Page 3 of A Taste of Silver
"I think you're exhausted, frightened, and isolated in a house full of banned objects." I began measuring dried leaves into a mortar. "The mind creates its own demons when given enough darkness to work with."
"Then explain this."
He strode to the largest draped mirror and grabbed a handful of black cloth.
"Lord Valtier, don't?—"
He yanked. The fabric fell away like water, revealing an ornate mirror easily seven feet tall. The silver frame writhed with carved serpents, their scales so detailed they seemed toshift in the flickering light. The glass itself appeared black at first glance, as if it reflected nothing at all.
Then something moved within it.
I stood slowly, the pestle still gripped in my hand. The movement in the mirror didn't match anything in the room. It undulated. Serpentine. Too large to be contained by the frame yet somehow fitting perfectly within its borders.
"Every night," Valtier whispered. "Every night it calls to me."
The familiar motion of pestle against mortar anchored me. This is not a simple haunting. Valerian and moonbell are useless. What is in that glass? I forced myself to focus on grinding the herbs.
"How long have you been hearing it?" I kept my tone clinical, though my pulse hammered in my throat.
"Three weeks. Since the new moon."
The mortar grew warm beneath my hands. I added dried silver leaf, not for its medicinal properties, but because something deep in my memory insisted it would help. My hands moved without conscious thought, adding ingredients I couldn't name but somehow knew.
"Has anyone else heard it?"
"The servants won't enter this room anymore, with the rare exception." I assumed he was talking about the serving girl that just fled. It made sense why she hadn’t been the one to pour the tea now.
The mixture in the mortar began to shimmer, taking on a pearlescent quality that had nothing to do with the firelight. I transferred it to a glass vial, adding three drops of distilled water. The liquid turned silver-white, like moonlight captured in crystal.
"Drink this before you sleep. All of it."
I held out the vial. As Valtier reached for it, a whisper slithered through the room. Not from him, not from the fire's crackle or the wind against windows.
From behind the exposed mirror.
"Aurea..."
The vial slipped from my fingers. A sharp crack of glass on stone. The silver liquid spread across the floor in patterns that looked like quicksilver script, symbols that meant something, if only I could remember what. It moved in a way that was unnatural.
I couldn't move. The whisper echoed in my bones, familiar as my own heartbeat and foreign as the moon's dark side. Behind the mirror's black glass, that serpentine movement intensified, pressing against the surface as if testing the boundary between worlds.
"Aurea..." The voice came again, not from the mirror this time, but from the spreading liquid itself. The silver began to write, curves and symbols that made my eyes water to follow.
Valtier stared at me, his exhausted face draining of color. "It knows you." His voice cracked. "The voice…it's never said anyone's name before. Only mine."
The firelight dimmed without warning, flames shrinking to blue wisps though the logs remained intact. Frost began creeping across the windows from the corners inward, and my breath emerged in white clouds that shouldn't exist in a room with a fire.
Behind the mirror's surface, the serpentine shadow pressed closer, and for one horrifying moment, I could have sworn I saw its eyes, glittering orbs, staring back.
"What are you?" Valtier whispered, but I couldn't tell if he was asking me or the thing in the glass.
The silver liquid script pulsed once with moonlight brightness, and deep in my mind, a door I'd locked long ago began to rattle on its hinges.
CHAPTER TWO
Chapter 2
Aurea
