She meets my eyes as she says the word one, her expression simultaneously arch and a little anxious. Like she’s just asked me to carry something large but fragile, infinitely precious, and isn’t sure I’m up to the task. Like she wants to trust me, but isn’t sure she should.
I have the absurd urge to kneel. Fresh tears prickle in the corners of my eyes. “That would be—I would be—” I swallow. “Like, I know I haven’t been that reliable lately, and I can’t promise that my GRM will stay in remission or whatever—but it would be my honor.”
Prim nods without breaking eye contact. Her gaze feels like a sword touching each of my shoulders, not especially gently. “Good.” She inhales sharply and draws something from her pocket. “We’ll talk more when you come back, then.”
I know I’m not at my sharpest—having been zapped into a dozen different universes, lightly tortured, imprisoned, kissed, nearly executed, rescued, and chastised by pretty much everyone I’ve ever met—but this feels like a real left turn in the conversation. “Come back from where?”
Prim hands me the thing she took out of her pocket. It’s long and silver, and in its surface I catch the blue flash of her eyes, the glare of the cheap light fixture above us.
It’s a long, broken shard of mirror. “I pulled it from your hair when you first arrived.”
I could kiss her. I could ask her what the hell took her so long. I could weep, because hope is so much more terrifying than despair.
I draw a breath that shakes only slightly. “Tell Charm I’m coming back, okay? For good, this time. Cross my heart.” I don’t wait for Prim to agree, or tell me to be careful. I hold the shard so that it reflects a jagged piece of my own face, and whisper to it: Mirror, mirror.
10
IN AN OBJECTIVE and literal sense, there’s no way Eva is the fairest of them all—her face is too square and her mouth is too wide, and she’s maybe a smidge too old—but that’s the face the mirror shows me when I ask, and the mirror never lies. Maybe beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, and if the beholder is willing to ditch her friends and damage the fabric of space and time for someone, the mirror logically assumes they’re past the point of objective beauty standards.
Which I guess I am, because Eva’s face makes it suddenly difficult to breathe. I fall toward her, diving through nowhere, feeling like a smear of toothpaste being squeezed out of some cosmic tube. I’m braced to land in hellish chaos—a burning castle filled with murderous huntsmen, perhaps, or a public execution—but I find myself standing in a small, whitewashed room with lots of windows and no blood at all.
It doesn’t look like the sort of room that could conceivably exist anywhere in Evil Snow White’s castle, or even in the same world. The light slanting through the windows is an ordinary dusky gold rather than the malevolent violet of endless twilight; the fire in the hearth is cheery and warm and probably was not made to heat iron shoes or boil human soup. The whole place reminds me strongly of Zellandine’s hut, except a little emptier and newer.
I would assume I’d made a wrong turn in nowheresville if it weren’t for Eva. The queen—my queen—is sitting at a small table, fiddling with something shiny.
I make a small, embarrassing sound in the back of my throat, nearly a whimper; she looks up.
And she’s—fine. A little tired, maybe, but not tormented or terrified. There’s a crust of red around one nostril, but no mortal wounds. She’s still wearing her sheer white shift, grimed with prison filth, but there’s a plain cloak draped over her shoulders now. Her feet are bare on the floor, the skin smooth and unhurt.
One side of her mouth tilts. There’s a light in her eyes that doesn’t quite manage to be a wicked gleam. “Why, Lady Zinnia,” she drawls. “Have you come to rescue me?”
“I…” I glance around the room, which persists in being almost aggressively nonthreatening. “This was a whole lot cooler in my head. How come you don’t need rescuing?” I remember, very distantly, wishing more of the princesses would rescue themselves. “The last thing I saw was the huntsmen coming for you, on account of how you assassinated their immortal monarch.”
“Yes, well, you left before it got interesting.”
She says it with a sly bat of her eyelashes, but another pound of guilt settles in my stomach. I’m surprised there’s room, at this point. “I didn’t mean to.” I make myself meet her eyes. “Leave, I mean.”