The Soul Mirror

by Carol Berg

  I kneaded my right hand where I could yet sense the brush of his beard. An apparition . . . a phantom . . . conversing, gesturing, thinking, reacting like a human person. Impossible.

  Duplais had to know what I had seen. I’d tie a love knot to my window. But what was I to do between now and sunset? Idleness would drive me mad.

  Ella brought cheese and baked apples. As I dressed and ate—checking my ring, holy saints, always checking my ring—I tried to devise some strategy for the day. I had an hour until I would be expected in the queen’s bedchamber. If I could get my hands on the Mondragon Book of Greater Rites and find out what magical working required raising the dead, perhaps we’d know what Dante and the Aspirant planned. I could use the potion, steal the book from Dante’s room. But I’d need Duplais to help decipher its meaning.

  Perhaps I had time to learn something of nireals. Shoving the remains of breakfast aside, I pulled the two pendants from the armoire. Though the same highly polished silver as Dante’s palm-sized spheres, they were but solid, flat ovals the size of my thumb. They bore no markings save the frog on Lianelle’s and the olive tree on the unbound one she had made for me. Soul mirrors, she’d called them. There was only one way to learn more.

  Barricading the rising mindstorm, I grasped the pendant my sister had named hers and invoked its key. “Soror deliria.” Silly sister.

  And she was there. As if she had run past me only a moment before. As if I might glimpse her through the sun glare did I turn my head quickly enough. So close . . .

  Heat and blazing Aubine sunlight, blinding swaths of gold and green and rich brown, scorching hair and blistering skin. She’d been traipsing through the maquis . . . the fragrant oils of juniper and madder, smilax and sagewort hung sticky on her clothes . . . and the smell of dog. She never went anywhere without the dogs . . . wrestled with them in the grass . . . napped with them in the heat of the day. The dry ground crunched beneath her boots as she ran. . . .

  Saints, Nel, do you never walk anywhere?

  Whistling at woodchats. Yelling at the shrike to scare it off the particular lizard she was hunting. Forever hunting, for herbs or insects, for leaves or roots or arrow grass, for pebbles or eggs or carob buds on the verge of bursting, for bits of glass or bark, for a cloud shape, for a raindrop, a scent, a nut, for sand or clay or green stones . . . Insatiable. All to feed her magic.

  For a moment, I felt as if I were falling . . .

  . . . and then did the immensity of my sister’s desire rattle my bones, like the substance of the earth rising through my feet . . . and then her talent, forked fire touching every piece of the life she loved—the natural world, learning, adventure, Ambrose, Mama, me—and binding it with laughter and rebellion and teasing and the vow never, ever to stop, to hide, to be quiet, to stay in one place, to serve, to forgive, to be satisfied, to hold back, to fail, to be ordinary . . .

  . . . and then I felt words, not spoken in the present moment, as my mysterious friend did, but waiting for me in this magic to be graven in my spirit for now and forever. . . .

  Don’t be scared of this, Ani. I want you to understand. We’re not the same and that’s good. Magic is my calling. War and poetry and prison will drive and shape Ambrose. But you are our true warrior, our defender. Your mind and heart are our bright center . . . our fortress . . . our home.

  I dropped the pendant. Bent double, I clutched my breast, racked by dry, barren sobs. How could talent and life so large fit in one single heart? And how could it all be snuffed out? For all these years, even before Papa rode away, before Mama went mad, I had chided and scolded Lianelle because she was not some imitation of me. Someone polite and tidy and reserved. Someone ordinary. “I never knew, Nel. Never understood. And I’m not what you thought. I’ve lost you and lost Ambrose and failed. . . .”

  A sharp rap on my bedchamber door wrenched me from grief and regret and deposited me alone in my bedchamber.

  I blinked, fist clutching at the hurt in my breast, stunned by the incomparable wonder and undeniable terror of the pendant’s magic. Lianelle had been present in a manner far more deep and true than memory, more substantial than the person just beyond that door. And Dante had created something similar that he used to summon the dead. Was that why they seemed so real?

  The visitor rapped again.

  “Yes, all right. Coming.” I pinched my cheeks and pressed my temples. The turgid gray beyond my window had taken on a rosy cast.

  “Heurot!”

  Duplais’ yellow-haired secretary, lacking his usual grin, bowed and passed me a folded paper, sealed without any device. “This was left at the main gates day before yesterday, damoselle. The gate warders sent it to Sonjeur de Duplais, as that had been their standing orders. But my master was out most of yesterday, and now he says you’ve been raised up in the household and his mandate did not allow what was the rule before. He begs your pardon for the delay.”

  “Yes, all right. Thank you.” I hurried him out and wasted no time breaking the unadorned seal. No signature. An unfamiliar hand.

  Damoselle, I’ve business with you in reference to our last meeting. As a result of your timely message, I’m off to foreign parts, thus my visit to Merona will be brief. I’ll watch for you outside the postern at sunrise three days running. I sincerely hope this finds you, as this time I’ve no assistance to get your name correct.

  A riddle. But from whom? I dared not bite without knowing.

  Ambrose would not dare come here, even using someone else to write the message. The grammar was not Bernard’s, and Melusina did not write. The writer referred to a timely message . . .

  Adept Guerin! I’d sent Lianelle’s instructor a warning about the dark deeds at Collegia Seravain. He was here in Merona, and the third sunrise was not a quarter of an hour away.

  “Heurot, wait!”

  Saints be thanked, the youth had dawdled outside my door. He leaned on the passage wall, laughing with Ella and another serving girl. But he popped to immediate attention, while the girls melted into adjoining bedchambers.

  “Take a message to your master. His interruption of my post and messages has been despicable. He must notify the stewards and the castellan immediately that I must be accorded the respect and privacy due Her Majesty’s ladies. But first he must inform Lady Eleanor that my chambermaid has spilled ink on my day gown, thus I shall be two hours late to the queen this morning. While I see to Ella and her laundering, I’ll respond to this horribly delayed message.”

  “As you say, my . . . uh . . . damoselle.” Heurot’s good manners handled shock and a bit of confusion well. He bowed and retreated, while stealing glances at my unsullied skirts.

  I disliked blaming Ella for an untruth, but Lady Eleanor, on duty in the bedchamber before dawn, would approve such an excuse for my lateness. The dull, excessively proper ducessa viewed the need to discipline servants as a divine mandate.

  I darted back to my room just long enough to return the nireals to the drawer and dig out my zahkri. Blessed Melusina insisted on sewing a fitchet into my every skirt and petticoat. Strapping the Cazar knife to my thigh behind the hidden knife slit, I set out for my dawn assignation.

  CHAPTER 27

  23 OCET, DAWN

  The postern was far busier in the dawn hour than were Castelle Escalon’s main gates. Coal wagons, farm carts, boys wheeling barrows, and girls herding pigs passed in and out of the narrow gatehouse in a steady stream. Scullery maids and sweeping girls pinned on caps as they ran or yelled at the guards to let them by before milady or the chamberlain sacked them. A broad-chested understeward haggled acrimoniously with a fishmonger over the night’s catch. A tinker had set up a booth and was banging on a dented cauldron, while acrid smoke bellied up from his stove, further graying the murky morning.

  Frustrated, I scanned the crowd from the shelter of the wicket gate, seeing no sign of the boyish adept. With the pain of Lianelle’s death so fresh in mind, I was in a frenzy to know what Guerin had come to tell me. If he was trul
y leaving Sabria as a result of my warning, I might never hear.

  A fellow ambling alongside a coal wagon broke off when the wagon rolled to a stop at the guard post. He strolled around behind the tinker’s booth and vanished. Curiously, he emerged back down the road and tagged on to another party. His dark green jerkin, leather breeches, and worn rucksack were wholly ordinary. But surely this was the third time he’d done the same.

  I drew a gray shawl over my hair and strolled out of the wicket, setting a course to intercept the man as he approached the tinker’s booth again. Fair hair peeked out from his broad-brimmed felt hat.

  “Divine grace, sonjeur,” I said, matching my pace to his. “We’ve business, I think.”

  The young man puffed a relieved breath. “Blessed angels, damoselle. I was about to give up.”

  “Palace confusion delayed your message. You’ve abandoned Collegia Seravain?”

  “Can we get out of the way?” he said, his eyes darting hither and yon. “For sure someone’ll notice if I go round again. Skin’s been crawling since Tigano.”

  “Follow me up the path behind the sheep sheds,” I said. “I know a place.”

  I kept a businesslike pace, skirting the animal pens and coal stores that sprawled along the road, then angling across the rocky slope toward the ridge top. Guerin strolled along behind like a shop clerk taking the morning air.

  Ambrose and Lianelle and I had often played adventurers or chase-and-hide on the ridge behind Castelle Escalon. I knew every crevice in the rocks, most particularly the steep stair someone had hacked out of a fissure. Almost obliterated from centuries of rain and rockfalls, the narrow steps led to the highest point on Merona’s toothy spine.

  Long before the Sabrian kings built Castelle Escalon, a watchtower had stood atop these crags of slate and granite. Little remained of it. A weedy clearing tucked amid great slabs and boulders. An arc of its west-facing foundation that jutted from the height like a scrap of jawbone. A few rough-dressed blocks scattered in the apron of slabs and boulders that spilled all the way from the foundation arc to the flatter shoulder of the ridge where the palace stood. It was as if a god had sent a bolt of lightning purposely to shatter the tower and erase all memory of it.

  “I didn’t want to believe your warning,” said Guerin, huffing a little at the climb. “Seravain has been my home since I was seven. The thought that such evil had taken root there . . . My head just wouldn’t accept it. Yet since the day your sister died, I’d noticed odd things. My room out of order. Notes disturbed. Eyes looking away too quickly. I told myself it was just students. Rumors spread like maggots in a collegia.”

  We sat on a slab at the head of the steep rockfall and propped our backs on the foundation stones. On a finer morning the prospect—the sprawling city falling away to the broad river and its crescent harbor—would enrich the soul. But on this gray day the river had swollen into a sea of cloud. At the base of the rocky jumble below us the treeless waste we had just traversed sloped gently down to the sheep pens and the postern road.

  Guerin offered me a biscuit, pulled from a shabby rucksack. I shook my head. The last bells had rung half past the hour.

  He talked between ravenous bites. “I looked into the things you wrote me about Ophelie de Marangel: her years of failure, the abrupt change, her sudden isolation, her illness and disappearance. It was all there in the archives, as you said. Blessed light . . . blood transference, torture, murder happening right under everyone’s noses. I was only a student at the time, self-absorbed as we all were. But how many ignored the signs of her trouble ? If you’re even half attentive to your students, you’d notice something like that. And now Lianelle . . . I’ve tried to think what she might have been about that last morning.”

  “In her letter, the one you gave me, she said she had set events in motion.”

  He nodded. “The enchantment that killed her was her own; I told you that before. But there was no evidence she’d worked the spell in the ravine. So where had she done it? She frequently practiced spellwork outside supervision. I never reported it, because the mages did seem to be holding her back unfairly, and she swore to me the work was merely uncanonical magic—spells that fail to adhere to the Encyclopaedia of Workable Formulae—not illicit in the way of blood transference or such. Being a self-righteous ass, I never let her tell me where she did it. She’d never have worked on something dangerous in the dormitory or any of the student laboratoriums, where she might have harmed someone else.”

  He rummaged in his rucksack, setting aside books and papers, a shirt, a scarf. His words flowed on, as if he’d held in his thoughts for much too long. “After a day wasted searching every laboratorium where she might have had some privacy, I remembered something she had told me about the day Savin-Duplais, the librarian, questioned her about Ophelie. She’d said her nerves had near fractured when he’d hauled her off to one of her favorite places for his interview—an overgrown pergola in the outer gardens. Sure enough, tucked away under a bench in that old pergola, I found nitre powder, oil of vitriol, and sulfur—which would certainly fuel an explosion—and I found this.”

  He pulled out a grimy canvas bag and dumped its contents into my lap. Flint and steel, bound together with wire. A lock of hair, the sun-scalded brown curls unmistakably Lianelle’s. Five silver finger rings of various sizes. Three keys dangling from a loop of leather. The skull of a small rodent—a mouse or a vole. A jumble of nonsense, it appeared.

  He picked out a tightly rolled bit of paper, tied with a ribbon, and gave it to me. Unrolling the scuffed little scrap revealed a neatly written message.

  Unable to walk out with you this evening. It is wholly improper, no matter my “heart’s bidding,” as you so cheekily put it. No matter that we could talk solely of schoolwork. Pass your adept’s examination, milady, and you may spy a familiar face among the hordes of moonstruck swains at your feet. Until then, I must be your teacher only, and must—and shall—heed my duty to that office.

  Grief aged Guerin’s face twenty years as he watched me read the message, leaving me no need to compare the handwriting to the note in my pocket, or to ask why my unsentimental little sister had cherished it. Plenty of other questions remained, however.

  “Why would she keep something she treasured . . . or any of these oddments . . . alongside the makings for an explosion?” Heed both mind and heart to understand, she’d told me in her letter.

  “I believe them to be particles,” he said, clearing a roughness in his throat, “objects we use to supply the appropriate proportions of the five divine elements needed for spellwork—air, water, spark, base metal, and wood. As to why this paper, I believe—you have to understand this is a heretical suggestion, and I’ve no idea how one might accomplish such a thing—influencing a person’s mind without using the senses. But I believe she wanted me to find her.” His fingers toyed with the paper, then rerolled it so tightly, it appeared no more than a straw. “Somehow, she wove me into her enchantment. Enough to draw me to her. She knew I would consent; a participant’s consent makes spellwork stronger. All that day, I knew she was in trouble. I just couldn’t leave my younger students unsupervised to hare off after her. Why didn’t she tell me what she was afraid of? Why didn’t she just ask me to help?”

  He waved off his pain, contorting his face with the effort. “It makes no difference. I found her, as she wanted. Walked straight down to the ravine as if she’d left me a signpost. Only too late.”

  But now he’d set me on the path, I caught a glimmer of my sister’s purpose. “She’d no intention of risking your life. She understood how honor and duty would shape your reaction to this . . . disturbance . . . she caused you. Your note says it all: You’d heed your responsibilities first. As certain as I can be of anything in this world, Guerin, she was deliberate about the events of that morning.”

  The nireal’s vision had taught me that. Magic was not whimsy to my sister. Not a childish fancy to be outgrown. “So, what do these other things tell us?�
�

  “The skull implies she was working a spell of mortal consequence. The particular mix of air and wood that makes up bone is said to bend a spell toward death, though I think it’s included as much to be a warning for the practitioner.”

  “Or a telltale for an observer,” I murmured. “A mortuis memore.”

  “Yes.” He touched the five little rings. “Silver contains all five of the divine elements—the wood, air, and spark needed for combustion, as well as base metal and water that might be needed to balance the spell’s formula to make it work. Though, truly, these particles don’t match any I know. Duplais could tell you more; no one knows the formulas for spellwork as he does. The flint and steel would supply additional base metal. The hair would bring water and wood to the balance—”

  “No.” Once I had studied even a smattering of alchemistry, the business of particles and divine elements and formulaic magic had never made sense to me. Wood and air were not component parts of silver. One look at a hair through an opticum lens revealed no water or wood. These bits and pieces shaped my sister’s magic into a story, just as the encrypted characters on the Mondragon book had shaped themselves into its title.

  “If your note designated the person she intended to find her,” I said, steeling myself against incipient dread, “then perhaps the lock of hair designated her intended victim.”

  He looked up sharply. “But it’s her hair!”

  “You told me there were no boot prints, no signs of anyone else around her. She made sure you would come and find her once she was dead.” I had thought that nothing about Lianelle’s passing could slash deeper than her loss, but this truth was laid out as stark as a grave stele. “You said it: Consent is everything. She worked this explosion apurpose.”