Page 41 of A Taste of Silver
"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 theamnesiac 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
