Manda was brushing Sita's hair in front of the mirror, lulling herself into a stupor with the slow, rhythmic strokes. Every time the silver-backed hairbrush passed over that perfect dark, it was like a comet streaking across an otherwise deserted sky.

And she had learned to tune out everything else. The sobs and wails from the morning's service might just as well have been birdsong, they were so familiar.

Sita had asked how she could ever relax in a place where everyone was crying all the time, but Manda had an answer. She'd always had an answer.

"Because at least the cries are being voiced. At least the tears are being shed. Think of the damage they could do if we just kept them inside."

Sita tilted her head and watched Manda in the mirror. "But it's always the same people crying, and nobody else. Don't they run out of things to cry about?"

"No," said Manda primly, running the brush down the rich black swathes of Sita's hair. "Because people come and tell us their own problems, and we can teach them how to cry about it – or just convince them that someone is crying about it. That's a great comfort to the bereaved."

"Could they cry about my mother and father?"

"Certainly, if I put it in the service book."

"And about your fiancé with the demon in him?"

Manda hesitated. She had forgotten to guard her expressions while Sita's hair had been soothing her into a stupor. She must have let some of the worry show on her face. And the girl noticed everything.

"Well, what's to cry about there?" she asked breezily. "The demon's coming out."

"Yes, but only if he kills somebody."

"She's not a somebody," said Manda, more sharply than she'd intended. "She's an evil demon sorceress who even Mr Danvers considers to be irredeemable."

Sita didn't say anything, so Manda resumed her brushing, a little too vigorously.

The wedding was in two days' time. Neither she nor Sam had said anything about delaying it, in spite of recent developments. So the wedding was in two days' time. Manda was only excused services – was only here brushing Sita's hair in the first place – because she would be renouncing her orders tomorrow. And in any case, everyone assumed that a bride-to-be would find it impossible to weep two days before her wedding, no matter how long she'd been a mourner.

There was less to cry about, in a way. Lily was gradually picking up her things and leaving the space she had occupied in Manda's heart. There didn't seem to be any acrimony. She was just fading. There was guilt and panic about that on Manda's side, but not on Lily's. Somehow – and maybe just in her best friend's head – Lily was at peace.

Manda's eyes were half-closed when she felt Sita jerk her head to the side, and saw the light darken. A green shade was sweeping over the room. She looked up, and then let the hairbrush clatter to the floor.

She took two steps towards the window, motioning for Sita to stay where she was. To the North-east, behind the gorgeous turrets of All Souls, briars were rearing up, like something enormous and ungainly trying to stand.

And there was a sound. At first, she took it for the rustling of leaves, because it was dry, reedy and sibilant. But it was too close at hand, and those vines were too solid to rustle.

She looked back at Sita. The girl was no longer craning her neck round, but staring straight ahead of her, into the mirror. The glass had gone black. There was no reflection. And suddenly the soft, rustling sound became intelligible to Manda. It was a sighing breath, repeating the word 'Ssssssiiiita' over and over again.

Manda took a step towards her, and then stopped. She was sure she was dreaming. Vines didn't grow to a height of fifty feet around the city. Reflections didn't just vanish. And Sita didn't sit still and quiet when there was something interesting going on.

Surely she must have fallen asleep – lulled into it, maybe, by the soothing strokes of the hairbrush. Any moment now, she would wake with one cheek pressed against the floor, and Sita would tell her in a breathless rush how exciting it had been when she'd collapsed.

But then she felt a wave of toxic emotion. It made her teeth ache at the roots. Bitterness that had been stagnating for centuries – a sense of betrayal and mad, inconsolable grief. It rushed out of the mirror and knocked Manda back against the wall.

And something followed it. A charred, blackened arm reached out of the mirror and fastened around Sita's throat.

Manda opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out. The choking bitterness was still pinning her to the wall. There was too much of it. She could never cry that out, not in a thousand years. The sheer impossibility made her freeze – made her eyes so dry that her lids seemed to scrape against her eyeballs. And all that time, Sita was being serenely strangled by the mirror's hand.

Manda didn't even look up when the door burst open. She didn't see the newcomer until she ran into her eye-line, and even then, it was hard to make sense of her, because she was usually so quiet and apologetic, and she was currently wielding an axe.

It was that bright, eye-lacerating thing of Jack's. Ellini swung it at the arm protruding from the mirror, and there was a shriek – all that pain finding its voice at last.

The arm wasn't severed, although the axe's blade bit deep. It let go of Sita's throat and scrambled madly, blindly, through the debris of the dressing table, trying to fasten on Ellini. And Sita was shouting now, half in outrage and half in admiration, because it wasn't every day you saw an arm emerging from the glass of the mirror.

It wasn't bleeding. It was too old and charred and rotten to bleed. Manda just had time to think 'It must be strong as teak' before it found Ellini, who was trying to help Sita stand up and limp away. It grabbed her dress and bent her forwards, until her breath was misting the black glass.

That was when Manda unfroze. She summoned up all the frustration, all the invectives she'd been longing to hurl at Ellini for the past eight months, and threw them at the mirror.

"How dare you let me think you were dead?" she shrieked, rushing forwards and grabbing hold of the arm. "Didn't you know I'd lost my oldest friend in very similar circumstances?"

The arm let go of Ellini and groped for Manda, but it came up against the embroidered handkerchief in her breast pocket and drew back as if it had been burned.

"You think nobody suffers except yourself, don't you?" Manda demanded. "You think suffering begins and ends at your door? You couldn't conceive of somebody being upset by your death, could you?"

Ellini swung the axe again, pushing at Manda to try and keep her out of its way. The blade bit deep once more, and this time it hissed and crackled. A rank sort of steam spiralled up from the wound.

The shriek came again, and fired through every one of Manda's nerves. But it was helping. The pain was being given some kind of expression, and that made the air much easier to breathe. The arm shrank back into the mirror in ripples, as if the glass was sucking it in.

Ellini tore the counterpane off the bed and threw it over the mirror-frame, upsetting any jars and bottles that hadn't already been knocked over in the struggle. Her face was bloodless and slick with sweat, but she still cleared her throat, smoothed down her skirts, tried to pick up the bottles she had just knocked over. She seemed very conscious of the fact that all Manda's shouting had really been directed at her.

"Thank you for protecting Sita," she muttered.

"Don't thank me as if I wouldn't have done it anyway!" Manda snapped. "She's as much my friend as she is your sister."

Manda didn't notice the stomping in the hallway, but she looked up sharply when the door burst open, and reacted by instinct after that. She saw a man in a grubby greatcoat dashing into her room and diving for Ellini, to catch her before she fell, and she pointed a shaking finger at him.

"Hands off her, Jake Hardinge, or I will tell your wife!"

He backed away, hands raised to protest his innocence. "The General told me to-"

But he broke off when he saw Manda's glare. She knew that, angry as she was, she didn't want some clumsy greengrocer nursing Ellini.

She was obviously having trouble standing on her own – she kept catching the edge of the dressing-table, as if she was about to fall – so Sita hobbled over to help her, though she was only just tall enough to crawl in under her arm, and of course she had her own crutch to manoeuvre. The two of them formed a sort of Russian nesting doll of crutches.

"Leeny, who's been shooting you with arrows?" said Sita, eyeing the ugly barb sticking out of Ellini's shoulder.

"Just an old friend."

Manda sniffed. "Given how you treat your friends, I'd say that's not surprising." But she relented a little at the sight of Ellini's sweat-streaked face, her ragged breathing.

"Hold still," she said, kneeling down in the debris of her dressing-table. There was a sharp smell of eau de cologne rising up from the floor, soaking into her dress at the knees. Sita helped to lower her sister into a kneeling position, and Manda studied the barb sticking out of her shoulder. Ellini watched her – clearly alarmed, but still too sheepish to protest.

"Are you going to-?"

"Hold still, I said."

Manda tore her clean chemise into strips to make the bandages, and ordered Jake Hardinge to surrender his hip-flask. It was filled with brandy, which she sloshed onto the wound, and then poured down Ellini's throat.

She choked and gasped and spluttered, which gave Manda some degree of satisfaction. Still, she was not going to relish pulling that arrow out.

"We should give her something to bite down on," said Sita knowledgeably. "Maybe Mr Hardinge could give us his belt?"

"I'm not having her put that in her mouth," Manda retorted.

Ellini didn't seem to mind being spoken about in this way. She was swaying on her knees, her eyes half-closed, dazed with pain and alcohol.

Manda decided, with some misgivings, to take her by surprise. She reached behind her back and snapped off the feathered end of the arrow. Then she seized hold of the barb, put a steadying hand on Ellini's good shoulder, and pulled.

Ellini made a sound like a stifled sneeze – as if she had clamped her mouth shut on the pain. Blood spilled out like wine from an upturned bottle, but Manda bunched up her handkerchief and held it to the wound. The blood pressed into the handkerchief, but the handkerchief pressed back. Some of its warm colour washed across Ellini's face, even in the green-tinted light of the briars.

It was the one Ellini had given her – with a bright, blazing sun embroidered in yellow thread. Manda remembered the way the mirror's hand had flinched back from it. "Is it magic, this thing? What did you put into it?"

Ellini opened her eyes. They were a bit watery, but they had regained some of their focus. "I suppose I put you into it. What you are to us."

Manda frowned. She wasn't sure she understood, and she suspected it was an attempt to curry favour with her anyway, so she ignored it.

She soaked her chemise-strips in brandy and wound them around Ellini's shoulder, while Sita babbled words of comfort and Jake Hardinge shuffled from foot to foot, his mouth pressed into a thin white line. She left the handkerchief under the bandages, since it seemed to be doing Ellini some good, though she felt a pang at the idea of not having it, the next time the mirror's hand came groping towards her.

"That was Myrrha, was it?" she said. "Coming through the glass?"

"Yes."

"What did she want with Sita?"

Ellini tried to shrug and winced at the pain in her shoulder. "I think she just wanted to hurt me. I knew she'd go after the knife first of all, but if Jack secured that – and it looks like he did – I thought she'd probably come after my loved ones."

"What knife?"

Ellini looked at her, as if realizing for the first time that she had no idea what she was talking about. "I – I suppose there's time to explain."

"Oh, thanks very much," said Manda sourly. "Very gracious of you."

She listened to Ellini telling a disjointed version of the events in Edinburgh. Her voice caught in her throat a few times, and she shut her eyes or looked desperately at the floor, but Manda put this down to the pain from her wound. It would be too unbelievable – too maddening – if it was due to grief for Robin Crake.

"All right," said Manda eventually. "So she's in the city – and, as long as Jack keeps that knife out of her hands, she's here to stay. We'd better get to the Faculty. You," she added, turning to Jake Hardinge, "get to the Academy and bar the doors, cover up all the mirrors, close the curtains. If she's decided to target Ellini's loved ones, she might come after the girls."

Ellini had closed her eyes and was smiling weakly, but she didn't say anything – no more insulting 'thank you's. Manda was half-pleased and half-annoyed. "We'll need Sam and Mrs Darwin to fight her, of course."

Ellini's eyes snapped open. "Sam?"

"Yes," said Manda, with an irritable smile. "Let me tell you my side of the story."

***

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