Mirrorstrike

by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  Eventually it is no longer possible to do so. The general moans into her hair, hips thrusting fast. Nuawa gasps and shudders and thinks, helplessly, that she will scream: so much for that self-control.

  They collapse together into the throne and into the crumpled pile of their clothing. Nuawa kneels, her hands still tied, the general’s seed warm on her thighs. “You’re going to clean me up.” She shifts her hips, inhaling at the brush of cool air on engorged nerves. Her shirt is halfway off, baring a shoulder, a breast.

  “I shall be as attentive as any handmaiden.” The general cups her exposed breast, lazily reaching over to loosen Nuawa’s belt. “Your back will be scrubbed until it gleams, and your hair shall be oiled as though you were an archduke and I your humblest of servants. Why, should you wish, I’ll lacquer your nails and perfume your throat, and warm your feet in attar.”

  Nuawa rubs at her wrist: it is imprinted vividly with belt buckle and sunrays. “We must do this again, General.”

  “Worth those marks?"

  “I wouldn’t trade them for the world.”

  Seven

  Noon comes quickly. When Lussadh looks out the window it is to a city wall on which the sun has poured all its treasury, a largesse of endless gold. So different from in the queen's palace: there the light is wan, as if the queen herself has willed the sky and celestial bodies to her pastel tastes. Lussadh glances at Nuawa, who nestles in the furs, still asleep. It has been strange to settle into intimacy so easily, sleeping together naked, Nuawa's breasts against her back, their legs twined like braided ropes.

  She watches the rise-fall of Nuawa's chest, the small but constant motion which signals that the body's alimentary processes turn in proper order. She kisses a pale, narrow shoulder that—like so much of Nuawa—is marked by thin scars. They hint at coherent shapes, like an augur's readings. She pulls the furs all the way up, tucking Nuawa in.

  Lussadh puts on a fresh robe that smells of citronella. In Kemiraj everyone knows her preferences, down to the fragrance of laundry. Sometimes she likes to picture what this country will be like after her passing: who will govern it, in what manner. But it will not be her concern. She is no longer prince and succession no longer her task. The most she'd have to do is select a few candidates for the queen to appoint. None of the strife of choosing heirs.

  Guryin is waiting in her office, holding a flat paper box in xer lap. "Did you redecorate again, General? I swear this place never looks the same twice."

  "It keeps things novel." She does redecorate every so often. Once this office belonged to one of her cousins, her fellow candidate to be king-in-waiting, and she has done what she can to remove traces of that cousin. Currently one wall is covered in masks: theatrical ones from Sirapirat, white horned ones from Yatpun, half-masks in the shape of hawks and monarch butterflies. "How's the prisoner Nuawa brought in?"

  "Docile, though she wouldn't talk to anyone else but the lieutenant. She shakes and sweats like she's dying if I so much as pop in to take a look. I thought of leaving one of my shadows in her room, but in a place that small it's going to be ... noticeable." The major waves xer hand. "Especially to the lieutenant, who seems awfully observant. And who is tricky to track—she blinks in and out of my scouts' sight. Very odd, since I never detected any charms on her, and I know she's no practitioner."

  "Curious. She wasn't like that in Sirapirat." The court thaumaturge Lussadh brought with her to that tribute game had no issue scrying for Nuawa. Potentially a matter of being a glass-bearer, potentially something else. "What else?"

  "Mm. She said in passing that someone witched her wine at the party—not as if she was concerned, so it's possible our lieutenant has protected herself against toxins. Her prime suspect is Minister Veshma, who picked out her glass. Interesting, don't you think?" Guryin turns the paper box over to her.

  "As a matter of fact, it is. Keep an eye on the minister." Veshma survived both the coup and the feast. At any other time, she would not have thought the minister inclined to treachery, but in a time like this ... Lussadh opens the box. The paper within, protected by lining, is on the verge of crumbling and so dark that the ink on it closes in on illegibility. She does not fault Guryin's craft—this is not xer specialty, and reconstituting ash into readable letter is no small task. "I didn't even know you could do this, and I've always thought you one of the best thaumaturges I know." Not in scale, for Guryin can manifest no miracles, but in finesse and application.

  "You know me, General. All talent." Xe snaps xer fingers and a small shadow-hawk appears in xer palm. Another snap; it disperses. "To be sure, I was never this good before the queen granted me her gifts. Used to be I could maintain maybe a couple scouts at a time and none of them were this substantial. Don't let anyone know though, I like to look good in front of the other bearers."

  That is news to Lussadh, though not surprising. The mirror increases and amplifies, often unpredictably. She gently handles the remade letter, spreading it over the glass of a lamp to better make out the words. Addressed to Sareha and written in Mehrut, in a hand she knows bears no resemblance to Nuawa's. There is nothing as convenient as a name, being signed merely Your friend. "Nothing conclusive." She returns the letter to Guryin: xe might be able to track its sender. "But this is masterful work. You must've long surpassed your old teachers."

  "Only by the grace of Her Majesty," xe says primly. "My gut says Lieutenant Nuawa wasn't involved, and I'm not just saying that because she's nice to look at."

  "You've been monitoring her. You may well know better than I do."

  Guryin makes a tsk. "You've always rated your own judgment better than anyone else's, as is proper. Are you worried that she clouds it?"

  Again, Lussadh imagines what it would be like to watch the breath stop in Nuawa, the last of it exhaled like the whisper of sand. Again, it is a difficult thought to bear, a spike of lightning in her throat, but it is not impossible: good enough. "No, but I believe in your intuition."

  "My intuition is that if she moves against you, it would be something else—an act all her own, in solitude. The lieutenant views collaboration with contempt, by my reckoning." Xe daintily removes xer boot and props xer foot up on the divan. "Right now, I'd rather she isn't guilty. She makes you—not happy exactly. More content, maybe. Nicer to be around."

  Lussadh pantomimes shock, putting her hand to her breast. "I should like to think I've never been such unpleasant company."

  "You're excellent company, General, but these days you're more personable."

  She smiles, as though she agrees, and perhaps she does. "The queen will come as soon as she can." Even now this country, the hottest part of the continent, quietly resists winter. Her Majesty rarely visits Kemiraj, and each time she does she must prepare for it, submerging herself in ghosts. Lussadh has borne witness to this, the queen drinking souls out of shot glasses and the sluggish plumes of them dying between her lips. It was medicinal—the queen did not enjoy the act, the taste. "We're well-defended here until then, as long as we keep to the palace. That includes you."

  Xe grimaces. "So, we're to sit tight until she arrives and sorts this Heron out? I don't like that. There has never been a threat we couldn't meet. We are her swords, not mewling children she needs to protect."

  "We have limitations. The queen has none. I know you were having fun out in the city and I hate to interrupt your fine time, but I'd rather you stay put unless you absolutely must."

  Guryin mock-pouts. "Killjoy. Very well, I will remain here, cooped up in these beautiful rooms until I wilt from ennui. Maybe I'll debauch our icy lieutenant a little. She is in need of fun." Xe pauses. "General, you're turning a little red."

  "I'm certainly not."

  "Ah, I forgot." The major bats xer eyes. "You already visit upon her all the debauchery she could possibly require. Quantity and quality—"

  "Enough of that or I'll tell Imsou on you." Lussadh touches her calling-glass; it twitches a drumbeat, one, two, three. "My aide is coming."

>   "Ulamat the Imminent." Xe laughs. "I'll stay, if you don't mind."

  She does not, though when Ulamat lets himself into the office it is evident that he does. He does not let it show on his face—he's always had good control of his expression—but he gives Guryin a very correct salute: a sign that he accords someone the bare minimum and no more. "My lord," he begins and doesn't go further, waiting for her to dismiss the major.

  "Report."

  "Yes. The lieutenant has a cousin, the son of her aunt Indrahi Dasaret—a monk teaching at a theological college in Kavaphat, if you recall, lord? Indrahi's execution wasn't very public, but the son found out nonetheless." He pauses, knitting his fingers together. "A few days later the monk was found facedown in a lake. I have had his body retrieved; it's on the way here."

  This she did not expect. "Why?"

  "If we rule out the incident at the feast as the Heron's doing, then the lieutenant's innocence is surer. But her exoneration would be definitive with one final test. Indrahi Dasaret was a subversive and her son—"

  "No." Lussadh pulls herself short. She has almost shouted. That is not like her, and it is nothing to do with how fond—or not—she is of Nuawa. "I will not test someone until they have a reason to hate me and move against me in truth. King Ihsayn liked to test people, Ulamat, in that very exact way, with that very exact result. Indrahi Dasaret is dead." By Nuawa's hand, after all. "Let that be. Corpses are corpses."

  He flinches and now she remembers, when she took him in from the streets, how long it was before he stopped flinching from everything; how long it was before he stopped expecting to be beat for eating too much, for breathing too loudly, for not learning his letters instantly. "I beg your pardon, my lord. I am unwise." He lowers his head, falls to his knees.

  "You meant well." She takes a long breath; the king used to closely observe how she and her cousins carried themselves, and that extended to how they genuflected—dropping too fast, not enough poise, too arrogant. They were not punished, not exactly, but the king's disapproval would be known, and it would sit under the skin like a trapped thorn. "On your feet. Be at peace, Ulamat. Just have the body sent elsewhere, have it dealt with the respect a monk deserves."

  * * *

  Once Nuawa is certain the general has left the suite, she shakes the sheets and the furs off. She is alone, naked save for the bandages on her wrists, still damp where Lussadh rubbed ointment into them. Her feet likewise oiled and wrapped, for the general fulfilled her promise to warm it in attar. The arch of your foot, Lussadh said as she stroked it, down and up. How perfect it is, like the rise of a dune. The catenary of your hips, the way your skin runs, it feels as if I could lick a sky out of you.

  She doesn't bother to put clothes on. In the parlor she listens for the telltale signs of a familiar. In small enclosed spaces, they are not impossible to detect if one knows what to look for: a warping of light or a bending of shadow, a thrum in the air like thunder's consequence. Nothing. She is alone.

  The diptych is veiled by a riot of bronze ferns and blooming chain cacti so bright they look as painted as the sky that Tafari put onto canvas however many decades ago. She circles the frame, running her fingers around the brass tracery that rims the diptych, avoiding the canvas or paint itself. Her throat closes and she wipes at her eyes, taking a deep breath. To weep before this, an ensemble of wood and metal and canvas. How grief's fault lines make a child of her, how they make dross of intellect.

  She thinks back to that precise moment in the kiln, where she swallowed that cold, sharp thing. When she opens her eyes again, all of her is honed to a single point, a purpose as calm as a grave.

  As Penjarej said, there is a panel in the back, a lone disc among trapezoids and rectangles. It detaches surprisingly easily, a simple brass plate, not much breadth or dimension to it. She presses it to her pulse-points one by one. She turns it about, holds it close to a ghost-pipe, and tries breathing on it: all to no result. Blood, or else—she locates her sliver-knife, a weapon of needle slimness and piscine ribs. She slices off a piece of her own shadow. The etheric pain is immediate, striking marrow-deep. She grits her teeth and catches that sliver of her spirit. To the touch it is wet, like living tissue.

  She brushes it across the disc. The metal splits neatly in half.

  Inside, a small cube of dark celadon, so smooth and richly colored it could’ve just cooled yesterday. It rattles when she moves it, little clicks against the worked earth: bone fragments or molars or gritty ash. Tafari's. The other object is a folded paper, good thick paper that must have been witched, like the painting itself, to withstand time and damage. The texture of it is crisp, and the ink on it the clear, direct green of malachite. She spreads the paper out. The letter is in cipher, one of the many Indrahi taught her almost as soon as she understood her letters. Shift the abugida this many places forward, the vowels this many places backward. Literacy in code, Indrahi used to say, is as important as any other. Acquiring it is much like acquiring a second language, and as fundamental to a good education.

  Nuawa translates as she reads.

  One to wake. Two to bind. These are the laws that govern those of the glass.

  Our daughter, when you came into the world, we dreamed of victory. So close were we to the cusp that we thought we would raise you in a world of monsoons and warm rice, mangoes and all the sweet things that we'd regain once the Winter Queen had been repelled.

  Tafari was a field chiurgeon in her time, and when we found him, he was deeply wounded, a shard of glass in his throat like dying. Nevertheless, he could speak as though his trachea had not been pierced, and he told us to take this glass right out, without breaking it. Not that we could have.

  It was in a shadowed, stinking alley. Tafari and I had just conceived you, and I bore you within me waiting for the months to turn and you to grow large enough to be transplanted into an iron womb. Between us there was new life, and a future that we imagined as luminous as a summer day. In this alley he gave us a promise; without that we might never have granted him aid.

  I am a servant of the Winter Queen and I have deserted her side.

  There was no way to corroborate his claims, save the evidence of his own body. There was no blood, never any blood. The shard left him open and beneath the skin there were translucent structures crisscrossing the muscles; capillaries of the same material wound around his bones and drew cobwebs over his organs. He let Tafari dissect him to prove his good faith and his story.

  He called himself the Heron; no other name did he give us. Perhaps it is a custom in Yatpun for those who worship the god Kidashoten, or perhaps it is particular to him and the queen he betrayed. Why he left her we never learned, for that alone he kept close to his chest. But much else he confided in us, the secrets that he asserted belonged to the queen.

  This, then.

  As the Heron has it, the queen was once a snow-woman created by the mountain gods of Yatpun. Her kind was made to be weapons, in a war that he insisted neither you nor I could possibly comprehend. Most of her sisters did not have what we might call volition. The queen developed hers by accident and came to resent her place, the place of a tool, hungering for more: to see what else she could do with herself, to see the earth beyond Yatpun. What happened next, you can surmise. She stole a mountain-god's treasure, a mirror of vast puissance, a mirror that is also a gateway. She studied it, she listened to its song, and in time she gained mastery over it.

  Through this mirror, she stepped into our world, taking with her the first of her votaries, now her fellow exile.

  (Are you human, we asked him. Yes, I was, at the beginning.)

  Her mirror did not bear the stress of her passage, and on the shore of our world—on our side of Yatpun's event horizon—it shattered in her lap. But it was not only a mirror, and what it became was not only glass. Each of the shard was a seed, and in suitable soil it would gestate, mature into fruit. The Heron was the first, and through him she discovered that the shard fed on the human heart, granting
its host marvelous strength. A bearer of this glass doubles the breadth of their soul and their self, and that is no small thing.

  Yet the Heron did not suffice. To ensure success she scattered her mirror far and wide, letting it seek suitable hearts, letting them ripen for the harvest. The Winter Queen's desire is at once simple and unthinkable. She wishes to return to Yatpun clad in glory, in her full might; the mirror restored will allow her to pierce Yatpun's shield. There she will conquer, adding her birthland to her dominion, making of the mountain-gods either her slaves or vassals.

  The mirror shard fostered in the Heron's body is the same that resides now in yours, a fruit half-grown. It would not grow within Tafari or myself, because we were adults. It would not grow in your brother, who was by this time too old. It required a young child. Yet we could not sacrifice you on a fable. There was no proof. There was only a shard of glass, steel-strong and brilliant, yet merely glass.

  Years after the Heron left us, a link in our hidden chain snapped, and delivered you and Tafari to the kiln for crimes of sedition. And what could have saved you inside the kiln if not the fable, the shard as a decoy soul that would be harvested in place of yours? When I collected you, I thought it impossible, but the Heron's claims—in that at least—proved true.

  The mirror shard will, or already has, made you potent and to the queen irreplaceable. She will come for you and hold you close. To her, you will be the greatest of prizes. She will kiss you, the first to wake the shard, though yours will already be woken. She will kiss you again to bind you to her, though the Heron asserted you will remain free.

  This kiss symbolizes transference, an exchange; each time she touches the mirror shard inside you, she becomes—for a single instant—that close to flesh and marrow, that close to us. The substance of her softens. Her heart becomes arterial. She will be vulnerable to blade and ballistics.