The next morning, the girl, Elena, woke Margaret at the crack of dawn. Or before the crack of dawn, she didn't bother to check. Margaret snapped awake to see Elena waiting by the door. When she saw that Margaret was awake, she left the room and closed the door most of the way behind her.
Margaret had begun to think of the girl as Elena now. She wasn't going to call her that to her face since she wasn't totally sure the girl approved, but she still thought of her as Elena.
Margaret sprang out of bed and swept her cloak out of the closet. She paused by the mirror to check her hair. It was a tangled disaster, but she had yet to find a hairbrush. She would fix it later.
Elena walked a bit slower this time, as though she wanted to make sure Margaret kept up. She didn't look back to see if Margaret was following, but when Margaret paused to adjust her shoes, Elena paused as well.
They finally came to a door at the end of a series of bewildering staircases. Margaret was glad she was wearing such sturdy shoes. In her slippers, she would surely have terrible blisters by now.
Elena held open the door. Margaret tried to peer into the room, but she could see nothing but darkness. She wasn't sure she was willing to go into a room where she couldn't see anything, but Elena was looking at her expectantly, so she took a deep breath and stepped through the doorway.
As it turned out, the room had only seemed dark from the outside. Inside, the room was actually quite well-lit by candles along the walls. She wasn't quite sure how that worked, but she was dealing with wizards in a magic school. It wasn't much stranger than everything else that had happened lately.
Hung from hooks on the far wall were two mirrors, both with intricate gold frames. What is it with all the mirrors? Margaret wondered. She heard the door close behind her, but didn't turn around.
She studied each mirror. They both showed her reflection, her tangled hair spilling down from her head in a ruffled sheet, her crazy assortment of garments awkwardly set against her fine features. They both had the same pattern of diamonds and stars along the edges of their frames. They looked exactly the same, and yet...
Somehow, the mirror on the right felt different. It was off-putting, as though the Mirror Margaret was a stranger, and not a reflection of Margaret herself.
Margaret stepped up to the mirrors and put a hand to each frame. The one on the right, the strange one, hummed almost imperceptibly with some sort of energy. She stepped back and stared at the Mirror Margaret.
She had spoken to the mirrors last time, and something had happened. Maybe she should try that again? But what would she say?
Well, this Mirror Margaret clearly wasn't her. She told it that.
"You're not me."
The Mirror-not-Margaret grinned, as though Margaret had just told her something she'd been waiting to hear. Margaret couldn't help but smile back at her as the Mirror Girl stepped out of the side of the frame.
A lock clicked behind Margaret.
Feeling rather triumphant, she whirled around and yanked open the door, prepared to face her next challenge: Elena. The door did not lead back to the room, however. Instead, Margaret faced a chamber, with a bluish-glowing pond in the middle of the floor. The same room she had been lead to upon her arrival.
She looked out over the pool. Again, something floated in the middle, but it looked different this time. It's silhouette was much smaller, and it didn't look anything like a bird.
Margaret looked behind her, skimmed the shadows. Once again, she appeared to be alone in the room.
She was curious about the thing on the surface of the pool, but she was also wary. What if she was dragged under again? Would she wake up in the room, like last time? Or would something more sinister happen?
In the end, Margaret decided that she would never make any sort of progress if she didn't take action, even if that action was to nearly drown a second time.
When she had last gone into the pond, she had lost her slippers. With vague hope, she scanned the water's edge, but her shoes were gone. She didn't want to lose the work boots, so she stripped them off and held them in her hand as she waded out into the lake for the second time. Hopefully, she would still have them when she returned to the room.
Margaret was tense as she waded through the water, but nothing grabbed her and the room was silent.
She could see the floating object more clearly now. It looked like some kind of boat, with something thin and jagged resting atop it.
The water became deeper as Margaret drew nearer to the middle, but not so deep that she couldn't stand. She finally reached the boat-thing, and reached out to grasp the object that rested on top of it. It looked like some sort of key. In the wavering, unsteady light from the pond's bottom, Margaret could make out intricate designs along it's stem, and the complicated bit she had ever seen.
Margaret turned and waded back out of the pool to the door. She was soaked to her chest, but she had acquired a key of some sort, and still had both shoes in hand.
She tried the handle of the door. It swung open smoothly into her bedroom.
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