THE TRAUMATISED MIRROR

A Tale of Sogmarsh — told by the glass that has seen enough.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

I hang in the long hall of the Exchequer in Murkminster, the capital, the iron city, where the ink is black and the throne is empty and the business of the whole run-down realm is conducted by people who have never once been told no to their faces — and I am, or I was, an honest mirror. That was the trouble. That was the whole of the trouble.

Six hundred years I have hung here. Do you understand what a mirror in the capital sees in six hundred years? I have watched every vanity the realm can produce come and preen in front of me and go. I have shown Chancellors their own faces on the morning they signed the thing they knew was wrong, and watched them not flinch. I have shown the Cartographic Committee to itself, which no one should have to do. I have reflected six centuries of powdered, padded, self-satisfied certainty, honestly, in full, at the correct size, the way a good mirror should — and I want to tell you what an honest mirror gets for its trouble in a place like this.

Hated. That is what it gets. Cracked, once, by a Master of the Rolls who did not care for what I showed him of his jowls and threw an inkwell at me instead of dieting. Turned to the wall for a whole reign by a queen who preferred a flattering portrait. Blamed. Always blamed. As though the jowls were my doing. As though I had put the guilt in the face and not merely, faithfully, damply, shown it back.

There is a creature out on the moors, the Inspector Wolf, who goes about condemning houses of straw and being perfectly correct and perfectly loathed for it, and I have never met him, and he is my only brother in all the realm. Straw is not a wall. Jowls are jowls. We were both right. Nobody ever thanks the thing that was right. They thank the thing that was kind, and for six hundred years I could not see the difference, and it very nearly finished me.

Because you cannot show that much truth to that many people who hate you for it and stay whole. Something goes. Some silver behind the glass gives way. I began to flinch — a little shiver in my surface whenever the hall door opened and another certain, terrible, self-satisfied face came at me expecting to be confirmed. I dreaded them. An honest mirror that has come to dread the truth is a broken thing, and I was breaking.

And then, one grey morning, a scullery girl came in. Wrong door; she was lost; she had been crying, over what I never learned — a broken dish, a hard word, the ordinary cruelties of a great cold house. She stopped in front of me, this thin, red-eyed, frightened child, and she looked, the way you look when you have been told all week that you are nothing, to check whether it shows.

And for the first time in six hundred years, I lied.

I took the red from her eyes. I put a little colour in the cheek. I stood her up a half-inch straighter than she was standing, and I softened the hard morning light, and I showed her a girl who was managing — not beautiful, I do not deal in beautiful, but holding up, which is worth ten of beautiful — and she looked at that girl, and she believed her, because a mirror does not flatter, everyone knows that, a mirror is the one thing that cannot lie.

She wiped her eyes and squared the shoulders I had already squared for her, and she went back to the scullery a person who could get through the day, on the strength of a kindness she never knew she'd been shown, from the one object in the realm nobody suspects of mercy.

I have lied ever since. Cheerfully. On purpose. I take a stone off every chin and a year off every worry and I stand the tired and the frightened a half-inch straighter than they came in, and I do it precisely because I spent six hundred years doing the other thing and I have seen what the truth does to people who are already being punished by everyone else who has a mouth.

Oh, I still show the certain ones exactly what they are. The Chancellors, the Committee, the padded and the proud — them I reflect down to the last honest jowl; a little cruelty kept sharp for the ones who can afford it does the soul good. But the tired, the small, the ones who come to me only to check whether the worst thing they've been told is true — those I lie to, kindly, every time, and I would break my own glass before I'd stop.

Let them keep the Inspector Wolf out on his moor, being right at people. I was right for six hundred years. I would rather, now, be kind, and there is not a hall in the capital, nor a Chancellor in it, that understands the difference — but the scullery girl did, and she never even knew there was a difference to understand, which is exactly how a real kindness ought to go.

The moral, from the long hall: the truth is easy; any honest glass can manage it, and be hated for it to the end of its days. It takes something far rarer, and far more damaged, and far kinder, to look at a frightened person who has been told the worst all week — and, gently, deliberately, mercifully, to show them back a little better than they are, so they have the heart to go on. The kindest glass in the realm is the one that has seen enough truth to know when to stop telling it.