Page 27 of A Taste of Silver
"You were trying to own him." A hot flush of shame burned up my neck. Own him. The accusation settled in my gut, heavy and cold as a stone. Was that what it was? Had my love been nothing more than a cage? "Oh, you called it love. Called it sacrifice. But those marks tell a different story. They're shaped for possession, child. For keeping."
My right hand went to my still-gloved left arm. Beneath the leather, the marks throbbed in time with my frantic pulse, a hungry, living thing. "Then why didn't it work?"
"Because he loved you too much to let you complete it." Melora's expression softened slightly. "Whatever else that creature in the mirrors might be, he stopped you from finishing the binding. The backlash should have killed you both. Instead, it shattered you, your memories, your power, even pieces of your soul scattered to keep you alive but separate. And him..." She gestured at the cracked mirrors around us. "Trapped deeper than before, neither fully in his realm nor able to leave it."
The basin on the corner table drew my attention. I stood, walked to it with deliberate steps. The water within reflected my face in fractures, the cracks in its copper bowl creating a kaleidoscope effect.
"I need to see them. All of them."
"Aurea—"
"I need to know what I was willing to become." I set down the empty basin and began filling it from the pitcher, each pour of water sounding too loud in the morning quiet. "If I'm goingto face whatever comes next, I need to understand what came before."
I sat on the low stool beside the basin and slowly pulled off my right glove. The leather stuck where dried blood had sealed it to my skin. When had I bled? Finally, it came away with a sound like tearing paper.
The marks began at my fingertips.
Not vines, I realized now, but script. Ancient words in a language that predated the kingdom, each letter formed of living silver that moved beneath my skin like mercury. They spiraled up my fingers, across my palm, wrapped around my wrist in delicate chains of meaning I couldn't quite grasp. When I turned my arm, they shifted, rearranging themselves into new patterns, new words, new bindings I'd written into my own flesh.
My left glove came off easier, revealing the mirror image of the right, but these marks were different. Darker. Where the right arm's marks looked like promises, the left looked like demands. They climbed higher too, disappearing beneath my sleeve, and when I pushed the fabric up, I found them spreading across my shoulders, down toward my heart.
"Royal binding marks." Melora's voice came soft, resigned. "The Mirror Queens could write contracts into reality itself. Make the universe acknowledge their will as law. But the price?—"
"Was usually their life." I finished, remembering suddenly a passage from one of the forbidden texts. "They burned through their own souls to power the bindings."
"Usually." Melora stressed the word. "But you found another way. You were going to use his power and yours, twisted together, feeding each other in an endless loop. It would have worked, too. If the realm itself hadn't rejected it."
I reached toward the basin, then stopped. My fingers hovered over the water's surface, and in the reflection, I saw themcovered in silver fire. Not memory. Not imagination. The marks were responding to proximity to the water, to the potential for reflection.
I pressed one fingertip to the surface.
The world tilted.
Bile rose in my throat. The world was water and air, up and down, a nauseating fold in reality. I fought the urge to pull back, gritting my teeth and pushing my fingers deeper.
My hand passed through the reflection.
Not into the water.
Through it.
Into the space beyond where water became mirror and mirror became doorway. The workshop existed there too, but wrong, reversed and slightly off, as if someone had tried to copy it from memory and gotten the proportions just slightly incorrect.
In that reflected workshop stood Silvyr.
He was more solid than I'd ever seen him in dreams or visions. Almost real. Almost there. His fingers pressed against his side of the reflection, matching mine exactly.
"Don't." His mouth shaped the word, but the sound came from somewhere deeper, resonating through the silver marks on my arms. "Not yet. You're not strong enough."
I wanted to argue, but the marks were burning now, spreading up my arms in visible tendrils. I watched them write themselves across my skin. New words, new bindings, new promises, none of which I remembered making.
A sharp, percussive bang on the shop door ripped me back into my own skin. I gasped, yanking my hand free with a sound like tearing silk. The reflection shattered back into mere water, Silvyr gone.
"Open in the name of the Crown!"
Melora went rigid. "The messenger. I sent word that you were indisposed, but?—"
Another knock, harder. "This door opens now, or we break it down."
