The Mirror Prince

by Malan, Violette

  “You doubt they’re after you?” she said, her voice brittle. “Maybe I should have left you in the car a little longer.”

  “All of you people are making a mistake,” he said, eyes fixed on the world he’d always known. “Whoever it is you’re looking for, I’m not him.” He looked back at Cassandra to find her nodding at him, as if they were sitting over coffee, discussing the Peloponnesian conflict and she was considering his point, finding a polite way to tell him he was full of it.

  “We can talk about that when you’re safe,” she said. “You didn’t seem inclined to argue with the Hound,” she added, when Max opened his mouth.

  Once again Max felt the Hound’s misshapen hands, pulling him into the car, saw the look of feral recognition in the beast’s eyes as it approached him, felt the coldness in his wound before Cassandra had healed him, and he shivered, whatever argument he was about to offer dying in the cold. She was right, he wasn’t inclined to argue with the Hound.

  “And, frankly,” Cassandra added, ignoring his trembling as if she hadn’t seen it, her voice neutral again, matter-of-fact, “I would prefer not to argue with whoever sent the Hound either.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Max said, forcing a lightness he didn’t feel into his tone. “Maybe we could get all this straightened out.” Cassandra hitched up her shoulder bag and looked away. “Okay, then, you seem to have all the answers.” His voice was harsher than he intended. “Where to?”

  Cassandra turned back to him and took his hands, standing so close that Max thought she was going to kiss him. He parted his lips and inclined his head.

  A SLAP! of air sucked the breath from his lungs and a loud CRACK! like a thunderclap deafened him.

  “What the—” The darkness was so complete Max couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed. Suddenly there was a great rumbling overhead, and a rush of movement filled the darkness around him, followed by a subdued moaning howl. Disoriented by the dark, it took him a minute to place the sound as metal wheels hugging metal tracks around a curve. Streetcar? he thought. No, not a streetcar, the subway.

  “We’re safer here?” From the hollow echo, the space they were in was quite large, and quite empty. It also seemed at least ten degrees cooler and much damper than the alley.

  Max heard Cassandra sigh in the darkness as she let go of his hands. He clenched his fists against the urge to grab at her and took a slow, careful breath.

  “So where are we?” he persisted.

  “If you’re going to be distracted by unrelated matters, this is going to take much longer than it needs to.”

  Max reached toward her voice and grabbed a handful of sleeve.

  “Remember me?” he said around the tightness in his throat. “I’m the one who doesn’t know what’s going on. How do I know what’s related and what’s not?” he asked the darkness around them.

  “We’re in the abandoned Queen Street Station.” Once again her voice was drowned out by a roar, and a rush of air as somewhere nearby an empty station was suddenly filled by a hundred and eighty tons of subway train.

  “Can I ask why?”

  “We need a crossroads,” she said, taking hold of his wrist and freeing her sleeve from his hand. She spoke like a teacher, as if she were repeating the same lesson for the hundredth time but still found it interesting. The tone was familiar, soothing, and Max was surprised to find the muscles in his neck and shoulders loosening. He felt more than heard her move away from him in the darkness. “In this world, the land’s dra’aj—its magical essence, for want of a better term—concentrates in Lines, so to Move any real distance quickly, we need a crossroads. And to be safe, we’ll need to put some real distance between us and the Hunt.”

  Max gestured in the darkness. “This is a crossroads?”

  “Union Station is the crossroads. Using it is tricky. We can’t just Move straight to it because there’s a Portal to our Lands there as well, and we don’t want to trigger it by accident, so we’ll have to walk from here.”

  Max shook his head. Some of that made a kind of sense. What were train stations but huge crossroads, and Union was the largest and busiest of Canada’s train stations. He wanted to get somewhere safe as badly as Cassandra did, maybe more so. He just wasn’t sure they had the same idea of safety. He needed time to think, to find out what they wanted with him, and—most of all—time to figure out the flaw that made them think he was one of them, the flaw that would free him. But how were they going to get anywhere in this darkness?

  “Couldn’t we have come straight here? How come you didn’t Move—” he tried to give the word the same emphasis she had, “us away from the Hound?”

  “What, you think I should have stood still in the middle of Queen Street? Tried to Move us from there?” Judging from the tone of her voice Cassandra was rolling her eyes to the heavens. “Besides,” she added more evenly, “once the Hunt is on a trail, it can follow you through a Move. You can’t leave it alive behind you.”

  Max nodded in the darkness. That figured. He blinked rapidly, realizing that he could now make out a soft glow, just beyond arm’s length. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that Cassandra had taken off her coat and pulled off her T-shirt. She was on her knees beside her leather shoulder bag, taking the sword out and placing it to one side so she could rummage through the bag. Max saw that the glow came from the mail shirt he’d caught a glimpse of through the tear in her T-shirt while they were in the alley. Soft as it was, the light was clear enough that he could see the skin on her arms forming into goose bumps. He shivered again.

  Lit from below, Cassandra’s features were sterner, the color washed out, the hollows of her cheeks and eyes darkened into angles until her face resembled an old bronze mask of the Athene Nike that Max had once seen at the Royal Ontario Museum. Then the mask moved, and Cassandra’s human face returned. Max pushed himself back from her, finding himself unexpectedly close. Except she isn’t human, he thought.

  “You’re a faerie,” he said, not sure until she looked up that he’d spoken aloud.

  “We don’t call ourselves that,” she said, starting to take cloth-wrapped bundles out of her shoulder bag, one of them another, shorter sword, and laying them next to the long sword already on the dirty pavement.

  “So what do you call yourselves?” Max said, when it became apparent she had nothing further to say.

  “The People, of course, same as any other sentient race.”

  Max stepped closer to her. “You know other sentient races?”

  She sat back on her heels and looked up again.

  “Well, I have my doubts about humans, now that you mention it.” She frowned. “What humans call the Trouping Faerie—beings like you and me—we call ourselves Riders, because we . . .”

  “Ride?”

  “Yes, actually. We’re social, we live in groups and we Move. Solitaries . . . well, that’s self-explanatory, isn’t it? They’re the People who live alone, Trolls, Ogres, and Giants are the ones best known to humans. Then there are Naturals—they’re like Solitaries, but they live in one place, mostly Trees and Water People.”

  “And would I be right in thinking that you all live together, in harmony?”

  “You’re the professor of military history, you tell me.”

  Max nodded, not really surprised that she knew so much about him. He would have liked it better, however, if she knew things about him because she was a normal human woman, interested in a normal human man, instead of a . . . a Rider, mistaking him for something he wasn’t. “How much like humans are you?”

  She stood, holding something round, flat, and thick, still wrapped in its protective cloth. “Imagine Riders are like Men—we have our own races, too, Sunward, Moonward—” she pointed at him, “—and Starward—” she pointed at herself, “and Solitaries are, say, dolphins, whales, and sharks. Naturals are the Everglades, the Oceans, the Rain Forest. How well do you figure we’re getting along?”

  “Ah,” Max said.

  “Exactly.”
Cassandra untwisted the cloth in her hands to reveal a heavy silvery torque, almost as bright and obviously made of the same metal as her mail shirt. She placed the torque around her throat so that the ends rested on her collarbones. As soon as it touched her skin, it glowed brighter.

  Now Max could see that they were standing quite close to the edge of what could have been a subway platform, if you took away a century’s worth of dirt and damage. The wall close to their backs arched over their heads—though not very far over, he thought. Either of them could easily touch the ceiling with a little stretching. But on the other side of the sunken tracks there was no matching platform. Instead, the space opened out, farther than he could see in the light given off by Cassandra’s armor. He could make out no ceiling, just a couple of round columns thick as old oak trees, thick enough to hold up the whole city over their heads. Faint gleams showed where water lay still and silent between the old pillars.

  “I’ve heard about this place,” he said, his voice sounding louder somehow, now that there was more light. “People say it’s a myth.”

  “People say that about us, too.”

  Max turned back to her, his wonder once more replaced by irritation. “Look, before this goes any further—why don’t you just tell me what’s going on? I know you’ve got the wrong man; I could clear this up in a second—”

  She was on her feet, her face suddenly inches from his own.

  “You’re a Faerie Prince. You lost a war and were Exiled. Now, for some reason, they’re trying to kill you. Does that clear it up for you? Happy now?”

  “But I’m not—” Max stopped talking as she raised her hand, palm up, placed his own palm against hers and kept on. “You’re making a mistake, you only met me the other night.”

  Cassandra lowered her hand and pressed her fingers to her eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly; it fogged in the underground air.

  “I don’t have the wrong man. They aren’t hunting the wrong man. I didn’t just meet you the other night,” she said, biting off the words. “We’ve met many times. You just don’t remember.” She let her hand drop from her face. “I know you have a thousand questions,” she said, her voice low and tight. “I swear to you, I will give you all the answers I have. Somewhere safe.”

  Max hesitated. It couldn’t be true. He knew who he was. But she was so certain, and she sure wasn’t human, she had that part right and . . .

  “You could have died in that alley,” she said. “I only killed one Hound; do you bet your life there are no others? Shall we still be standing here arguing when the Hunt finds us?”

  For an instant Max felt again the bone-deep chill that almost claimed him in the alley.

  Max studied Cassandra’s face. The mask of the goddess of battles was well and truly gone. Cassandra’s hair had crinkled further in the damp, and there was a smudge of dirt and bright blood on her face. He was raising his hand to wipe it away when he remembered whose blood it was. The Hound had been real, he reminded himself. And the woman in front of him was real. More than real, somehow. As if the world came into focus around her. As if everything close to her was somehow . . . truer.

  “I believe you,” he said, hearing the truth in his own voice. And he did believe her. She would tell him everything she could . . . once they were safe. He would have his chance to figure it out, explain how they got it wrong. He pulled in a ragged breath of his own, looking away from a face that had become somehow more frightening than the face of Athene.

  Cassandra held still a heartbeat longer before turning back to her open bag. “Did you ever go in for any weapons training?” she asked.

  “That’s a funny way to put it,” Max said, glad of the change of subject. “But no.”

  “None of this will be of any use to you, then,” she said, frowning at the cloth-wrapped bundles she’d taken out of her bag. Now that he looked closely, Max could see by the shapes that some of the items at least were daggers, and others looked like arrows, though he could see no bow.

  “What, no guns?”

  “Guns won’t kill the Hunt, only gra’if does, and god knows where yours might be.”

  “That what this is?” He brushed the tips of his fingers against Cassandra’s body armor. “Got any more?” He’d been dying to see what it was made of, but he found himself somehow reluctant to actually touch it.

  “Mine won’t work for you.”

  “What makes it glow?” The light, moving as Cassandra moved, prevented Max from seeing much more of what was in her unzipped shoulder bag.

  “My personality.”

  “Smart-ass.”

  When he looked up, Cassandra was smiling the first genuine smile he’d ever seen on her face. He found it easy to smile back at her.

  She pushed her hands through her hair, and her smile slowly faded.

  “What is it?”

  “My hair clip.” She knelt and scanned the ground around their feet. “I must have dropped it in the alley.”

  “I hope you’re not planning to go back for it.” Max crouched to help her hold the side of the bag open. “What’s this?” he picked up a light helm that lay to one side of the bag, loosely wrapped in silk. It was warm, and it seemed to hum with the faintest of vibrations, as if a charge ran through it. Odd, but not unpleasant. She was quite right, he thought, this wouldn’t fit him. Even in the uncertain light, Max could see the helmet, very little more than a coronet hung with fine mesh, was fancifully carved, with a beast’s face on the guard that would rest just above and between Cassandra’s eyes. Max found that he could make out even the finest of the carved scales, even the teeth in the beast’s mouth.

  “My Guidebeast,” she said, taking the helm from him and sliding it into the bag.

  “A dragon?”

  “You have good eyes.”

  Anther rush of air, another roaring moan overhead. Max looked up. This time a smell came with it, a smell like an old dirt-floored cellar. It was ancient but curiously clean, damp earth and wet concrete. Still, the ceiling was so close above his head that even those huge pillars didn’t make him confident that everything wouldn’t come crashing down.

  “Okay, so if we want Union, we go that way, right?” Straightening to his feet again, Max pointed south.

  Cassandra shook her head. “There’s no direct route, not anymore. We’ll have to go around the long way.”

  Max shook his head, rolling his eyes to the damp splotches on the tunnel’s roof. “Why am I not surprised?”

  Cassandra packed the last of her daggers back into her shoulder bag, zipped it almost shut and slipped in her longer sword before slinging the bag once more over her shoulder. She would have liked to have the sword in her hand—that’s where it felt most natural—but she’d need her hands for other things. Besides, anything that came at them faster than she could draw her sword—well, she wasn’t going to worry about it.

  She glanced once over her shoulder, checking to see that Max followed, before leading the way past a bricked-over opening that had once been intended as a pedestrian exit from the platform. The concrete underfoot was uneven and cracked. Rough-poured and left untiled in the first place, it was now showing the signs of years of water damage and uneven heating.

  Cassandra took a deep breath and rotated her shoulders as she walked, trying to relax muscles as tight as steel cable. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had so much trouble saving someone’s life—well, actually, she could, and now that she thought about it, it was the same someone. The Exile always thought he knew better, no matter who he happened to be at the moment. Fine, he was often right, but he never realized that there were some situations you couldn’t talk your way out of. She hadn’t meant to lose her temper, but somehow she’d known it was going to happen ever since she’d seen Max Ravenhill at the cocktail party. Their eyes had met, and she’d felt that familiar jolt, as everything in the world rearranged itself around them. She’d spent the last two hundred and fifty years—six of his lifetimes—avoiding that feelin
g, and fighting the urge to experience it once more.

  He was too much the same, and different enough that the sameness couldn’t help her. As usual, his response to strange events and stranger beings was more curiosity than confusion—he’d always been able to adapt easily. Malcolm, who was Stormbringer the Singer, had wondered whether this, too, was part of his fundamental nature, something left over from when the Exile was the Prince Guardian.

  Right now Cassandra felt as though she hadn’t slept since Diggory the Solitary had come to give her warning. Her shoulder hurt, and she knew that soon the long muscles in her thighs would start to twitch and cramp. She’d been running on adrenaline since pulling the Exile out of the blue sedan, and killing the Hound—she pushed that thought away. She could think about that later when she had leisure to be terrified.