Echo in Amethyst

by Sharon Shinn

  “I didn’t know anyone else was.”

  “Yes! Vivienne! Apparently her carriage practically overturned on her journey here, and one of the echoes was paralyzed or something—at any rate, injured so badly she had to be sent back to Thelleron. Vivienne’s been weeping all over the palace ever since she got here. I’m surprised you haven’t noticed.”

  “I’ve never paid too much attention to sad little Vivienne,” Elyssa said, causing Deryk to muffle a laugh. “And now that she’s out of favor, I don’t think I’ve even bothered to look in her direction.”

  “No, it’s hard to care about her too much these days,” Deryk agreed. “But you know who I think we should be befriending?”

  “Who?”

  “The Orenza girl. Marguerite.”

  “Is she interesting enough to befriend?”

  “If she marries Cormac, she’ll be plenty interesting. And if you marry Jordan—”

  “Gorsey,” she said in a mocking tone. I had recently discovered that gorsey was a word people used when they didn’t feel like producing all the syllables in goddess have mercy on my soul. People like Elyssa only used the word in a joking manner, but I’d heard servants say it as if it were an actual prayer. “She’ll be my sister-in-law. Maybe my closest friend.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t hurt you to do something nice for her, if you get the chance,” he said. “I know that’s not your usual style, but who knows? It could pay off.”

  By this time, we had completed our slow circle around the first chamber, and we moved past a massive central column to step into a second round room. I glanced at the statue on the dais to find her holding her arms out to either side. Apparently we were now in the portion of the sanctuary dedicated to justice. There were many more people sitting in these benches, praying, staring fiercely at the statue, or speaking earnestly with one of the priestesses. I supposed the world held far more injustice than joy, so more people had congregated here to seek the goddess’s intervention.

  “Well, I won’t go out of my way to do her a service, but I suppose if an opportunity arises, it couldn’t hurt,” Elyssa said with a shrug.

  “And you know Jordan will appreciate any evidence of your good heart,” Deryk added provocatively.

  Elyssa laughed loudly enough to cause a few petitioners to glare at her with disfavor. “Come on, let’s go outside and wait,” Elyssa said, heading for the nearest door. “I have had enough piety for the day.”

  “Possibly for the year,” Deryk agreed, and followed her out into the light.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The evening’s entertainment was a card game that commenced directly after the meal. Tables for four were set up in a strict formation—those for the originals running down the center of the room, those for their echoes fanning out behind them. We quickly learned that the women would keep their same seats all night long, while the men would move from table to table after every few hands.

  “So every woman gets a chance to flirt with Prince Cormac, and every man gets a chance to look over the women who aren’t good enough for Cormac and consider them for their own brides,” Elyssa murmured to Deryk as they took their places together at one of the tables. She was wearing a gold satin dress that made her hair look black and glossy, and he had already complimented her on her appearance. “Was anything ever so romantic?”

  Deryk signaled to one of the servants circling through the room carrying trays of wineglasses. “I need a drink,” he said. “I imagine I’ll need many before the night is through.”

  I was located at the echoes’ table nearest to Elyssa, in a seat that afforded me a good view of the originals. I could see the back of Elyssa’s head, the profiles of the men sitting with her, and occasionally the face of the Banchura triplet who was seated at her table—Lavinia, if Deryk’s greeting was accurate. Elyssa was in a careless mood, so she wasn’t binding her echoes to her very tightly, which gave me an opportunity to glance around the room whenever I didn’t have to pretend to pay attention to my cards.

  And “pretend” was the right word. I had to shuffle and deal and discard in concert with Elyssa, but other than that, no effort was required from me at all. The cards the echoes used were all blank rectangles—unlike the ones the nobles held, which appeared to be covered with pictures and numbers. I wondered if the game was interesting when the players could see those pictures and numbers; it certainly was dull without them. Watching the others in the room was far more entertaining.

  Deryk made good his promise and began drinking as soon as the first hand was dealt. Elyssa matched him for his first two glasses, but then slowed her intake considerably; she would never let herself get tipsy in such a public place. The servants were providing drinks to the echoes as well as the originals, but they weren’t paying close attention to how well our levels of consumption matched. Since I barely touched my lips to my wine whenever I lifted my glass, I never needed it to be refilled.

  After about a half hour of play, the men stood up and rotated to the next table. The new echoes who sat down with me belonged to nobles I couldn’t remember meeting before, but I could feel the smile tugging at Elyssa’s face as she flirted with them over the next few hands. Judging by the answering smiles on the faces of the echoes, they were responding to her enthusiastically. These must be men who didn’t know Elyssa well enough to hate her. Lavinia’s echo tried to keep her expression noncommittal, but I saw disapproval and impatience shape her face several times in the next thirty minutes. I had the impression that Lavinia held a low opinion of any man who would find Elyssa enchanting. It made me like the Banchura women even more.

  We had been at the game close to two hours when the rotation of players brought Jordan and his echoes to our tables. I found myself sitting straighter in my chair and smiling even more widely than Elyssa. I didn’t even bother watching Jordan’s echo, sitting on my left and seeming almost as solid as a real man; I kept all my attention on the prince.

  He smiled impartially at the three other players but addressed Lavinia first. “Is this the longest stretch of time that you’ve been separated from your sisters by more than five inches?”

  She laughed. “No, indeed, we are perfectly capable of being in entirely different rooms, and once Letitia even spent a whole week at our cousin’s house while Leonora and I stayed home. But I admit she was only five miles away. I’m not sure we’ve ever been farther apart than that.”

  “I’m afraid to ask what will happen if any of you ever decide to marry,” Jordan said.

  “Oh, that’s easy!” she responded cheerfully. “We’ll just pick meek and amiable men who are willing to move into our father’s house so we can all live together.”

  Elyssa tossed down a discard. “And yet you are all still unwed!” she marveled. “Impossible to believe that no men have been convinced to join such an enticing arrangement!”

  Jordan’s echo gave me a reproving look, but Lavinia’s echo just laughed silently. “I do wonder if we will ever find the right kinds of husbands,” she said. “I must say, it doesn’t concern me overmuch. Scheming and plotting to catch the eye of some noble or some royal— What a dreary way to live.”

  So the Banchura women could joust with the best of them. I felt the whiplash of Elyssa’s anger, but she was still smiling. “And yet here you are,” she said. “Scheming and plotting.”

  Lavinia opened her blue eyes as wide as they could go and stared soulfully at the prince. “Oh, no! Jordan! Have I seemed to be throwing myself at you? You’ll have to forgive me. I didn’t mean to show myself so desperate for your attention.”

  The other lord at our table gathered up all the cards and sighed mournfully. “Why is no one scheming to catch my attention? That’s what I want to know,” he said, obviously trying to lighten the mood. “I’m not a prince, but I have a manor! And extensive lands! And three echoes! Am I not worth a little flirtation?”

  Elyssa’s grin seemed a little more genuine as she turned in his direction. “But you live in Thelleron,
” she said. She might as well have said, But you live in a barnyard.

  He did not seem particularly offended. “I cannot recall that you have ever set foot within the borders,” he replied. “I don’t know that you are particularly well-suited to judge.”

  Jordan seemed eager to change the subject. “Oh, Thelleron’s a fine place,” he said. “And don’t forget, it’s the birthplace of Edwin, the first king of the Seven Jewels.”

  “Yes, you can hardly find a town square in any hamlet of more than thirty people that doesn’t have a statue of Edwin right in the middle,” the other noble said.

  Lavinia’s attention had drifted to one of the other tables; I saw her echo follow her gaze and frown slightly. “Look at that,” Lavinia said in a dismayed voice. “Deryk is causing a scene.”

  Everyone twisted around to get a better look. Deryk was sitting at the table with the reserved Lady Marguerite and two other nobles I couldn’t name. He was kissing her hand in a very apologetic way, so I supposed we had just missed him saying or doing something outrageous.

  Jordan looked concerned. “I wonder if I should have a word with him. Marguerite seems uncomfortable.”

  “Oh, he’s harmless,” Elyssa said. “Annoying, maybe, but just high-spirited.”

  “He’s just drunk,” Lavinia said flatly. “He had three glasses of wine before he left this table, and I’m sure he’s had another bottle’s worth since he moved on.”

  “But it’s such good wine,” Elyssa said provocatively. “Nothing but the best in the royal cellars.”

  Jordan sat back slightly in his chair. “He seems to have settled down for the moment. But I’ll watch him.”

  Elyssa shuffled and dealt the cards. My hands followed her movements as closely as possible, but she was barely paying attention to her echoes, so it was hard to keep up. She said, “I hope I don’t seem like I’m flirting with you, Jordan, when I ask how you’ve been enjoying all your visitors? Everyone else is having a grand time, but you and your brother have seemed preoccupied.”

  He gave her one quick look, as if surprised that she’d been so observant, but he answered readily enough. “I’m sorry if we’ve appeared that way! It’s just that we’ve begun to worry about Jamison. He should have been back at court before any of you arrived, but we’ve heard no word from him for days.”

  “The little time I’ve spent with Jamison has convinced me he can take care of himself,” Elyssa said.

  Jordan smiled. “That’s true, of course. Still, when it’s your brother …” He shrugged and didn’t finish his sentence.

  “You don’t have sisters or brothers, do you, Elyssa?” Lavinia asked.

  “I don’t.”

  “I can’t imagine what that’s like,” Lavinia went on. “The world would seem so empty.”

  Elyssa was sorting her cards. “I have always found the world over full of people as it is,” she said. “I suspect having siblings would have made it seem even more crowded.”

  “Well, I always thought—” Lavinia began, but before she could go on, there was a small commotion on the other side of the room. We heard the sounds of a glass falling over, a woman gasping, and a chair scraping back. We all automatically looked in that direction, to find one of Marguerite’s echoes on her feet, holding her skirts away from the wine spilling out of a glass that had been overturned by Deryk’s echo.

  Then we all froze, staring in wordless astonishment. The echo was standing, but Marguerite was not.

  The echo had reacted when her original had held fast. The echo was … the echo was … The echo was independent.

  I felt my breath moving so rapidly in my chest that my vision started to blur. Could there be other creatures like me in the world, shadows that were not quite shadows, echoes that could move and think and act and dream? Was I not entirely alone? And did calm, reserved Marguerite know of her echo’s sentience—did she allow the creature some leeway, some chances to make its own choices, or did she try to crush its wild spirit and force it into the mold of her own making?

  Or was this the first time the echo had ever moved on her own initiative, and was Marguerite as shocked as the rest of us?

  While we stared, still mute and amazed, one of Marguerite’s other echoes came to her feet. After a moment, the third. They each took slightly different stances—deliberately, I thought—so it was clear all three of them could move under their own volition. The last one to stand was Marguerite herself.

  Still staring, the woman at her table exclaimed, “Your echoes. They have minds of their own?”

  “Hardly that,” Marguerite answered. “They are capable of some individual motion, but only when I choose to release them. Mostly I control them—” She snapped her fingers, and the three echoes instantly assumed Marguerite’s exact pose and expression.

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing!” someone exclaimed.

  I felt a sense of bitter letdown. Now that they were slaved to Marguerite again, the three echoes looked every bit as vacant and mindless as any shadow. I gazed more closely at the third one, the one who had jumped up first, but there was nothing extraordinary to be seen on her face. These echoes were just like Elyssa’s—they could be freed, but they could not think or feel. They were nothing like me at all.

  I might have been crushed at the turn of events, but it was clear that the lords and ladies who had witnessed this byplay were feeling unnerved and suspicious. It was if Marguerite had suddenly revealed she was an imposter or a spy—not truly a high noble after all. I wondered how Cormac would react to this revelation. Would a prince want to marry a woman who couldn’t even control her own echoes?

  There was a rustle from the table nearby. “Then you’ve been living in some unsophisticated backwater,” Elyssa said, rising gracefully to her feet. She smiled at the assembled nobles but directed a silent command to my fellow echo and me, and both of us kept to our seats, our hands folded before us. “It’s a common enough thing among people who have particularly fine command of their thoughts.”

  A second later, she made a slight twist of her wrist and gathered us tightly to her again, and we both instantly jumped up and assumed her precise pose. “But, generally speaking, I find life less tedious when I don’t have to wonder if my echoes are behaving themselves.” She laughed. “So I usually don’t give them freedom.”

  The others in the room began glancing at each other, and whispering back and forth, seeming just as shocked but much less suspicious. That’s why she did it, I thought. Deryk told her to befriend Marguerite if she could, and this was an easy way for her to do it. I wondered if Marguerite would be grateful, if she had even noticed that sudden, yawning chasm of doubt that had briefly opened before her. I wondered if Elyssa had paused long enough to reflect on how that doubt might now extend to her.

  I cut my eyes over just enough to give Elyssa a considering look. She appeared completely unruffled, even bored, as she sank back to her seat and drew both of us down with her. Maybe she hadn’t interfered as a kindness to Marguerite. Maybe she simply was trying to draw attention to herself in some dramatic fashion; this opportunity had presented itself, and she took it. Maybe she thought Prince Jordan would be intrigued by the idea of a woman with unconventional echoes.

  On that thought, I shifted my gaze to Jordan to see if I could read his reaction. He was staring at me, his brows drawn down, his eyes narrowed. Caught unaware, I stared back, meeting his eyes with a frankness no echo should ever show. He nodded once, short and sharp, as if confirming something to himself, but did not look away.

  “Jordan!” Lavinia exclaimed. “Are you going to deal the cards or not?”

  His voice was perfectly normal, perfectly light, as he turned his gaze from me and smiled at his tablemates. “My apologies! Of course I’m going to deal. I’m at a sad deficit in this game and I must make up my losses.”

  It was clear Jordan wasn’t going to make any observations about the scene that had just played out, but the irrepressible Lavinia could only contain her
curiosity for as long as it took him to parcel out the cards. “So, Elyssa, tell us all about having echoes who think for themselves! How odd that would be! As if they are separate people! It would make me very uncomfortable.”

  “Oh, they don’t think for themselves,” she said. “You have just witnessed the extent of their abilities. I usually only release them at night so that I can send them to bed while I enjoy an hour or two of complete solitude. I find it so freeing to be able to comb my hair or turn the pages of a book without having them copy my every move.”

  “Do you?” Lavinia asked in wonderment. “I would find it so … strange. Like my body wasn’t properly weighted, or something.”

  “Dezmen can’t free his echoes, not the way you can,” Jordan said. “But he says he can send them to a sort of trance, where they just sit unmoving for a little while. I’ve never seen him do it, though.”

  “We will have to compare stories sometime, Dezmen and I,” Elyssa said.

  “I’m sure he would enjoy that,” was Jordan’s polite response.

  Lavinia threw down a discard, then glanced over at Jordan. “Though if anyone was going to have freethinking echoes, I’d expect it to be you or your brother,” she said.

  “Oh? And why is that?”

  She gestured. “Well, look at them! They’re so—so vigorous. Not like mine and Elyssa’s and everyone else’s, which are so obviously copies. Yours look real enough to step forward and have a conversation.”

  “They never have, though.”

  “Just as well,” said the Thelleron lord in a firm voice. “Nobles should be nobles and echoes should be echoes. That’s the way the world works.”

  I was not quick enough to glance away before Jordan cast another look in my direction. “Well,” he said, “the world will often surprise you.”

  Elyssa was in a good mood that night as Gretta got her ready for bed. “And the ball is tomorrow night, so I need to look my very best. I shall wear the lavender gown. And all my amethysts.”