Serafina opened her eyes. Their green depths were clouded with worry. She’d had private conchs from him when he first returned home, carried by a trusted messenger. Every time one arrived, she would rush to her room and hold the shell to her ear, hungry for the sound of his voice. But after a year had passed, the private conchs had stopped coming and official ones arrived instead. In them, Mahdi’s voice sounded stilted and formal.
At about the same time, Serafina started to hear things about him. He’d become a party boy, some said. He stayed out shoaling until all hours. Swam with a fast crowd. Spent a fortune on mounts for caballabong, a game much like the goggs’ polo. She wasn’t sure she should believe the stories, but what if they were true? What if he’d changed?
“Serafina, you must come out now! Thalassa is due at any moment and you know she doesn’t like to be kept waiting!” Tavia shouted.
“Coming, Tavia!” Serafina called, swimming back into her bedroom.
Serafina….
“Great Goddess Neria, I said I’m coming!”
Daughter of Merrow, chosen one…
Serafina stopped dead. That wasn’t Tavia’s voice. It wasn’t coming from the other side of the doors.
It was right behind her.
“Who’s there?” she cried, whirling around.
The end begins, your time has come….
“Giovanna, is that you? Donatella?”
But no one answered her. Because no one was there.
A sudden, darting movement to her left caught her eye. She gasped, then laughed with relief. It was only her looking glass. A vitrina was walking around inside it.
Her mirror was tall and very old. Worms had eaten holes into its gilt frame and its glass was pocked with black spots. It had been salvaged from a terragogg shipwreck. Ghosts lived inside it—vitrina—souls of the beautiful, vain humans who’d spent too much time gazing into it. The mirror had captured them. Their bodies had withered and died, but their spirits lived on, trapped behind the glass forever.
A countess lived inside Serafina’s mirror, as did a handsome young duke, three courtesans, an actor, and an archbishop. They often spoke to her. It was the countess whom she’d just seen moving about.
Serafina rapped on the frame. The countess lifted her voluminous skirts and ran to her, stopping only inches from the glass. She wore a tall, elaborately styled white wig. Her face was powdered, her lips rouged. She looked frightened.
“Someone is in here with us, Principessa,” she whispered, looking over her shoulder. “Someone who doesn’t belong.”
They saw it at the same time—a figure in the distance, still and dark. Serafina had heard that mirrors were doorways in the water and that one could open them if one knew how. Only the most powerful mages could move through their liquid-silver world, though. Serafina didn’t know anyone who ever had. Not even Thalassa. As she and the countess watched, the figure started moving toward them.
“That is no vitrina,” the countess hissed. “If it got in, it can get out. Get away from the glass! Hurry!”
As the figure drew closer, Serfina saw that it was a river mermaid, her tail mottled in shades of brown and gray. She wore a cloak of black osprey feathers. Its collar, made of twining deer antlers, rose high at the back of her head. Her hair was gray, her eyes piercing. She was chanting.
The sands run out, our spell unwinds,
Inch by inch, our chant unbinds….
Serafina knew the voice. She’d heard it in her nightmare. It belonged to the river witch, Baba Vr?ja.
The countess had warned Serafina to move away, but she couldn’t. It was as if she was frozen in place, her face only inches from the glass.
Vr?ja beckoned to her. “Come, child,” she said.
Serafina raised her hand slowly, as if in a trance. She was about to touch the mirror when Vr?ja suddenly stopped chanting. She turned to look at something—something Serafina couldn’t see. Her eyes filled with fear. “No!” she cried. Her body twisted, then shattered. A hundred eels writhed where she had been, then they dove into the liquid silver.
Seconds later, a terragogg walked into the frame, sending ripples through the silver. He was dressed in a black suit. His hair, so blond it was almost white, was cut close to his head. He stood sideways, gazing at the last of the eels as they disappeared. One was slower than the rest. The man snatched it up and bit into it. The creature writhed in agony. Its blood dripped down his chin. He swallowed the eel, then turned to face the glass.
Serafina’s hands came to her mouth. The man’s eyes were completely black. There was no iris, no white, just darkness.
He walked up to the glass and thrust a hand through it. Sera screamed. She swam backward, crashed into a chair, and fell to the floor. The man’s arm emerged, then his shoulder. His head was pushing through when Tavia’s voice piped up.
“Serafina! What’s wrong?” she called through the doors. “I’m coming in!”
The man glared hatefully in her direction. A second later, he was gone.
“What happened, child? Are you all right?” Tavia asked.
Serafina, shaking, got up off the floor. “I—I saw something in the mirror. It frightened me and I fell,” she said.