“Dammit!” Tala burst out in frustration, rubbing at the side of her head where her mother had scored with one of her arnis sticks.
Far from being apologetic, Lumina only laughed. “You keep thinking your weapons are enough to deflect a move you see coming. I can attack you in so many other ways, and you must be prepared to anticipate every one of them.”
“Easy for you to say,” Tala grumbled. The ringing in her ears had finally ceased, and the pain was letting up. Her pride had taken a harder blow than anything else. “I don’t have as long a reach as you do.”
“Your mom’s got far shorter arms than I have,” her father rumbled cheerfully, extending one long brawny arm for emphasis before pulling it back to flip over a burger sizzling on the grill before him, “and she still kicks my ass on a weekly basis. It’s not about what you’ve got, it’s about knowing how to use what you’ve already got.”
“It’s not like I can even use arnis in my daily life,” Tala grouched.
“Are your classmates bothering you again?” Lumina asked immediately, a scowl forming on her face. “Because I told your principal that if he’s going to blame you again for beating up some bully—”
“No,” Tala said hurriedly. “What I mean is that—I don’t know, Mom. This is Invierno. Nothing ever happens here.”
“We can help you compete for the Olympics if that’s something you’re interested in,” her father offered.
Tala wrinkled her nose. “If I can’t even beat Mom, what makes you think I’d be good enough for that? I don’t think I have anything I’m really good at.”
“You are not allowed to have an existential crisis before lunch,” her father ordered, “and definitely not before you have a bite of one of my special burgers and secret sauce.”
He had a point. The smell was making Tala’s mouth water.
“Sesame hoisin and sriracha isn’t that hard to make,” her mother said, grinning.
“Hey!” Kay protested.
“We’ll take a break to eat,” her mother allowed. “I think you would be exceptional at anything you put your mind to, anak. You just have to figure out what that is first, but you’ve just had your seventeenth birthday. You have all the time in the world to find that out.”
“Four months on, and doctors are still at a loss explaining this phenomenon.”
Tala stopped. She hadn’t noticed the television set on their lawn. This one had a nearly transparent screen, the news reporter sitting in the air like some kind of hologram. This was Avalon tech, but in a place like Invierno, spelltech almost never worked.
Avalon tech? But she’d never even been to Avalon. Avalon had been frozen in ice for almost—
The reporter’s image shifted to that of a harried-looking doctor.
“It’s not possible for many of those who have been assigned male at birth to undergo pregnancy,” he said. “The amount of magic necessary to rework the human anatomy is more than remarkable. It’s going to change the medical industry. So many things we know about our bodies have now become obsolete almost overnight.”
The news reporter took over. “While some view this as nothing short of a miracle, others have condemned those responsible—among them Zoe Carlisle, niece to King Philip XXII of France. Hundreds of death threats have been sent to the rue la Farge since the news broke, along with bomb warnings—”
“It wasn’t her fault!” Tala burst out without thinking. “She’s being blamed for something she never even—”
“Are you all right, lass?” her father asked. “Who’s Zoe?”
“I—” What was she doing? She’d never even met this Zoe Carlisle. But why did the name sound so familiar?
“If you ask me,” her mother said with a sigh, “they should normalize treating pregnancies like any other medical condition. I would have hoped this would lead to a better discourse to make pregnancy safer for all, but alas.”
“You mean Dad can get pregnant now?”
“I’m a bit too old for that to be a real possibility,” her father said, laughing, “but I’d give it a try if your mom’s still hankering for a another kid.”
“Tala is more than enough for me,” Lumina said. “But I wouldn’t say no to a puppy or a kitten.”
“Riselle Gardner’s golden retriever, Daisy, just had a litter. We could ask for one if you’d like. Apparently Daisy took a shine to their next-door neighbor’s dog, Picard, and no one knew until she was already—”
“Picard?” Tala broke in.
“That’s the name of their neighbor’s dog. Odd choice, but—”
“He said he wanted to have a dog so he could name him Picard,” Tala said, her head spinning. “Star Trek. Picard always called Riker Number One. He hoped that he could be that to any dog he had. Because he’d never had anyone to care enough for him to be their number one. This is wrong. This is all wrong. This isn’t real.”
“Tala, what are you talking about?” Lumina sounded alarmed. “What’s—”
Tala rounded on her. “This isn’t real!” she cried. “This is an illusion! I need to break it! Where—?”
An agimat. She was still so annoyingly weak, but at least she remembered that. She seized it now, felt the familiar surge around her after all her years honing it at Invierno—the real Invierno with all its ugliness and bigotry, and not this attempt at keeping her complacent and trapped forever in wherever the Dragon Palace had thrown her into.
Her parents leaped back as she pushed her agimat forward. It caught on to some strange, complex magic that was absolutely staggering in the waves she could feel emanating from it.
Whoever had placed the barrier clearly meant to prevent her from getting out. Trying to match its strength would only exhaust her, so she switched to the salamanca technique Lola Corazon had taught her, allowing the magic to bounce back onto itself, letting its own momentum be the catalyst to its destruction. There was a sudden give, and Tala found herself looking at the surface of a mirror.
“Wait!” Lumina shouted. She and her father were walking toward Tala. “Don’t leave!”
She had no time to ponder what lay beyond the other side of the looking glass. Tala took a deep breath and plunged through—
—and stumbled into a darkened hallway. The looking glass from where she’d emerged gleamed brightly, but the light soon faded away.
Tala’s first instinct was to examine it, taking care not to touch the surface lest she fall in again. Her reflection stared back.
This was not the only mirror there. More fanned out on either side of the passageway. Some were shining, others dark.
She looked through one and saw everything.
Some mirrors were of the past and gleamed gold; she saw armies mobilizing, flags waving in the air as opposing forces clashed together. She saw lances and horses, both simmering with ancient magic, shifting into cannons and fire, guns and bullets as the centuries rolled on. She saw Avalon’s banner flapping in the wind, saw a king sitting at a round table full of knights. It crossed her mind that her father might have been one of them, but it was too late, and another scene, another war, had already flitted past.
She tore her gaze away and took a step back, proceeded farther down the hallway. The mirrors here were now silvery by design, and as she looked into them, Tala realized they documented the present.
No, not the present—the possibilities of the present. Those that could happen, might happen. Because Tala saw the Snow Queen triumphant in one, the ruins of Maidenkeep a smoking background behind her victory cries. And yet she also saw Avalon standing in another, their armies pouring into Beira. It was similar to the dream she’d had a couple of years ago at Tintagel Castle—dreams of smoke and nightwalkers and her friends.
She gazed into another looking glass and saw nothing but fire. It obscured her vision, preventing her from seeing anything but soot-filled skies. She leaned closer, straining to see past the smoke, shaken at how similar this looked to what she had dreamt, and reared back when the heat blazed out at her, the fires just as hot as if she’d been standing within them.
“Coo,” something said.
The adarna had been lurking behind one of the silver-gilded mirrors. It poked its head from around the frame and managed a curious, nervous tweet.
“Are you real this time?”
The adarna looked relieved. It stepped out and chirped happily.
“Can we at least find the others, retrieve the tamatebako, and make our way out of here before you decide to—”
The colorful bird flew straight toward her, landing with practiced assurance on top of her head.
“—use me as a perch again,” Tala finished. “Do you know where everyone else is?”
It shook its head.
“Do you have an idea of where we should go next?”
The adarna bobbed its head up and down.
“Lead the way, then.”
The bird leaned forward, jabbed its beak at one of the mirrors farther along the hallway.
The mirror showed her another war, one between Buyan and Avalon. It was easy to spot the red and gold flags of Avalon dotting half of the battlefield, slowly but steadily gaining ground over the armored troops bearing the matte-black flag of Buyan.
This must be the final war between the two kingdoms, with Koschei defeated and presumed killed, the Snow Queen siding with King Arthur and his knights. But the mirror kept switching scenes too rapidly for her to process the details, and she realized that she was seeing through the eyes of many of the battle’s combatants. She moved closer.
The adarna trilled out a warning. Tala felt wings flap down on her face, slapping her lightly on the cheeks and forcing her to retreat. Was it her imagination, or did the mirror’s light recede ever so slightly?
“Is it trying to pull me inside?”
The coo from her head told Tala she’d guessed right.
“So everything is a trap designed to keep us all here forever.” And the other Banders didn’t have her agimat to fall back on to negate the magic.
The mirror changed again. Tala stared into a throne room that seemed to be made of nothing but ice. She could see a tall warrior in elaborate heavy armor, face heavily concealed beneath a black visor, shouting in a language she didn’t understand. He slashed angrily at everything he could reach with his broadsword, sending shrapnel flying. Before him was a pretty girl, ashen-faced and trembling, wrapped up in a long robe that surely could not keep her warm given their surroundings, though she showed no signs of being cold. Her face was familiar. The Snow Queen, though she was only called Gerda then, before she’d called herself Anneliese in a bid to disguise her true identity in the years since.
And the man in armor must be Koschei.
There was a gleaming mirror on the wall behind him. It was shining, but neither Koschei nor Gerda seemed to notice.
There was another man on the ground, his gray armor streaked with blood. He wasn’t moving.
Tala watched as the man in black turned his wrath on his daughter, roaring curses at her face. Gerda shrank back, but her hands clasped at a strange black dagger, its blade more like it was made of a shard of glass than from steel. When he moved toward her again, his sword raised, she sprang.
Tala had thought that the armor would be enough to deflect the blow, but the knife sank into the man’s side like he wore no protection at all. Koschei stared down at the dagger in shock before raising his head to stare at the girl. He managed to utter a few more words before he staggered backward, trying to get the blade out, but the girl shook her head, tears streaming down her face, and forced it in even deeper.
Even from the other side of the mirror, the magic coursing through the dagger and spiraling outward hit Tala like a thunderclap.
With a cry, the man tore his helmet off. Tala had thought Koschei would look cruel, as if the evilness of his soul was great enough to stamp itself across his physical features. But the man underneath the visor looked ordinary enough—bearded with a scar across one cheek. He looked like he could have lived in Invierno his whole life and never stood out from the crowd.
Koschei turned to stare at the mirror, and Tala saw what he finally did—a small part of the glass was gone, the missing piece shaped like the dagger Gerda had plunged into him.
A fine mist rose around the man, obscuring him from view. When it dissipated, only the girl was left, staring blankly at the blade now in her hand, a strange steam rising from it.
She turned to the other fallen figure. She plunged the dagger into him too, but it appeared to do the opposite. The figure in gray wheezed as his chest took in air, and the girl wrenched the visor off his face. He was young—so, so young—but Tala recognized her father in the youth’s face. He smiled faintly at the girl as she sobbed, clinging tightly to him. The dagger clattered to the floor, magic still swirling in its depths.
The Snow Queen had been telling the truth. It was she who had killed her father, not King Arthur and his men, but she had never been lucky enough to write history.
The dagger. Did the Snow Queen still have it? That must have been the magic she’d used to resurrect Tala’s father, bind him to her side as a fellow immortal. The mirror had been a part of the Alatyr, Lord Suddene had said. If the Snow Queen was already immortal in that vision, then it must mean that she had already been bound to the Alatyr by her father as well. It helped explain why she despised Koschei.
Tala watched the young Kay’s face for several long moments, the look of concern and love there as he held his lady in his arms, letting her cry while he murmured soothing words of assurance.
A sudden loud crash brought her back into the present. She spun, heart pounding, the adarna on her head already squeaking out nervous threats.
The shade was frozen in motion, one hand stretched out toward one of the mirrors that it had accidentally toppled. The glass didn’t shatter; the shadow was attempting to right it, a puzzling thing for a nightwalker to do, given the little care they had for lives, much less property. The shade itself managed to look almost embarrassed despite its lack of a face. It would have been almost comical if it wasn’t for everything else.
“Wait!” Tala shouted, but it was already springing away, scuttling across the floor and then scampering up one side of the wall. She raced after it, the adarna clinging to her head for dear life.
The shade ducked behind another row of mirrors, and Tala spotted the closed door up ahead—no doubt locked, though that had never stopped shadows before.
A sudden shower of magic rained down on them. The shade was thrown back violently as the door refused it, sending its form to the floor, its skinny arms flailing.
“Ha!” Tala cried as she reached it. She stomped one foot down on its side, keeping it in place to prevent it from fleeing again. “What the hell are you? You aren’t like any of the other nightwalkers I’ve fought before.”
The shade looked up at her, limbs still splayed wide on the ground. Tala saw its shoulders move up and down as if in a shrug. Most would have attacked mindlessly, but this one appeared to have a working brain.
“Why are you following me? How did you manage to sneak in?”
A second shrug. The shade pointed toward the closed door again.
She didn’t have much choice. It looked to be the only way out of this corridor. “Are you going to run again when I take my foot away?”
It shook its head earnestly.
Tala slowly lifted her leg. It hopped up, danced a little jig to discern that it still had all its body parts, and then pointed at the door again.
“If you couldn’t get past it, what makes you think I can?”
The shade pointed at her and then gestured widely, and Tala realized it was referring to her agimat.
“Fine. But if this is some kind of trick…” She focused on the door. Something was fusing it shut, that much she could determine. She concentrated on her agimat once more, trying to overload the defensive wards like she had done inside the mirror.
It was much more difficult this time. She was still drained from her last bout, and that had been fueled by adrenaline and panic.
The adarna sang. Its melody filled the room, and Tala saw the mirrors flickering in and out, the magic within them waning and ebbing to the rhythm. At the same time, she felt some of her old strength returning. She pushed back harder against the spell, and the adarna sang louder in response.
The door folded into itself and crumbled down noisily, the wood splintering like it had been made of paper, pulverizing into dust. The open doorway now stood before them, dark and threatening.
The shade scampered through before she could stop it.
“Dammit,” Tala growled, shaking off the strange high the adarna’s song had given her, and followed.
She wasn’t expecting to find more mirrors in this room. She groaned.
The adarna was a flurry of chirps and squawks, its wings agitated. Something was making it nervous, but Tala wasn’t sure what it was until she realized that the looking glasses weren’t the only things in the room.
There was a wooden table. On it were several jeweled boxes, all a dazzling display of colors and gems. No wonder there were treasure hunters eager to get into the palace—one box alone must have cost a fortune. Tamatebako, she realized.
Were they all just different variations? She didn’t recall Chiaki describing what it looked like, and she presumed it was because none of them knew. Neither had they been told that there was more than one.
She picked a jeweled box up at random. It didn’t look like it required a key—there were no unlocking mechanisms that she could spot—but nothing seemed to suggest how it could be opened.
“Any ideas?”
The adarna shook its head. Tala felt the bird dip down, poking cautiously at another box. It let out a curious sound.
“Is this it?” Tala asked, picking it up. She admired the craftsmanship; it was simpler than the others, but the turquoise color interspersed with the small gems dotting its exterior was nice to look at.
The lid slid back without warning.
And then she was falling yet somehow still on her feet. It felt like a part of her was slowly being dragged into the box, and she could hear the frantic chirping of the adarna as it, too, was slowly being pulled down in to the depths of the—
The lid was slammed shut abruptly by a shadowy hand, and the box spun away from her grasp. It hit the floor with a loud thud, and the shade chittered admonishingly at her.
“What was that?” For a moment, Tala was afraid that she was already inside the box. Everything was disorienting, the world strange and alien all of a sudden. But as her anxiety dissipated, her sense of normalcy returned. “What did I do?”
The shade made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a sigh.
“I only touched it! How are we supposed to bring the tamatebako out of here if it starts sucking in our souls whenever we pick it up?”
The faceless shade gave her a look as if to say, That’s not my problem.
“It destroys no souls,” someone said from behind her. “It does quite the opposite.”
Tala spun, arming herself with her agimat.
The woman staring back only looked amused. She was entrancingly beautiful, her bangs arranged in an even, almost severe cut across her forehead. Her hair was so long that it all but brushed the floor as she moved to take the turquoise jeweled box off the floor, cradling it lovingly in her hands. She wore robes of an ancient style that Tala recognized from long-ago Japanese dynasties in history textbooks, and her eyebrows were drawn in an odd teardrop shape.
But the woman showed no anger that they had entered her home without permission. “You must be one of them,” she said.
“One of them?”
The woman gestured at a row of smaller mirrors lined up beside the table of jeweled boxes.
“Oh no,” Tala said once she caught sight of what lay within those surfaces. She could only see flashes of scenes, but it was enough.
She saw glimpses of Loki in the first one, scaling up the trees toward a large tree house, laughing with their parents. She saw Zoe in a large stage production of a ballet, beautiful in her tutu as she pirouetted and jetéed to wondrous applause, and Ken riding Horse across the plains, singing into the wind. She saw West in shifter form with the rest of his family, the pack chasing each other with gleeful howls. She saw Nya in her village, dancing and laughing as fireflies gleaming with bright magic fluttered around her, and Cole stalking through the snow with other hunters, rooting out nightwalkers. Every mirror was configured to offer each Bandersnatcher pieces of the happiest moments in their lives, even if they were lies. And Ryker’s—
It hurt to look at Ryker’s mirror. She saw a younger version of him lying in a narrow cot in a small room, and a woman with long dark hair and eyes and a smile so much like his own reading him a bedtime story. He was snuggled in her lap, eyes drifting closed.
“I apologize for our trespassing,” Tala said, fighting to keep her voice even, sensing that the woman was stronger than she looked and attempting to take her on in a fight would be harder than it appeared. “But would you please release my friends from their prisons?”
“Is it really a prison if they are happy within it?” The woman sounded far too calm. She had taken to rearranging the other jeweled containers, fingers lingering affectionately over each one.
“It is if they don’t know their lives are a lie.”
“I do not command the Ryugu-jo,” the strange woman said. “I only live within its walls. There is nothing I can do for them if they cannot do it themselves. There is only one way to break through the illusions. Only then can they prove themselves worthy.”
Tala’s gaze drifted back toward the table. “To take one of these as a reward?”
The woman’s lips curled. “As it had always been with Urashima Taro and those who came after him. The tamatebako tucks a part of your soul away to bring out when all else seems lost. But only if their souls can find their way back, if they trust in themselves enough to withstand temptation for truth. Such has always been the price, and so it shall ever be.”