Page 62 of Fractured
It had been hidingthere under that book, turned upside down, the shape of it unmistakable. The metal, the small gemstones that decorated it—it was the very same mirror that the Ice Queen had had in her hand in that painting that the seer showed me.
It was the mirror.
“What is it? Do you see it?” Vair said.
My hand was steady when I reached for it, the gloves still on. I don’t know why I expected to be pushed back or at least to feel something when I wrapped my fingers around the handle, but I didn’t. It was just a mirror, and nothing stopped me from pulling it out of the drawer.
I lowered to my knees so that Vair could see it, too, when I turned it over, terrified of facing my reflection in it, but…
“Broken.” Pretty sure the word came frommylips, but it didn’t much matter at that point. I only ever heard my own voice in this place; it no longer mattered who said what.
The oval-shaped mirror surrounded by gemstones wasbroken, and a piece of it like an upside-down triangle was missing from the middle.
“She broke it.”
This time the whisper definitely came from Vair, but I didn’t even pay attention because there was no reflection on the pieces that were still attached.
No reflection—justwhite, like the mirror couldn’t see me right there in front of it. It refused to reflect me.
“This is wrong,” I said, and I couldn’t even tell you why. I stood up, raised the mirror and looked at the walls…
“I found it. I used frostfire and I found the mirror. It’s here,” I said, and it was still just as difficult not to believe that I’d lost my fucking mind for talking to a room, but this was my reality now. “I have the mirror. Let me go. It’s right here—let me?—”
A noise cut me off—something moving. Something heavy, and it was coming from outside the bedroom door.
My heart stood still for a good moment, and then I was running, my bare feet barely touching the stone floor. The mirror was in my hand when I ran out into the hallway, hoping, praying with every fiber in me that the palace had given me a way out.
I stopped for the second time when I realized the door that had appeared in the hallway was open. The gigantic thing made out of wood and metal that I couldn’t get to even move a little bit before was now halfway open, just like that.
My eyes closed. My legs refused to move still. I felt the heat of Vair’s body as he stepped out, too, stood there near my feet, and looked ahead curiously.
“Well, Nilah?” he eventually said. “Do you want to see where this door leads?”
Not outside.
That much I already knew. The door didn’t lead outside because my ears were working just fine, and all I could hear was silence.
My eyes were working, too, and all I saw was darkness.
Licking my lips, I squeezed the mirror in my fist and nodded, and together, we went for the door.
It was so big that it fit us both through even though it was only open halfway. The other side was dark, but there were windows here and I could see the stars outside, just a handful that weren’t hiding behind clouds. I breathed in deeply and I could tell just by the sound of it that the room ahead was vast.
Then I said, “Light.”
Light sprang to existence everywhere at once.
Two large chandeliers on the ceiling brightened up with magic. Raw fae magic. Lanterns on the walls, not torches, were suddenly brighter than flashlights, dotting the stone walls that were different here from the queen’s bedroom. A pale grey, but no silver veins went through the blocks. It was just ordinary stone, notmoonstone, I figured.
And the room the palace had brought us to was athroneroom.
I stepped deeper inside and the air shifted, like the palace itself exhaled. The flames in the lanterns burned, and the windows taking up most of the right wall of the room had no glass in them, yet the entire room was so still it felt like stepping inside a different world altogether. No ice on the floor, no frost coating the walls, but there was what I thought might besnow, thick and soft, lying in drifts in the corners. Pillars made of stone that was almost completely white were everywhere, holding up the high ceiling.
At the far end was the dais—a crystal platform thatreflected the light like a gigantic gemstone. No throne was on it. No chair of any kind, which was strange as hell.
The ceiling was a dome made of frozen glass that cast spectral colors across the room—pale blues, silvers, hints of violet. No guards. No sound—just silence and marble and light, yet I couldn’t for the life of me shake the feeling that I was being watched. That the room itself had eyes on me.
Fuck.
