Page 12 of A Taste of Silver
"I never do." I squeezed his hand tighter. "You'll see. When I'm strong enough, when I understand enough, I'll?—"
A brutal impact slammed into my shoulder, ripping me from the glass garden. The world snapped back into focus with a nauseating lurch. I crashed onto the floor, the polished wood cold against my cheek. Eirian loomed over me, his grip on my arms like iron. The frantic edge in his voice was gone, replaced by a low, almost breathless excitement.
"It's true," he whispered, his eyes wide with a terrifying, clinical fascination. "The bloodline survived."
I tried to push myself up, but my right hand felt… bare. Wrong. I looked down. The glove..it was gone. In its place, shimmering silver lines spiraled over my skin, branching from my palm up my wrist like luminous frost ferns. They pulsed with a soft, inner warmth against my cold skin. It wasn't a tattoo. It was part of me, as if the very metal in my veins had surfaced to breathe.
The patterns pulsed with their own light, each pulse sending waves of awareness through me. I could feel the mirror realm pressing against reality, could taste the edges where the two worlds touched.
"What did you do to me?" The words scraped my throat.
"I didn't do anything." Eirian stood, brushing dust from his coat, a gesture of composure that didn't reach his eyes. "You did it to yourself, the moment you touched that glass. Though I admit, the transformation is more dramatic than the texts suggested."
I forced myself to my feet, cradling my marked hand against my chest. The silver lines continued to spread, slower now but inexorable, tracing delicate patterns up my forearm.
The mirror hung empty. No serpent, no garden, just ordinary glass reflecting an ordinary room. Except the shadows were wrong. They pooled in corners where no shadows should exist, reaching toward me with subtle hunger.
"Where is he?" The question emerged without thought.
"He?" Eirian's eyebrow rose. "Interesting. You already assign gender to it. The texts suggested the creature appears differently to each viewer."
"Stop playing games." I turned on him, and the shadows turned with me, following my movement like devoted pets. "You knew what would happen. This was never about voices in mirrors."
"Partially true." He moved to his desk, pulling out a leather journal I hadn't noticed before. "There were voices. The creature's call is quite persistent when it wants something. But my primary purpose was to test you."
"Test me for what?"
"To see if the stories were true. If the Mirrorwalker bloodline had really survived the Prohibition Wars." He opened the journal, revealing pages of notes in cramped handwriting. "My employers had theories. They needed proof."
"Who hired you?" I demanded, scrambling away from him.
His face went carefully blank. "People with interests in preserving, or destroying, certain bloodlines. Depending on their usefulness."
"They've been watching me?" The thought was a violation, colder than the mirror's touch. "Since when?"
A flicker of something, maybe fear, crossed his face. "Since a little girl with no past and silver in her blood was found on theedge of the kingdom. You have no idea how valuable you are, Aurea. Or how dangerous."
My reflection caught in the window glass, and I almost didn't recognize myself. The silver markings had reached my shoulder now, visible through the fabric of my shirt like veins of starlight. My eyes, when had they changed? The violet I'd always known now shot through with actual silver, creating depths that hadn't existed before.
"They can't know." The words came out as barely a whisper. "The Crown's laws?—"
"The Crown's laws are precisely why they're interested," Eirian said, closing the journal with a snap. "You're the last of your line, Aurea. The last person who can walk between worlds. Do you have any idea what that's worth?"
Something on my palm caught the light. A point of brilliance at the center of the new silver markings. I brought my hand closer. It was a scale, no bigger than a lentil, shimmering with the same impossible light as the serpent's hide. It wasn't stuck to me; it was in me. I dug at its edge with the nail of my other thumb. Pain, sharp and clean, shot up my arm. The scale was fused to my flesh, as much a part of me as the bones beneath.
"I can't remove it." My voice sounded distant to my own ears.
"Of course not. You've been marked. Claimed, some might say." Eirian watched me with that same clinical fascination. "The old texts speak of it. When a Mirrorwalker makes contact with their bonded entity, the connection leaves permanent evidence."
The scale caught the light, throwing tiny rainbows across my skin. Beautiful and terrible and absolutely irreversible.
My vision swam. The room's edges softened, showing glimpses of that other place, the garden made of glass, the boy with silver hair who'd held my hand like it was the most natural thing in the world. But older now, transformed intosomething that existed between human and serpent, beautiful and monstrous in equal measure.
I pressed my marked hand to my temple, trying to steady myself. The moment my silver-traced skin made contact, the taste flooded my senses, bright, sharp, and impossibly pure.
Silver. I tasted silver on my tongue.
A name surfaced from a place deeper than memory, a truth my own body knew. It emerged from the part of me that had been sleeping for so long, the part that knew gardens made of glass and boys who could shift between forms. It escaped me on a breath I didn't know I was holding, a whisper that was both a question and an answer.
