The Ledger of Ash

The reflection did not move when Maeve stepped toward it.

It stood at the far end of the chamber, where the bound ledgers rose in shelves like gravestones. Its face was hidden behind a mask of polished black glass. No mouth showed beneath it, yet the figure seemed to be smiling. In one gloved hand it held a needle. In the other, a spool of gray thread.

Isaac seized Maeve’s arm. “Don’t.”

The jester had already crossed the chamber.

It walked directly toward the reflection, its bells making no sound. At the edge of the mirror, it lifted both hands and pressed its palms against the glass. The surface trembled. For an instant, the jester’s childish costume fell away—not vanished, exactly, but became transparent. Beneath the bright sleeves and painted buttons was a body wrapped in strips of written cloth. Names crawled over them in tiny black stitches.

Maeve saw one name repeated across the jester’s chest.

ELIAS VALE.

The mirror split down the middle.

On the other side was not the masked figure but a narrow passage lit by the orange pulse of distant fire. Smoke drifted along its ceiling. A boy stood in the passage with a girl clutched against his chest. The boy’s hair was burned away on one side. He was coughing, but he was still on his feet.

“Isaac!” he shouted.

Isaac made a sound like a door being broken open.

He stumbled through the mirror.

“Isaac!” Maeve called, following.

The passage swallowed them both. The chamber behind disappeared, replaced by the old Hall of Mirrors as it had been on the night of the fire. Its walls were unblackened. Its chandeliers burned overhead. Somewhere beyond the doors, people screamed while music continued to play.

The boy—Elias—turned toward them. He looked younger than Isaac remembered, though not by much. In his arms, the girl had a strip of gray fabric tied across her eyes.

Maeve stopped breathing.

The girl was herself.

Not as she had been in memory: no older, no hardened, no hands stained with tailor’s chalk. She was seven years old, soot on her cheeks, one bare foot bleeding. Elias lowered her behind a display of ceremonial cloaks and pulled the gray strip from her eyes.

“Listen to me,” he told her. “They’ll ask what happened. You tell them nothing. Not because you’re afraid. Because they’ve made a coat from the truth, and they’ll put it on you if you speak.”

Young Maeve stared at him. “Where will you go?”