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MIRRORS is another fairytale fusion…Snow White meets Beauty & The Beast meets Red Riding Hood, where our heroine loves old books and libraries and all that stands between her and true love is a mirror.
If Hearts is gardens and teaparties, and Wishes is royalty and a ball, Mirrors is castles and libraries. Read the first chapter below.
Be my guest.
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FROM THE BACK COVER
MAYBE THE TREASURE IS REAL
Nineteen-year-old Paige Wrenley will do anything to protect her father—even if it means returning to the old castle where her mother died. With their home and her papa’s shop at risk of being foreclosed by the bank, Paige is blackmailed by their landlord, Lenora Hayes, and has a mission to follow rumors of a buried treasure at the abandoned castle, Fairhavens.
Chased by dark memories of a great fire that ruined his family’s ancestral castle, Nolan Hayes has finally returned home to Gabreville to stop his uncle, Declan Hayes, from taking over stewardship of the abandoned castle lands. Up on a mountain in a dark forest, the estate of Fairhavens has long been stewarded by the Hayes family, since the true lords who built the castle disappeared a hundred and fifty years ago. But Nolan is convinced those old lands should belong to someone else, if a true heir to Fairhavens can be found.
Scouring the antique library in the abandoned castle, Paige and Nolan must work together to find an old book called the Oirdera and if the rumors are true, find clues to a buried treasure before the first day of spring. Time is running out and threats from all sides push Paige and Nolan closer to finding the truth at the castle that holds the secrets to both Nolan and Paige’s past, but will uncovering the story of the fire that awful night that changed both their lives be a truth too heavy to bear?
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ENDORSEMENTS
“Mirrors takes the whimsy of Lewis Carroll and the romantic yearning of Stephanie Garber to create a tale in a category all its own. This is not a story to devour, but to savor—each sentence pondered and experienced. Rich with vivid detail and imagery, Eden weaves a serendipitous tale that honors fairy tales of old.”
—EMILY BEQUETTE, author of Flameheart
“Mirrors is an absolutely magical story with stunning imagery, rich symbolism, and beautiful prose. Not only did the plot keep me invested and the characters steal my heart, reading this book was a whole experience. Brittany Eden’s writing always makes me feel like I’m curled up inside a poem. I was enchanted from beginning to end!”
—RACHEL LAWRENCE, author of Seashells and Other Souvenirs
“A tale almost as old as time that will leave you absolutely enchanted, Eden’s Mirrors takes us on a journey to crumbling castles, dusty libraries, and warm hearths as romance blossoms between two searching souls finding their way home.”
—KAITLYN CARTER BROWN, author of Queen of Shifting Sands
“Heartfelt and poetic, Mirrors weaves a tantalizing mystery where past and present collide in a tale of books, musings, and romance. For anyone who has fallen in love with fairytales, Mirrors promises a treasure hunting adventure sure to sweep you off your feet.”
—ASHLEY SCHALLER, award-winning author of R.E.M. and Riley + Sam
THE SERIES ISN’T OVER YET
There’s more to come. Including Curses, the candy shop book (Juniper & Percy’s story) and Endings, the final, sad book (Darragh & Lucille’s story).
READ IN SEASONAL ORDER
Wishes in the winter, Mirrors for spring, Hearts for summer, Curses in autumn, and Endings in the winter, with all the seasons combined.
PREVIEW OF THE FIRST CHAPTER
The Gated Library, Loirehall University
NOT LONG AFTER DAWN, I ENTERED THE QUIET HEART of Loirehall’s historic University district and arrived at the first place I fell in love—with books, of course.
I walked alone through the echoing arcade in the center of the massive building, which hosted the library but also the administrative offices and auditorium only used for dignitaries and graduations with overlong council speeches. The building’s façade was simple but grand on the outside, but inside every surface was ornate. Tales from Loirehall and Gabreville’s shared history were embellished on detailed frescoes and on the painted domed ceiling.
For all their bickering, the towns shared the university in uncharacteristic cordiality. The students…not entirely. First-years usually kept to their side of the twinned stairs, where carvings lined the walls bracketing each respective staircase. They kept to their own side, that was, until they inevitably made friends from the other side of the river. Lecture boredom and unceasing essays made comrades across the division the two staircases represented—not for me, though. My real-life friends were few, but there was a whole world of characters waiting for me between bookshelves.
Paige, they called, come up here.
Those fables told on frescoes towered above where flying buttresses met in the middle, creating four curved white domes. The painted ceiling was an opulent collision of history and stories and art. A fitting entrance to a library. I took the left staircase as I always did, where Gabreville’s rich inheritance of mining, hunting, and all things mountainous and grand was represented by statues at even intervals along the walls.
Who were they? What did they do to deserve their bust in marble? Something good, or evil?
I shifted the pile of books in my arms and ascended to the second floor, past the magnificent arches at the entrance to the library, diverting to another polished set of stairs then up again one more time on another less grand—and increasingly narrow—to finally arrive at my favorite part of the library. The fourth floor. The Gated Library. Then, bowing inward in that particular hunch of a bookworm around their overly-tall stack of books, I lost my grip on the heavy load, leading to the inevitable—
“Oomph!” The books left my arms as if they meant to, toppling to the ground.
“Sorry!” a male voice replied, deep and husky and dark, like he hadn’t appeared around the corner out of nowhere and nearly knocked me down.
Aghast at my scattered books, I stood insulted at their abandonment and his hurried manner. “You shouldn’t rush through the library,” I retorted, kneeling to grab the farthest book first.
“Aren’t you also supposed to be quiet?” The young man spoke above me with eerie calm, the opposite of my racing heart so soon after he’d barrelled me down. But my surprise had good reason. We were in the corridor farthest into the secluded, light-and-air controlled, and usually locked section of the topmost floor of the joint Gabreville and Loirehall Memorial Library. The Gated Library, called such not just for the fragile books, but for the locked case containing the literal Crown Jewels.
“How are you even up here?” I snapped. “It’s locked.” There was a reason those curving iron steps leading up here were narrow. They kept out intruders and allowed only the most ambitious readers deep into the heights at the heart of book heaven. And my poor books, strewn across the floor. Reaching for my papers scattered beyond, I mumbled, “Saturday morning curse. I should have known…”
Then I finally looked up.
I’d always dreamed of love at first sight. I even believed it was possible, especially if it involved haughty cheekbones beneath beautiful brown eyes and a hint of scruff over a dimpled chin and mesmerizing bold lips refusing to smile. His face was angled and proud. Pale, freckled skin, perfectly clear but for a scar clear through the far edge of one eyebrow and a similar white line on his jaw. I had always hoped for my own heart-stopping moment, like any good lover of stories. Until now, as my heart skipped a beat with annoyance.
Disdain at first sight.
I continued collecting my books with painstaking care. This was not the ambitious reader type. But it wasn’t just his lack of etiquette, or the detachment in his voice, that made me want to pull away. I was also avoiding the cut of his jaw, attractive like unforeseen danger or the suspenseful chapter that ends amidst dialogue. To admit enjoyment in the study felt akin to jumping off a cliff, and I was far too poised for that. So, I spoke with the tone of Cleopatra—the real one, the legendary queen full of guile, not Shakespeare’s iteration or any other fictional one.
“There are priceless books in this section,” I informed his feet. “Aged, preserved, and special. I was just going to file them.” One by one, I turned each treasure upright and checked for ruined pages. This old section, the Gated Library, was no longer a functioning library so much as storage for literal antiques—including the forsaken scepter of power and crown of Loirehall with its diamond-speared tips pointing to the stars, all gilt and golden with endless diamonds like a casual aside from a bygone age. I huffed a short breath. “There’s a reason one should speak only in hushed tones in a library.”
He talked to the top of my head. “Would my voice really wreck the texture of those books? They’ve already survived longer than us.”
I was inordinately pleased that this rude apparition in my part of the library at least recognized our small place in history. Old stories mattered. Gently unbending a page from a book that had fallen facedown, the sound of his voice having suspended, I was about to look up before large hands—strong looking, with a smattering of freckles across the knuckles—reached over mine to help. Now on his knees on the waxed-wood floor, he took care in closing a leather-bound journal that was over two hundred years old. I couldn’t help but be pleasantly surprised.
“It’s not about that,” I said finally, after pondering the concepts of long ages, memory, and survival.
His question came after another moment of carefully arranging books in such a way as to begin stacking them. “What is it about, then?” His voice had an unusual tone, a little bit raw.
As he gathered the lost papers from my folio case and handed them to me, I took the loose pages before he examined their contents too closely. He surrendered easily. It was hard to quiet my humming thoughts, caught red-handed for being in possession of sketches ripped from my late mother’s diary. As if guilty, for having ripped a single page from a dead woman’s book. I’d ripped out ten. On the other hand, I felt silly to feel let down in the face of his disinterest, as if having this stranger intrigued with these old pages could validate me.
I almost said they were sacred, but I sighed instead beneath the weight of the books piled once again in my arms, tired and suddenly lonely in the face of their longevity. Beneath the stack were the pages of repeated drawings of a crest of sorts, the symbol in my mother’s diaries I’d been researching on my own, alone. I hadn’t yet found trace of it, no matter where I’d looked.
“Books…they’re like family.” Heat bloomed across the skin of my throat. Why did that come out so honestly?
“Are they now?” Teasing failed to hide the uncomfortable end of the question in his husky voice. It was intriguing to hear him sound so deliberately unattached. Surely there was great value to whatever question had led him on some quest into the highest and loneliest part of the Gated Library. It was obvious to me even through the scratchy timbre in his baritone. Neither too high nor too deep, but implacably centered. “Isn’t this a bit much to be carrying?”
I huffed to standing, back ramrod-straight, refusing to swoon at his husky voice. For all I knew, it was the dangerous surface above fathomless waters. No one gets to see me struggle. “Do I look weak to you?”
One straight eyebrow raised. “The books look heavy to me.” His arms crossed, light brown eyes darkening, and I resisted the urge to step back. With the build of a young man whose shoulders had nearly filled in to match his height, his seemed the kind of face that was hard to place in time. He was probably a few years older than me, and if he was a student here at the university, he could already have been one for years. There was a prominent line between his brows that remained, even as his forehead smoothed, a haughty expression transforming into a smile. A rare grin, it seemed, but because I was determined to not be charmed and he couldn’t hold it through our silence, and it fell.
“Books are heavy because they carry the weight of imagination and history. Much weightier than your life or mine. So yes,” I said, accepting the final book from him without flinching. “They’re heavy.”
The smile returned briefly, slightly too sad for a smirk, as if he was truly trying to see beyond the books, the weight, I’d grown used to holding. “Whatever you say,” he said, the straight edge to his broad shoulders lifting in a shrug.
His acquiescence wasn’t what I wanted, now that I had it. And I was annoyed at not being annoyed so much as intrigued. “Intrigue” was a dangerous word. Both a fascination and a plot. A curiosity, or a conspiracy.
Which meaning would the word come to mean between us?
Either way, he was confounding. Morning sun lit strands of cropped hair. Too-long at the top, as if hacked by hand, but short on the sides, rough edges turning golden. His fair eyelashes squinted as the rays struck his face, as if the stained-glass windows lining the upper portions of the hallway meant to blind him. His brown eyes glowed bronze, for a moment.
I shook my head. “You never answered my question.” Why was he alone with me on an early Saturday morning on the fourth floor in the Gated Library that should have been locked?
“I did not,” he replied. “How could I, with the tomes of history piling insignificance on my head?” His tone gave the truest signal that he—and his questions—were far from aimless. At my answering expression, a heady feeling of my smile trying very hard not to smile, his countenance lightened.
I thought—irrationally, and likely due to the irresistible hue of his eyes—that he might actually understand the search for meaning plaguing me, the search for what truth could only be found in books. The history and love that every intangible word was seeking to draw with type and ink. Could he hear it too? The sound of possibility in pages? At the tilt of his golden head and an ageless hint of gilt in his bronze-brown eyes, I inhaled dust motes and scents of dust jackets and a deeper breath found its way inside, behind my heart, filling me with air and life. Like dawn breaking after a cold night.
He…saw me.
“Why are you here?” I asked again. His open expression shuttered at the repetition, and he stepped back, turning and walking away before I had a chance to rescue this one song, these impossible paragraphs, this fascinating first chapter of my day that I was not quite ready to let end. I hurried after him saying, “Wait, please.”
At my please, he stopped.
I didn’t need his name. I didn’t care if his finely cut, white-collared shirt was rumpled or that the shoes beneath his jeans were the muddiest oxfords I’d ever seen. My pulse spiked. I just didn’t want him to leave. Afraid that my library haven had forever shifted, the ache of loneliness threatened to burn the back of my throat if he were to go. I can’t be lonely in a library.
“Tell me what you need.” I rushed, and risking, took a step toward him. Leaning in with all the hope I could muster. “I won’t tell my supervisor, and if no books will tell…have we really done anything wrong?” I half-giggled awkwardly; his face didn’t even crack a smile. “I’ll help you if I can.” I inhaled thinly, because the looseness in my chest from moments before was long gone.
The pause was an interminable millisecond before he turned his head to speak to the rows of tomes bracketing our convergence. “I’m looking for a rare book. The Oirdera.”
I released my breath gently. “I don’t recognize it.” I blinked at the name, though. It was familiar—like each flower in spring was familiar but new—but I couldn’t place it. “But,” I said, gazing down the hall, “I can find it if it’s here. I know my way through all the codex listings almost as well as I know the rest of the books in the Double Sea.”
His fair hair was so haphazard, nothing like heroes with wavy locks of hair grazing their cheekbones. The uneven long bit at the top slanted as he tilted his head, gilded gaze back on me. “The what?”
But I smiled, because he wasn’t leaving. I hoped my answer would make him let me in on his search. “Welcome to the so-called ‘boring’ Catalogue and Chronicles section.” With books in my hand, I couldn’t gesture grandly to the three long straits of rows or the nearby bracketed room—a collection of thousands of volumes and periodicals dating centuries back to the first king of Loirehall. Vast, valuable. The reason the Gated Library wasn’t open to the public. “A place I lovingly call the Double Sea.” Which absolutely no one deigned to use as a nickname. Merciful shame, that.
“Sounds like a place you could get lost.” Words like that, in a sad, husky voice like his, felt heavy in the quiet place.
Every person’s voice is a story in itself, my mother had said in her diary. Every inhale an expectation of a happy ending, every shuddered exhale a tale of woe.
If she thought of voices as music, then right now, whatever this young man was hiding about his purpose was discordant, the adjacent note lilting beside the resolved chord, unable to let the dissonance go. Unfinished. She’d been gone many years, but I’d read enough of her abundant diaries and handwritten stories to believe that Mother would call his story lonely, as if the harmony trying to survive without a melody was merely missing the appropriate character for the hero to complete their journey. And for a young man I’d disdained at first sight, I was hard-pressed to imagine him with anyone but me beside him right now, because he exuded alone like a brand.
Just like me.
His half-smile wasn’t going to be enough to make him stay—his motion was controlled hesitation—and I could just tell. It took a recluse to recognize one. My original disdain was now turned to desperation to keep a fellow lost soul nearby.
He’d stopped at the break between the narrow aisle dividing the alphabet of Legislative Orders. It was my first catalogue assignment last semester, and I had checked every single pre-war measure with its post-war counterpart in the opposite rows. Little did I know the job was repeated every academic year by each new, unknowing apprentice, assigned by bitter teachers’ assistants who’d suffered the years before. It was the most hated row in the library for those of us apprentice archivists who’d spent too many unfortunate—and ultimately pointless—hours there. People trying to someday become professors should be kinder, yet I never knew if the assignment had been because I was from Gabreville or because I was worth initiating.
Hateful uncertainty. I can’t be lonely in a library, I reminded myself and said, “Chronicles of all kinds of histories are always forgotten until people need the information preserved in their oceanic depths.” I hurried forward, closer to his tall frame and crossed arms, pausing at the rows between “P” and “Q.” “I’m only a first year, but I know these seas.” I still couldn’t close the distance between us, struck by a strong sense of unease. Of wanting to avoid making him feel as lost as I had at the beginning of the academic year last September. Now, in March, I was one of three others from the university library who had access to the Gated Library’s inner room, and hopefully information about this mysterious Oirdera. My shift was first in the day—was it twisted fate that we should run into one another?
Straight eyebrows rose, brow furrowing, his scar twisting. His gaze was hope distressed, and something like gold fleck sparked in his eyes as he looked down on me. Heavy gaze, heavy gold. Those hopeful embers lit within his gilded eyes, and in the chemistry of dusty bookends and filtered morning bright for once, a different sort of warmth filled me. Instead of jewel tones of burgundy and aged green and burnt leather, the irises of his gorgeous eyes were hidden treasure, bronze edges tarnished. An overlay darker than it should be, on golden, precious metal.
Inhaling a lost sunshine scent that didn’t belong in the musty library, I asked, “Other than a very rare, nearly unfindable book, is there anything else you’re looking for?”
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