Broken Mirrors

by A. F. Dery

  He barely took them in, working instead on keeping his stride steady and purposeful when his eyes were beginning to water at his brightly day-lit surroundings and his head was now pounding in time to his footfalls.

  At length Thane ducked through the door into the kitchen. It was a massive, sprawling conglomeration of flagged and cobbled stone, and to Cook’s unfailing pride and the consternation of his aching head, every one of those stones somehow managed to shine. There were pots and bowls on every conceivable surface, and bundles of herbs hanging from the ceiling around the perimeter of the room. A thick bundle of sage almost smacked him in the face as he entered. Servants bustled in nonstop motion, not even appearing to take notice of him, or more terrified of earning Cook’s displeasure than his. He would not have been surprised if this were the case.

  Cook herself, a tall, big-boned woman well into middle age with graying brown hair pinned tightly up and tucked under a white cap to match her apron, stood with all the presence of the High Lord in the midst of the proceedings. Her keen eyes took in everything, and her tongue was as perpetually in motion as the kitchen servants, driving them on. Between that continuous monologue and the normal clatter of pots and pans, Thane thought the place to be quite a fair match to any battlefield he’d fought on when it came to his survival.

  “Best turn that hare, if it scorches you’ll be the one on the spit next,” Cook hissed to one hapless maidservant. She then spun as though mysteriously sensing some disruption on the smooth running of her domain, mouth already opened to rebuke the intruder before she quickly snapped it shut, stiffening a moment before dropping into what Thane was certain was supposed to be a curtsy. “My lord! Dear me! I am so sorry!” The woman’s face reddened, a normal sight in her anger but Thane had a suspicion that it was not anger turning it that tomato hue now. Graunt had told him long ago that Cook would have been ecstatic to be the next Lady Eladria, even with his obvious deficiencies. The thought filled him with embarrassment. It was not uncommon in his country for the reigning lord to take whoever they wished to wife, whether commoner or noble. Even diplomatic marriages were unusual, which was not all that surprising when one considered the typical Eladrian xenophobia that had been the punchline of many a joke in the High Lord’s court. He could not begin to grasp what Cook’s interest in him would be, though, apart from the obvious promotion she’d receive from such a marriage.

  Thane answered Cook’s greeting with a polite nod of his head, instantly regretting it as pain flared afresh in the base of his skull. He tried to curve his lips slightly in what he privately called his “court smile,” which very carefully showed no teeth. He had spent a rather humiliating amount of time perfecting it in his younger years.

  “Good day to you, Cook,” he murmured politely. “I was hoping for a word?”

  “Of course, my lord!” Cook said, smiling a little too widely. “That girl told me you’d be coming.”

  Thane lifted a brow. “So she can follow instructions? Remarkable.”

  Cook’s red hue deepened and she suddenly scowled. “Usually she follows them a little too well, actually, my lord,” she said in conspiratorial tones. “But let us go into the dining room if you wish, my lord, so we can speak without this rabble about.”

  Thane gave another, far more subdued, nod and followed her through a set of doors into the smaller of the two dining rooms in the Keep. This one was supposed to be for what was termed “family dining,” featuring seating for merely 16. The rows of empty chairs seemed to mock his failure at domestic entanglements and he barely suppressed an answering scowl at them.

  Like every room of the Keep, the kitchen included, this one was a study in stone, but the heavy carpets, long since faded into a uniform pale gray that matched the floor beneath, muffled the sound of their steps and the walls were covered with family portraits. These were stiffly posed affairs of relatives that were long dead before his time. They smiled uncomfortably from within their heavy gilt frames, most of them red-haired, all of them large, and none of them deformed.

  Sensing his own losing battle with his scowl, he took a deep breath and turned his attention back to Cook. She was looking around the room and wringing her hands.

  “Oh, ought I have a fire laid, my lord? There is such a chill in the air. I ought to have thought of it a’fore you came,” she said, sounding annoyed.

  “No, no, it’s fine, this will not take long, Cook,” he said. He had not even noticed the cold. It was a rare day when he did. “I wanted to speak with you about the servant who brought my tea this morning. The first time, I mean.”

  Cook stared at him expectantly. He cleared his throat slightly and continued, “Well, what exactly was she doing there? I thought my feelings were clear on this subject.” His voice remained quiet but Cook still paled. Of course he had been clear. There were only certain servants who attended him in his private chambers. He was a creature of routine, and those who were accustomed to his face tended not to react so much to it. It was nice not to be gawped at like a beast on display in his own home. He could hardly help it elsewhere.

  “M-my lord,” Cook said at last, “I do know your feelings and I am most sorry for the intrusion. I will of course dismiss the girl-”

  “Why?” he interrupted. “You sent her to me, did you not? Would you have retained her if she’d refused your order?”

  Cook went paler still. “It is only that, my lord, well, I have been trying to get that girl out of this house,” she said feebly. Again he raised his eyebrow and she hastened on, “We had to hire her for want of any other help when the ague passed through, only now, well, there’s no easy way to cut this foreigner loose.. We’re none of us comfortable with her about. I was at my wits’ end.” She paused a moment, flustered under his scrutiny. “But I ought to have found another way that would not disturb his Lordship, I was not thinking aright. I am so very sorry, my lord, it will not happen again.”

  “It is not like you to think, er, a’wrong,” Thane observed. Cook made a choking noise that might have been a laugh.

  “No indeed, my lord. The chit made me that mad, and I don’t lie.”

  He tried to look sympathetic, or rather, the way he imagined people probably looked when showing sympathy, which involved somehow squinching his eyebrows and down-turning the corners of his mangled mouth just a bit. He was out of his depth on this one and Cook’s quickly suppressed shudder was all the proof of that he needed. However, his effort was still rewarded with the desired effect.

  “Every day, my lord, that girl comes into my kitchen for her orders knowing plain well how we all feel about her,” Cook said in a rush. “I’m beginning to feel as though she just shows up to irritate me, to see how long she can malinger here. Well, I won’t be made sport of by some little foreign upstart!”

  Thane sacrificed a sage nod. “But she is satisfactory in the completion of her duties?”

  “She does what I tell her, yes.” Reluctance was written in every line of the woman’s face.

  “She does it well?” Thane pressed.

  “Well enough.”

  “And so you had to resort to defying your lord to be rid of her?”

  Cook looked away from him, suddenly nervous. “As I said, my lord, I was not thinking aright,” she said meekly.

  “Clearly not,” he said, his voice staying quiet. Cook shifted her weight from one side to the other, now intently studying one edge of the old carpet.

  “You surely did not think I would take care of your little foreign problem for you?” he continued. He saw by the sudden return of the redness in her cheeks that yes, she had expected exactly that, but she stammered a barely coherent protest. “I enforce the laws of our people, Cook, and under law, this girl, however objectionable to you in temperament, has done nothing, but you have conspired to kill her, is it not so? And to lure your lord into such an unjust act on our behalf, knowing so well my frailty.” As if to remind her of this, he tapped two fingers lightly against the side of his skull. It was laughabl
e to use a word like “frailty” in relation to his immense hulking self and he knew it, but he also knew Cook was far from laughing at the moment.

  “Not kill her, my lord, only put her out,” Cook insisted pleadingly. Her hand-wringing had taken on a frantic character. “You know she’d never be here if not for that ague. It is a disgrace to have an alien working here when there is no longer need of her. There are kinsmen looking for work who would be better served.”

  “The law,” was all he said. Cook swallowed hard. Dread her lord may be, but not unjust. Never that. After a long moment of tense silence, he continued gently, “Now that she has been hired, whatever the reason behind that, she cannot be dismissed without just cause. I am not to see her in my chambers again unless I request for her to be there, nor any other I have not approved. Moreover, since she is an alien to whom you have raised objection, Cook, I would have her watched carefully for now.” She looked up at him suddenly, saucer-eyed with surprise. He shrugged one shoulder. “It is a precaution. Perhaps you are not amiss in your suspicion of her. We will soon know.”

  “Oh thank you, my lord,” Cook said, and though her gratitude seemed sincere, it was also subdued, a certain wariness in her eyes.

  “I will give you the honor of telling your second of her promotion and my orders,” Thane said casually. He had not thought it possible for her eyes to further widen, but widen they did as she blanched. He added, “The penalty for what you’ve tried to do is actually quite a bit steeper, but as I completely understand your sentiments where this particular servant is concerned, I am inclined to leniency.”

  By the look on Cook’s face now, Thane thought he’d probably just lost his only marriage prospect.

  The afternoon passed as many of Thane’s afternoons did. He trained with his men, gritting his teeth against the pain that continued to pound away in his head. He met with his adviser about the revenues and taxes from Eladria’s many mines, gritting his teeth against the pain pounding away in his common sense.

  Usually, his headaches only improved with the passage of time, but by the time dusk fell, but he could not even face his dinner tray and retired early to a pitch-black bedchamber, knotting his hands in the sheets until his knuckles cracked. He buried his face in the pillows and prayed with silently moving lips to gods he was not sure believed in him.

  On the other side of the Keep, a young Ytaren woman was slapped awake in the servants’ quarters by a scowling maidservant. “Will you cut out that bleedin’ noise?” she hissed curtly. Kesara pressed a hand to that much abused side of her face, thinking resentfully that the other woman could have struck the uninjured side at the very least. She felt destined to hear her nose or cheekbone snap one of these days.

  “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, blinking into the darkness. As usual, her night vision left something to be desired, and the communal chamber was only lit by a small fire. A small fire that was located on exactly the opposite side of the room, of course. Kesara felt little besides cold draft where she lay on her narrow cot.

  The maidservant huffed off to the other side of the room to her own cot without deigning to reply and Kesara pushed herself up on her elbows. She could not recall making any noise, but then, she had been asleep. It did not take a greater intelligence than her own to discern what must have been the culprit.

  She could feel that thick, heavy pain reaching for her from wherever the Dread Lord slumbered. It had only grown stronger as the night wore on, and like spilt treacle sliding slowly across a kitchen floor, it had begun gradually to tease and prod at her senses now even from a distance, wearing its own ponderous path through the ordinary aches and discomforts of the living that surrounded her. Now that she had touched it, it would not leave her be until it was spent. She could only imagine the torment Lord Eladria must be enduring.

  Of course, given what she was, her imagination on this point was probably giving his suffering more credit than it was actually due. When Kesara thought of “pain,” she recalled those things that managed to splinter her own self control, the pain of battlefields, sundered limbs and surgeries that stank of blood and sweat and the cheaply made spirits that the healers used on the field to quieten their patients’ screams, spirits that in household application were used for stripping unwanted varnish from metal.

  But the burning did make it harder to scream. Of that much, she was sure.

  She wondered if she had been screaming before she’d been so rudely awakened. Her throat felt dry, but she couldn’t now remember what she had been dreaming. Or if she’d been dreaming at all. She pushed at the distant pain that taunted her, tried to close herself off to it, forget about it, ignore it.

  But she was made for it, and having tasted it, every fiber of her being hungered to take all the rest, as uncomfortable it would be. It was not unlike the first meal after recovering from a bout of illness that prohibited eating, with one’s stomach growling for food even as it threatened ominously to reject every bite at any moment.

  Yet still, something inside her growled for it and her thoughts stubbornly kept returning to it, no matter what else she attempted to think of.

  Cook’s demotion, for example, she thought to herself, settling back against her pillow. Now Cook was Eva, and there was a new Cook, formerly Eva’s second, Camille.

  It had been an astonishing sight, or so she heard, for she had not been present at the actual demoting. She had been relegated to one of the never-used back parlors after her return from Lord Eladria’s tower rooms to scrub uselessly at the stone floor, as she did nearly every day since the ague had ended. Cook had reacted to the sight of Kesara’s bruised face with a slight but unmistakable smirk and sent her on her way without a moment’s pause.

  Later on, Kesara had overheard two of her fellow servants chattering in amazement about the events that had followed: the Dread Lord’s visit to the kitchen, his subsequent private conversation with Cook in the adjoining dining room (which, regrettably, none of them had heard- no one dared attempt to eavesdrop on such intimidating figures as either Lord Eladria or Cook made), then Cook returning ashen-faced and stunned to the kitchen to stammer out that Camille was now to be Cook and she, Eva, would take Camille’s place as second and teach her what she needed to know.

  Then Eva had apparently requested an hour’s respite from the new Cook in hushed- but this time, overheard- tones, only to be answered with a cold, “Not when there’s work to be done...unless you are ready to leave this ‘rabble.’”

  It was all the other kitchen servants could talk about, not even bothering to hide their words from the foreign girl’s ears as they normally would. Their few idle moments were filled with speculation as to what could have caused such a thing. Never in their lifetimes had a Cook ever been deposed. Despite the universally known order that Kesara attend the Dread Lord with his tea tray that morning (was it only that morning? For it felt now like it had transpired months ago!), no one seemed to ascribe to her enough importance to have been the cause of it.

  And never would Kesara have been able to predict such a turn of events herself. She could not help but feel like perhaps it had something to do with her, however dismissive her fellow servants were of her.

  Though the “why” of that remained as much a mystery to her as it would be to them, had they considered it. She knew better than to think she would ever be preferred by an Eladrian over one of his kinsmen, but Eva-formerly-Cook must have done something. And against all odds and all sense, Kesara had not lost her position, and the new Cook treated her with a certain wariness that only reinforced Kesara’s sense of suspicion that this was, indeed, related to her experience earlier that day. Perhaps the timing was merely coincidental, she thought, and it truly had nothing to do with her, but clearly, she was not the only one to consider that it may have been otherwise.

  It was a troubling thought, one that only steeped her in confusion. Kesara stared unseeing into the dimness of the room, wondering what it all meant and if she ought to flee the Keep. Something insi
de her was tired of running. She had expected when she arrived here to die in menial servitude, safe from her demons, but unmourned. She was no fool. She had known of the Eladrians’ attitude towards foreigners before she ever crossed the border, but where better to hide until it was all over?

  For the first time since she’d stepped over the Keep’s threshold and had passed that uncomfortable interview with the former Cook, she was starting to feel unsafe again. It was not the blades and barbs of the Eladrians that she feared, but the part of herself that she was beginning to fear could not be outrun. The part that even now gnawed and groaned and worried at her, bombarding her with the memory of anguished brown eyes and pain as slow and thick and heavy as cold honey.

  CHAPTER TWO

  When Lady Margaret Malachi woke early that morning, it was to the sound of a horse's legs snapping. Not many would have recognized the sound for precisely what it was, but she had occasion to know it well. She lurched ponderously from her bed with a hand pressed to the small of her back. She was only just halfway along with her first child, but already she seemed vast, her belly visibly round and her lower back protesting the change in equilibrium heartily. She rubbed her other hand over her heart-shaped face, once roses-and-cream and now merely cream, as the occupant of that protruding belly joined the protest. She felt as though her entire body had been beaten, her bones heavy and aching.

  "Easy, little lad," she murmured with a fond pat to the hoped-for son she carried as she moved clumsily to the bay window, trying her best to ignore the uneasy lurching of her belly and the aching of her limbs. She pushed aside the heavy rose-colored velvet curtain, bent one knee carefully at the seat built into the wall just under the sill and swung the glass door open, poking her head out carefully.

  As she expected, not far off to her left, just past the flower garden that she herself had dug and planted, were the glittering remains of one of her husband's horses, with the man himself bent over them, studying them with a critical eye that was magnified by a glass monocle that glinted in the morning sun.