Page 26 of A Taste of Silver
Chapter 11
Aurea
The sound of a thousand cracking mirrors still echoed in my bones. I stumbled back toward the village, the three small mirrors pressing against my ribs, humming a silent, triumphant song. Each step back toward the apothecary made them chime louder, as if proximity to their destination amplified their voice. Morning light cut sharp angles through the village streets, and everywhere I looked, people swept glass from doorways, muttering prayers against whatever had caused the breaking.
I pulled my hood lower and quickened my pace.
The apothecary's door stood ajar. Through the gap, I glimpsed Melora's shoulders as a rigid line above the workbench, her knuckles white around the pestle as she ground something with punishing force. The sharp, clean scent of crushed vervain cut through the dust, a ward against unwanted visions.
I pushed inside.
"Don't." Melora's voice came flat and hard, her back still turned. "Whatever excuse you've prepared, whatever explanation you think will make this acceptable…don't."
Glass glittered on the floor like frost. The great copper still wept from a spiderweb of cracks in its belly. Every bottle on the shelves was fractured yet whole, their contents throwing a thousand splintered rainbows across the walls.
"I found them." I pulled the mirrors from my cloak, setting them carefully on the scarred wooden table. They continued their wordless song, harmonizing with something deeper—the shop itself, perhaps, or the fragments of broken glass that littered every surface. "The pieces I hid."
Melora's grinding stopped. Her fingers went white around the pestle.
"You found what you hid." Not a question. "And you spoke your name. Your full name. The one I spent years helping you forget."
"You knew."
"Of course I knew." Melora turned at last, and her face held the exhaustion of someone who'd been awake all night, fighting battles no one else could see. "Who do you think helped you hide those memories in the first place? Who mixed the tinctures that let you sleep without dreaming? Who—" Her voice cracked. "Who held you while you screamed his name and begged me to let you die rather than forget him?"
The air rushed from my lungs. Melora's words, begged me to let you die, struck a place so deep inside me it didn't feel like memory, but a fresh wound. My hand shot out, fingers gripping the scarred edge of the table to keep from falling.
"Then why?—"
"Because you were a child." Melora's hands shook as she set down the mortar. "You were burning yourself alive from the inside out with power you couldn't control." As she spoke, I felta phantom heat against my skin, a memory of overwhelming force. I touched my arm, and a flash of memory hit me, the feeling of that power, the heat. I gasped.
"The binding…"
Melora's eyes darted to my hand. "The binding you attempted? Gods, child, do you have any idea what you almost did? What you almost became?"
"Show me."
The words emerged before I could stop them. I pulled out the chair across from Melora and sat, placing both hands flat on the table. The rip in my left glove was a gaping mouth, silver winking from the darkness beneath.
"Show me what I am."
"No." Melora backed away. "The mark…if anyone sees them?—"
"They're already spreading." I peeled back the torn leather, exposing the silver vines that wound from my wrist to disappear beneath my sleeve. They pulsed with their own light, casting strange shadows that moved independent of any light source. "Every time I use the power, they grow. So either you tell me what they are, or I'll find out myself."
Melora's gaze fixed on the exposed marks. "You don't understand. Those aren't just tattoos or magical scarring. Those are binding marks. Royal binding marks. The kind the Mirror Queens used to—" She stopped, pressing her lips together.
"To what?" My voice was a raw whisper.
"To chain gods."
The singing mirrors went silent.
I looked down at my exposed wrist, at the vines that seemed to breathe against my skin. "I wasn't trying to chain him. The letter, the one I left myself, it said the binding was meant to merge us. To let him exist in both realms."
"And you think that's different?" Melora pulled out her own chair, sinking into it like her bones had turned to water. "You think giving someone no choice but to be bound to you forever is anything other than a chain made of prettier metal?"
"I was trying to save him." The words sounded defensive to my own ears, even though I didn’t have any memory of him or the events that lead up to the binding.
