Chapter 4: The First Trial
Corvain was waiting for them, seated behind his desk as though he had never moved, as though the last hour had happened purely for their benefit and not his.
"I did tell you," he said, setting down his quill with theatrical patience, "that the slow way would bring you back to me eventually. I simply didn't expect it to take less than two hours."
"The compass pointed here," Mira said, holding it up, still trembling faintly in her palm. "That means the second wisher's echo is somewhere near you. Not that we wanted your company."
"How refreshingly honest." Corvain's smile did not so much as flicker. "As it happens, the compass is not wrong. Your linked wisher passed through this very chamber not forty minutes ago, quite distraught, asking a great many of the same questions you're about to ask me."
Mira's stomach lurched. "They were here. You spoke to them. Where did they go?"
"Ah." Corvain steepled his fingers, and Mira was beginning to recognize that particular gesture as the one he made right before extracting maximum value from a piece of information. "That, unfortunately, is Ledger business. Names and locations are earned, as I mentioned before. Trial business."
Kade stepped forward, and the temperature in the room seemed to drop a degree. "She already declined your trial once, Corvain."
"She declined my offer of an easy path. I'm now offering the only path, since your little detour to the Archive has, I gather, come up empty handed." Corvain's gaze slid to Mira, warm and reasonable and utterly untrustworthy. "The Trial isn't cruelty, Miss Ashworth. It's tradition. Every wisher who wants information from the Ledger proves themselves worthy of it. Complete the Trial of Reflection, and I will tell you exactly where your linked wisher went, and their name besides."
"What does the trial involve," Mira asked, against every instinct telling her not to.
"A simple thing." Corvain snapped his fingers, and the round chamber's far wall dissolved into a tall mirror, its surface rippling like disturbed water. "You step through, you face a reflection of the choice that brought you here, and you make it again, honestly, out loud, with nothing hidden. The mirror rejects lies. It also rejects those who refuse to look at themselves clearly. Most wishers fail on their first attempt, out of pride."
"And if I fail."
"Then the mirror keeps a small piece of your resolve as a toll, and you may try again tomorrow. Nothing so dramatic as memory or time. Merely confidence. A thing you seem to have plenty of."
Mira looked at Kade. His face was carefully blank in a way that told her exactly how much he disliked this, though he said nothing to stop her, which told her something else entirely, that he trusted her to make her own choice even when he disagreed with it.
"I'll do it," she said.
"You don't have to decide this second," Kade said, low, just for her. "He'll still be smug about it in an hour."
"If I wait an hour I'll talk myself out of it, and then I'll spend the whole night wondering what the mirror would have shown me instead of actually finding out. I'd rather know." She glanced at him, managing something close to a real smile despite the nerves twisting in her stomach. "Besides, you'll be right here when I get back. That helps more than you'd think."
Something shifted behind his eyes, quick and unguarded, gone before she could be sure she'd seen it at all. "I'll be right here," he agreed.
The mirror's surface parted like water around her fingers when she stepped through, and for one disorienting moment, Mira stood nowhere at all, surrounded by a soft gray light with no walls, no floor she could see, only her own reflection standing a few feet away, except the reflection was not quite her. It wore the same clothes, had the same face, but its eyes were harder, its mouth curved into something bitter that Mira did not recognize from any mirror she had ever looked into at home.
"Go on," the reflection said, its voice an echo of her own dragged through gravel. "Tell me why you really made that wish. Not the version you gave the boy in the coat. The real one."
Mira's throat tightened. "I told him the real one. I'm tired of doing everything alone."
"That's the surface," the reflection said. "Dig further. The mirror doesn't accept surfaces."
Mira closed her eyes, and beneath the easy answer, beneath the joke she had made standing in her aunt's shop with a textbook open on her knees, she found the thing she had not said out loud to Kade, or to anyone, in longer than she wanted to admit.
"I wished to disappear," she said slowly, "because some nights I think it would be easier for everyone if I did. My parents wouldn't have to feel guilty about being away. My aunt wouldn't have to worry about whether she's doing right by me. I could just stop being one more thing on someone's list of responsibilities." Her voice cracked on the last word, and she hated how true it sounded once it was finally outside her own head. "That's the real one. I didn't want to vanish from a history assignment. I wanted to vanish from being a burden."
The reflection studied her for a long moment, its bitter expression softening into something almost sad.
"That's the truth," it said quietly. "Here is the honest answer to it, since you asked it of yourself and not of anyone else. You were never a burden. You were only ever afraid of being one, and fear like that doesn't disappear just because the person carrying it does. It only moves to whoever loved you enough to notice you were gone."
The gray light around Mira rippled, and the reflection stepped forward and, impossibly, pressed something small and warm into her hand before dissolving into mist. When Mira opened her fingers, she found a tiny shard of amber, glowing faintly from within, identical in color to the door that had started all of this.
She stepped back through the mirror into the round chamber to find Kade halfway to his feet, tension bleeding visibly out of his shoulders the second he saw her whole and steady.
"You passed," Corvain said, sounding almost genuinely impressed, which was somehow worse than his usual smugness. "Most take two or three attempts before they're honest enough with the mirror. You did it in one."
"The name," Mira said, holding up the glowing shard as proof. "You promised."
Corvain's smile turned thin, the pleasantness stretched taut over something that looked, for just a moment, like reluctance. "A promise is a promise, even from someone in my position." He opened the great honey colored Ledger book again, flipping to the fresh entry from earlier. "Your linked wisher's name, Miss Ashworth, is Priya Okafor. Seventeen years old. She left this chamber forty minutes ago heading toward the Market Spiral, in considerable distress, insisting she would find you herself rather than wait for anyone's help."
Mira's breath left her in a rush. "Priya. That's Priya."
"Small world," Priya's voice said unhelpfully in Mira's memory, an old joke of hers whenever something coincidental happened, and Mira almost laughed out loud at the absurdity of hearing it in her head while standing in a place with three moons and a sentient bureaucratic ledger.
"You know her," Kade said, watching her face.
"She's my best friend. She must have come by the shop to drop off notes from class, since I skipped the study session tonight to finish the essay, and she must have seen the door, seen it open, seen me go through." Mira's hands had started shaking again, though this time it wasn't fear so much as something closer to devastated affection. "She wished to bring me back. She didn't even think about what it would cost her. That's exactly like her."
"Then we'd better find her quickly," Kade said, "before Veylorien decides to test her patience the way it's been testing yours."
Corvain, closing the Ledger with a soft, satisfied sound, called after them as they turned to leave.
"One more thing, Warden, Miss Ashworth, before you go rushing off into the Market Spiral at this hour." Something in his tone had shifted, gone quieter, almost careful. "The Spiral is not like the corridors you've walked so far. It answers to older rules than the Ledger does. And I would be remiss, whatever you both think of me, if I did not warn you that a girl wandering it alone, frightened, and newly arrived, is precisely the sort of thing the Spiral's older residents find most interesting."
Mira did not wait to hear anything else. She was already running, Kade half a step behind her, the little amber shard clutched tight in her fist, toward a market she had only ever heard through walls, praying she would reach her best friend before whatever lived in the Spiral did.