“And?” I looked at the girls.
Peggy looked over at Lilly. “You’re the sweet one, Lil. You tell him.”
“Tell me what?” I said.
Lilly took a deep breath. “It’s the mirror, Kenny. Jimmy’s—in 1967. Prince Harming must have done it when he escaped after shooting you. It’s in water again. He’s thrown it in the lake.”
Part Three
The Mirror in the Lake, Summer 1947
One
And so began my summer of exile.
I slept on the sofa beside the mirror, fifteen years before I was born.
I was trapped. The mirror was in the lake. Lilly, Peggy, and John Wald took me to the carriage house to the mirror. They took me to 1957 where Anthony met us in his basement. Jimmy had described him as a husky overconfident kid, but he was sunken now, his eyes darting all around. He was desperate that we be quiet in case his mother heard us, and seemed happy when I took Lilly and John into the Silverlands in the direction of 1967.
We couldn’t go through. The mirror and its cloud of image-fragments were dark. If I hadn’t been warned of what lay beyond, I might easily have died. John and Lilly held my shoulders as I tested it. The hand I stuck inside cramped agonizingly as the uptime heat gave way to chill water.
Then they brought me back. To 1957 where Anthony apologized and said we couldn’t stay. To 1947 where Peggy said she’d bring blankets out to the carriage house and sneak me food when she could. John Wald retired for the evening to a shelter he’d built in the woods. Lilly and Peggy went back to their homes. I asked Lilly to leave a doorstop open to her time, just in case Prince Harming, whoever he was, tried to come back from the future. He seemed to be the only one of us who had the secret of getting into a mirror that lay in water.
Most evenings, Peggy would head back to Lilly’s time, pulling out the doorstop, so John Wald and I could go forward into Anthony’s basement. From there, we would try the passage to 1967, but every time we went, the mirror was underwater. In daylight we could make out what we thought might be glimmers of sun through the water, but neither of us wanted to trust what it might be.
Over the days, I learned John Wald’s strange story. He took me for walks in the woods, and in between teaching me how to build a simple shelter and make a meal from leaves and berries, he talked about his life and his long-ago year in the backward glass. By the middle of July, I could make pepperweed tea, dandelion salad, and a bland snack mix of nuts, seeds, and chewy stalks. I guessed he made a pretty decent wise old man, though I had been hoping for a little more wisdom about the way the Force worked and how to handle a lightsaber.
I grew used to his talk. Lilly, who came often and tried to make my exile bearable, brought dictionaries, Shakespearean English, Scots-English, and we used them to puzzle out his words.
He didn’t know exactly when he was born, sometime in the 1600s in a small village in the south of Scotland. He was the son of a blacksmith. His mirror, the same one that all of us used to travel back and forth between our decades, hung in the manor house of the local baron. It wasn’t until May of his year that John saw a child come through the mirror, then found that he too could enter it. His opportunities were few, but he took them where he could. In the end, he was tripped up by the mirror’s rules. Fed too much beer at a year-end celebration by a strange, scarred servant he didn’t know, he came back to the mirror too late and found himself trapped ten years in his own past.
Fifteen years old, and all alone in the world, he still managed to make his way. He tried to change his future, as many of the mirror kids do, by approaching his younger self, but a horse kicked him in the head, and so he learned his lesson and didn’t try again. In the next few years, he fell in love with a girl in a neighboring village and ended up married with two children. Ten years onward, he saw his own self at the year-end feast, and realized that he, John Wald at twenty-five, was the strange servant who had kept his younger self out of the mirror. What else could he do? He had built a life. He didn’t want to lose it.
Knowing he was trapping himself in the past, he became a willing participant in his own fate.
“But didn’t it turn out?” I said. “You got to have your family, right?”
He shook his head and told me more. Eight years after his year of the glass, the plague came to his small corner of the world. His children died, then his wife, pregnant with a third. “Her last words to me were, ‘John, will ye jig my belly? I haven’t felt it move in an age.’”
He was quiet for a couple of days after that, but then one morning he took me out to pick what he called partridge berries and told me the rest. He had gone mad after the plague year. “We all did, those of us as lived. The world was dying ’round us.”
He stopped and knelt by a clutch of low plants bearing red berries. “Here now. Pick these. We’ll make a tea of it for pain.”
“How did you end up here?” I said. It was the main question on my mind. “This is—hundreds of years from your time.”
He tugged at a berry. “I found work digging graves and hauling dead. I stayed there, fitting my soul-broke body into the place it had grown up. And in that mad world, I came into a madder plan. I would wait until that cursed glass opened once more, but this time I’d go down and down the years, each time getting a child to take me through, ten years, ten years, ten years again.”
Mostly Wald’s old face—how old? Fifty? Sixty?—seemed crinkled more with kindness and sorrow, but now a wild fire jumped in him.
“I wanted the maker, see? There must, I thought, be some old wizard ahind the making of that glass. I’d place my hands athwart his reeky neck and twist the breath within him.”
“So—what happened?”
Satisfied that we had enough berries, he straightened and stretched his back. “Time zones, you call ’em,” he said. I gave him a blank look so he went on. “You’ve seen that space between the mirrors, and you know it’s long and full? In there I met a girl from the long-to-be, traveling back as I intended. We sat one night and talked, and she told me an answer to the thing I had always wondered. Did you ever not wonder, Kennit? What clock the mirror keeps? It’s always an hour before midnight it opens, you know, wherever in the world. This girl from another mirror told me about time zones. Think on it—back in my day, there was no agreed-upon time the world about. Noon was when the sun was overhead.”
“I don’t get it.”
“See’st it not?” he said. “All along, I had been scheming to follow that mirror back to its making. Now I saw I had it back-and-front. That glass isn’t made in the long-ago, Kennit. It’s from the long-to-be.”
I stopped, stunned. “It’s from the future?”
“How can it be otherwise? It keeps its days to a tune not yet sung in my day.”
“So you—decided not to go into the past to find its maker? You’re going into the future?”
He put a gentle hand on my shoulder and started me walking again. “Nowt for me there, a plague-burned world. I’ve used my days in climbing up the years. Three times I’ve had to take the slow road. I almost missed the glass in Rose’s year, for they made me go to that long war in Europe, the one they said would end all wars. Then that mad fool got me coppered by the guard for grasping Peg as then they thought. Madness.” He rubbed his thick-bearded chin. “To think that even now I’m clapped in irons ten miles off, yet talking to ye here and ten years older.”