Page 62 of A Taste of Silver
"Then we stop it."
"We can't. Not from here." His free hand cupped my face, thumb tracing my cheekbone with desperate gentleness. "The Garden exists between realms. We're neither in your world nor mine. We're?—"
"Nowhere," I finished. "And everywhere."
The implications crashed over me. We were together, finally, truly together. But we were also trapped in the space between spaces, unable to affect either realm as they tore each other apart.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Chapter 22
Aurea
The Garden shifted around us like a living thing responding to our combined presence. Silvyr's hand remained steady in mine as we fled deeper into the impossible space, crystal paths reforming beneath our feet with each step. Behind us, the mirrors still showed the catastrophe, Prince Aldric's binding circle consuming courtiers, the Crimson One's hunger spreading through every reflection, reality itself developing fractures like a fever dream.
"Through here." Silvyr pulled me beneath an archway woven from frozen moonlight and forgotten promises. His fingers were cold as starlight against mine, but solid, more real than he'd been since I was a child.
The structure materialized as we approached, walls of translucent pearl that hummed with barely contained music. Not quite solid, not quite ephemeral, a building that existed because we expected it to, shaped from shared memory and desperate need.
"A theatre?" My voice echoed strangely in the space between spaces.
"Our theatre." Silvyr pushed open doors that shouldn't exist, revealing an interior that stole my breath.
Tiers of empty seats faced a stage where silver curtains hung motionless despite the wind that had no source. Dust motes floated through beams of light that came from nowhere, each speck a tiny mirror reflecting infinite versions of us, young, old, together, apart, all the possibilities we'd never gotten to explore. A giant chandelier hung from what should have been a ceiling, but seemed to go on forever into the sky above.
"We built this?" I moved down the center aisle, my dress, still transformed to starlight from his magic, trailing behind me like captured moonbeams.
"When you were eight." Silvyr followed, his form flickering between the boy I'd known and the man he'd become. "You insisted the Garden needed culture. Said every realm deserved a place for stories."
The memory stirred, not stolen this time but merely sleeping. Eight-year-old me standing with hands on hips, declaring that a garden without art was just pretty emptiness. Silvyr laughing as we shaped walls from wish and will, arguing about whether the seats should be velvet or starlight.
We'd chosen both, in the end. The chairs shifted between states depending on the angle of observation.
The theatre responded to our reunion, walls solidifying from pearl to marble shot through with veins of silver. Smaller chandeliers bloomed from the ceiling around the large one that had been there when we first walked in, crystal drops catching light that remembered how to shine. Each breath we shared in this space made it more real, more ours.
"Come." Silvyr led me backstage where props and costumes from stories never performed lay scattered. A trunk lined withmidnight leaked shadow at the edges. A crown of frozen tears sat beside gloves woven from whispers. All impossible things, and yet, here in this place, completely possible. "This is what I wanted to show you."
Off to one side a music stand grew from the floor and atop it sat a book bound in scales that shifted from silver to gold to colors that had no names. It would have been innocuous if I hadn’t sensed the power coming from it.
The Queens' Songbook.
Even from a distance, I knew it’s name and could feel its weight, not physical but temporal, containing centuries of accumulated understanding. Knowledge that was priceless and probably paid for in blood and heartache.
I approached slowly, my marks burning beneath the silken gloves. The book fell open at my touch, pages ruffling past of their own accord. Each one covered in different handwriting, some elegant, some desperate, all in silver ink that moved like living mercury.
"Every Mirror Queen added verses." Silvyr stood close enough that I felt the cold radiating from him, winter given form. "Your grandmother wrote about the price of seeing too much. Your mother about the weight of crown and curse combined."
The pages settled on an entry in my mother's hand:
*The binding breaks the breaker,
The mirror shows what's true,
Between the silver heartbeats,
We are neither me nor you.*
Below it, musical notation twisted across the page in patterns that hurt to follow. Not meant for mortal instruments but forvoices that could sing between frequencies, in spaces where sound became solid.
