Chapter 2 - The Girl with the Same FaceAt first Elara thought she had been struck harder than she realized. A woman stood ten paces away wearing her body as though it were another borrowed dress. The stranger had the same dark eyebrows, the same narrow scar above the right wrist, even the same anxious habit of touching the hollow at the base of her throat. Only her expression was different. The stranger looked angry enough to burn the whole palace down and afraid enough to do it accidentally.
"You're late," the stranger said.
A guard drew his sword. Both women lifted a hand. The guard's steel broke into harmless silver droplets before either one had consciously decided to defend herself. The two women stared at each other. Their gestures had been identical. The hall went silent except for the sound of chandeliers trembling overhead.
"Who are you?" Elara demanded.
"I should ask you that. I watched you wear my life for twelve years."
The stranger struck the floor with one palm. Cold light rushed outward across the tiles. Elara answered on instinct, a crescent shield rising around her. The two spells met with the sound of a thousand goblets shattering. Nobles fled toward the doors. The guards stumbled behind them. Somewhere beyond the throne a man shouted for the passage to be sealed.
Elara felt something pull behind her ribs. A jewel was forming against the fabric of her silver bodice, a tiny diamond-shaped shard shining with white fire. The stranger had one too. Between their hearts a narrow thread of light stretched and snapped. Pain shot through both women. They fell to their knees together.
Mara abandoned the silver tray. The crystal hand struck the floor without breaking. She ran to Elara's side but could not tell which woman had been the princess a moment earlier. One held her chest, one gripped the stone beneath her; both looked up with the same desperate eyes.
"My lady," Mara began, and stopped.
The stranger laughed, a thin sound with almost no amusement in it. "You don't know either, do you?"
"I know whose blood has stained these floors," Mara replied. "Get up before the king's men return."
She pulled the nearest girl to her feet and then, after an instant's hesitation, offered her other hand to the stranger. The second girl regarded it with suspicion, but accepted. The three ran along a servants' corridor as a terrible scraping noise rolled from the portrait chamber. It sounded like a mountain trying to turn over in its sleep.
They reached the linen cellar. Mara barred the door with a broken iron pipe and lit a single lamp. The light revealed that the princesses' dresses were not quite identical. One had a small line of old blue stitching on her left cuff; the other did not. Elara recognized it: her mother had sewn the mark on a sleeve she had worn the night she disappeared. Yet that sleeve had burned years ago. How could a new dress carry its thread?
"I remember the sleeve," said the stranger, watching her. "You cried because she told you it would keep the winter out."
Elara backed toward a wall. "I have never told anyone that."
"No. You only remember the day after. I remember the night itself."
Mara held the lamp between them. In its uneven light the stranger's cheek had a faint translucent quality. Within the skin moved tiny dark motes, like words floating in deep water. The stranger saw Mara noticing and covered her face.
"When I was eight," she said, "a woman put her hands over my eyes and told me not to be afraid when the room became a picture. I woke inside the queen's tapestry. I could hear the king speaking outside. Every year I saw you grow taller. Every year I grew too, but the people woven around me did not move."
"That's impossible," Elara whispered.
"That's what he wanted you to believe."
Elara seized the lamp and brought it close. Their faces were the same. Their breath clouded the glass in the same pattern. As Elara concentrated, she could remember a woman's voice telling her not to be frightened. But the memory had no image, only a blank square where the room should have been.
"Are you my sister?" she asked.
"I don't know. I don't have a name of my own. He never gave me one."
A knock sounded on the cellar door, three taps, a pause, two more. Mara went white. It was the signal her mother had taught her for a royal search, the signal that meant the person knocking already knew where you were hiding.
"The king has forbidden all mirrors," a voice said from outside. It was Captain Roran, commander of the palace guard. "The chancellor has ordered the girl from the tapestry executed."
"Which girl?" Mara asked.
Captain Roran's answer came after a terrible silence.
The cellar smelled of lavender and soap. It was an absurd place for the beginning of a royal crisis, a cramped room with folded sheets stacked to the ceiling and labels written by servants whose names would never appear in court chronicles. Iris touched the nearest pile. The fabric was warm. For twelve years she had been able to feel only the woven imitation of cloth. Here her fingers could pinch the edge and lift it. The sensation astonished her. A real sheet had weight; it resisted her hand; it had been washed by someone who expected it to be used again.
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Elara watched her in silence. Until that moment she had assumed the stranger was pretending bewilderment. But no one could have rehearsed the way Iris examined the grain of the wooden shelf or the soot on the lamp chimney. She looked at ordinary objects as if they were forbidden treasures. Elara felt her anger complicate itself. She wanted the intruder away from her life, yet the intruder's first act after escaping imprisonment had been to marvel at laundry. Neither moved.
"He has ordered both."
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