Broken Mirrors

by A. F. Dery

  “It does matter, though. I think..I think I’ve wronged you, in a way.” It came out as a whisper. Lord Eladria shook his head and opened his mouth but she quickly said, “No, please listen. You know that Mirrors...people like me...are sold for our bonding rights, but what you probably don’t know is that it is in our nature to bond with another person. It is a drive we have, like the need to eat or drink, breathe or sleep. I did not think it was possible, my lord, for such a thing to take place...well, accidentally. Normally we’re sold off well before it would be an issue, as soon as we reach full maturity. I’ve never heard of a Mirror as old as myself living unbonded. Then again, I’ve never heard of any of us successfully escaping that fate, either. But I think I’ve started, well, forming an attachment to you. It can’t be a full bond without an effort of will on my part and openness to me on yours, but the process, such as it is, has already started, though I promise you, I never meant for it to.” It was getting harder and harder to hold onto her own thoughts, she suddenly felt exhausted beyond belief.

  “And I take it this...process...can’t be stopped, or you wouldn’t be looking quite so upset,” Lord Eladria observed. He sounded calm and it bolstered her waning moment of courage.

  “No, what’s done can’t be undone, but it does not have to move forward any farther, either. It is just..well..it’s you or no one now. I had already planned on ‘no one’ when I left Ytar so it’s no hardship to me, but...I know it’s unfair to you, to put you in this position. I left for my own freedom, I never wanted to take away anyone else’s...” Again the tears threatened. She felt her cheeks warm with her embarrassment and looked down to her hands, still caught in his. Part of her hoped perversely he’d fly into a rage and end her misery.

  “Kes, I’m not sure I understand why you feel my freedom is threatened,” he said gently. She shut her suddenly aching eyes.

  “I worry that you’ll feel entrapped, and that’s not what I wanted. I didn’t even realize what was happening, though I suppose I should have known there’d be a risk of it when I started helping you...I just didn’t think of it. It didn’t seem so very bad at the time.” She shook her head, trying to clear it. She was just so tired.

  “Well, I’m not. I wanted you to stay, or I’d not have come after you, now would I?” Lord Eladria said bracingly. “And as you didn’t intend to bond with anyone anyway, it is not such a catastrophe as you seem to think, is it?”

  “What made you change your mind?” she asked in a small voice. When he did not answer immediately, she looked up at him again and was startled by the confusion on his face, which was almost like a grotesque caricature of the emotion on his deformed features.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Master Graegun said you let him take me, that you didn’t want the trouble...” her voice trailed off at the expression on his face. The only word she could think of to describe the sudden darkening of his features, the fierce flashing of his eyes was murderous and she flinched.

  “Kes, I let that filth do no such thing and I assure you, the only trouble I do not want I shall never have again,” he said tightly, his words closer to one long growl than intelligible speech. It took a moment for her brain to resolve the sounds into words, and another moment to understand the gist of them.

  “He’s...dead?”

  “Oh, yes,” Lord Eladria gave her a peculiar smile, lips tightly pressed together to show no hint of tooth. “Very much so.”

  Kesara in that moment felt both relief and foreboding. She somehow knew, without knowing just how she knew, that she did not really want the answers to the questions that teased now at the edges of her increasingly groggy mind. Yet, she couldn’t deny that she was tempted.

  “You didn’t have to do that-”

  “Oh yes, I did. I really did have to do that. No other choice, really. The man came into my Keep, stole a Mirror right off my wall, and tried to break her. Good gods, Kes, the things he had in that cabin...” he abruptly shut his mouth, apparently feeling that saying even that much had been too much. But he stared at her a moment more, his expression softening, the worry returning to his eyes. “Did he take you into the cabin, before we got there?” His voice was almost a whisper now and she couldn’t make out what emotion was behind it.

  She shook her head mutely and he sighed. “Thank the gods for that,” he muttered. “I’d thought not. You look too...” Again he sighed but he did not go on. With a sick feeling in her stomach, she suspected it was probably for the best that he had not.

  “So you’re not mad then?” she asked, trying to return him to the subject that was worrying away at her before she slept again, or again awakened- he was taking the news so well, her doubts were only increasing as to which it was.

  “Mad? Of course not, Kes. You said yourself it was accidental. Just...eh...does this change anything? Apart from your lack of future prospects, I mean? I would much rather just know up front.”

  She looked away. “Nothing changes for you, apart from what I’ve told you.”

  He let go of on of her hands and nudged her cheek to make her look at him again. “And you?”

  Kesara sighed. “I’m starving, and thirsty, and tired, and I can’t seem to get enough air...it is harder and harder to fight it. In...the other place...my dreams? My waking? I wasn’t even trying anymore, which makes it harder still to start trying again...”

  This appeared to surprise him. “You make it sound like this is something you want to do, but I thought you didn’t.”

  “I do and I don’t.” Now she couldn’t stifle her yawn. “It’s...complicated. On the one hand, it’s all I’ve ever wanted, and all I ever will. On the other? You don’t know what a cage it can be. I have seen it for myself. The people I grew up with...people I called ‘friend.’” Again she yawned.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” Lord Eladria told her. “And I do want to hear all about it. I only hope when you’re a little more lucid, you won’t clam up.”

  “You don’t mean to say you’re deliberately taking advantage of my less than fully functional state, my lord?” Kesara tried to raise an eyebrow but this was now nearly as taxing as shrugging.

  “Not deliberately,” he assured her. “But yes, I did take advantage. If you want, I’ll apologize, but I warn you right now that I won’t mean a word of it.”

  She tried not to smile, but as with so much in her life lately, her efforts were futile.

  Lord Eladria hesitated as he rose to his feet. “Can I leave now? Will you be all right? I have some things that need to be taken care of.”

  She blinked sleepily at him. “Of course, my lord. Why would you even ask?” But before she’d even finished speaking, she blearily recalled the distant sound of her own screaming. If she weren’t so exhausted, she was sure she would have been mortified. “Ah, never mind...I’m sorry...I’ll be fine, my lord.”

  “Call me Thane, won’t you, Kes...privately, at least. I don’t feel like the Dread Lord Eladria around you. More like a very confused and hopelessly ignorant man.” The resignation in his voice would have elicited another smile on any other day.

  She meant to ask him about such a curious name for a leader of a country, but words were beyond her, and a moment later, so too was all awareness. She slept without dreaming.

  The past week had been a version of hell Thane had never anticipated seeing in his lifetime. The last time he could remember feeling so frightened, he’d been a lad of fourteen on the eve of his first major battle, and only about half as tall as he was now. The single-minded purpose of finding Kesara had held his fears at bay, but when he and his men had finally tracked the pig-man down, he had been seized by a horror and a helplessness that were utterly new to him, as foreign to him as the pig-man himself.

  He almost hadn’t found her at all. He and his men had searched the cabin, the grounds, the surrounding woods. He had done things with his ax to the vile beast that had abducted her that would shame him, if his fury would only die down enough to allow
any truly human feelings to return when he thought of the monster. But even in the pig’s last agonizing moments before the fire hit what was left of him, he’d surrendered not a word of where his captive was.

  None of them had given more than passing notice to the root cellar, whose rough wooden door had been mostly obscured by the rough underbrush that sprouted up from between the stones in the ground, and from which had come no sound. He still wasn’t sure what had finally drawn his eye to it, on a last, desperate combing of the grounds for some sign of her, for anything. There were no clues, there was no trail, some signs of struggle near the door, then nothing. If he hadn’t seen that sliver of wood through the brambles that had grown there, if he hadn’t thought to check, neglected though it appeared...would she have suffocated first in that dark, filthy place, or would she have burned alive with the cabin and the monster who had taken here there?

  It was this sickening thought that haunted him almost as much as what came when he shoved aside the brambles, which scratched uselessly at gauntlet and armor, and wrested open the wooden door from where it was wedged in place- and barred from the outside with a small, makeshift metal pole. The image of the little Ytaren with bloody chewed up legs and feet and glassy staring eyes as she’d tumbled like a rag doll onto the dirt at his feet was seared into his mind with such force that he could still see it every time he closed his eyes, every time he blinked. He had been terrified that she was dead and equally terrified that she might have survived, especially after he’d seen inside of that cabin.

  It had taken him three days in total to track down the pig-man and his Ytaren captive; three days through treacherous terrain that no foreigner could have made their way through unaided. He couldn’t even say how many times he’d doubted the trail he’d seen with his own eyes, sure the pig-man could not have possibly known to go that way. Between that, the beast’s knowledge of the abandoned cabin, and the projectiles the pig-man had wielded in his escape- not just the fogger he’d thrown in the Great Hall, but an actual vial of poison gas as well he’d used in the outer courtyard- he had his answer about how Kesara had been found, though he still had no idea how the traitor had even known about her.

  He intended to find out, though. He had been trying to since the day he’d brought her back to the Keep, alternately praying and swearing every second of the trip. He’d been afraid she would bleed to death on the ride, jostled as she was on Sam, his war horse, even from where she lay in his arms. Sam was an immense roan beast known more for strength and fortitude than grace, and the field bandages Thane had used on her had soaked through within half an hour. His men would not have dreamed of questioning why he would have run the pig-man to earth, not after his audacity in the Great Hall, but he still had no idea what they made of his refusal to relinquish the Ytaren for even a moment once they’d recovered her. He’d held her as if the act would somehow hold her together until Graunt could substitute for his grip with needles and thread and what she passed off as porridge, if necessary.

  As it was, no porridge had been required, but the Ytaren was less two toes than she’d entered his Keep with, and if he could have brought the piggy bastard back and roasted him again, he would have in a heartbeat. If he had not been so afraid in decades, he had not been so angry in almost as many.

  Her revelation of becoming “attached” to him had come as no surprise. He’d known the moment he’d roared at Graunt when she’d first refused to do anything to relieve Kesara’s pain that he was somehow hopelessly bound to her. He neither wanted nor intended to look at it any more closely than that, perhaps it was some magic of her nature that she knew nothing of that had ensorcelled him, it didn’t matter anymore, if it ever had. She was not going anywhere unless she put it in writing first, and the next sentient pig to cross his border would be feeding his hungry kinsmen through the next long Eladrian winter.

  And if she wanted to be bound to him someday, he’d take whatever she was willing to give, if it meant he never had to know that shameful helplessness, that soul-bleeding fear he’d felt when he’d opened that cellar door ever again. He could live with the pain of his headaches, of any other bodily ailment, but that pain was not one he thought he could endure again and live.

  And he’d be damned if he was going to let the one who had brought it about go unpunished. He knew those projectiles because he had invented them and he knew exactly who he had shared them with.

  “Ah Edmund of Malachi, you’d better oil those tin dogs,” Thane muttered under his breath. “You’ve got bigger things to worry about now than rust and finding chocolates for your little wifeling.”

  How the bastard could have betrayed him, he’d never know. No, they were not speaking. No, they were not on terms that could rightly be called “amicable.” But enemies? He’d never thought of the man as his enemy. Crown prince of the idiots, perhaps. A pathetic cradle-robber, certainly. But an enemy?

  Thane’s mind spun as he walked. There had to be someone within the Keep working with him, unfathomable as the thought was to an Eladrian. How else would he have known about Kesara? She went nowhere, wrote no one. Only the other workers knew of her.

  Undoubtedly, however Malachi had learned of her existence, he’d underestimated her worth to Thane. Likely the man thought he would just let the Ytaren go, knowing Thane’s usual opinion of foreigners- the same as every other Eladrian’s. A pity he won’t be expecting the high cost of his dues, then. I shall be picking tin out of Sam’s teeth for a year, Thane mused with a slight, bitter smile.

  He threw open the door to his steward’s office without a word. The man leapt to his feet from behind his desk, bowing at once before studying his lord with startled eyes.

  “I need two of my fastest messengers,” Thane said. He tried to sound pleasant, but his blood was pounding in his ears, the more he considered the situation.

  “Of course, my lord, at once,” Darius said.

  Thane could see the confusion in the man’s eyes. “This isn’t normally your job, dealing with the messengers,” he observed.

  “No, my lord, but of course, I will do whatever you ask,” Darius said hastily. When Thane said nothing to this, he added another “my lord” for good measure.

  Thane sighed. “I’m afraid I am in the regrettable position of trying to find out who has been distributing information from within my keep for malicious purposes. I’ve known you since you were no taller than my knee is now, Darius. But if you’re a traitor, I’ll rip out your spine through your left nostril. Naturally I cannot vouch as to my accuracy with this. I have yet to be able to pull an entire vertebrae through a natural orifice that small, but Darius, I am willing to try. I believe perseverance is a character trait worth cultivating, don’t you?”

  The steward’s brown eyes were huge. “M-my lord...I would never...I could nev-”

  “Yes, yes, your objections are duly noted,” Thane interrupted. “And I don’t believe you are the traitor in our midst. That is why I am asking you to get me those messengers, whatever your usual obligations. Now.”

  Darius scrambled out the door, narrowly edging around his hulking lord, who stood immobile in the middle of the room, regarding the window overlooking the courtyard with watchful eyes.

  He would have to restart the judgment days soon, he realized, seeing that the throng milling outside was greater than it ought to have been at this time of day. Many had simply stayed, even at the expense of their work back home, rather than waste the expense of the trip, believing a favorable judgment would be worth the loss of income. And of course, though none of them ever would have admitted it, they all wanted to watch the shocking spectacle they had seen first unfold through to its conclusion. They wanted to see their Dread Lord triumph in justice over whoever had violated the sanctum of his hall and stolen a woman from under his nose, even if that woman was a foreigner.

  Thane had barely even registered their presence when he’d ridden back into the courtyard with Kesara in his arms, but he recalled vaguely that they had chee
red. He would have to tell her that sometime. She would be scandalized, knowing as she did the general Eladrian sentiment regarding outsiders of all kinds.

  But it had nothing to do with who she was, or where she was from, but that they had succeeded in finding her, brought her back alive and punished the one who had dared to cut through their defenses, something that any one of their number would have thought incomprehensible.

  And it should have been impossible. His men never would have been lax in their duties even if it meant defending an alien such as Kesara. It would have been a blight on their honor and an offense to their lord.

  No, there was a traitor, possibly more than one. The thought sickened him, so thoroughly contrary was it to all he believed to be true of his people. Someone working with Malachi, but who the hell would know Malachi?

  He heard noises in the hall and seated himself behind Darius’ desk with a sigh. No sooner had he managed to arrange long limbs in some semi-dignified position than Darius and two liveried messengers appeared, all seeming out of breath.

  Thane gave a nod of greeting to the two young men, which they returned with bows and murmured “my lords.” He recognized both of them, of course- he had relied on them without disappointment in the past.

  “Here you go, lads,” Thane said, drawing two sealed missives from the pouch at his waist. “This one goes to our dear neighbor to the southeast, Lord Malachi. You are to be discreet, but move with all possible speed. Depart in, say, 3 days’ time. Because this other is for the High Lord, and it must reach him first. Spare no trouble or expense, but no one else to be trusted.

  “And as for you, Darius...I have another task in mind for you.”

  Kesara woke, at some time far distant, with pounding heart and throbbing in her feet. The herbs she had been given before had clearly worn off; she felt nothing now so much as relief. She closed her eyes briefly, taking a mental inventory of her healing injuries, trying not to let her mind rest for too long on any one of them, nor stray to their origin at all, if she could help it. She felt a restlessness inside her, a gnawing sense of incompleteness, and she knew it was Thane. He had not yet returned.