The Soul Mirror

by Carol Berg

  Once the administrator was perched on the bench, knees drawn up to keep his boots out of the river, the second gate clanked and groaned, rising slowly from the water. Not a speck of rust marred the thick bars.

  “Maintain your dignity, damoselle,” Duplais called, as Scago rowed under the second gate. “You are Her Majesty’s gentlewoman. And consider: False hopes are worse than any bars or gates.”

  Unlike his usual pronouncements, these did not sound like warnings from a Royal Accuser to a suspect. His head sank to his knees, and I wondered if he thought of sweet Maura, condemned by his own relentless pursuit of treachery.

  The second gate clanged shut. Across the stretch of churning water, a wooden dock stretched out from the mouth of a narrow cavern that penetrated the Spindle’s rocky base. No evidence of the third of the Spindle Prison’s notorious water gates was visible. Scago shipped his oars, and the boat bumped gently against the bollards.

  While the oarsman tied up his boat, the warder offered me a hand up to the dock. A few metres’ walk took us onto the apron of rock that fronted the cavern.

  “I’ll see the bag now, damoselle,” said the warder, grinning cheerfully. An ugly, pale scar creased one ruddy cheek from brow to chin. “Can’t have any naughtiness brought into my prison.”

  He laid out books, clothes, paper, ink, and wine flask on the ledge of a barred window hacked from the stone to provide light in the cavelike gatehouse. He sniffed the ink, shook out the bag and the shirts, and quickly thumbed through the books and papers.

  Clicking his tongue in disapproval, he held up the bulbous green flask. “Don’t like books or wine for prisoners,” he said. “Don’t like ’em forgetting what they are or where. It’s discipline gets ’em through the days. Not coddling.”

  “Perfectly understandable,” I said, trying not to bristle. “But of course my brother is hostage, not prisoner. I assumed you would permit a few small reminders of home.”

  “Maybe. Don’t imagine he’ll care. He’s not a friendly sort. Nor studious.”

  Mumbling, he passed a pewter charm over the wax plug sealing the wine flask. He frowned and rubbed the charm with his thumb. Mumbled again. This was no Gautieri brilliance, but the kind of magic I’d seen growing up—unreliable and inefficient at best. Pognole tried his charm three more times until satisfaction replaced the frown. “Spell seal seems to be intact. So you’ve not put something ill inside the flask.”

  “The wine was brought straight from Castelle Escalon’s cellar.”

  He chuckled. “That’s no recommendation. But I’ll bring it along once I’ve put it in a skin. Not allowing the young rapscallion to have a bit of glass, now, am I? Might break. Might cut.”

  He set the flask aside, his smile crinkling the leathery skin around his eyes. He breathed through his mouth, nasal, liquid breaths, as if his nose was clogged by the river damp. “Have you weapons on you, damoselle? Or magics? Pretty little daggers or pox charms or unlocking spells? ’Twould be a foolish deed for a girl by rights should be living here alongside her kin.”

  “Certainly not.” I mustered innocent indignation. But I dared not add more words. Stammering would make him suspicious.

  His thick fingers curled, rubbing idly together as his gaze roamed over me. “We’ve no females here to inspect you, and I don’t trust these charms to detect all. ’Twould be sufficient grounds to turn you away. You see, I’ve just got the boy tamed. Don’t like the thought of him getting riled up again.”

  Of a sudden the barrel-necked warder’s round cheeks, thick fingers, and crinkle-eyed smile sickened me. How had he tamed and disciplined my brother, who would have been wild with terror when they brought him to this horrid place?

  Maintain your dignity, Duplais had warned. I summoned the hauteur of Eugenie’s highest-ranked ladies. “Warder Pognole, the Queen of Sabria has expressed her especial trust in me by that document you hold. She can hold no fond memories of this place, having herself been unjustly imprisoned here. And as Sonjeur de Duplais will tell you, and as you yourself noted by so rightly forbidding him entry, she will allow no whim to contravene her warrant.”

  Pognole’s smile became chipped flint. For a moment I thought he might topple me into the gray-green water. But I did not flinch, and with a motion deceptively quick, he shoved the two shirts and one of the books into my arms. The rest of the materials he returned to my bag, which he slung over his thick shoulder. “I’ll provide the wineskin. But I’ll pass the detainee the rest of your bounty only as he deserves. Hostages, just as prisoners, must be taught proper behavior. Come.”

  The warder snatched a torch from a bracket. Leaving Scago snoring in his boat, we climbed the slanted walkway into a natural rock cavern. Walls and ceiling were slimed with moldy seeps. Every step required attention, as the flat floor was riddled with cracks and channels, some no more than a finger’s width, some spanning almost a metre. Water slurped and gurgled in the inky depths.

  As we left the afternoon behind I felt, more than heard, the warder mumble a word. Iron bars shot up from the water, from the lip of the cavern ceiling, and from either side of the opening, slamming, screeching, clanging into an impenetrable grate behind us.

  The metallic dissonance faded into a profound quiet.

  Pognole parked his torch and pointed up a narrow, twisting stair lit by gloomy daylight. Every twenty or thirty steps, a barred window open to the weather illuminated a landing and two or three iron doors.

  The wind gusted through the barred portals, skirling up and down the stair. Together with the distant, lonely cries of river birds, it composed a song of misery that only compounded the silence from behind the doors.

  “How many are prisoned here?” I asked as we climbed.

  “Only three just now.” He was sorry for it.

  The warder did not stop until we had reached a single iron door at the topmost step of the Spindle stair. As the damp wind whipped my hair, Pognole unbolted a hinged steel plate and peered through a square grate in the door. “Seems he’s at home. No surprise, eh?”

  From inside came the sound of soft, quick breaths.

  Pognole pushed a key from his belt ring into the lock. The door swung open and the warder stepped through, motioning me, in no questionable terms, to wait. But around his sturdy bulk I glimpsed a blur of long limbs, whirling, lunging, one brief pause to balance, then another spin-and-slash executed with grim, mute precision. Martial exercises.

  My heart raced from the climb, from anticipation, and now from the fear that the tall, hard man I’d glimpsed—dark hair trimmed close to his head and jaw, gaunt limbs rippling with corded sinews—could not possibly be my brother. Ambrose had adored both fighting and dancing, and practiced them with equal devotion, but always laughing, a handsome, rangy youth whose flowing hair glinted with copper, whose easy grace and careless beauty had roused both pride and jealousy in his elder sister.

  “Display before your warder, prisoner. ’Tis not a day to play your games. You’ll rue the choice.”

  The prisoner had moved out of sight. After an overstretched moment, Warder Pognole motioned me into a semicircular room of rough stone, the barred, slotlike gaps in the wall open to the weather. A thin mat leaking straw, a single blanket, a battered tin pot—nothing more occupied the room, save its resident.

  He stood, back to the door, arms spread and hands flat against the curved wall, legs splayed wide, bowed head pressed to the stone. A mortifying posture. Indecent. Slops of common canvas scarce reached his knees. A filthy shirt stretched thin and tight across his shoulders, sleeves ragged. No hose. No shoes. Angry red scars glared on his wrists. Impossible . . . yet the back of his left hand bore the imprint of an angled knife—the zahkri, the mark of our Cazar blood.

  “Ambrose,” I whispered.

  He did not move, and for a moment, my fear returned.

  But then Pognole widened his vile grin. He sidled up to the man leaning on the wall and brushed his hand slowly across the quivering shoulders and down the rigid s
pine to his buttocks, where it lingered just long enough to claim possession. “Is the boy not well disciplined, damoselle?”

  Even yet, Ambrose held still. I prayed he was responsible for the scar on Pognole’s cheek.

  The warder almost danced back across the stone floor to the door. “At ease, prisoner. Enjoy this happy hour.” He slammed the iron door behind me and locked it.

  “Forgive me,” I whispered to that rigid back. “Saints forgive me, I didn’t know.”

  CHAPTER 15

  SOLA PASSIERT, EVENING

  The prisoner’s splayed hands curled into fists. Then he drew in his arms, folded them around his chest, and swung around to settle his back against the wall. Ankles crossed casually, as if he were waiting for Melusina to set his place at supper, he nodded in emotionless greeting. “Good afternoon, Ani. You look well.”

  I ached to embrace my brother, to comfort, to soothe, to erase the loathsome history so callously exposed, to convince him it changed nothing about his worth. But naught in this man’s manner invited intimacy. I could not comment on his knuckle-length hair, his bristling chin, or his impressive height—grown almost half a metre since I’d seen him last—any more than I could have tweaked Duplais about his scrawny body or teased Chevalier Ilario about his long straight nose. We were strangers. Even the common greeting wish of the Creator’s grace seemed presumptive, and most assuredly a mockery in a place so utterly alien to grace.

  “My first visitor in four years and she does not speak. Is this Pignole’s idea?” His voice had settled into a timbre deeper than my father’s. Arms, legs, and spirit displayed a web of scars. A few inconspicuous iron loops and hooks fixed high on the stained walls glared at me in accusation. Ambrose would not have been tamed easily.

  My arms clutched the materials I carried as if they were the keystone that held the world in place. Ambrose was a hostage, not a prisoner. How could I have known what he lived with? And even if I had, what could I have done differently? Yet excuses were dross.

  “I’ve so much to tell you,” I whispered, choking. “I don’t know where to begin.”

  “Sit if you wish.” He jerked his head to the thin pallet. “Do not assume privacy.”

  Indeed the metal plate over the door grate remained open, and I could almost hear Pognole’s sibilant breathing outside it. Vile. Disgusting. Imagining his eavesdropping began to transmute loathing into anger and resolution.

  “I doubt the good warder would be listening in,” I said, stringing a warp of lies and hoping my brother could interpret my truer belief. “He has no wish for me to report a gift of Castelle Escalon’s finest vintage stolen. Her Majesty has sent a flask of wine, and the gentleman has promised to decant it into a skin and bring it here. He seems to think a glass container might incite you to misbehavior. Could that be true?”

  Ambrose snorted. “Did you not witness, damoselle? I am well disciplined.”

  He existed beyond bitterness. Had anyone cut him, he would have bled sand.

  In the hard silence that ensued, my senses, so heightened in these past days, noted soft steps descending the stair. Clutching the paltry comforts the warder had allowed me to bring, I surveyed the barren chamber that would be a sultry furnace in summer, and a cold, wet, windy agony all winter. I could not believe our goodfather intended this deprivation. Not for a youth who had committed no crime.

  “They would not allow me to come before now,” I said softly. “I tried. I wrote everyone who might have influence. Every plea was returned. I paid a lawyer”—who had taken the fee and done nothing, claiming that no one would hear a petition from Michel de Vernase’s kin—“as I wrote you . . .”

  His expression remained blank.

  My brother’s few letters had never mentioned his situation. Nor had he responded to my questions or complaints, to the news of our mother’s illness, to anything specific.

  “Ambrose, did you get any of my letters?”

  “The pig said I could read them when I stopped trying to tear his eyes out,” he said, quiet and harsh. “And then he said it could be when I stopped trying to rip a hole in these walls with my fingernails. And then it was to be when I chose to eat again, as he hated the mess of forcing me. And then it was to be when I licked his boots. And then it was to be when I would lick . . . whatever he wished to be licked. Always another condition. So no. But I always appreciated the intrinsic heat of paper and ink. You see, he would burn them a centimetre or two from my hands or my eyes or whatever he chose that day. But always”—one small, shaking breath—“I recognized your hand, Ani. I knew you had—”

  He slammed the back of his head to the wall, jaw clenched, nostrils flaring. He might have been formed of that very granite.

  So he knew nothing of Mama or our struggles at Montclaire or how sorely he was missed. Pognole had likely told him every kind of lie. Ambrose wouldn’t have believed him, but in the absence of any alternative, the lies would have eaten at him. So long not knowing.

  “You have been in my thoughts every day, brother. Every single day.” I propelled each word across the chamber with the force of a mangonel slinging stones. “Only fourteen days ago was I brought to Castelle Escalon, where I at last found an advocate. I’ve so much to tell you. We’ve only a few hours.”

  A heavy breath slipped his tight lips. “He’s not found, then.”

  Of course Papa would be foremost in his mind. Ambrose could not be free until Papa was arrested, if even then. And angels’ mercy, that was not the hardest thing I had to tell. “No.”

  “But you’re not held? Nor Mama nor Lianelle?”

  “No. But I have to tell you what’s happened to them. . . .”

  Perhaps it would have been more merciful to keep the news from him. Yet he deserved honesty, and whatever lie I told gave Pognole another weapon for torment. Perhaps anger might give him something to hold on to, something to live for, even if it was hollow vengeance.

  But his hands did not so much as twitch. His face did not sag or twist or reflect the slightest pain. His silence frightened me. It felt as if I’d murdered what splinters of him remained.

  It did not ease matters that the warder’s boots rang on the stair just then, and a mocking command accompanied the rattle of keys. “Discipline, prisoner!”

  Ambrose flushed, closing his eyes.

  As he spun face to the wall, I moved to one of the window slots. At least sixty metres of polished granite lay between the barred opening and the cruel rocks below. The city sprawled along the riverbank and bluffs, barely visible through the afternoon haze. The caravel in the harbor might have been a toy ship.

  A groan of iron hinges, and the warder sauntered in, swinging a wineskin. “Here you are, damoselle. As promised. Are you two getting on? Remember, I don’t reward misbehavior.”

  “My brother was always ill behaved, Warder. Wild. Stubborn. Your results are impressive.” I snatched the wineskin from his fingers. “Now you may leave us. I’ve estate business to discuss . . . vineyards, tenants, my marriage portion. In a few days I’ll be sending a lawyer with documents for him to sign. It’s why the queen agreed to send me. I’d not waste your time with such tedium.”

  I doubted Pognole was fooled, but at least he didn’t argue. And when I called after him to request a lamp, as the days were getting shorter, and it would be unseemly for a queen’s maid of honor to be closeted in the dark with an unmarried man, even a kinsman, he grumbled but set a blazing torch in the bracket outside the door.

  Having no illusion that we were left unsupervised, I moved to the pallet and smoothed the filthy, rumpled blanket as if it were Eugenie’s silk sheets. I sat back to the wall, skirts spread modestly over my knees, which I’d drawn up in front of me. “Come sit beside me. I’ve brought you a book.”

  “He won’t allow them, Ani. As soon as you’ve gone—”

  “You could study it now. It would give you something new to think on.” I propped the rare folio of river birds on my knees and leafed through the wide, expensive pa
ges. Expanses of unmarked space set off the short descriptions and delicate sketches. Shielded from the open door grate, where only Ambrose could see, I produced a stick of plummet from my pocket. “It’s important to make good use of time.”

  The man’s eyes met mine for the first time. Nowhere in those deep, cold layers of despair could I find the bright youth I had known. He joined me on the pallet, though maintaining a solid distance between us. I could understand his need to keep his armor intact. I would have enslaved my soul to Dimios himself to have some hope to offer.

  “I thought you might have an opportunity to observe these birds while you were here and record the sightings to keep the family records complete. I’ve left a fresh supply of ink and paper with the warder, and I’m sure he’ll allow you to have them. Now I’m resident in Merona, a member of the queen’s household, I’ll be checking up on you more often.”

  Or so I hope and pray, I wrote above a hoopoe’s beak, angling the book where he could see.

  Thus I continued for two hours, speaking of birds, Montclaire’s grape harvest, and court life, while filling the pages with what I knew of Lianelle’s murder, Mama’s illness, the Gautieri books, and the strangeness in the city that everyone linked to Papa’s sorcerers. I regaled Ambrose with details of my “honored” position as the king’s gooddaughter and queen’s maid of honor, but at the same time sketched out the cipher that was Duplais, and the circumstances of Lady Cecile’s murder and Antonia’s complicity, and I affirmed his suspicions of the hooded mage who had visited Montclaire.

  Dante, I wrote. All of these events are connected, and they all come back to this Dante. At the trial they said the conspirators’ purpose is chaos severe enough to topple the king. But there must be more. Why else manipulate the queen? She has little actual power.

  When I came to the tale of Lianelle’s magic trinkets and my certainty of Papa’s innocence and captivity, I would have sworn my brother stopped breathing.