Mistress of Ambiguities

by J F Rivkin

  Nyctasia sighed. Corson would tell her that she thought too much, no doubt.

  Corson would tease her out of this mood somehow. But there was no one at court now whom she felt free to confide in. For a moment she toyed with the idea of sending for ’Malkin, who would be glad enough of the summons, as she well knew.

  But though she found him amusing, it was not his companionship she wished for tonight.

  If only she could have gone to the Midlands with ’Kasten! It seemed the height of luxury to her now, to be free to travel aimlessly from place to place, with nothing to worry her except where she would spend the night. If ’Kasten met with no delays, he might reach Osela in time for the Harvest Fair, she thought wistfully. And no doubt, instead of enjoying his luck, he felt himself ill-used to be sent away from Rhostshyl. But soon enough it would be his turn to share in the burden of governing the city, and only then, when it was too late, would he learn to appreciate the freedom he’d lost. But ’Kasten, surely, would not be alone with his duty…

  “Is it too late, in truth?” Nyctasia asked herself, ashamed of her self-pity.

  She had much to be thankful for-the city was at peace, her plans were bearing fruit. “Regret deceives the spirit,” she reminded herself sternly, “and mourning denies the Discipline.” Perhaps she should leave the city for a time. Might she not serve Rhostshyl best by preserving her own peace of mind? Suppose she were to visit Maegor the herbalist, who always spoke sense to her, or Corson’s mad friends at The Jugged Hare, who treated her as one of themselves…? Her hold on the city was not so weak that a few days’ absence would break it. And it might serve her purposes, as well, to let the others see that she was not afraid to let them out of her sight. She could all but hear Corson commanding her,

  “Come along! It’ll do you good to get away from here.”

  She paused before the tall mirror, examining herself critically. Her nightdress of silver-grey watered silk caught the moonlight and shimmered with a rich luster, but her shoulders sagged, her head drooped like a wilting lily, and her face was wan and careworn.

  Nyctasia straightened her back. Really, this would not do. She could not go about looking weak and worried-However she might feel, she must appear strong and confident before others. She must not go without sleep.

  She glanced at the table by her bedside, where a goblet waited, half-full of a powerful sleeping-draught of her own preparation. It would give her the rest she needed, but she had resorted to its aid all too often of late. She must try to do without it.

  She threw herself across the bed and lay gazing about the moonlit room, looking everywhere but at the silver goblet so close at hand. Moonlight streamed through the tall windows to strike the mirror and splash against the walls and ceiling in soft, rippling waves. “Neither sea nor sky,” Nyctasia murmured, trying to recapture a fleeting memory hidden among those dancing lights and shadows. She was as wakeful as ever. Even when she closed her eyes she was aware of the bright glow flooding the chamber, but she did not think to draw the curtains about the bed. Instead, she turned toward the mirror again, watching it from where she lay as if it could answer her questions-just as she had done as a child, when she had so often been confined to this very bed by wasting illness and frailty.

  The mirror had been hers for as long as she could remember, a legacy from the remote ancestress whose name she bore. The warped old glass gave an unclear, shadowy reflection which had fascinated her from the first. She had mirrors of better quality, but none that knew her, she thought, so well as this one. It was as tall as she, and had always seemed to her like a door, with the twin pillars that supported it serving as uprights flanking the lintel and threshold formed by the frame. As a child, she had imagined that this door would one day open to receive her, that it was the portal to another place where she would not be always sickly and aching and bedridden. She had kept the mirror drawn near to her bedside, that she might talk to the reflection she had pretended was her twin, the sister who shared her longings and her loneliness.

  She had first attempted to cast spells with the aid of the mirror, long ago, when she’d had only the faintest notion of what such spells meant, and had achieved little enough to show for her efforts. Yet… hadn’t she once, while still a young girl, succeeded in weaving a spell of Reflection-or believed that she had done so? How could she have commanded such power before she had mastered even a fraction of the necessary Discipline? Was it this teasing memory that eluded her? Had it ever really happened?

  She had been ill at the time, she seemed to remember, but when had she not been ill, as a child? No-she had been more gravely ill than usual, and had, moreover, overheard her elders discussing the court physicians’ view that she was not likely to live out the year. She had determined to attempt a Reflection of the Future, to learn for herself the truth of their prediction.

  Perhaps the fever itself had given her the detachment that allowed her to enter into a trance of spellcasting, but more probably the experience had been only one of the febrile dreams, half-remembered, half-invented, that had haunted her nights and days. That dream had left her with only the dim memory of a ghostly figure robed in shining silver, a woman-or perhaps a boy-who bore the familiar Edonaris features, resembling many of her kinsfolk without seeming to be any one of them. Had the reflection of that long-ago Nyctasia, the mirror’s first mistress, returned to the glass at her summons? Standing in the mirror as if framed by an open doorway, the vision had answered her unspoken questions before she herself had known quite what they were, or how to give them voice. She had awakened with the conviction that faith in the vahn would save her, that she would not only live but grow well and strong. Her fever had broken at last. It was after that night that she had begun to apply herself to the Discipline in earnest, immersing herself in study of the Influences, Balances and Consolations, the Manifestations and Reflections. Had she not been given up for dead, her family would have sought to turn her from such impractical pursuits-respectable enough, but hardly appropriate for an Edonaris who must one day devote herself to the duties of the Rhaicimate. But it could be of no consequence how a dying child passed her remaining days, and she was allowed to indulge her fancies in peace, until it became apparent that she might very well live to come of age after all. And by then it was too late to shake her deeply-rooted faith. She remained firm in her belief that she owed her newfound health-indeed her life-to the vahn’s magic and its messenger, though she had never been able to remember just what the presence in the mirror had said to her, and as time passed she had all but forgotten the appearance of that half-seen visitant as well.

  But now as she tossed restlessly in the great bed, it seemed to her that the memory, whole and unfaded, was almost within her grasp, like a familiar tune that one could recall in full if one heard just the first few notes. If only she could remember it at last, she thought, perhaps she could sleep…

  A moment later, she stood before the mirror again, gazing steadily into its brightly-veiled depths as she bade it to show her the past, just as she had bidden it, so long ago, to show her the future.

  “Seek in this enchanted mirror

  Images reversed but clearer.

  Patterns of shattered shadow yield

  Their mysteries, in silverglass revealed,”

  Nyctasia whispered, her eyes closed, her fingertips lightly pressed to the cold glass.

  “Read if you will the gleaming’s meaning.

  Pierce if you please the dreaming’s seeming.

  Let far be near, and first be last.

  Let time return that hath gone past,

  Let old be new, and last be first,

  Their mysteries in silverglass reversed.”

  The words meant little. The words of spells served only to focus the mind of the magician on the task at hand, to point the way the spirit must follow. Nyctasia knew that true masters of magic needed no chanted rhymes to work their will, but it had been a long while since she had aspired to such mastery herself. She
requested, rather than commanded, the vision she sought, expecting little, yet she was not surprised, when she opened her eyes again, to find that she no longer cast a reflection in the glass.

  Instead, a wan, frail girl-child looked up at her in wonder, her eyes bright with fever, her small hands held out unsteadily to meet Nyctasia’s. And then, after so many years, standing in the same place, in the same way, and faced with the ghost of the child she had been when she heard them, Nyctasia at last remembered the words she was seeking, and spoke them softly.

  “Though thou seekest far and wide,

  Yet within thee lies the guide.”

  It was but an old nursery-verse, a first lesson in the way of the Indwelling Spirit. Nyctasia had known it long before the stranger in the mirror had spoken to her. But hearing the familiar words thus, in a mysterious glow of enchantment, she had known that they held a new meaning for her, not a precept but a promise. She had replied, she remembered, with just such another couplet, the one which evoked the landscape of death in traditional Vahnite imagery-the black waves, the dark shore-the rhyme the child sadly recited to her now.

  “Where the headland meets the tide

  There the heart and spirit bide.”

  She seemed almost to make a question of it, and Nyctasia knew well enough what she was asking. She was seized with pity for the pale, fragile little girl, shadowed by a mortality she barely understood, and ready to seek among ghosts for the comfort she had not received from the living.

  “But you shan’t die, little one,” Nyctasia said. “You will learn to heal yourself through the grace of the vahn, and so learn to heal others as well, I promise you.” She longed to warn her young self of so many mistakes yet to come, but there was no time-already she could sense the spell beginning to fade, and the reflected moonlight seemed to shine through the still, solemn figure in the glass.

  And even if there were time to tell her, she would forget! “Only remember that you are a healer,” Nyctasia cried. “Let nothing persuade you to forget that!”

  She thought the child smiled at her for the first time then, a curiously reassuring smile.

  Sunshine filled the windows and spilled over Nyctasia’s pillows, waking her suddenly. She lay still for a time, eyes closed against the light, remembering everything but uncertain whether or not she had really left her bed during the night. It would have been utter folly to summon a Reflection for such a trifling reason-indeed for no reason at all-yet even if she had only dreamed the spell, it need not have been the less real for that…

  Nyctasia yawned and stretched luxuriously. It was useless to ponder the matter further; she was not likely ever to discover the truth of it. But she had the satisfaction of knowing that she had passed the night without the aid of the sleeping-draught. And she knew, now, where to find the peace she sought.

  9

  the man who called himself Veron wondered if he were perhaps a criminal. He had considered many possible answers to the riddle of his past, but that particular one had never occurred to him. He’d gone so far as to consult fortunetellers, but the false ones had told him transparent lies, and the honest ones had admitted that their arts could reveal nothing of his history. It was one of the latter who’d searched his palms for a clue, without success, then told him,

  “You’re no laborer, that much is certain-look at your fingers, smooth and uncalloused, like a gentleman’s. You look like a gypsy, but you belong to the gentry-it doesn’t take the second sight to see that.”

  His hands were harder now. He’d been working on trading ships to earn his way from city to city along the coast, and that was as humbling an experience as life has to offer, but he suspected that the seer had been right about his origins. He remembered nothing about himself, but he knew enough about many other subjects to be sure that he was well educated. He could read and write, he was familiar with a good deal or history, philosophy, poetry-no, it had not seemed at all likely that he was a criminal.

  But the tall swordswoman, the lout who called herself a Desthene, certainly seemed to think that he’d done something reprehensible, and he’d not be the first of the gentry to commit crimes. Unless she was lying, unless she’d taken him for someone else, it would appear that he’d led a far from blameless life.

  But was she to be believed? He’d been duped before, by others who’d claimed to know him, who’d offered to lead him to his people, and led him instead into the clutches of outlaw slavers. A nameless, kinless man was their perfect prey. The supposed Desthene was far more likely to be a criminal than he.

  But her reluctance to have anything to do with him had made him feel inclined to trust her. The others had always been all too willing to accost him, to engage him in amiable conversation. He’d learned to be wary of anyone who was eager to be of help. And her claim to be a noblewoman-it was hardly the sort of lie she’d expect a stranger to believe. Why invent something so unlikely, then? He doubted that she was subtle enough to feign hostility, to deliberately offer an unbelievable lie, in order to convince him.

  Indeed, the very insolence of his guide was reassuring. When she’d found that he had no horse, she’d sent the potboy to hire one for him, and asked sneeringly,

  “You’ve not forgotten how to ride too, have you?” It was not only that she knew-or guessed-that he could ride, but that her whole manner suggested that she suspected him of some deception. Perhaps these were poor reasons to put faith in her, but he wanted desperately to believe that this time he’d found someone who knew him-even if she hated him.

  But when they’d started out, and she’d taken an isolated route along the shore, he’d been sure it must be a trap. Even though slavery was forbidden by law in the city-states of the Maritime region, it was not unheard of for solitary travelers to be waylaid and smuggled south in the holds of bandit ships. There, riverways led inland from the coast to the Midlands, where the slave-trade flourished. No doubt the woman’s confederates waited somewhere on this dark stretch of beach to seize him and row him out to the ship lying at anchor offshore, unlighted and invisible.

  More disheartened than afraid, he’d reined in his horse and said, “Far enough.

  Your friends will have to wait. What a disappointment you are, after all. I’d almost come to believe that you were something more than a rogue slaver.”

  He watched closely to see how she would respond to the accusation, expecting either a denial or an outright attack, but he was not prepared for the sudden storm of rage she turned upon him. “You miserable hound!” she shouted. “You dare to call me-?” Wheeling her horse around, she pressed close enough for him to see her shaking with fury. “I’ve killed better than you for lesser insults!” she hissed, and spat full in his face. She looked half mad and very dangerous, but he only wiped his sleeve across his face and continued to watch her narrowly.

  When he made no answer, she said more calmly, with bitter scorn, “I’ve wanted to do that for a long time. Now go your way if you like! I could stop you-and I wouldn’t need any help to do it-but that’s the last thing I want to do. You can even keep the horse-I’ll pay for it. I’m going on this way, and I don’t care where you go. You can follow me or not, as you choose-but if you do, you’ll take care what you say to me.”

  And he’d followed. It was impossible to doubt the sincerity with which she’d said, “I’ve wanted to do that for a long time.” She knew him.

  It was too late for doubts now, at all events, no matter what befell. He was as good as a prisoner here, though the noble residence where his guide had brought him, with its well-kept grounds and liveried guards, was clearly not the den of outlaws. The sentries had obeyed her orders readily enough, treating her as a person of some authority. He was under guard, not precisely in a cell, but in cramped, windowless servants’ quarters that looked to be a converted storeroom-chosen, no doubt, because there was only the one way out to watch. He supposed he should be grateful that she hadn’t locked him in the cellars instead.

  She’d taken undisgu
ised satisfaction in leaving him there, apologizing with mock servility that she was unable to offer him accommodations more befitting to his rank.

  “And what rank is that?” he’d asked evenly. “If you won’t tell me who I am, will you tell me what I am?”

  “You’re trouble, that’s what you are!” she snapped. She turned her back and strode from the room in two steps.

  Her continued rancor had come as a great relief. If it had been merely pretense, she’d surely have dropped her mask now that she had him safely secured. “If I’ve wronged you, I’ve paid for it, believe me,” he said quietly, to her back.

  At the door, she hesitated and turned back reluctantly. “If you’re not the one I take you for, then I-I’m sorry,” she said uncomfortably. “But if you are, then I’ll be the judge of when you’re quits with me. And I don’t have a forgiving nature.”

  He merely bowed in reply. Clearly it was useless to reason with the creature.

  But, straightening up again, he saw her looking at him with a puzzled frown. At last she said, “I think you’re a Jhaice. With ‘ancillary distinctions,’ whatever those are. But maybe you’re not-we’ll know soon enough.” She gave him another long, uncertain look, then shrugged and left him there to wait, to study his unfamiliar hands and wonder what kind of man he was.

  ***

  “Curse her! Why does she always have to do something unaccountable?” Corson complained, though in truth that was one of the things that drew her to Nyctasia. She had arrived in Rhostshyl only to learn that the Rhaicime was nowhere to be found. “Didn’t that scatterwit tell anyone where she was going?”

  “She didn’t so much as tell anyone that she was going,” Lady Tiambria explained, sounding rather amused. A year ago, she’d have been offended by Corson’s offhand manner, but she’d grown accustomed to the ways of her sister’s favorite.

  Nyctasia oughtn’t to have ennobled such a person, of course, but there was nothing to be done about that now. Corson was one of the few people Nyctasia trusted, and though many at court looked down at her lowly origins, there were not many who dared refuse her an audience. The Lady Tiambria dared, but did not choose, to turn her away. “She only left a note to say that she expected to return within a few days’ time. I thought you’d be able to tell me where she was.”