The Mirror Prince

by Malan, Violette

“Indulge me.” Max was aware of a certain bitterness in his tone. “It won’t be for long.”

  Moon nodded, but something about the stubborn set of her mouth gave Max the idea that she wasn’t happy.

  “We should be on our way,” Moon said to Cassandra as she closed and retied the wicker lid, “before the snow begins again. This is time we cannot afford to lose.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to wait until morning?” Max said around a mouthful of travel cake.

  All three looked at him, Lightborn and Moon puzzled, Cassandra with the small smile he was beginning to find irritating.

  “It’s always midnight here,” Cassandra said. “This is one of the unchanging Lands.”

  Max decided not to ask.

  Lightborn insisted on helping Max carry gear down to the stables, but Max suspected it was more to give the man an excuse to visit the Cloud Horses than for anything else. The animals recognized them both, but they were particularly affectionate with Lightborn, blowing air in his face and shaking their heads at him.

  “They were born in Griffinhome,” Lightborn said, laughing, as he ran his hands along the flanks of the horse nearest him in evident delight. “My own horses.”

  “Are they . . . magic somehow?”

  “Many say they have no dra’aj,” Lightborn said, “but I am not of that mind. They have dra’aj in their own way, as does everything in the Lands. They are sensitive to Movement, and they take pleasure in the Ride. How could they do this, if they had no dra’aj?”

  “In my world people argue over whether animals have souls,” Max said. “Over whether they should have some of the same rights as humans.”

  “Perhaps I should visit the Shadowlands, when this is over.”

  “I’ll take you,” Max said, “if I can.”

  “When this is over,” Lightborn repeated, giving the horse’s flank a final stroke.

  “Can you get us around the broken Ring?” Cassandra was saying to her sister as Max and Lightborn returned to the great room.

  “I believe so,” the younger woman said. “The Songs tell many stories about the Lands around the Rings. I should be able to piece together a pathway, though I wish I had my Singers with me.”

  “Can’t we just Move to where we’re going?” Max found his muscles protesting at the thought of more riding.

  “Only the very powerful can Move to a place they have never been,” Moon said as she fastened the ties on her own saddlebag. “And I think now they live only in the Songs. For the rest of us, the common run of Riders, we must know a place, and sometimes know it well, before we can Move there. The Ring Road,” she continued, gesturing to the outside, “any Rider has sufficient dra’aj to use it, since it opens only to another Ring, another point on the Road. And it is used for Riding on a first journey, when one is not familiar with one’s destination. The Songs tell that the Basilisk Prince found the Tarn of Souls using the Ring Road, and it is those Songs we follow now.”

  Max shook his head. “If we know which Rings to use, why don’t we just Move to the one nearest the Tarn?”

  “Movement to a Ring,” Lightborn said around the piece of sweet cake in his mouth, “always takes you to the one nearest you, and so sets you on the Road.”

  “So it’s not the Road that’s in a Ring?” Max said.

  “The Rings make up the Road . . .” began Lightborn.

  “There is no Road,” Cassandra interrupted, recorking a stone bottle and replacing it in her saddlebag. “There are only the Rings.”

  “Very Zen,” Max said after a moment. “But no explanation.”

  Cassandra shrugged, that same half smile on her lips. “They’re like Portals that open only to another Ring. The road is the road. No shortcuts.”

  “It is the destination that determines the order in which the Rings must be traveled,” Moon added.

  “So when the Basilisk wanted to find the Tarn of Souls . . .”

  “He tried each combination of Rings, one at a time, until he found the one that would take him there. Once there, of course, he could Move there anytime . . .” Cassandra’s voice died away.

  “So he could be there now, waiting for us, since he knows that is where we need to go.” Lightborn let his hand, the sweet cake still in it, fall to his side.

  Max looked around at their faces. “He won’t do it,” he said after he’d had a moment to think. “From what you’ve told me, he can’t spare the time to lie in wait himself, and he won’t want the rest of his people to know where the Tarn is.”

  Moon and Lightborn looked at Cassandra. Finally, she nodded.

  Max hung back as they followed the others to the stables.

  “You weren’t very quick to agree,” he said.

  Cassandra smiled as she slung her saddlebag over her shoulder, careful not to catch it on any of her weapons. “The Songs all tell that the Prince Guardian was a more-than-able military commander,” she said. “All I know for sure after Warding you for a thousand years is that you’re very good at putting yourself into the minds of opposing generals. You have an intuitive grasp of strategy, of the balance and pull of forces. But even with this, you haven’t always won.”

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  “No.”

  “Then let’s get on with it.”

  The Basilisk Prince turned from the Garden view outside the round window of his workroom to his guard captain, on one knee before him. Two others, each high in standing among the guards, knelt behind their captain. As if bad news came more easily to the palate from fools on their knees.

  “I have sworn to withhold my hand from the Dragonborn Warden,” the Basilisk Prince reminded them.

  “In return for the Exile, certainly, my Prince, but we . . . you, do not have him.” The Captain of the Guard, a flaxen-haired Starward Rider, lifted his eyes to the Basilisk’s face.

  The Basilisk smiled, though his teeth gritted from the cramp that suddenly clutched his right leg. “Young Walks Under the Moon is more clever than you, I think. She did not trade me her sister for the Exile, but for his whereabouts. The bargain is a true one, un-breached.”

  “But, my Prince—”

  The Basilisk stared him into silence, one hand raised. He had glimpsed an idea, but exhaustion kept it hovering just out of his grasp. He had not had a chance to refresh himself after awakening feeling pale, when they had come to him, afraid to tell him that Dawntreader was gone—afraid not to tell him. Roused from his bed, it was all he could do to hold himself upright in the low chair before his dressing table. Now it seemed that he could feel his skin hardening, his lungs filling with heat. He forced his hands to stop trembling, his lungs and throat to unlock; he took two deep breaths, the second steadier than the first. He was tired, that was all. He was far more tired than he should be; there was so much to do, and he had to do it all himself. So many details, and he could not afford to let any of them slip away.

  Then, as he lowered himself into his chair, the elusive thought came clear. Of course! He had thought to find the Guardian, to hold him until the Talismans manifested, but surely now that he was here in the Lands, there was no need? To have the Talismans before the end of the Banishment would be more than convenient, but not necessary. The little Moon had said revealed they intended to take Dawntreader to the Tarn so that he might be restored and so fetch the Talismans from their hiding place. Well, then, why should he not wait and let that happen? Why not let the Talismans be found, and then simply take them away? He would use the time to rest and strengthen himself. After all, he would always know exactly where the Guardian was. He could put his hand on him at any time. Still, he thought as he eyed the Riders on their knees before his chair, that did not excuse what had happened. While he could relax himself, there was no reason for laxness among his followers.

  “The fault lies not in Walks Under the Moon,” he said to them. “The fault lies here, in you. The Exile was lost from here, from my very Citadel by your carelessness, and you . . .”

  The Basi
lisk’s throat closed over the words, his breath choking in his lungs. Once more he forced himself to relax.

  “You,” he continued, “have not even suggested a way to regain him. Fixing blame brings us no closer to solving this problem. Unless the problem is of a different kind?”

  “No, my lord Prince,” said the Captain of the Guard, his eyes lowered.

  The Basilisk relaxed still further. People changed sides, there was the thing. Perhaps even little Moon. It was always better to be certain. Always better to take precautions. The Exile had few friends left, but even those were too many. Here was a chance for a lesson to be taught.

  “I will call the Hunt,” the Basilisk said. “Send them to Griffinhome, let them have a fresh scent.” He gripped the small bone ornament that hung around his neck on a chain. His hands were trying to tremble again. “Send me—no, let this one stay and attend upon me,” he said, holding his hand out to the short Moonward Rider nearest him.

  “Yes, my Prince,” said the Captain of the Guard. “And Honor of Souls and her people?”

  “Give everyone you find to the Hunt. Burn her fortress, cleanse the Land.”

  They had been Riding for most of the morning, and Max swallowed for what felt like the tenth time in as many minutes. Now he knew why everyone here always referred to the place as the “Lands”—plural—and how it was “always midnight” at the Lodge where they’d slept. They’d gone back the short distance through the moon-lit landscape to the Morganite Ring, where it had taken them only seconds to pass through to the Quartz. From there, the small party had set out to Ride around the gap in the Road—though it isn’t a Road, he reminded himself—that was formed by the broken Carnelian Ring. Almost immediately after Riding into what he’d thought would be a clearing in the trees Max found himself balancing on a ledge halfway up a mountain face, just wide enough for him to lead his horse. After that, they’d Ridden through a rain forest, which had changed abruptly into a wide beach in a windstorm, with waves crashing and salt spray stinging their eyes; and he’d watched a cornfield turn into a foul-smelling swamp in a space no greater than the length of one of the Cloud Horses. These and other changes had been accompanied by corresponding shifts in air pressure, temperature, and, what was worst for Max, direction. He’d always had a perfect sense of direction, able to navigate even underground without difficulty, and twice this morning alone he’d found himself queasily disoriented as the compass inside his head had spun for a few seconds before coming to an abrupt halt in a new—and very unlikely—setting.

  And he couldn’t even complain, because no one else seemed to notice the way the landscape changed all of a sudden from one step to the next, like the panels in a newspaper comic, although Max would swear he’d seen Cassandra flinch a couple of times.

  “When I was first in the Shadowlands,” she said, after they had left a forested hillside and entered a prairie grassland, “I thought I would never get used to how gradual everything was, how you could ride for days across a prairie, how a meadow would slowly become a forest, or a beach ease into a mountain range.”

  “Is the whole land like this? Aren’t there any . . . normal bits?”

  “This isn’t an ecosystem,” Cassandra said, her eyes focusing on the horizon. “It isn’t a coherent whole, like the Earth. The Lands are more like a network of separate places, connected by dra’aj.” She indicated the prairie grass they were currently riding through, already springing up behind them to show no trail. “Each place is and remains always itself,” she smiled at him, “forever touching and forever separate like the pieces on a patchwork quilt.”

  That made a lot of sense, Max thought. Considering the abilities of the Riders to transport themselves, why should the world they inhabited be coherent, each physical location blending and connecting with others?

  “There are places one cannot reach by walking or Riding.” Lightborn, unnoticed, had fallen back to take a position on Max’s left, leaving Moon alone in the lead. She hadn’t been much company as they Rode, constantly singing or humming snatches of tune to herself, matching the lines in her head to the landscape around them, or, for all Max knew, calling up the landscape with the Song.

  Lightborn laughed, and tugged on Max’s shirtsleeve. “Do you remember,” he said, “the time you swore we would find a way to Ride around the Shaghana’ak Abyss . . .”

  Max saw Lightborn’s clear blue eyes cloud over as the man fell silent. He felt his own smile stiffen on his face. No, Max thought, I don’t remember, though I suppose I will soon.

  “Some say that Ma’at, the Stone of Virtue, may be such a place, that one can only Move there, and that only the Prince Guardian knows the way. Is that so?” Moon’s voice was startlingly loud. She had stopped singing, reined in her horse, and sat waiting for them.

  Cassandra spoke into the silence. “He doesn’t know.”

  “Oh, yes,” Moon said, drawing her brows together in a frown, “I forgot.”

  They rode for some time in relative silence, each of them lost in their own thoughts. Cassandra drew in deep, stimulating lungfuls of air that tasted like rich wine aged in oak barrels. This was home. She had spent years deliberately putting the Lands from her thoughts, knowing she would not return to it for hundreds of human years. And this wasn’t the same place she’d left, no matter how heartbreakingly familiar the smell and feel of the air. She would have to be careful and not fall into the same kind of mistake that she had made in the Shadowlands. More than once she would revisit some treasured place only to find the people she knew gone, fields where there had been forests, roads where there had been fields, busy harbors in quiet coves where she had once gone swimming. Even here, things had changed, and the Lands were no longer the world of her childhood.

  Between one step and the next, the country turned hilly, and they slowed, letting the horses find their own footing on the increasingly rocky ground. There were no real paths or trails, but like all of the Lands, it was always possible to find going, however rough, for either feet or hooves.

  “Are we anywhere close?” Max said, as Cassandra and Lightborn joined him and Moon at the bottom of a particularly tricky slope.

  “I believe so,” Moon said, looking at Cassandra as if she had asked the question. “We should enter into a forest soon, and come upon a lake with an inn beside it. The Jade Ring is nearby.”

  “Do all the Rings have places to stay?” Max got down off his horse to walk it carefully around a steep stretch of gravel. Cassandra smiled as the Cloud Horse nudged him playfully in the back, as if to demonstrate that it didn’t need Max to watch out for it.

  “I don’t know that I’ve been to all of them, but many do,” Cassandra said. “Before the Great War—”

  “Go back before that,” Lightborn suggested. “Back not to your youth, but to mine. Do you know how we traveled then?” His eyes looking at a distant image, Lightborn looked relaxed for the first time since they’d left Griffinhome. “On foot, sometimes,” he said, smiling, “or by coach or horseback; each journey would have its particular delights, sometimes by day, sometimes by night, depending upon which would best bring out the special beauties of the places in which we Rode, whether soft meadow, roaring waterfall, or silent and forbidding crags. My favorite places were those that brought the lightening of the spirit that comes when you round the shoulder of a hill, expecting only another hill, and instead you find the world spread out before you.”

  “I know what you mean,” Max said. “There’s a place I used to go to in Scotland, and I’d get up early every day I was there, just to watch the sun come up. No matter how often I was there, it was like seeing the whole world laid out in front of you for the first time. There was nowhere else like it.” He looked at Cassandra. “At least, I think I was there.”

  “Many times,” she said.

  “As a rule,” Lightborn continued, when the silence grew strained, “we would not carry provisions with us, unless for a light meal on the grass. When we would rest, or feast, we simply M
oved to some convenient and comfortable spot, some favored haven such as the inn we head toward now, and resumed our journeying the following day.”

  “I have heard my father tell of these journeys,” Moon said, her voice a mild reproach. “But no one has done this for some time.”

  “Why’s that?” Max wouldn’t have thought that the economy or social structure of a place where magic was the rule would have been affected so much by a civil war.

  “There is not dra’aj enough now.”

  “But dra’aj has been Fading since even before the Great War,” Cassandra protested. “Certainly there were no Guidebeasts, even then.”

  Moon shrugged. “There are no Guidebeasts except in the Songs.”

  “Not so,” said Lightborn. “When I was a child, there was a Wild Rider—one of those who came on occasion with your father,” he said, turning to Max, “who had seen Guidebeasts when he was young.”