Page 8 of A Taste of Silver
Some doors, once opened, swallow both key and keeper.
The serpent's words echoed in the space between heartbeats:You can't run from yourself forever.
But Melora had made sure I could try. Had woven the running into my very skin with silver thread and protective herbs, had taught me to fear my own reflection more than death itself.
The question that burned now, as I fled through the white night toward a shop full of covered mirrors and careful lies, was simple, had Melora been protecting me from the serpent?
Or protecting the serpent from me?
CHAPTER FOUR
Chapter 4
Aurea
The apothecary door scraped against warped floorboards as I shouldered it open. Ice crystals scattered from my clothes, catching candlelight before melting into nothing. My boots left wet prints across Melora's carefully swept floor.
A few silver petals still clung to my hair like accusations. I plucked one free, watching it dissolve between my fingers, leaving traces of light that burned without heat.
The silence was the first thing that struck me, heavy and cold. The hearth, usually the shop's warm heart, was a black maw of dead ash. No customers milled about. The air, stripped of its usual scent of simmering herbs and brewing teas, smelled only of dust and old fear. A cruel throb pulsed behind my temples, a rhythm that seemed to mock the shop's stillness.
I lit candles with trembling fingers, avoiding the brass holder's polished surface. Each flame threw new shadows, and shadows meant no reflections. Safe. Or safer.
The headache pulsed harder. Cold fire still felt like it traced the silver threading in my gloves, though the fabricremained intact. I flexed my fingers, watching the metal catch light. Whatever had happened at Valtier's estate, whatever I'd awakened, it hadn't finished with me.
Melora's public shelves held nothing. My fingers, clumsy in their gloves, fumbled with the first tome,Approved Histories of Virelda. The page fell open to a chapter on the Sorcerer-King. The words were sanitized, hollow. Folly… madness… doors best left sealed. I slammed it shut, the sound swallowed by the shadows. The next book was no better.Herbalist's Guide to Winter Plants.The Crown's Decree on Magical Prohibitions. Frustration soured in my throat. All of them, just the Crown's approved lies, rehearsed warnings to trust the Crown's wisdom and fear your own reflection.
But nothing about silver-scaled serpents with constellation eyes. Nothing about voices that knew my name.
The memory of my childhood promise to Melora surfaced unbidden. Keep the gloves on. Be afraid. Fear will keep you safe longer than courage ever could.
I set down the latest useless text. My mentor's private study beckoned from the back room, door closed but not locked. Melora trusted me. Had raised me. Had given me everything except truth.
The study door opened on silent hinges. Darker here, with heavy curtains blocking even moonlight. As I paced the length of the room, a chill that had nothing to do with the draft shot up my arm. My gloved hand, hovering near the far wall, felt… wrong. The silver threads seemed to tighten. I knelt, tracing the floorboards with my fingertips. One of them felt colder than the rest. I pressed, and a section of the wood sank a fraction of an inch with a soft click.
I worked my fingers under the board's edge. It lifted with barely a protest, revealing a cavity lined with silver-threadedcloth. Inside, wrapped in more of the same material, lay three books I'd never seen.
The first fell open in my hands. Handwritten, in script so old I struggled to parse the letters. But the title page came clear as my eyes adjusted.
The Serpent Prince of the Mirror Realm: A True Account of the Third Binding
My breath caught. The pages smelled of age and something else, frost that never melted, starlight given form. I read by flickering candlelight, each word landing like a stone in still water.
The Serpent Prince serves as guardian between realms, neither fully of one world nor the other. Bound by love, cursed by sacrifice, he waits in reflected spaces for the one who holds his name...
The text blurred. Not from poor light but from recognition that crawled up my spine. I knew this. Had always known it, buried beneath years of careful forgetting.
His form shifts between man and beast, beauty and terror, depending on the viewer's capacity to accept truth. Those who fear him see only the serpent. Those who know him see?—
The shop door slammed open. I shoved the book inside my cloak and stood, heart hammering.
"Miss Aurea!" Eirian Valtier stumbled through my shop, coat askew, hair wild. "Thank the stars you're here."
He looked worse than before. The careful composure of nobility had cracked, revealing something raw underneath. His hands shook as he gripped the counter.
"Lord Valtier." I emerged from the study, closing the door behind me. "The shop is closed."
"I don't care about your hours." His laugh held an edge of hysteria. "The mirrors, all of them, the servants pulleddown every covering while I was gone. Said they couldn't help themselves. Said something called to them."
