With an oval silhouette, the mirror took up almost an entire wall. Its frame—made of ebony and intricately gilded—was magnificent enough, but it was the snakelike gold rope wrapped around the frame that had first drawn her eye when she’d found the mirror hidden in her master’s shop. The rope lay smooth on the lower half of the mirror, but became more erratic and vine-like near the mirror’s top, where it seemed to breathe out of two serpents’ mouths like tongues. The jewels that adorned the mirror, too, were worth more than any of the diamonds in the kingdom’s mines. If she didn’t keep the
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