Chapter 24: The Mirror

Spring came to Thornfell the way it comes to the North, all at once and with a great deal of mud.

I stood at the black iron gate in a borrowed grey coat, with the snow sliding off the keep roof in long wet slabs.

Ansgar stood beside me, his scarred left hand loosely in my right.

Hedda leaned on the gatepost, eating a honey cake, and pretending that she was not also watching the road.

"She's late," Hedda said.

"She's sixty-one, and she's been walking since the thaw."

"She was sealed for forty years. She can be late."

At the bend in the road below the wall, something grey moved.

A woman came up the hill with a stick in one hand and a bundle on her back.

She wore the plain wool of the Sisters, and she walked slowly, but she did not stop to rest.

Her chin was my grandmother's chin.

I knew it from forty feet away, and my heart turned over.

She came to the gate and stood before the bars, breathing hard.

She looked at me for a long while.

"You have her mouth," she said.

I had thought of a hundred things to say, and all of them left me.

"You've got her chin."

"Hm." She almost smiled. "She always said it was mine and she'd borrowed it."

The latch on the gate was a ward-knot, as old as the keep.

Nobody had told her how it worked.

She lifted her free hand, glanced at the iron, and made a small flat gesture.

The gate swung open without a sound.

Hedda dropped her honey cake.

"Forty years in a box," my great-aunt said, "and it's still all there."

Then she let go of the stick, and I caught her.

She was lighter than I had expected, and shaking, and holding on as hard as I was.

"Where is she?" she whispered. "Where did they put her?"

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