And to prove it, at that moment, Leopold slipped into unconsciousness, his face gone gray and pasty.
"It's now or never," Lily said, putting Jimson's mirror in her pocket. She had suspended her travel-mirror facedown between the back of a chair and the table. Crouching beneath it, she invoked the spell, hoping that combining the four small mirrors wasn't going to scramble her, or leave her quartered as she came through.
Slowly and carefully, she stood up, passing through her travel mirror at the oddest angle she had ever taken.
She found herself waist-deep, as if she was in a pool of water — except, of course, she was in a mirror at the edge of a churned-up field. Beside her, there was an exhausted firebird, and a very surprised unicorn. The unicorn yelped and jumped away. The firebird's eyes pinned in startlement as she fluttered her wings and trilled with alarm.
She ignored them, getting a grip on the frame and pulling herself out, exactly as she would have pulled herself out of a pool of water, getting her rump up on the frame, then swinging her legs out. That went better than she had any reason to believe. "Jimson?" she asked.
"Still here, Lily, and much relieved," he said from her pocket.
She turned to the unicorn and firebird. The stared at her as if they could not believe their eyes. "Where are Leopold and Siegfried?" she demanded.
"In the Tower," the unicorn said promptly, the first of the two to recover her wits. "They told us to stay here."
"And you obeyed them?" she asked incredulously. "Come on! Let's go! They might need us!"
The unicorn blinked. "You have a point, Godmower." And as Lily dashed across the field to the tunnel in the thorns, she shook herself and followed at a weary trot.
It was not easy ground to run across. Every step threatened to turn her ankle, and the gown she was wearing was not exactly constructed for running in. I should have taken the time to change — She thought about transforming what she was wearing, but that would take too much time. Illusions were one thing. Actually changing — that was something else entirely.
Halfway across thefield, she heard Rosa scream. Cursing the encumbering skirt of her gown, she reached down, grabbed the hem in both hands, and hauled the mass of fabric up to run faster.
As she entered the tunnel through the thorns, she heard a bestial roaring that sounded more as if it had come out of a bear's throat than a human's. And just as she was within sight of an open door —
The vines shrieked in a high-pitched cry that sounded like nothing she had ever heard in her entire life. She had to clap her hands over her ears, and she bent over double; the terrible sound cut through her head like a knife, bringing tears of pain to her eyes. The vines shook with a convulsion that nearly brought the entire tunnel down around her.
For a moment her heart leapt into her mouth as the vines thrashed uncontrollably. Something was killing them — but if they broke through the barrier of their own dead, they could still impale her and the unicorn. Then the scream cut off abruptly, leaving behind an echoing silence.
And with another convulsion they all straightened, pointing skyward. Then they abruptly shivered into black, bitter dust. The dust went everywhere, and she found herself coughing desperately to rid her lungs of it. Dashing her hand across her eyes to clear them, Lily ran the last few feet to the open door, and froze at the gory vision that she had stumbled into.
The first thing she saw was Prince Desmond, quite dead, grotesquely pinned to a table by a sword. His eyes stared sightlessly at her, his face bearing a strange expression of surprise.
The second thing she saw was Siegfried cradling a near-fainting Rosa in his arms, touching her face and kissing her, both covered in blood. Her heart nearly stopped.
Then as they both looked up, she realized it was nottheir blood, and her heart started again. "Godm — " Rosa exclaimed, reaching for her.
And the Huntsman rose up from the table, face made with rage, a sword in one hand, a meat cleaver in the other.
Lily froze. Siegfried had his back to the Huntsman and couldn't see him. Rosa was looking at her. In another second, the Huntsman would —
The unicorn shouldered her aside and charged the Huntsman, uttering a high-pitched scream of fury.
The Huntsman laughed and dodged, so that the unicorn hit him with her shoulder instead of her horn. She whirled on her hind feet and charged again. He neatly stepped aside at the last minute and parried her horn with the sword. This time the cleaver came down on her neck, inflicting what had to be a mortal wound. The unicorn made a gurgling sound and went to her knees, scarlet blood pouring down her neck, and the Huntsman turned on Siegfried, who flung himself between the Huntsman and Rosa, searching frantically for a weapon.
"Lily! Throw me! Throw my mirror!" Jimson shouted from her pocket, breaking her paralysis. Without even thinking, her hand went to her pocket almost of its own accord, and as the Huntsman raised the sword for another fatal blow aimed at Siegfried, she threw the mirror with a snap of her wrist, sending it spinning for him.
She hit the Huntsman squarely in the face with the edge of the mirror. And it was the Huntsman's turn to scream. The mirror shattered into a cloud of coruscating motes and a deafening explosion, half blinding her for a moment, and the Huntsman went down on his knees.
Then the cloud condensed back into the shape of the mirror again; the mirror clattered to the floor.
But — it was not Jimson's mirror, with the clear glass and the gold frame. It was a mirror with a sinister, tarnished black surface, and a frame of rotting wood and verdigris-greened bronze.
Lily ran for the mirror and snatched it up. "Jimson!" she whispered, her voice catching in her throat with fear. What had happened?
But what looked back at her out of the mirror was not Jimson.
It was the Huntsman. The Huntsman, as she had never seen him. His face was contorted in a rictus of terror, his mouth open in a silent scream, as two skeletal blackthings seized him by the shoulders. He glanced at one of them, and turned his gaze back to her, clawing at the surface of the mirror frantically. His captors were inexorable. His face receded into the black depths, mouth still open in a scream she was glad that she could not hear, as they hauled him down, down, and at last, were gone. Then there was only the mirror, black and empty. "Jimson?" she sobbed. Where was he? What had happened to him?
"I'm — here, Lily," said a hoarse voice beside her, and she looked down, startled. What looked up at her might have been wearing the Huntsman's clothing, his body even — but the face?
The face was Jimson's.
Before she could even begin to react to that, Siegfried's frantic call dragged her attention back to the three against the wall. "Godmother! You must help Leopold! He's dying!"
She stumbled over to them, but from the Prince's pallor and his shallow, catching breaths, it was obvious that there was nothing she could do in time. "I — I'm not a healer," she said helplessly. "He's hurt more than I can mend — I can't help him — "
"I...can..." coughed another voice. Bleeding terribly from the wound in her neck, the unicorn lurched to her feet and staggered the three steps it took to get to them, falling to her knees beside them all. With a last effort, she flung her head across Leopold's chest so that her own wound bled into his.