Starside novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The Mirror

I dressed with my back to him and walked out of the hollow.

The cord pulled Dain after me, and I heard him limp on his wrapped feet.

I didn't offer him an arm.

The mirror stood at the edge of the Pool, taller than a house and perfectly clear.

There was no frame.

Its silver light fell across the black stone and across my hands.

"It shows you what you came for," Dain said behind me, very quietly. "Sorrel, wait."

"Rule two."

"Please wait."

"I've waited five years."

I stepped up to the glass.

The silver went out of it, and I saw Emberfold.

I saw the church with its crooked bell, and the green, and the long tables set out for the harvest dance.

Lanterns hung from every post, and my mother was laughing at one of them with a pie in her hands.

My father stood by the forge with his sleeves rolled, arguing with Wick about the fiddler.

It was the last evening, and I knew it, and I wanted to put my hand through the glass and stop it.

Then the mirror climbed to the hayloft above the stables.

A girl lay curled on a heap of hay with a candle burning down beside her.

She was nineteen and she had long dark red hair, and she had cried herself to sleep waiting for someone to come at nine.

It was me.

I watched myself sleep.

Light came up under my skin.

It was gold first, a thin glow along my arms, and then it went white, and the hay around me began to smoke.

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