It belongs to this shop, which makes it mine.” He stepped in front of her. “Who gave you permission to fix it? Did you not think there was a reason it was dying? Did you not wonder why I wouldn’t think of something to bring it back to life on my own? A mirror with power like that was meant to die. It is too dangerous for this world.”
“Maybe it was too dangerous for you, but it is not for me!” Ingrid thundered. “The mirror saw my potential and it called to me, therefore it is mine, and I am taking it now.”
She pushed him aside and went straight to the back room, where the mirror was waiting behind the curtain. Even without her presence, it had come alive, smoking and fogging up the room. A swift wind picked up even though they were indoors, and in the distance, she heard thunder. She picked up the mirror and prepared to carry it out to the carriage, where it would be well hidden. But her master blocked her path again. This time he held a potion in his hands.
“I’m warning you, Ingrid,” he said. “Put that mirror down or it will be the last thing you touch in this world.”
“You would really harm your own apprentice over a mirror?” she asked.
“I would to keep you from letting its darkness bury itself into your soul.” He prepared to drop the vial. She didn’t want to think of what poison it might possess.
“My lady?” one of the guards questioned.
“Stop him!” Ingrid commanded.
It all happened so quickly there was no time to stop it. Her words, which had seemed so simple, meant something more to the guards. What she’d thought was merely an instruction to restrain her master, the guards interpreted as an order to end his life. Moments later, the old man lay on the floor of his shop, blood pooling around the knife wound in his chest. He had died instantly. The potion bottle was still in his hand. The bile rose in her throat. Her master was dead because of her.
“We must go!” one of the guards said. “Quickly!” He reached for the mirror. Ingrid hesitated a second and then allowed him to take it. “Let’s go!”
She looked down at her master once more and stepped over his body. Then she stooped to grab the potion from his still-warm hand. After all, it would be a pity to waste it.
Ingrid walked out of the shop for the last time with her head up, knowing the mirror was truly hers at last.
She had given up a lot for that mirror. The memory of what had happened would haunt her all her days. And even now that she lived in the castle, her master buried and his disappearance barely noticed, it still bothered her that the mirror’s original vision for her future had been wrong. Hadn’t it shown her being crowned queen? Wasn’t she the one who was meant to reign?
“She has worn out her use; but if the queen is to live,” the mirror told her, “your future I cannot give.”
She came this close to throwing something at the mirror when it said that, but she didn’t dare. The small voice inside her that grew ever louder by the day told her doing something like that would be the death of her. She wasn’t sure if the voice meant figuratively or truly, but she wouldn’t chance it. She kept quiet, praying the outcome would change, until the day the mirror started to get more persistent.
Stop wasting time with chores! Fulfill your destiny. Take the crown if you want it to be yours.
Ingrid tried to ignore the mirror. This was her sister, and she drew the line at destroying the only person she’d ever truly loved. True, Katherine now loved someone else far more than she loved Ingrid, but Georg was just a nuisance. Someone she’d eventually be able to get rid of.
She never imagined she’d have to compete with yet another for Katherine’s attention . . . someone who wouldn’t be so easily done away with.
Seventeen years earlier
“Does she ever stop crying?” Ingrid asked, bouncing the baby on her hip as a team of women helped Katherine dress for the day.
Katherine laughed. “Yes! Coddle her, Ingrid. Babies need to be coddled and told all will be right with the world.”
Coddled? This baby was selfish.
Two years had passed since she had moved into the castle, and instead of Georg and Katherine’s love dimming,