I had just taken poison when the king arrived to inform me that he had murdered his wife…
It’s one hell of an opening line in T. Kingfisher’s latest reinterpreted fairytale. The king in this case is still grieving a horrific betrayal, and what he had to do in response to that betrayal, and now his surviving daughter is wasting away from grief. Or illness. Or poison. Our narrator Anja is an expert in poisons, to the point where she’s comfortable with testing them on herself on a semi-regular basis. What she isn’t at all comfortable with is royalty. Or children. Or people seeing her as a healer when usually her main focus is identifying which of several fascinating poisons is the one killing someone.
That was why I wasn’t really a healer. A good healer wants to help the person. Whereas what I wanted was to solve the problem.
Anja and her comfortable life as something of a cheerful mad scientist is an absolute delight. She’s middle-aged, unmarried, with a wealthy merchant father. And at no point in her life has anyone tried to pressure her to cultivate more ladylike pursuits, find a husband, have children to continue the family line, or do anything other than spend her life studying. With the support of her father and a pleasingly empathic tutor, she’s trying to learn everything she can about every poison in the world. Because seeing someone die two hours after eating something they really shouldn’t have was an event that galvanized an eleven-year-old Anja to try to find a solution to hemlock, and every other poison while she was at it.
It wasn’t right that your life could intersect with a little white root and then you were simply dead, without possibility of appeal.
A lot of the book’s humor comes from Anja’s endless enthusiasm for what most people think is a pretty disturbing subject. Anja can also see the ridiculousness of her situation after the visit by the king. Imagine going from puttering around in a workroom with her collection of powders and her venomous chime-adder (think rattlesnake, except with chimes instead of rattles), to traveling across the country in the king’s retinue, with a collection of royal hangers-on who have no idea why the conservatively-dressed, socially awkward chemistry enthusiast is riding next to the king unless she’s maybe the new mistress. (Anja can’t decide if she’s more insulted by the people who believe that, or the people who think of course she isn’t, the king has better taste, what’s the matter with you?)
Arriving at the king’s secluded second home means Anja can now set up a nice workroom, but that’s the only thing she succeeds at, at least at first. There doesn’t seem to be anything specific wrong with the king’s daughter, and no way for someone to slip poison into her food without being spotted by the army of servants around her, or poisoning everyone else in the castle. Despite this, the princess is sickly and withdrawn, also uncooperative, and seems to be hiding something. The servants, nurses, and courtiers still don’t know what to think about the king’s strange guest. And just to make things even more complicated, the risk of a theoretical poisoner wanting to remove an obstacle (ie: Anja) means she has to be accompanied everywhere she goes by armed guards.
Then Anja stumbles through a mirror into another world, and things get really complicated.
My head struck the immense mirror, and I fell through into silver.
By this point in the book you may have picked up which fairytale is being retold here, but Anja’s accidental trip through the mirror is where the story really takes on a life of its own. And becomes a lot closer to a gothic horror tale. Mirrors already have the potential to be very creepy; an unexpected mirror in a dark building can startle the hell out of you. It’s also easy to imagine the glass is actually a window, with things hiding just beyond your line of sight, or your reflection doing things behind your back and just pretending to just be a reflection again when you turn around. Kingfisher takes all of this inherent creepiness and runs with it, creating a whole set of rules about a world that exists because of the real world, but also independent from it.
The mirror world poses a lot of questions: what happens to reflections when the person being reflected walks away? How far does this world extend? And what sort of ways could it be misused? Imagine a potential assassin with access to a mirror big enough to walk into, and a smaller one just big enough to fit a weapon There are also things that happen in mirrors when reflections are messed with that are downright Lovecraftian, and the mirror world isn’t really a safe place to explore, even with Anja’s taciturn (and let’s face it, kind of handsome) guard by her side. Anja fortunately can ask some questions from a knowledgable talking cat named Grayling (it’s a Kingfisher fairy tale, a talking animal is practically mandatory), but cats are notorious for withholding information, especially when the answers are hard to explain.
“So they aren’t really alive, then?”
“Alive,” said Grayling, “Is complicated.” He turned his paw over and inspected the burgundy pads. “What you ought to worry about is awake.”
The mystery of who’s (possibly) poisoning the princess blends nicely with the little details Kingfisher sprinkles in about Anja’s world of animal saints and somewhat worldweary kings, as well as the complex mirror world and all the many, many things that can go wrong there. In addition to dealing with a standoffish cat and an angry rooster, Anja has to keep the princess alive somehow, and keep her investigation secret from whoever’s plotting against her, and also avoid telling anyone about the mirror world (don’t want to be accused of witchcraft), and maybe figure out if her handsome guard actually likes her or thinks she’s off-putting and weird. And if it’s not too much to ask, maybe she can find out why the king’s wife went crazy and started this whole mess in the first place.