Chapter 4 What the Glass Wants

I did not sleep, and I did not cover the mark, and when the laughing stopped I got up and turned one of the mirrors back around to face the room.

My mother would have called that stupid. She spent my whole childhood teaching me to leave the dark alone, to keep my eyes down when the wells went quiet, to press my thumb over the silver curl on my wrist and say nothing, be nothing, draw no eye living or dead. But my mother was thirteen years gone and her careful daughter had just married the keeper of a prison full of the murdered, and being nothing had not kept Sera off the lottery, and being nothing had not kept Aldric from selling me to the fog with a smile. Careful had failed. I was done being careful.

So I lifted the heavy mirror down from where it faced the wall, and I set it against the foot of the bed, and I sat in front of it with the cold flame burning in its dish, and I waited.

For a long time there was only me. Hollow-eyed. The cut on my palm crusted black. The mark at my wrist throwing its faint light up under my chin.

Then the glass fogged from the inside, the way a window fogs with a breath, and she was there again. The grey bride. Younger than me, dark hair wet against her face, the years gone soft on her gown. She did not press her hand to the glass this time. She simply looked at me, and I made myself look back, and I spoke first, because the one who speaks first is the one who is not yet afraid.

"You said you were murdered," I said. "Tell me by whom."

Her mouth moved. The sound came threadbare and late. "Names go last. They take the names first." She tilted her head. "You turned the glass to face you. None of them ever did that. They all kept us at their backs until the end."

"How many of you are there."

"Enough to fill a wing." A flicker of something almost like humor. "You walked past our portraits tonight and did not know it. He keeps us in the west. Behind the iron door."

The black door on the stair. The one he had not looked at.

"What is your name," I asked. "I will not take it. I will keep it."

She went still. Whatever she had expected from a living girl, it was not that. The fog behind her stirred, and for a moment I saw the others again, the long line of pale gowns receding into a corridor that did not exist, and I felt the cold pressure of all their attention turn toward me at once, hungry and careful, the way the canal pulls at your ankles.

"Cassia," she said. The frost bloomed faint around the letters. "I was the first. He loved me. That is why I am closest to the glass." Her grey eyes held mine. "He will tell you he buries every bride to keep from caring. He is lying to you and to himself. He cared for me, and I still died, and that is the thing you must understand before you trust a word he says. Caring did not save me. It is not enough here. It has never once been enough."

"Then what is enough."

"The truth of who is holding the knife." Her hand rose toward the glass and stopped short of it. "We did not die for the seal, Mara Vane. The seal feeds on a bride, yes, it always has, that part is old and true. But a bride given to the Gate goes slow, and gentle, and her name is remembered. We did not go slow. We were opened. Someone has been using his curse as a blade and dressing each murder as a sacrifice, and it has been the same hand for a very long time, and tonight that hand put you on the altar."

The coal under my skin pulsed hard. "My uncle."

"I do not know his living face. I know his work." The frost crept toward the frame. She was fading; speaking cost her something I could see draining out of her. "Find the burned bride. Third portrait from the door. She did not die by water or by knife and the wrongness of it is written all over her. He got careless once. Start where he was careless."

"Cassia. Wait." I leaned toward the glass. "Why help me. You loved him. I am the next one wearing your place at his table."

Her face did something complicated, grief and warning and a thin, fierce thing that might have been hope.

"Because you turned the mirror around," she said. "Because not one of us could ever make the dead obey, and the moment you bled on that stone tonight, I felt every soul behind the Gate turn its head toward you like flowers toward a window." The light in her was almost gone. "You are not the next bride to be buried here. You are the first one the dead will follow. That is what your family bred you for. That is what your uncle means to take. And that is why you must reach the burned girl before he reaches you."

"How long do I have."

The frost reached the edge of the frame.

"He is already in the city," she whispered. "He came in on the same fog you did. He is in your sister's street right now, knocking on a bolted door, being let in."

The glass cleared. My own face stared back, alone, the mark blazing white at my wrist.

I was on my feet and across the room and pulling at the door before I remembered it would be locked, and it was not. It swung open onto the dark stair, and the iron door of the west wing waited at the bottom of it, and from behind that black iron, very softly, a great many voices had begun to say my name.