The Mirror Maker's Apprentice

About this book:

In the sulfurous dark of Castle Grim's under-cellars, seventeen-year-old apprentice Toby has spent three years breathing mercury and polishing glass to a perfection that shows not just a face, but an absolute, unforgiving truth. But when the Great Mirror for the Queen is completed, Toby glimpses something impossible in its silvered depths: his own reflection moves a heartbeat too slow, and a Queen's breath reveals a hidden lattice of runes linking this glass to eleven others across the continent. The mirrors are not vanities—they are the bars of a cage being forged around twelve kingdoms, and Toby's master holds the hammer.

Now trapped in the Queen's gallery with a looking-glass that shows a stone chamber three hundred miles away instead of the room behind him, Toby realizes the terrible design: a network of spy-glasses keyed to a single, cold purpose. The Queen knows he saw. The Master fears what he built. And the Princess—long hidden in a northern convent—is riding toward a court where every reflective surface has become an eye that never blinks.

From the mercury troughs of Grim to the obsidian mirror of Oakhaven, *The Mirror Maker's Apprentice* is a dark fantasy of secreted messages written in silver-nitrate, of reflections that steal more than light, and of a boy with stained thumbs who must decide whether to polish the lie—or shatter the glass before the final frame is locked into place.