again, all hate drained away. “It wasn’t you. I couldn’t make it not happen by killing you. It wasn’t you. It was me. She died because she met me.” He shook his shaggy head.
I didn’t know what to say. I was still too stunned by what I had done. I had killed his wife after all, just as he said I would. He warned me, but I didn’t believe. If I had just told someone. Peggy, Anthony, Lilly. If Peggy had known, surely she wouldn’t have come.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He shook his head again. “I was telling you to kill yourself. It’s me who should kill myself.” He turned and looked at his younger self grappling with John Wald, and suddenly his face shifted again into bottomless rage. He reached down past John to grab the younger Curtis, but as he did, a flash of blue light erupted in the air between them. The older Curtis—I had to stop thinking of him as Prince Harming—screamed and withdrew his mutilated hands. The younger one flinched from the pain of the blue sparks, and Wald took the opportunity to flip him over and pin his hands behind his back.
Older Curtis stepped back and held his hands up, then looked at me. “That pain. Like when I was younger. I remember now.” He breathed raggedly and squinted his eyes as though not entirely seeing me. “I didn’t remember until now.”
The younger version of him wasn’t listening. Wald had him pinned well enough that he could barely move, but he continued to shout. “Let me go. I can get her.”
“You can’t,” said the older one, but he said it so quietly I think I was the only one who heard. “You won’t and you can’t.” He looked at me. “I have to die. That would do it. She would be better if she never met me, if I never existed.”
He turned and began to limp away through the thick air of the Silverlands. I wanted to call after him, but what was there to say? He had been right.
“Kenny,” shouted younger Curtis, jolting me from my thoughts. “Tell him to get off. I have to save her.”
I looked at the retreating back of the man I had been thinking of as Prince Harming, now burned and broken. I wanted to stop him. What was he going to do next? I didn’t want him to kill himself. I wanted to stop it, to make it right.
Behind me, his younger self was rocking back and forth under Wald, who looked at me, strain evident in his eyes. “I cannot lose him, Kennit. He’ll quell his own life. Help me, lad.”
“No,” shouted Curtis. “I won’t. John, let me go. I can get her.”
I knelt down beside him. All our faces were wet with tears. “You can’t,” I said. “She’s gone into water. If you go in there, you’ll drown. You can’t save her. If John lets you go, you’ll die as well.”
“You pushed her,” he said. “You knew, didn’t you? All this time, you knew this was going to happen. You pushed her. When I was a kid—you knew.” He stopped struggling as the realizations hit him all at once. “You knew I’d grow up to meet her. You knew who she was. You knew you were going to kill her. You knew everything, and you could have changed it, but you watched it happen and you killed her.” He screamed those last words as he again tried to rock Wald off him.
“Kennit,” Wald hissed at me, and beckoned me closer with his head while holding Curtis down. “Go up a ways, there, farther from our own glass. Find one for me. A mirror. It’s up ahead. It spies out upon an auld stone castle wall. Find it, Kennit.”
Uncomprehending, I stepped past them and farther down the hall of mirrors. I passed the cloud of images glowing orange and red. It was, on both sides, a mirror inside a fire, the one Prince Harming had burned his hands in. After that came one inside a dusty old junk shop on one side and a bedroom on the other. Were there ten years between these mirrors as there were between our own? I almost tripped over a strip of cloth connecting the mirrors. A doorstop? Were the rules always the same? Next I passed more mirrors in bedrooms, one in a museum, and one in the middle of a forest. How many stories were here, how many kids in their backward glasses, how many haunted houses with legends about missing children? Here was a mirror looking out from under a waterfall, and there one that looked like it had been bricked up inside a tiny space with, in both of its decades, two skeletons looking like they had died inside waiting to escape.
“Fleet, lad,” shouted Wald, and I pushed on.
I found the mirror he wanted, looking out on a stone castle wall. I called to him, and through the clouds of image-shards, I saw him drag Curtis to his feet, an arm twisted behind his back. The younger man was wild with rage and grief. Somehow, though, Curtis hit Wald with his free hand, stamped on his feet, kicked him, and tried to throw them both to the side, Wald steadfastly ignored every blow and kept marching him toward me.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Saving the fool’s life,” Wald replied. One of his eyes was swollen closed already, his lips and nose bloody, but that iron grip of his still held.
“Why?” Curtis screamed at me as Wald bore him forward. “You were our friend. We trusted you. There has to be some way to stop it. Kenny, you have to stop it. You have to.” His voice rose to a fever pitch.
“Hold!” shouted Wald even louder, and he tightened his arm around the younger man’s neck. “Will ye hear?” Curtis stilled for a moment in his grasp. “You cannot fetch her from the glass.”
“No,” shouted Curtis. “You’re wrong. I can get her. I’ll hold my breath and go through. I’ll find her. I’m going after her. Let me go.”
“And if I do?” said Wald, still straining to hold Curtis. “You’ll dive into that watered glass? Though it’s death for you to do it?”
“What are you doing?” I said to Wald. “What are you going to do?”
“Yes!” shouted Curtis. “I have to. Let me go.”
“Aye, lad,” said Wald, a terrible sadness in his voice. “I will.” His eyes met mine, and I saw in them the sort of decision I’m sure I could never make.
Almost faster than my eye could follow, Wald took his arm from around the man’s throat, shifted his own weight, and flung Curtis through the mirror. Curtis might have managed to grasp the edges and keep from going through, but Wald hooked a foot to trip him, and gave him a second shove.
On the far side of the mirror, I saw Curtis sprawl forward into the stone wall. He immediately sprang back up and turned to the mirror, throwing himself at it.
As he crashed into it, Wald, never taking his eyes from Curtis, spoke to me. “There’s another rule, Kennit, for that list you’re making. You cannot come back through a glass that’s not your own. Ten years back and ten years on, that mirror is, but not for us.”
“What did you do? What have you done?”
He lowered his eyes. “Trapped him. I couldn’t hold him long. He was too much for me, too young and strong. If I let him go, he would have killed himself. Or you.”
We stood and watched him. His voice came thickly through to us, crying for us to reach out and let him in as he beat on the mirror with his fists.
“What’s going to happen to him?” I said. Outside of the mirror, two people had come along and were trying to talk to Curtis who was almost frothing at the mouth, his hands bloody from beating against the glass. He rounded on them like a cornered animal, and they backed away.
Wald shook his head sadly. “Now? Go mad, methinks, for ten long years. They’re all as one, the mirrors. All on the sevens and all for ten years. I know that glass. Two hundred years it’s held its wall in that Welsh castle. I had to do it, Ken. D’ye see? He would ha’ drowned himself or dashed your brains.” He looked around. “Where went the other?”
I looked back down toward our mirror and my heart clenched. “I don’t know.” Far down the Silverlands? Waiting in the coal cellar? “He saw what happened,” I said hopefully. “I don’t think he wants to kill me now.”
“Nor should he. I saw it, too. Ye did no thing in malice.”
“But it’s still my fault,” I said. I was on the verge of tears and collapse all at once.
“Whisht, now,” said Wald. “Whisht. All’s done.”
“But what do we do now?” I said. “We were supposed to get him away from Rose and now he’s gone. What do we do?”
Wald stood up, straightened his back, and shook himself as though to cast off the hurts he had from Curtis. “Back to Rose, I think, though her mother will not thank us for coming. Still and all, with the madman loosed again, ’tis best we set a watch about the girl.”
