Nora Tweed was very old. She realized in retrospect that she should have kept track of how many years she had been alive, but the fact of the matter was that she was not particularly interested in how old she got. She kept track of the important things. Did her rings still fit? She wore three rings on each hand. One on her ring finger, one on her index finger, and one on her thumb. Both hands mirrored each other, and when she clapped, the rings clinked against each other. Did her corset still fit? Indeed, it did. How many chins did she have? Still just the one? Perfect.

  There were mirrors in her castle, and she looked at herself in them often. It seemed that she was more beautiful every time she saw herself reflected in one of them. It was like opening a present, and every time the gift was her! The very thing she wanted most.

  Her reflection showed that her hair shone in glorious white waves. Her eyes were blue and brilliant. Her skin was not creamy, but sparkled slightly as if crushed diamonds decorated her cheeks. Her clothes were warm and felt like wool, but looked like white silk.

  In reality, Nora was old, hunched, and bony. The mirrors propped up on the rough obsidian stone of the walls showed beauty because that was their function. It didn’t matter that Nora felt the homespun wool of the cloak she always wore, because inside the mirrors, she always saw beauty.

  Nora lived in a castle hidden inside a mountain. More mundanely put, she lived in a cave. The rough walls were exposed, as well as the old mining beams that stopped some of the passages from falling on her head. There were not many windows, only seven that were used for ventilation more than for their views. That had been the original reason for putting in the mirrors. Something needed to reflect what little light they had. Being beautiful had been an afterthought in those days. At first, they were about light.

  The man who made them, Stag Ration, had been a magician Nora had hired when she was old, but still as beautiful as a teenager. He had worked for her until she took him on as a partner. He filled the castle cave with his craft. He made mirrors. He was brilliant, making the best mirrors in the world: enchanted mirrors, light mirrors, glamorous mirrors, true heart mirrors, and more.

  Nora and Stag’s plan hadn’t been much in those first days. They wanted a decent demon god to worship in Spectral Shade, but it was practically at the top of the world; it was so far north. It was further than Forest Spire, which had a reputation for being cold. It was colder in Spectral Shade, and few people lived there. Those who did lived underground, and they relied heavily on mirrors that could multiply light sources. They burned stones instead of wood, and their furnaces could heat mountains. Their numbers had dwindled, and the demon gods would not come when so few people could worship them.

  A few years before, Stag had gone to Forest Spire to talk to the king there about letting them worship Swaneve alongside them. There had been a snowstorm locking them inside the palace for days, and something had happened to Stag while he was there. Nora was quite fuzzy on the details. He had gone with a mirror to give to Queen Angelique. It was to be an offering to warm them up to the idea of trade and of becoming so close to them that they would allow them to worship Swaneve. The snow had fallen. Being snowed in should not have had any effect on Stag, but something regarding the princess had happened.

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  Nora could not remember much about the details of how Stag had failed so completely that he had been banished from Forest Spire after having been locked in the castle with the royal family, but she did remember the princess’s name. It was Bianca. Stag could not stop thinking about her.

  Sometimes, he would lean back in his chair at the dinner table, and as the firelight danced across his masked face, he would say something like, “Spiders clasp thread with their toes and never with their fingers.”

  Nora had stopped asking what the gibberish meant. She knew where it came from. He was talking about the invisible letters on Bianca’s skin.

  “The fish scale caught between my teeth feels like an extra tooth that slices my tongue.”

  Nora had learned to put her nose in the air and ignore the ideas that intoxicated him. Most of the time, Nora and Stag were so close, they were almost lovers. She could believe he loved her when he had his fingers in her hair and a mirror reflected aqua-colored light that was almost like the waves of the sea fluctuated through their world. It was when his words destroyed her illusion that she minded his words most.

  “You’ll like my skin if you touch it,” he sometimes whispered quietly into the fire.

  Nora saw him, leaning forward in his armchair, absorbed in the flames like they provided the best backdrop for the memories he treasured most.

  Even still, she could live... until the news came. Some of Stag’s mirrors were more useful than others, and the one he delivered to Forest Spire as a gift was one of the best he had ever made. Nora knew it sent information to Stag from time to time, though she didn’t understand how it could work. She also knew that the thing Stag wanted more than anything had finally happened.

  Stag was not allowed back in Bianca’s kingdom. He had been banished, and banishment under Swaneve was not to be toyed with. If he took one step inside the boundaries of their kingdom, his punishment would become death. No army would chase him. The boundary itself would do the executing. He had been warned. He could never step into their kingdom again, which meant he could never see Bianca again.

  Unless Bianca left Forest Spire.

  Stag had been scheming with his mirror for years. Apparently, success is for the determined. He had turned the queen against her step-daughter, and Bianca had been taken out into the woods to be done away with, but the princess escaped… exactly as Stag had predicted. The threat of death was all he needed to chase her away from her kingdom, the place she was the safest. She had left the borders.

  The time had come.

  Nora heard Stag, once known as Staggard, the masked necromancer, making preparations to leave and felt the twisted thing inside her chest twist a little more. She turned to the nearest mirror. At least, she was still beautiful.