword hilt, a study in feigned relaxation.
"Aurea Miren Solis," Prince Aldric said, his voice filling the chamber, each syllable weighted with authority. "Approach."
My footsteps echoed on the polished floor, the only sound in the vaulted space. The air was thick with the scent of old parchment and beeswax. Beneath it, something sharp and metallic pricked my nose, the smell of fear. It rolled off the council in waves.
Tapestries covered every wall where mirrors might have hung, their threads depicting a history so clean it was a lie. No reflective surfaces anywhere, not even in the dull pewter of the water pitchers. The only thing that could potentially hold a reflection was the Prince’s crown, but to see a reflection was to look at the Prince directly. It was a challenge I realized.
I stopped at the designated mark on the floor, a silver circle inlaid in the stone. My boots hit the silver, and a surprising warmth shot up through the soles, a hum of dormant magic that made the marks on my arms answer with a faint thrum of their own.
"State your full name for the record." Magister Drell's pen hovered over fresh parchment.
"Aurea Miren Solis."
"Daughter of?"
The question hung in the air. The answer was a brand on my soul, painted in the silver eyes and sharp cheekbones from the hall of mirrors. Admitting it here meant claiming the target on my back.
"Queen Lyralei Solis." The words were solid as iron in my mouth, but left a bitter, dusty aftertaste. "Last of the Mirror Queens."
Murmurs rippled through the council. Lady Meren leaned forward, her jewelry catching the light in deliberate, winking flashes, not quite mirrors, but close enough to make my skin itch.
"Your Highness," Lord Vex said, his voice sharp enough to cut through the whispers, "this changes nothing. If anything, it confirms the threat. The Mirror Queen bloodline was severed for good reason—"
"Was it?" Lady Meren asked, her voice smooth as silk. She adjusted a ring on her finger. "Or did we simply fear what we couldn't control?"
Prince Aldric raised a hand. The chamber fell silent.
"Magister Drell, present your findings."
The scholar stood, gathering his texts with ink-stained fingers. He approached me with the careful precision of someone handling a vial of poison.
"May I examine your marks?" he asked.
I hesitated. The gloves were a flimsy shield, but they were all I had. Refusing, however, was an admission of guilt. Slowly, I pulled off the left glove, finger by finger.
A collective gasp sucked the air from the room.
Silver vines wound from my fingertips to my elbow, pulsing with a soft, inner light. The patterns were not random; they were symbols, equations, entire languages written in light and metal. Magister Drell's monocles gleamed as he leaned closer, his breath a ghost across my skin.
"Extraordinary," he whispered. "These aren't just marks. They're living script. The Codex described this, but I never thought..." He traced a pattern in the air above my arm, careful not to touch. "This symbol here, it's the glyph for 'passage.' And this cluster represents 'binding.' But this..." His finger hovered over a complex knot near my wrist. "This is new. Or rather, very, very old."
"What does it mean?" Prince Aldric asked. The question carried the weight of a sentence.
"Unity." Drell straightened, adjusting his monocles. "It's a fusion glyph. Theoretical only, no one's successfully performed such magic in recorded history."
My chest tightened. The failed ritual. My attempt to merge my soul with Silvyr. The evidence was written on my skin for anyone who could read it.
"The Codex," Prince Aldric commanded. Two servants brought forth a massive tome, straining under its weight. They set it on a lectern with a thud that echoed like a closing door.
Magister Drell's hands, stained with ink, trembled as he opened the book. The pages were silver-edged, the text written in an ink that shifted between black and mirror-bright. "The Mirrorwalker Codex," he said, his voice dropping into a formal, reverent cadence. "Established in the reign of Queen Morwyn, Third of Her Line. Let all who bear the blood know these words as law."
He began to read.
"A Mirrorwalker may not enter the Mirror Realm without sanction of the Crown."
The words were a cage. I thought of Silvyr, of the darkness behind the glass, and a fresh wave of fury and longing washed over me.
"A Mirrorwalker may not teach their arts to those not of the blood."
Another bar slammed into place.
"A Mirrorwalker must serve as guardian between realms, neither fully of one nor the other."
A life sentence. The list of restrictions layered upon me, tightening like silver chains, each a perfect blend of protection and prison.
"However," Drell said, his voice shifting, "a Mirrorwalker of royal blood holds certain privileges. The right to sanctuary. The right to trial by reflection. And..." He paused, his eyes widening behind his monocles. "The right to reclaim the Mirror Throne, should they prove worthy through the Trial of Stars."
Lord Vex's chair scraped against the stone as he stood. "Absolutely not," he said, his hand dropping to his sword. "We are not resurrecting dead traditions."
"The law is the law." Lady Meren's smile was all edges. "Unless you suggest we ignore the Codex when it is inconvenient?"
"I suggest we not hand power to an untested girl who appeared from nowhere—"
"Hardly nowhere," a new voice said. Lord Cray, elderly and, according to rumor, perpetually silent, spoke from his corner. "We all know where she has been. Hidden. Protected. Kept ignorant of her birthright. We were the ones who summoned her after all. The question is not who she is. It is who benefits from her return."
The council erupted. Voices rose, accusations flew. I stood in the eye of the storm, my silver marks still exposed, watching alliances form and fracture. Some wanted me dead. Some wanted me controlled. A few, I realized with a jolt, wanted me crowned.
None of them asked what I wanted.
"Enough." Prince Aldric's voice sliced through the chaos. "Lady Solis will be given quarters befitting her station while we deliberate. She is under the protection of the Crown until a decision is reached."
A polite prison. He was deciding my fate.
"Magister Drell, you will continue your examination of the bloodline records. Lord Vex, double the palace guard. Lady Meren, prepare a report on the economic implications of a Mirror Queen's return."
They each nodded at their assignment. Their eyes slid past me, landing on the tapestries, the water pitchers, anywhere but on me. I wasn't a person anymore. I was a problem to be solved.
"You're dismissed," Prince Aldric said, his gaze finally meeting mine. "All of you."
The council filed out, a silent, shuffling dance of precedence and power. I moved to follow, surprised there were no guards there to guide me, but a hand touched my elbow. I turned. A servant woman, gray-haired and nervous, stood in the plain browns of the palace staff.
"A moment, m'lady?" she asked.
I glanced at the departing council. None paid attention to two women, one a royal problem and one invisible. I nodded.
The servant led me through a side door into a narrow corridor, a vein running unseen through the palace's heart. The woman checked both directions before speaking.
"I'm Nira. I served your mother."
The words stopped me cold. "You knew Queen Lyralei?"
"Knew her, loved her, helped birth you." Nira's eyes glistened. "She made me promise, if you ever returned, to tell you the truth. The real truth, not what the histories claim."
"Tell me."
Nira glanced around again, then pulled me into an alcove hidden behind a tapestry. The space was barely large enough for us both, an intimacy of conspiracy.
"Your mother didn't die in childbirth, whatever the records say. She lived for years after you were born. Raised you herself, taught you the old ways." Nira's voice dropped to a whisper. "She died sealing the Mirror Realm. Not from the Sundering. She died preventing something worse."
"Worse than the Sundering?"
"The Crimson One." Nira's face paled at the name. "A mirror entity of immense power. It wanted to merge the realms completely, no barriers, no distinction between reflection and reality. Your mother stopped it, but the binding required..." She swallowed hard. "It required a willing sacrifice. A Mirror Queen's life force to power the seal."
My marks burned beneath my gloves. My mother hadn't abandoned me. She had died protecting everyone.
"There's more." Nira gripped my hands, urgency making her bold. "The Binding Chamber. It's restricted, but I can take you. You need to see where it happened. Where she made her choice."
We moved through servant passages, narrow corridors that smelled of lye and old wood. Nira knew every turn, every hidden door. We descended stairs I hadn't known existed, deep into the palace's bones.
The Binding Chamber's door was unadorned, just solid iron etched with protective runes. Nira produced a key from her apron, worn smooth from years of secret keeping.
"I clean it," she said, her voice defensive. "Someone has to maintain the protective circles."
The door opened on silent hinges.
The chamber was a void of perfect, circular black stone. The walls rose to a domed ceiling where crystals grew like frozen stars, providing a light that never dimmed, while the floor commanded all attention. Binding circles within binding circles were carved deep and filled with silver that hadn't tarnished in decades. The patterns were a terrible beauty, mathematical precision and artistic inspiration fused into one.
Ritual tools hung on the walls: silver knives, crystal bowls, implements whose purpose I could only guess. Everything was maintained, waiting.
"Your mother worked here for months before the end," Nira said, moving to the center circle. "Calculating, preparing, ensuring the binding would hold even after her death."
I knelt beside one of the binding stones, flat obsidian carved with symbols that hurt to look at directly. My palm met its surface, and the world fractured. Visions flooded me.
My mother, younger, belly round with pregnancy, carving these very circles.
My mother teaching a child with dark hair and silver eyes to channel power through precise gestures.
My mother weeping as she prepared the final ritual, knowing its cost.
The last vision struck deepest. My mother standing in this chamber's heart, power radiating from every pore, speaking words that reality itself obeyed. Not the desperate working of someone fighting to survive, but the masterwork of a queen who understood magic at its most fundamental level.
"She was magnificent." Nira's voice pulled me back. "The most powerful Mirror Queen in generations. And you..." She gestured at my exposed marks. "You inherited everything she was. Everything she could have been."
Movement in the corner of my vision. I turned.
A mirror. Uncovered, unguarded, its surface rippling with a light that belonged to no earthly source.
Nira saw where I was looking and took a step back, her face draining of color. "Don't," she whispered. "That one... it doesn't just reflect. It remembers."
"It belongs here," I said, my voice distant. I approached it slowly. "It's part of the chamber's function."
The mirror's surface cleared. But instead of my own reflection, I saw a child. Myself, at perhaps four years old, standing in this very chamber, hands raised and glowing with silver fire. The child-me spoke words in a language that predated Virelda, and the binding circles responded. Silver light erupted from every carved line, forming geometric patterns in the air that shouldn't exist in three dimensions.
The child gestured, and reality folded. Another gesture, and windows opened to other realms, not just the Mirror Realm, but places of pure concept and crystallized time. Power flowed through the child like water through a riverbed, natural and unforced.
This wasn't learned magic. This was birthright.
The vision shifted. The child grew, five, six, seven. Each age showed greater power, deeper understanding.
They had suppressed me. Broken my power into fragments, sealed away what made me dangerous. The silver marks I bore now were a fraction. A whisper of what I had been before someone decided I was too powerful to exist intact.
The mirror went dark.
The tramp of armored boots echoed from the corridor. Multiple sets, moving with purpose.
"Hide." Nira pushed me toward a shadow between ritual cabinets. "If they find you here—"
The door burst open. Guards entered, Lord Vex at their head.
"Search the chamber," he commanded. "Someone reported unauthorized access."
I pressed deeper into shadow, my marks burning with the need to defend, to fight. But to use my power now would only prove their fears correct. Nira busied herself with cleaning supplies, a perfect phantom.
The guards searched, but they were blind. They looked for intruders, not a woman who had learned to hide in plain sight. After long minutes, they departed, Vex shooting one last suspicious glance around the chamber.
When their footsteps faded, I emerged.
"You should go," Nira said, her hands shaking as she gathered her supplies. "They'll check the servant passages next."
But I couldn't move. I stared at my reflection in the now-ordinary mirror. I saw myself. Not the child prodigy. Not the amnesiac herbalist. But someone caught between. Someone whose power had been shattered, leaving me just functional enough to survive but not enough to thrive.
The child in the vision had made the council's power look like parlor tricks.
What could I become if I reclaimed those fragments? What was I truly capable of?
The mirror offered no answers, just my own silver eyes staring back, holding depths I was only beginning to fathom.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Chapter 16
Silvyr
The null room calls to me like a siren song of annihilation.
I hover at the threshold between realms, every instinct screaming retreat. The chamber ahead pulses with malevolent purpose, runes carved by those who understood exactly what I am and how to unmake me. They glow with the sick light of binding magic, each symbol a tooth in a trap designed to tear consciousness from form, to reduce me to nothing more than scattered thoughts dissolving in the void.
This room was built to kill creatures like me. Not quickly, not kindly, but through slow dissolution, each second within its walls stripping away layers of existence until nothing remains but an echo of an echo.
I should not enter. Every law of self-preservation demands I turn back.
But she is in there.
The bond between us thrums with her distress, a silver thread pulled taut to breaking. Aurea does not remember our connection, but it remembers her. It sings her fear through my consciousness like lightning through water, each pulse a clarion call I cannot ignore. She is in danger, not the ordinary danger of the manor's tricks, but something deeper. Something that tastes of old magic and older hatred.
The choice is no choice at all.
I push forward, and the null room receives me like acid receives flesh.
Pain is too simple a word for what happens when I cross the threshold. The runes activate instantly, recognizing me for what I am. Neither fully spirit nor flesh. Neither wholly real, nor completely imaginary. I exist in the spaces between definitions, and the null room abhors such ambiguity. It seeks to resolve me into nothing.
