Holding her breath, she grasped the heavy iron handle and turned it slowly. In the deathly silence the squeal of protesting metal rang out like thunder clap. Mistral cringed and quickly pushed the door open, stepping hastily inside and closing it behind her as softly as she could. Once inside, she leaned against it, listening hard. But apart from the pounding of her heart there was no other noise.
Mistral stood by the door, peering into the deep gloom of the cavernous Training Room, allowing her eyes to adjust to the heavy darkness. In the windowless room her candle cast only a frail glow as far as her arm reached, doing nothing to pierce the deep blackness that stretched out in every direction. Mistral started to walk to her left, the heavy padded floor swallowing any noise her feet made. As she walked she dragged her hand against the wall until it came into contact with what she was looking for. Quickly, she used the dying flame of her candle stub to light the torch mounted in a holder on the wall. It flared instantly to life, spreading a welcome halo of light into the room.
Mistral moved swiftly around the room, lighting each of the torches in turn until the huge room was filled with warm flickering light. Then she turned and padded back across to the mirrored wall. Settling herself cross-legged on the cushioned flooring in front of the vast mirror Mistral studied her torchlit reflection. It had been a while since she had looked at herself in a mirror for any length of time and was shocked by what she saw. Her eyes seemed huge in her gaunt face and were ringed with dark shadows. The exposed skin of her arms and ankles were a myriad of fresh and fading bruises, she didn’t care to look at the rest of her body to see what state that was in.
Mistral stared into her eyes in the mirror. They were the eyes of a stranger, cold and lifeless. She sighed and was almost surprised to see the stranger in the mirror copy her.
‘Oh well, best get on with the diagnosis, doctor,’ she murmured softly to herself, jumping at the sound of her own voice echoing around the huge empty room.
Mistral had only been in the room on a few occasions and then it had been filled with the noise of the apprentices training, their shouts and laughter and the ringing clash of weapons. Now it was eerily still with only the sound of her breathing and the occasional crackle of the torches to break the heavy silence.
Breathing slowly and deeply Mistral began to prepare to read her own aura. Usually, she could read auras with almost little or no effort but in recent weeks she hadn’t been able to see even a wisp of colour, so tonight she was going through the process almost as though Serenity was instructing her. She stared into her reflection’s eyes and began to methodically empty her mind of all thoughts, allowing her body to relax, forcing all of her focus into the eyes of the stranger in the mirror.
Nothing.
Not even a glimmer of a halo around her head.
Frustration welled up inside her, which she swiftly quelled. What was she thinking? Mistral knew she would never be able to see anything if she was distracted by negative emotions.
In a flash Mistral had the answer. That was the problem! She wasn’t thinking anything.
Feeling more hopeful she tried again, this time thinking of something simple, something that she knew how she felt about. The twins. Mistral called up an image of their faces in her mind and concentrated on her mirror image.
Slowly a faint wreath of lilac coloured smoke began to appear around her reflection’s head. The vision strengthened and a sparkling edge of light yellow glowed steadily into view.
Friendship and gratitude. Exactly the way Mistral knew she felt about the twins.
Encouraged by her progress, Mistral redoubled her efforts, switching her thoughts to another subject.
Training.
At once, the smoky wreath faded to a non-descript beige colour.
Boredom. That made sense. Nothing seemed to excite her any more.
With a disdainful curl of her lip she called up an image of Columbine’s sullen features.
Her aura began to swirl and boil like a storm cloud, vivid reds flickered like lightning against a smouldering backdrop of oranges and muddy browns.
Hmm. She hadn’t realised that not only did she detest Columbine, but the half-gargillian also disgusted her. Mistral ignored the flashes of anger her aura revealed. That was quite understandable. Columbine could antagonise a saint enough to commit violence.
Next she thought of Cirrus, her free-spirited horse.
A swathe of colours flooded through the broiling mass of brown and orange, obliterating it within a second. Fragile pinks, yellows and golds edged with a delicate pale blue framed the Mistral in the mirror. She smiled at the stranger in the mirror. No-one made her feel as free as Cirrus did.
Except Fabian.
Like a stone dropped into a still pond, her aura responded to his name. Ripples of colour flooded out from the inside edge, turning her halo of colours to a deep shocking pink shot through with fire all encircled by a thick border of palest green. A shimmering grey sheen floated like smoke across the pink, fading its bright intensity to paler pinks wherever it passed. Then, like the sun breaking out from behind a cloud, a sparkling rainbow suddenly arced across the vision, bathing her aura in a glistening light.
Mistral blinked, astounded by what she had seen and the illusion instantly vanished.
What was that? Her mind struggled to comprehend what she had just seen. After a few moments Mistral convinced herself that she had been seeing a reaction to Cirrus, not Fabian. But it took her a while longer before she could bring herself to retry the experiment.
Gritting her teeth, Mistral stared deeply at the pale figure in the mirror again and forced her pounding heartbeats to slow, her breathing to steady, and her mind to empty.
Grendel. She focussed her mind on the hygiene- challenged goliath, calling up in gruesome detail the image of his ugly face.
A startling clash of turquoise, lilac and orange swelled instantly around her head. She smiled and the stranger in the mirror mimicked her. Grendel ... despite being slightly revolted by him, his steadfast loyalty had impressed her over the last year and he had also been the one to find her in Cirrus’ stall on their return from The Desert Lands.
Desert Lands.
Fabian.
At once her aura exploded into flames of coral, fuchsia, rose all edged in pale green. Violent tongues of fire erupted sporadically, threatening to burn away the bright pinks and then, as before, a rainbow erupted that blasted away all the other colours, arcing over the Mistral in the mirror in a glorious blaze of light.
She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly while she stared in anguish at the irrefutable proof in the mirror. There was no denying it this time. Mistral knew that she to face the truth.
For some unfathomable reason she had fallen hopelessly in love with Fabian De Winter.
Staring at the vivid intensity of the rainbow in her aura she realised with a growing sense of horror that it was actually far worse than she had first thought. The rainbow in her aura was something Mistral had only ever seen in one other person, and they had been dying when she had read their aura. Isadora, the Bonded partner of Bali, who had chosen to die rather than live without her soulmate. Bonding. The sentence of death.
The frozen numbness of the last few weeks abruptly melted in flames of white-hot pain. Unable to face leaving, Mistral stayed in the Training Room staring at the swirling colours in her aura until the torches had burned low and the tears had dried on the stranger’s face in the mirror.
Why him? Mistral wanted to scream out loud. He neither knew nor cared that he had sentenced her to a life of emptiness to become like Isadora, waiting for the release of death. Fresh tears fell from her eyes then Mistral felt her stubborn streak rear its head, filling her with anger. Embracing its cleansing power Mistral lifted her chin and glared defiantly at the gaunt face in the mirror. She refused to fade to nothing. She was Ri. She would fight.
The spark of determination flared brightly and then died almost as suddenly as it had come.
&nb
sp; Fight for what?
Desolation won where the pain had been defeated, overwhelming her, choking her, and making the stranger in the mirror cry once more.
She finally crept from the room before the apprentices rose to spend the rest of the day in a haze, curled in a ball on her bed. Sleep came and went in fitful bursts, bringing with it none of the relief of oblivion. Her mind had finally given up its secret and in doing so, something had unblocked, unleashing vivid dreams of only one subject.
Over the next few days Mistral came to yearn for and dread sleep in equal proportions. The overpowering longing to see his face, to immerse herself utterly in a reality where she felt whole again was cruelly tempered by the waking agony of realising that it had all been a dream.
November announced itself in a series of bleak and grey days to match her mood. Mistral barely noticed the days passing, forcing her body to function in a mechanical, emotionless state. Eating became something that happened when she remembered to, or when the twins forced her to. She avoided the other apprentices and shunned The Cloak and Dagger, knowing she was poor company, lifeless and distracted.
Mistral withdrew from the twins as much as she could, desperate to conceal her pain from their perceptive eyes. Despite her efforts Mistral caught them casting concerned looks in her direction and sharing rapid whispered conversations when they thought she wasn’t looking. Mistral knew they deserved her honesty but to admit how she felt to another living soul was more than she could bear. What could they say to help her? And to feel their pity would be like a knife wound to her already maimed heart. So she spent as much time as she could out of the Valley, taking any work offered or, when no Contracts were available, riding up alone into the mountains, wrapped in her own misery for company.
At times the stubborn side of her fought against her despair and argued, demanding for her to at least fight against the pain. Mistral listened to its reason with a sense of futility, arguing back weakly that Ri warriors were fated to a fairly brief existence by the nature of their work anyway. What would it matter if misery claimed her end before one of the Contracts did?
At her lowest points she envied Isadora being able to make the choice to die. Her will was too strong to simply let her give up. Trapped inside her own mind and unable to share her pain with anyone else, Mistral spent more time contemplating death than life. Religion had not formed a part of her upbringing in Nevelte and it was not taught or practised in the Valley either, but the shadowy figure of the Divinus was never far from her thoughts. The mysterious head of the Magnate was widely rumoured to be a Necromancer. It was said that he communed with wraiths and spirits. Was that then proof of an afterlife? Were the spirits free-thinking or just echoes of their living souls? Fated to repeat their existence over and over. Mistral brooded morbidly on the subject for hours, overwhelmed with despair at the prospect of leaving this life only to spend an eternity in equally abject misery.
She utterly refused to let herself think of Fabian De Winter, to do so gave rose to a powerful yearning and mad half-formed ideas of riding off to find him. And what then? Her stubborn side would argue. He obviously had no clue that some impetuous half-breed had lumped a portion of her soul on him. He was a Mage, tempered by reason and therefore not prone to the instinctive Bonding her kind was. A small part of her mind reasoned that Fabian didn’t quite fit that mould. He was a warrior too, and as much ruled by passion and emotion as she. He had travelled across half a continent just to see Emiror again, how reasonable was that?
Ah, tears again. Her stubborn side chided with satisfaction. Making up for all those years you never cried?
She would argue with her sub-conscious like another person, suffer its painful reasoning and reprisals then fling all of her pain back in its too-knowing face. Without that outlet for the huge emotions Mistral was trying to cope with, she had no doubt that she would have simply exploded.
In a final act of desperation Mistral forced herself to visit Serenity in the Infirmary after training had finished. She had questions that she needed the answers to.
Pushing open the door to the Infirmary Mistral was relieved to find the room unusually empty of patients. Serenity was sat behind her table, the entire surface of which was littered with bottles of brightly coloured liquids and an open tin of yellow powder which Serenity was in the process of spooning onto a large set of brass scales. She looked up and smiled as Mistral entered.
‘Hello Mistral, are you in need of my care?’
Mistral shook her head and walked over to where Serenity was sitting, hesitating there with her hand on the back of the empty chair in front of the table.
‘Can I talk to you?’
‘Be my guest,’ Serenity smiled and indicated towards the chair.
Mistral sat down and clenched her hands together tightly in her lap, wondering know how to begin.
Serenity regarded her gently over the top of the scales, waiting patiently.
‘Um, do you remember Isadora?’ Mistral began in a faltering voice.
‘Of course. Bali’s Bonded partner. A tragic story,’ sighed Serenity, her smile fading instantly.
Mistral nodded absently and then leaned forward, her face suddenly intense, ‘Does it always have to be like that? I mean – well, tragic.’
Serenity regarded her with a slightly bemused expression, ‘Well no, I meant it was tragic because Isadora felt she couldn’t live without Bali. Bonding is not tragic Mistral. It’s when one soul completes another. A truly wonderful event.’
Mistral frowned and looked down at her tightly clasped hands, ‘But what if one of them is unaware that someone has decided to dump half their stupid soul on them? Does that mean they’ll just give up and die like Isadora did?’
Serenity frowned at her, ‘Bonding is mutual Mistral. It is not possible for it to be unrequited. It would be very hard to walk away from someone once you have Bonded with them, agony in fact.’
Mistral nodded wordlessly. Serenity had that bit right – but as to Fabian having mutually Bonded with her, well, she could have laughed out loud. He was too busy building a nest with someone else’s wife.
‘Is there something you want to tell me Mistral,’ Serenity asked gently.
Mistral looked up, nudged out of her own thoughts. Serenity was gazing at her intently with a look that was too knowing and far too sympathetic. Overwhelmed with a sudden urge to be anywhere but in that room Mistral leapt to her feet, words tumbling from her mouth in a garbled rush.
‘No, no nothing! I’ve got to go … er, thank you –’ Mistral turned and fled from the room, pushing the Infirmary doors open with a loud bang in her haste to leave.
Leo stepped out from the shadows of the apothecary store when the doors had swung shut behind her.
‘What ails her?’ he asked softly, his gaze on the closed door.
‘Nothing physical,’ Serenity’s voice was evasive.
She began to tidy away the array of bottles on the table in front of her, stacking them neatly back into the open cabinet.
Leo frowned, switching his icy gaze to Serenity’s face, ‘What then?’
Serenity didn’t reply for a moment or two, placing the last bottle into the cabinet she gently closed the doors and turned to face Leo.
‘Love,’ she said simply.
‘A passing affliction.’ Leo’s voice was coldly indifferent. His eyes flickered around the room, already bored by the conversation.
‘For some,’ Serenity agreed mildly, but her gaze was pitying. ‘But for others it is a deep and binding affinity.’
Leo’s eyes immediately switched back to her face, interest flared in their sapphire depths, ‘Do you know what blood she has?’
Serenity looked thoughtfully at Leo, her marble white brow furrowing slightly. Typical Leo, no concern for the girl’s health, just what value she had to the Ri.
‘No,’ she replied shortly.
Leo frowned in frustration, ‘No matter,’ he muttered softly before speaking in a clearer voice to Se
renity. ‘Well, the cure is quite straightforward. Just find out which apprentice it is that she’s mooning over and pour a love potion down his throat.’ Leo flicked a hand dismissively, underlining the callous tone of his voice.
‘It’s not quite that simple,’ Serenity murmured sadly, gazing thoughtfully at the closed door after Mistral. ‘I do not think that it is one of the apprentices.’
Leo studied her face through narrowed eyes, ‘Who then?’ he demanded impatiently.
Serenity pursed her lips and shook her head but she would not meet his icy glare.
He scowled suddenly, forcing the name out between his gritted teeth.
‘Fabian.’
Serenity kept silent and avoided his eyes. Leo took her silence as confirmation that he was correct.
‘He’s not even here and he’s causing trouble,’ he seethed, clenching his fists in frustration. Taking a deep breath, he composed his face into a calmer expression. ‘Serenity, you know what potential she has – and how rare they are.’
Serenity eyed Leo uncertainly but nodded in agreement, ‘The last true Seer was the Divinus.’
‘Exactly,’ Leo’s tone hardened. ‘And his time is drawing to a close. The Ri needs another to hold their value or we will be swallowed by the Council!’ a fanatical light flared in his eyes, he was suddenly breathing hard. ‘And I will not spend my life in servitude to the accursed Council!’
Alarmed by his fierce expression, Serenity took half a step back from him and folded her arms protectively.
Catching her startled look, Leo quickly mastered his outburst and composed his face back into its usual cold mask.
‘You understand the importance of her health?’
Bewildered by the speed of his mood changes, Serenity nodded wordlessly, her brown eyes wary.
‘Then I am relying on you to cure her.’
‘There is no cure,’ Serenity insisted gently.
‘Then find one.’ Leo snapped, his carefully controlled expression not quite concealing the threat behind his words.
Gargoyles
The Assassin's Tale (Isle of Dreams) Page 42