Page 56 of Fractured
“I don’t know,” Vair said, and I didn’t expect anything more, but… “She wore those often.”
This definitely made me look up at him. “What, the gloves?”
“Yes,” he said with a nod. “She liked fabrics and shimmer, and she liked her hands concealed. Something about her mother when she was still alive…”
Vair looked to the side as if he were trying to think—and I already knew what happened when he did that.
“Wow,” I whispered picking up the gloves and looking at them with a new eye. “Her mother.” Something about the idea of the Ice Queen having parents, which was ridiculous. “I keep thinking about her as this…statueor something. I can’t picture her as a person for the life of me.”
“She was,” the lynx said. “She was an extraordinary queen. A kind queen…when she was.”
I waited for him to continue, to give more sense to that sentence, but he didn’t. That was all I was going to get.She was a kind queen when she was.Now she was a dead queen.
“A queen who liked shimmer and music and to cover her fingers.” The image I’d seen in that painting, bothin the Gallery of Time and the mist over the seer’s bowl came alive in front of my eyes.
Then Vair said, “She always kept them with her mirror, though.”
It was like a large hand made out of ice slapped me across the face.
I put the gloves down and looked at him. “Mirror?”
“Her mirror,” the lynx continued, sitting there exactly like an animal would.
“What mirror, Vair?” Because I knew about a mirror. And this place had mirrors on the walls, too, and I’d told him about the sorcerer and about Helid. About the image of the seer. I’d told him all of this when he’d demandedmytruth,and he hadn’t reacted.
“The queen’s hand mirror that was given to her by her mother, together with the grimoire of the sorcerers. The one she always kept hidden away, together with these very gloves.”
There he went, reciting the words as if they’d been there inside his head all along.
“What the fuck.” It wasn’t even a question.
“Close your eyes, Nilah,” Vair then said, and he still didn’t get it. He genuinely didn’t look like he remembered.
I put the things aside and I rose to my knees and I dragged myself all the way to him. “Vair,whereis the queen’s mirror?”
He blinked slowly, his pupils suddenly dilated, like he just realized I was in front of him.
Sometimes I wondered if he was…okay.He certainly didn’t look like it at times like this.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“But you must. Remember when I told you about the sorcerer tied to the altar in Mysthaven?” I urged him.
“Yes, Mysthaven has always been an extension of the Frozen Court, since the first royal Ice family. Sorcerers make their altars to worship in them. Divination magic works best through worship,” he said, completely disconnected once again.
“Vair, no.” I went closer still until my knees were right in front of his paws. I leaned down a bit, too, so we were face to face. Our eyes, identical, locked. “He told me to find the mirror. Remember that? When he thought I was the Ice Queen—he told mefind the mirror,beforehedoes.” Vair froze completely, didn’t move or blink. “Helid, too—the Seelie Queen’s brother. He told me tofind the mirror.And in the painting, the image that the seer showed me—do you remember? The Ice Queen had a small mirror made of silver in her hand. She had it in her hand in the painting.” I’d told him this word for word before, and it hadn’t clicked then.
It did now.
Vair stood up on all fours and finally reacted, looked at me like he actually knew what I was talking about.
“She did. She always had her mirror with her.”
“Right, right—sowhereis it now? Because I told you this, Vair—I told you about the sorcerer and about Helid, and I need to find it. Where is it?!” I wasthisclose to grabbing him by the fur and shaking him until the answer came out of those jaws.
Luckily, I didn’t need to because Vair turned to look behind him and said, “There.”
The desk.
