Doubleborn by Toby Forward

prodded the pile.
    “We’ve been walking a long time.”
    “It’s a big storeroom.”
    She looked up at the roof, cruck-beamed, oak. The piles were so high she couldn’t see far enough along the gable to the end walls.
    Solder pushed the spearhead back into the stack and trotted on.
    “Are you sure you’re taking me to the door?” she asked.
    “Look at this,” he called. “You’ll like it.”
    He led her into a side room with high windows far above her head. A waterfall of light splashed down and bounced from a hundred mirrors leaning and hanging all around the walls.
    Tamrin looked at herself looking at herself. She saw herself disappearing, endlessly repeated into the distance. She saw the top of her head, the side of her face, her back, her front. She raised her arm and a thousand Tamrins raised their arm. She stepped back and out of the room.
    “Come on,” he said. He stood on his barrel and waved his arms, watching himself wave back.
    Tamrin hesitated, stepped back in.
    It was like being confronted by a poisonous snake or a wolf. She was fascinated and fearful.
    “Never seen yourself before?” he asked.
    Tamrin shook her head.
    “What?”
    “No. Not really.”
    “Never?”
    “In a window,” she said. “Reflected in water. In the bowl of a shiny spoon. There’s a small mirror, a glass one, in my friend’s kitchen. But you can only see your face, and not really all of it at once.”
    She moved slowly as she spoke, watching herself bounce back, reflected into infinity. The question elbowed its way back into her mind.
    “Who are you?” it whispered.
    She looked at the endless Tamrins.
    “Who are you?”
    “Some of these are glass,” said Solder.
    He jumped from his barrel and found a round looking glass, just within his reach if he stood on tiptoe and touched it with his fingertips. “Most of them are polished metal.”
    “How do you get them so bright?”
    “You’ll have to ask Smith about that.”
    “Did he make them all?”
    “You’ll have to ask him. I think he did. But there are other people who used to make them, before there was good glass and they learned how to silver the back of it.”
    Tamrin stood in front of one that showed the whole of her from tip to toe. It was buckled about a third of the way down so that her face seemed to be disfigured. She reached out her hand and touched it.
    “He collects them,” said Solder. “Or Winny does. With her cart.”
    “Why?”
    The light in the room was greater than the amount the windows let in. It was as though the mirrors caught it, kept it and threw it back to be caught and kept and thrown out again, over and over, getting brighter all the time. Like lighting a thousand candles from a single taper.
    Tamrin stood quite still and waited and watched. She wanted one of the other Tamrins to move on her own, independently of the others. They all stood and waited with her.
    “Yes, but why does he collect them?”
    “You’ll have to ask Smith that.”
    Tamrin was getting tired of this answer. Especially as Smith wasn’t there to ask.
    She wondered what magic would be like here. She raised her arm and pointed straight up. She took a deep breath and her lips parted.
    “Don’t say a word!”
    Smith pushed into the room and nearly knocked her over.
    “Don’t. Not a word.” ||

T amrin stepped aside
    to avoid Smith’s rush at her.
    “Why did you bring her in here?” he demanded.
    “I thought you wanted her to see it.”
    Solder didn’t seem to mind that he was being told off. He was as cheerful as ever.
    “I’ll decide when she sees this,” said Smith.
    “Too late, Smith. I’ve shown her.”
    “Has she done any magic yet?”
    “I think she was just about to.”
    “And do you think you could have stopped her? And what would have happened then?”
    “We’d have found out if you hadn’t come in,” said Solder. “Wouldn’t we?”
    Smith glared at him.
    “Roffles,” he said. “You’re all the same. You’ve no sense of