Or was he just flattering himself?
Her intense gaze became uncomfortable, and he looked down at the mirror. “The half-hour must be almost done,” he said.
Her gaze dropped, as well. “It is; it’s changing right now. I can feel...”
She didn’t finish the sentence; instead she stared silently at the mirror.
So did Gresh. The glass had gone black, and then something began to thrust itself upward out of the mirror—but it was no spriggan. It was neither green nor brown, but glossy black—covered with lush black hair, Gresh realized.
It was larger than the mirror. Some of the fatter spriggans might have had to squeeze a little, but this creature, whatever it was, was somehow forcing itself through an opening much smaller than its own dimensions.
The hair parted on one side as the thing continued to rise up out of the mirror, revealing a brown forehead. Gresh realized that a human head was emerging from the spriggan mirror. The face was turned away from him, toward Karanissa, who was staring at it in shocked horror.
More hair, a pair of ears, a nose—definitely human.
Then came the neck—that was relatively quick, as it did not need to be magically squeezed as much—and then a pair of shoulders, shoulders clad in red fabric...
“Oh, no,” Gresh murmured. “Let me...” He stepped around the mirror and stood beside Karanissa, where he could see the face as the creature continued to force its way up out of the far-too-small mirror.
It was a woman’s face, a dark-skinned oval. Gresh recognized it immediately. After all, he had been looking at it for the past half-hour and more.
It was Karanissa.
Gresh looked up and saw the original Karanissa still standing there, looking down at her duplicate. This wasn’t Karanissa, then; it was a copy.
And the copy had her hands free of the impossibly small glass now and was pushing herself up, just as the spriggans had, except that she was somehow emerging from the mirror despite being much larger than it. Even the slim Karanissa was far more than five inches across.
The mirror was doing something strange to space, obviously.
Then the imitation Karanissa sat back on the stone and pulled her legs from the little glass circle. She was entirely free, and the mirror once again looked like an ordinary mirror.
This Karanissa, at least initially, appeared indistinguishable from the original. She wore an identical red dress, and her hair was styled just like the original’s.
“Well, so much for using Javan’s Geas on the mirror,” Gresh muttered. “But we must have done something that altered the nature of the spell. Are we going to get a plague of Karanissas now, instead of spriggans?” He found himself thinking that that would certainly be an improvement.
The original Karanissa ignored him as she knelt by the rather dazed-looking copy and asked, “Who are you?”
The copy looked up, obviously confused, and said, “I’m a person.”
“I didn’t ask what you are,” Karanissa said gently. “I asked who you are.”
“I’m... I’m a person,” the other said. “That’s all I know.”
“Where did you come from?”
The imitation looked down at her feet, then pointed. “The mirror,” she said.
“Are you a witch?” Karanissa asked.
The copy blinked, then frowned. “I’m not sure,” she said.
“Can’t you tell?” Gresh asked the original.
“No, I can’t,” Karanissa admitted. “Which is puzzling, to say the least.” She looked up at Gresh. “This... this person isn’t all here, exactly.”
“She isn’t... well, you?” Gresh asked. “Could it be that you’re being confused because her identity isn’t entirely distinct from your own?”
Karanissa reached out and put a hand on her imitation’s shoulder; the imitation started slightly, glanced at the hand, then looked up at Gresh. “Do I look like her?” she asked.
“Very much,” Gresh said, startled by the question.
“She’s pretty.”
“So are you.”
The copy lowered her gaze. “Thank you,” she said.
“You know,” Karanissa said, looking up at Gresh, “until I touched her, I wasn’t sure she was really there. I thought she might just be an illusion, especially given how she squeezed through the mirror when she obviously couldn’t have fit.”
Gresh nodded. He was thinking furiously. He did not understand why this duplicate of Karanissa should have emerged from the mirror, but he intended to figure it out. It would almost certainly explain a great deal about how the mirror’s magic worked, and that might well help them end the plague of spriggans forever—if they had not already somehow altered the spell permanently.
He glanced down at the mirror to see whether anything else was climbing out of it; nothing was.
This woman, this copy of Karanissa, was solid, but Karanissa said she did not seem real...
“Lady,” he said, “do you remember anything from before you emerged from the mirror?”
The copy looked up at him again. “Of course not,” she said. “I didn’t exist before I climbed out of the mirror, did I?”
“We don’t know,” Gresh said. “That’s why I’m asking.”
“Well, as far as I know, I didn’t exist until a couple of minutes ago.”
Gresh looked at the original. “You say she doesn’t seem entirely human?”
“She doesn’t seem entirely real,” Karanissa corrected him.
“Do spriggans? Could she be a spriggan in human form?”
“I’m a person,” the duplicate interjected. “I do know that much.”
“She...” Karanissa tilted her head and studied the copy. “She’s not a spriggan, but there is a similarity. I never noticed it before, but you’re right, spriggans aren’t all there, either. If I hadn’t had real humans to compare her to, I probably wouldn’t have noticed anything wrong with her.”
“There isn’t anything wrong with me!” the duplicate protested.
“Stand up and let me look at you,” Gresh suggested. “Let’s see if you really are an exact duplicate of Karanissa.”
The two women exchanged glances, then rose and turned to face Gresh, standing side-by-side in the fading daylight.
“Oh,” Gresh said. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and looked again.
The two were identical in appearance in every detail except for one. The dresses were the same fabric, the same cut, belted identically, with the same knot at the same place; the hair was the same length and luster, with every lock and curl matching; the eyes were identical in color and shape; the teeth matched; the nose and mouth were indistinguishable—except for one thing.
The copy was smaller than the original.
She was proportioned exactly like the real Karanissa, but she was about two inches shorter, a shade thinner, and not quite as wide at shoulders, bust, waist, or hips. Her fingers were slightly shorter; her eyes and mouth were slightly smaller. She was the exact image of Karanissa, but somehow shrunken.
Image, he thought. Mirror image.
Gresh looked down at the mirror, then back at the two women.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh.”
He felt simultaneously brilliant and foolish—brilliant because he now was certain of exactly how the mirror’s magic worked, and foolish because it had taken him so long to guess the truth.
It probably explained how Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm worked, too.
It explained why spriggans were indestructible while the mirror’s magic was working, but not when it wasn’t. It explained why none of them had names when they emerged, why they sometimes varied in appearance but were sometimes identical, why they didn’t feel entirely real to witches, and why they had no odor. It explained why they emerged at apparently random intervals, and why the mirror had kept working when broken, but multiplied everything by four.