A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge

gave a scream that seemed to tear right up through her like a thumbnail through a blade
of grass.
    The mirror shattered when it struck the floor, but that was not enough. The lantern struck sparks off the bars and then swung wildly, its light and shadow tipping giddily, the little trap
snapping blindly at the air as its world tilted. The barred door rattled and jumped under a torrent of kicks.
    Only when she was exhausted did Neverfell drop to her knees, the dancing traplight glinting on the tiny shards of glass that now starred the puddled floor.
    The skin of the face she had seen in the mirror had been pale, with a dappling of faint freckles like those across Neverfell’s hands. A long face with a full and tremulous lower lip, downy
pale red eyebrows, large and light-coloured eyes. It had been wearing a Face. Neverfell had not expected that, for she did not remember ever having learned any. It had been an unfamiliar Face, but
it had looked just the way she felt. Then the reflection had changed Face, and the way it had done so had been strange. It had slid into a new expression in a curious, liquid way she had never seen
before. But it was not this strangeness that had made her break the mirror.
    Staring at the new Face, she had been able to read the thoughts behind it, even whilst they echoed in her own head.
    You locked me away , said the expression. You locked me away for seven years , Master Grandible. For nothing .
    The face in the mirror was not beautiful, but nor was it ugly. It was not scarred, burnt or disfigured. Aside from the curious shifting of its Faces, there was nothing wrong with it at all.
    Neverfell had expected the Enquirers to come running after this uproar, perhaps with cudgels and chains, but they did not. Instead she was left to herself, shivering in her
darkened cage as it creaked slowly to and fro, specks of glass crunching under her each time she moved, drips falling into the canal below.
    She tried calling out, but her voice was a mere mouse squeak in the well of darkness. She had plenty of questions now, but nobody to answer them. If there’s nothing wrong with my face,
why does everybody keep running away? And why am I here? All I did was steal a tiny piece of cheese that shouldn’t have been sent in the first place. What am I doing under Enquiry?
    Shivering, Neverfell sank into a sort of torpor, in which after a time she could hardly feel the cold of her limbs. In spite of everything she drowsed, and so it was that later she could not say
precisely when it was that the next visitation occurred.
    With a dreamy faintness, she heard the door open and close once more, and the jetty creak under careful steps. But it did not matter because her drowsy fear was receding, leaving her filled
instead with a warm and sleepy sense of well-being and safety. She knew that somebody had come whom she could trust. At the same time, the faintest trace of a pleasant fragrance seeped into
Neverfell’s awareness, whispering of rosemary, silver and sweet sleep. She could relax now, the smell told her, slide into slumber.
    Neverfell felt the scent stroke across her mind and soul like a peacock feather . . . and flinched in recoil, banging her head against the bars. Something told her that one’s mind should
not be touched like that. Now that she was shocked awake, her trained nose told her that there was an undercurrent to the smell, something wrong and ugly.
    In a flash, she remembered Grandible telling her over and over to sniff visitors through the vent before admitting them within his tunnels, to check for mind-enslaving Perfume.
    You’ll know it when you smell it. You’re a cheesemaker. We have a nose for something rotten, even if nobody else has.
    She pinched her nose shut, and instantly the feeling of trust drained out of her.
    Someone was standing on the jetty. It was hard to make out the figure, and Neverfell realized that the lanterns had been hooded. The figure stepped to the wall, and with