Palace of Mirrors Read Online Free PDF

puzzled voice, “Nobody’s there. It was just the wind.”
    Both of us rush over to stand in the doorway. A strong breeze tugs at us, teasing my hair loose from my kerchief, sending Nanny’s apron strings dancing behind her. But this isn’t exactly a gale-force wind. The door has withstood much stronger gusts before; it’s held tight against storms when the rain slashed sideways, beating ceaselessly against the wood.
    Nanny seems to be thinking along the same lines.
    “But why . . . ?” she murmurs. She reaches up for the leather latch we’ve always used to fasten the door at night. It fits tightly over a wooden peg near the top of the door. I remember feeling very proud when I was first tall enough to reach the peg, when Nanny trusted me enough to fasten the door at night all by myself. Now Nanny yanks the leather latch away from the wall.
    “Ah,” she says, sounding artificially cheerful. “It’s just that the latch broke. I should have known it was getting too old and worn.”
    She crumples the leather in her hand, but not beforeI’ve gotten a good look at it. The latch isn’t stretched and worn at all. It’s shiny and fairly new, and the tear is as straight and clean as a knife’s slash.
    As a knife’s slash . . .
    Whatever Nanny wants to pretend, I know the truth. That latch didn’t break. Somebody cut it.

  6  
    Nanny bustles about, cleaning up our supper things, then fashioning a hasty replacement for the latch. She insists that I follow my usual evening routine, So I pull out the books hidden behind my sleep mat, spread them across the table, prepare to stare at them until the candle sputters out. But I can’t concentrate on verb conjugations or the geographic features of countries halfway across the globe.
    “Don’t you think it’s odd that the latch could just snap like that?” I begin. “With no warning? Maybe—”
    “The world is full of odd occurrences,” Nanny says, in a tone that discourages further speculation.
    “But—”
    “Cecilia. This is your study time. Sir Stephen will be quite upset if you don’t have that royal genealogy memorized bythe time of his next visit. Or those geometric theorems. Or those Latin verbs.”
    I’m a little startled that Nanny knows so precisely what I’m supposed to be studying, but she is always sitting right there in the cottage during my lessons.
    “But don’t you think—”
    “Study!” Nanny points sternly at my pile of books. I give up and bend my head over the books.
    I can’t shut out the questions from my own mind, though.
Why would someone cut the latch? How did they do it? Did they slip the knife in through the crack between the door and the wall while Nanny and I were eating supper, and then run away as soon as the door swung open?
That didn’t make sense. If that was the plan, why didn’t they just rush on in and attack us?
    I take time to read one Latin word—
occultus,
“secretly”—and then I think of a different scenario. What if someone had sneaked in and cut the latch only partway through—not enough that Nanny and I would notice, but enough that my enemies could come back later tonight, easily open the door, and steal me away? What if no one had intended the door to come open during supper, but the breeze just gave us an unexpected warning?
    I shiver. And then I can’t stop shivering. Nanny sees this, and in no time at all she’s crouched beside me, wrapping her own shawl around my shoulders.
    “There, there,” she says, patting my back. “No need toworry. I had some extra leather and fixed us a new latch. We’re shut up tight for the night now. You’re safe.” She gently shuts the book on the table before me. “Maybe just this once, it’d be all right to go on to bed without studying.”
    “Will you send for Sir Stephen?” I ask. “Will you let him know . . . ?”
    “That the wind blew our door in?” She scoffs. “He’d laugh himself silly if I acted like that much of a ninnyhead.”
    Once