Wintersong(64)

“Must have been a fine night then.” A snicker. “Well, that bodes well for us.”

“Should we wake her?”

I stirred at the sound of voices in my room. Twig. Thistle.

“Sure. Lazy layabout.” Thistle. I recognized the contempt in her voice through my haze of exhaustion and grief. Her dislike was comfortingly reliable, like Constanze’s.

Constanze. The stab of homesickness roused me, and I groaned and sat up. Thistle leaped back with surprise, her hand poised for a slap.

“What is it?” I rasped. The painting above my fireplace once again showed the Goblin Grove. Several hours must have passed; the snow was much thicker now.

“Can’t spend the entire day lying in bed,” Thistle said. “Or on the ground, as the case may be. Funny.” She grinned, showing all her sharp teeth. “I thought you mortals preferred the comforts of a bed, but here you are, sleeping in the dirt like a proper goblin.”

I rolled my eyes as Twig helped me to my feet. My half-tied dressing gown fell off my shoulders as my joints creaked and protested against the abuse. Human bones were most certainly not meant to sleep on dirt floors.

“She has gone native,” Thistle said to Twig. “Not even a second thought for those quaint mortal notions of modesty!”

I tied the dressing gown properly about myself. “If you’ve come to wake me, at least have the decency to bring me a proper breakfast,” I groused. Twig made a motion to go, but I shook my head. “Not you, Twig.” I pointed to Thistle. “You. You go.”

Thistle made a face, but disappeared in a twinkling. Twig gave a deep bow, her cobweb-and-branch-laden hair scraping the floor.

“Twig,” I began. “What is that painting above my fireplace?”

An inscrutable expression crossed her face. Between my two attendants, Twig had seemed the more sympathetic one, but I was reminded that despite her kindnesses to me, she wasn’t my friend. But she was the closest thing I had to a confidante in the Underground, and I sorely missed the companionship. I sorely missed K?the.

“You touched it, didn’t you?” Twig asked.

I nodded.

She sighed. “It’s a mirror, Your Highness.”

“A mirror?” I glanced at it again, but all I saw was the Goblin Grove, blanketed in white. “Then why…?”

“That one,” Twig said, inclining her head toward the gilt-edged piece above the mantel, “was brought from the world above. Like most of the mirrors there, it’s silver-backed. Silver follows her own laws here in the Underground. She won’t show you your reflection; she’ll show you what she wants you to see.”

Josef. K?the. My heart twisted with pain.

“That’s why we warned you not to touch it,” she said. “Your thoughts, your feelings, your questions—that’s what gets reflected back at you, not your face.”

“Is what the mirror shows me not a true vision, then?” I desperately needed this magic mirror to be real. So I could watch Josef grow up to be the man he was meant to be. So I could see K?the blossom into the woman I knew she could become. So I would not forget what it was to live, even as life itself forgot me.

Twig’s lips twisted. “I wouldn’t necessarily trust what you see in it, Highness. Silver won’t lie, but it can conceal truths as much as it can reveal them.”

The ghosts of my family sat around us in my chamber, crowding in on the edges of our conversation. I had to talk around them.

“If silver won’t show me my reflection,” I said, “then what will?”

“Still water is best, of course, but in the absence of that, polished jet, bronze, or copper will do.” Twig picked up a round copper basin from the floor. She turned its convex side toward me.

I looked worse than I thought. Tearstains cut grooves through the ash and dirt encrusting my cheeks, but could not disguise the gray shadows beneath my eyes. My face looked sunken, haggard, old, and the copper basin distorted my image back at me—long, pointed nose; stubby, weak chin. Or perhaps I truly was this ugly.

I swallowed. “I look a right mess.”

“That you do,” Twig said cheerfully. “I’ve been told mortals like to bathe, so I’ve been instructed to bring you down to the hot springs. Come,” she said, gesturing to me. “You won’t even have to say I wish.”

I laughed. It felt good to laugh, even for a feeble joke; it relieved a bit of the pressure of grief and homesickness on my heart. It felt good to laugh with someone again, even if she wasn’t my sister. Even if she wasn’t a friend.

Humans were not meant for isolation. We were not meant for loneliness. I glanced back at the ghosts of my family sitting with me in my bedchamber, invisible to the eye, but visible to my heart. I was dead to the world above, but I could not help but reach for comfort and companionship, the way a flower yearns for sunshine in the dark.

*

After my bath, Twig and Thistle took me deep into the heart of the Underground, to the center of the goblin city for some proper gowns and dresses. I was curious about goblin ateliers—Thistle and Twig did not wear human clothes; they preferred to wear little skirts woven of leaves and branches and twigs. The fact that goblins had tailors and seamstresses at all intrigued me.

The corridors changed as we wound through the various passageways. Where my room was situated had curved hallways, tunnels rather than broad passages, paintings and portraits and other objets d’art, and dirt floors lined with rugs. The paths by the underground lake were smaller, tighter, and damper—less earthen and more rocky.