The Soul Mirror

by Carol Berg

  It was as if I had opened a door in a thick gray wall and stepped through into a feast of brilliant colors, of the smells of spices, wine, and ripe pears, of whirling dancers and sparkling conversation, of jewels, candles, rippling silks, and rustling taffetas. Not even Lianelle had spoken this way of nature and magic. I drank it in.

  As he moved onto other unusual plants, those that root in air or die every summer or flower only when their leaves have withered, it struck me that my sister had described a scholar who had touched a kindred part of her soul with his talk of magic. Kajetan. No, no, no, he could not be. . . .

  I could not but think of Guerin and his befuddlement at the objects Lianelle had brought to her spellwork. Uncanonical magic. Heresy. And I’d just revealed I’d worked magic unsanctioned. Foolish, incautious girl! This friendship could be a trap. How was I to know?

  Gods, I’ve rattled on too long, he said. You needed to go.

  You astonish me. I never understood that to work spells you would have to know so much about customs and culture, history and language, as well as the divine elements—five of them. Is that right?

  My friend slammed the door between us with such finality, I was astounded, moments later, when he spoke again. The Camarilla Magica teaches that all matter comprises five elements granted by the Creator. Grave and quiet, all exuberance quenched. Precise. Clear. Be warned. For a novice practitioner of magic to contradict or question Camarilla tenets is most unwise. Those who know little of the art must listen and learn. And weigh beliefs carefully and in private . . . as I do.

  All true. The words were stripped of every accessory feeling save wariness and a trace of anxiety—for me? Perhaps he did not realize he felt such a thing.

  I pushed. What we say here is private between us. Yes?

  Yes. I could interpret nothing from this but truth.

  It would mark me a lunatic to share any idea on a topic so unfamiliar, derived from a source I cannot explain, I said. Especially when the source might very well be a product of my own deranged mind or a Camarilla practitioner who might reside in Syanar or the Caurean Isles.

  He didn’t respond to my attempt at humor. I should get back to my studies instead of prattling about them, he said. You’ll see to your wounds? You mustn’t let them fester.

  I will. And thank you for all this. You’ve given me a great deal to think about besides potential husbands or despicable ruffians. Or terror of my own blood.

  Scholarly conversation pleases me.

  And me, I said. No one in my guardian’s house cares for plants or stars or books.

  He was not Kajetan. The chancellor of Seravain and prefect of the Camarilla, a man so certain of his own worth, so admired and valued even by those wary of him, would never ask his students to weigh his view of the world for themselves—even if he could convey the request without audible speech. And filled with purpose and righteousness as he was, Kajetan would never feel lonely.

  EQUANIMITY SOMEWHAT RESTORED, I RETURNED to my bedchamber. The day, still young, was already replete with revelation, including the terrifying, stomach-heaving possibility that I myself had used magic. This friendship outside the boundaries of physical presence was perhaps the least significant of everything that had happened, and yet its mystery roused the deepest wonder and the deepest confusions. I longed to know more of him. Yet he could be anywhere. Anyone. Had I truly glimpsed him for that moment behind my closed eyes? Almost anything seemed possible.

  Ambrose would call me a lunatic for believing. As ever, the thought of my brother wrenched my heart, and I prayed Duplais would bring me news that he had escaped. I’d prefer him a murderer than captive as Papa was.

  Clanging bells warned me that Eugenie and Antonia would be returning from the lace market at any time. Setting speculation aside, I quickly wrote a note to Lady Eleanor, apologizing again for shocking her with my incapable drawing. I promised to observe more carefully should I spy the “gentleman suitor” again and pass along his name so that she might advise me as to his suitability.

  Then, with hot water and clean linen, I cleaned the wounds on my arm. Swollen, mottled purple and black with cross stripes of dark blood, the limb looked as if I’d been lashed. Worse, the spiraled cuts had grown tender and hot. The lightest touch made me wince.

  Out of time, I bound it again with strips torn from a chemise, and donned a fresh bodice and sleeves the color of claret. As soon as I had opportunity, I’d ask Physician Roussel to look at it.

  NO SOONER HAD I BADE divine grace to Doorward Viggio than a bustle of gowns, footsteps, and muted voices announced the return of the shopping party. Yet the noise came from the wrong direction, and the excited babble was of a sober tenor, not at all the usual exuberant aftermath of an excursion.

  I hurried into Eugenie’s bedchamber to see the dark blue wall panel that opened onto the servant’s stair standing open. Antonia, swathed in diamonds and purple ruffles, snapped direction into the dim passage behind her. “Get her onto the bed and get out. Speak a word of this and I’ll have your tongues out of your heads! Out of their way, Ilario. I told you to—”

  “Roussel is on his way, dama,” said the lord, bursting from the doorway, his hands in the air. “Saints Awaiting, guard and protect . . .” His yellow satin doublet bore scarlet stains, and no foolery could mask his body’s tense lines as three footmen carried a litter through the open panel.

  “I told you to fetch the mage, you insufferable, milk-livered blot,” spat Antonia. “Where is that Anne?”

  “Here, my lady!” I stepped into view, yet my eyes did not linger on the dowager queen or the frantic chevalier, but rather on Eugenie’s mantle, sodden with dark-edged scarlet. Other blood-soaked wads of fabric—her apricot-hued gown, Antonia’s purple cape, the pearl gray silk cloak Marie-Claire had been wearing—fell to the carpet as the footmen gently lifted the unconscious Eugenie onto her bed.

  “Attention, girl!” The lines of Antonia’s face had hardened into crags. “Fetch Master Dante immediately. Her Majesty is suffering a woman’s hemorrhage. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes. Yes, certainly.” Not a wound, then, but from inside her. Sweet angels, let it not be a miscarried child.

  I didn’t question the need to summon whatever aid was at hand. Yet to fetch Dante, who twisted Eugenie’s life into a macabre travesty of maternity, revolted me. Physician Roussel should be able to catch any medical irregularities the mage might notice. But who might detect perverse magic?

  As I left the bedchamber, I grabbed Marie-Claire by the wrist and dragged her alongside. The tall girl was so astonished, she failed to resist, and actually looked at me. Men could write sonnets about her cheekbones and compose airs to praise her sapphire eyes, but she had a most dreadful squint. “Someone should fetch Sonjeur de Duplais, as well,” I said. “He can arrange for anything that might be wanted to serve Her Majesty and Lady Antonia in this need, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” she said, thoughtfully. “I’ll go. I’d like to be useful.”

  “Good.”

  Thanking her, I flew down the stairs and into the corridor referred to as the mages’ passage and hammered on the last door. “Mage Dante, you are summoned!”

  Three times elicited no response. Yet a noise very like the insistent drumming of winter rainfall emanated from inside. Steeling myself, I opened the door. . . .

  My hair rose, crackling as with the virtu elektric. Stomach, heart, head spun out of control with the terror of a chasm’s brink . . . vertigo . . . nausea.

  The mage sat on his heels inside a ring of raging flames. Sweat poured from his darkened complexion and dripped from the black hair, straggling loose from a knot at his nape. His eyes were clamped shut. One gloved hand gripped his staff, his shoulder and arm quivering with effort as if he worked to plunge the white stick through the floor.

  From the upper end of the staff plumed a circle of intense blackness the exact diameter of his ring of fire—a void, a tunnel, a passage into night. A not.

&nb
sp; My flailing hand gripped the unseen frame of the doorway. Surely one false step would send me plummeting into that void. Yet I could not look away. The world beyond his circle dimmed to gray.

  Then cracks appeared in the hole of midnight. Silver-white streaks quickly etched a pyramid shape, shimmering like glass in lamplight against the blackness. More silver streaks bent and twisted themselves into a knotted netting that mantled the pyramid, tinkling faintly like fine silver on crystal. Thick blue spirals tangled themselves in the netting, and a broad crimson band slashed across it all, as if a disgruntled artist had chosen to ruin his work with one broad brushstroke. More colors splotched and streaked the dark canvas—livid green and stormy purple, the colors of bruises and sickness, and a vomitous brown—the strange artwork swelling into something huge and horrid and wicked, though it mimed no pattern or image that made sense to me.

  Dante’s right hand jerked and swept in a circular motion, as if to scoop a handful of the heated air. As if in reflection of his movement, a black void appeared in the leprous image. At the same time, a searing spike shot from my eyes to my toes, straight down through the center of me, dissipating as quickly as it had begun.

  I stepped back, slapping the back of my hand to my mouth to choke off a cry. The mage did not react. He’d shown no evidence of recognizing my presence thus far, and as the vile, horrid pattern in the air continued to shift and change, his posture remained entirely focused. Saints’ mercy, what was he doing?

  The mage’s cupped hand twisted. Three strands of the silvery net slipped free of the rest and dissolved in a burst of sparks. Another quick movement and a bilious green swirl shifted to a dull mustard hue. Shifting, tweaking, he might have been some ancient priest painting on a cave wall. Each movement plucked my nerves and sent twinges into my extremities.

  I wanted to run away. Excuses flashed to mind. The mage was out. He refused to come. The door would not open. He frightened me. But Eugenie lay bleeding, and whatever interest this mage had in our queen might draw his skills to support her healing. I could not return without him.

  “Mage!” I yelled over the roar of the flames.

  His mouth, nose, and brow flinched, but otherwise he did not change his posture. Another gesture of his gloved hand split the scarlet band into three parts. My fingers stung, as if pricked by hot needles.

  The scarred floor of the laboratorium was littered with glass, earth, splattered water, and coils of thin black cord that announced the source of my arm’s persistent hurt. I stepped gingerly through the litter and around the ring of flame, placing me within his line of sight, and shouted again. “Mage Dante!”

  His eyes flicked open. Vague, confused, they scanned me and the laboratorium behind as if we were indistinguishable. But the amber firelight that licked his cheekbones and shadowed the deep hollows of his eyes soon set the green irises aflame. His mouth hardened. Yet without altering his posture, he squeezed his eyes shut again and gripped his quivering staff. The swollen blight slowly faded. The flames quieted, dulled, and died.

  As the last flame vanished with a soft pop, the laboratorium took on the ordinary colors and shapes of cloudy daylight. The amber ring dulled. The mage sagged backward onto his heels, his broad back bent, his head drooping.

  Jacard had been right about Dante’s works depleting the dark mage. Wrong, though, when he minimized the power of those works. Whatever wickedness this was, it had left the world changed in some unguessable way. The air felt brittle. Fragile. The temperature uncertain. The boundaries of objects and spaces slightly askew. I massaged my fingers as the hot wires threading my nerves cooled.

  “You are summoned, mage. Her Majesty suffers a hemorrhage that threatens her life.” My voice grated on the quiet like boots on crushed glass.

  For an exasperatingly lengthy interlude, the mage stretched his neck and broad shoulders as if to relieve the stiffness of long effort, and ran a finger under the silver collar—a seamless, five-centimetre-wide band wrapped snugly about his sinewed neck. He never looked up. My Cazar uncles would have reminded me I could whip out my knife and slice the veins in his neck, ridding the world of his evils. But I doubted Dante needed to look at me to assess such a threat.

  When he raised his eyes at last, the green holocaust had been controlled to a moderate blaze, his temper to a quiet menace. “Are you an entire fool to break through a mage’s door and interrupt him at his work? Or has someone put you up to it?”

  Perhaps his evident weariness emboldened me. Perhaps his deliberate restraint. The explosive violence that had bruised Jacard seethed just below his haggard visage, yet remained firmly in his grip. My ambiguous beliefs about the Creation stories had never been challenged with so vivid an image of Dimios the Souleater, the dark angel whose beauty had been consumed by lust for the forbidden.

  “I am perhaps not such an entire fool as one who pursues such work as you do,” I said.

  His brows lifted in irony. “Surely the daughter of Michel de Vernase, a man who disdains human authority and mocks the divine, does not fear for my soul.”

  I had no time for a war of semantics; my knees already jellied under his glare. “You’re correct. Not a whit do I care for your soul, assuming you possess one. But your skills are pledged to my lady’s service, and she lies in mortal peril at this hour. Attend her if you have aught to offer in her need.”

  I made a hasty exit. I did not wish to travel even so short a distance in Dante’s company.

  Feeling as though I’d fought the morning’s second battle, I sagged against the passage wall beside Jacard’s deserted desk. The scuffed table remained a jumble of papers and what I supposed were spellworking particles—the bits of metal, fabric, bone, and biological materials that seemed to litter a sorcerer’s worktable. Among them lay a short length of the black cord. As a moth drawn to flame, I touched it. It snaked up my finger.

  Shuddering, I flung it off and hurried off toward the queen’s chambers. It would take a month of bathing to make me feel clean again.

  CHAPTER 30

  23 OCET, AFTERNOON

  For three hours Physician Roussel bathed the queen’s wrists and forehead in spirits and administered repeated doses of herbal tinctures he swore would quell the hemorrhage and restore her blood. Though I trusted Roussel, I faithfully touched each vial, beaker, and spoon he used. My ring’s wardstone did not change color.

  To my chagrin, billowing smoke and the stink of boiling herbs forced me from Eugenie’s bedside into the ladies’ retiring room, where I watched and listened through the doorway. Watering eyes and incessant sneezing left me anything but useful.

  Antonia alternately derided the physician’s incompetence and begged his assessments, while snapping instructions at two serving women who provided steady replacements for stained linen and fouled water basins. Ladies Eleanor and Patrice tucked blankets, plumped pillows that Roussel promptly removed again, wrung their hands, and murmured soothing clucks and copious prayers. Standing as far as possible from the bed, the king’s portly First Counselor, Lord Baldwin, and his own owlish secretary maintained an awkward presence, representing the king and his privy council.

  Mage Dante propped his backside on the window seat, arms folded across his staff. Though he offered no assessments, no advice, and no medicaments, I doubted he was idle. The air about him quivered like summer heat shimmers. The lingering image of his disturbing magic had me expecting a crimson slash to split the steams and smokes. Everyone in the room did their best to pretend he was not there.

  Duplais never arrived. I didn’t know whether to curse Marie-Claire or fret about Duplais’ safety. I dared not leave to seek him out myself. And so I paced and fretted and clutched my throbbing arm.

  “Get out, you ninny!” Lady Antonia’s annoyance at Lord Ilario, rising throughout the afternoon, shattered the quiet.

  Ilario had come near wearing grooves in the floor circling the chamber’s perimeters. The chevalier threw himself onto a divan in my little alcove, his sister’s blood st
ill darkening his canary garments. “Her heart races like a songbird’s.” His voice came soft and filled with anguish. “If this be another miscarried child, however will she bear it? If she dies . . .”

  No one in the bedchamber had dared voice that wretched likelihood as yet.

  Though the wide doorway left us open to view from the bedchamber, no one was likely to overhear our conversation. Nonetheless, I wandered over to the window as he spoke. The sun peered through veils of fog, naught but a solid gray disk that offered little illumination to the day.

  He waved his slender hands helplessly. “As we went out this morning, she announced her intent to ride out with Philippe on his progress. To enjoy the autumn weather and the jolly company, she said, and to unburden him of the petty piffelry that complicates such a journey—the pig petting and child dandling and greetings of merchants and marriageable daughters and magistrate’s wives. My lady mother near collapsed at the thought of it. The more dama pressed, the more adamant Geni was. What was she thinking?”

  His report made this grievous turn of events even more wretched. Not only had Eugenie understood the meaning of my suggestion, she had added her own generous portion to it.