The Soul Mirror

by Carol Berg

  “I need no maudlin aristo female to speak for me,” Dante snapped.

  “Speak gently, mage. By her word only are you yet breathing.” Anger rumbled under Philippe’s judicious manner. “Yet despite Anne’s testimony as to your deeds at Voilline, I’ve a mind that you’re too dangerous to live. You have terrorized my wife and my household. You have tormented my goodson and destroyed the mind of his mother. You’ve caused havoc in my house and in my city, and have abetted, if not accomplished, the torture and murder of my friends and subjects, innocent as well as guilty. For all I know your treacherous talents have planted these stories in Anne’s head, and you but bide your time to impose your own perverted vision of nature on this kingdom. Tell me why I should not kill you.”

  “Do it if you want. I’d as soon be dead just now anyway. But do not accuse me of crimes and at the same time of failing to live up to our agreement in a proper manner. I swore an oath to Portier that I’d discover the person who shot a spelled arrow at you, and why, and what might be done about it. And so I have. No one bothered to tell me you didn’t care anymore, or that you only wanted these things done if I stayed in the kitchen with the other servants and dogs, or avoided breaking the crockery.”

  And that was all. Dante refused to say more, no matter that the king commanded it or that I pleaded for it. My furious goodfather slammed the shutter and shot the bolt that sealed the sorcerer’s hole. “You have a damnably perverse ally, Anne.”

  In the end it was Portier who tipped the balance. As soon as the surgeons finished setting his leg, Ilario had told him of our impasse. Though in terrible pain, Portier insisted on testifying. And so on the second morning at Barone Crief’s, the king and I sat at his bedside. Again my goodfather asked why he should not avoid future risks and slay Dante before he recovered full use of his power.

  “Because it would be unworthy of you, sire,” said Portier, hoarse and panting with fever. “He protected your wife, her very sanity, I think, many times over. He saved your kingdom. Saved your cousin’s life.”

  “Anne dragged you out of that pool. Gods’ balls, she is a Mondragon sorceress. She might have done it all.”

  Duplais managed a weak smile. “Determined, talented, intelligent as she is, she could not possibly have saved me, lord, or done any save perhaps a few of the more . . . explosive . . . feats on her own. I was drowned more than three hours, and your gooddaughter is untrained, incapable of true spellwork. Believe me, no one in the world has been watched more closely than she these few years.”

  But the king would not be satisfied. “How do you know it was Dante and not Jacard or some other of the sorcerers who performed this monumental sorcery that I don’t yet understand?”

  Portier laughed at that—though the movement robbed his face of what little color it displayed. “The message Anne relayed called me student. Back when we were partner agentes, Dante always called me student when he was trying to teach me, to make me listen. As I look back, I’m thinking that for all these years, he’s tried to point me in the directions I needed to go. He dropped hints that I pounced on as his own lapses. My queries turned up one anonymous lead after another, and I never questioned how they were so effective in putting me on the Aspirant’s trail. Yes, he did terrible things along the way. But his courage and skill, and Anne’s, have saved us from chaos that would make the heyday of the Blood Wars seem like a household spat. He has given—You cannot imagine what he has given, lord. You should grant him whatever boon he chooses.”

  With misgiving and ill grace, the king relented.

  Portier asked that Dante be allowed to stay with him, if the mage was willing. He faced sepsis or amputation, crippling at best, and offered that understanding the details of the magic we had worked might take his mind off his grim prospects. And Dante’s off his, I thought. In return, Portier would stand for Dante’s parole.

  To my astonishment, Dante agreed.

  And so on that second afternoon, Dante was released from the sorcerer’s hole. Haggard, unshaven, filthy, he was escorted out of the barone’s house and given temporary accommodation in a remote guesthouse, until such time as the king’s party left for Merona. Though I stood on the barone’s steps and spoke Dante’s name as he stumbled past, he did not speak or turn his head my way. He didn’t look at anything.

  Heartsick, I ran inside and consulted Portier, then persuaded Ilario to return to Voilline. Portier said Dante’s staff was like a third arm. By evening, he had it.

  SO MUCH LESS WOUNDED THAN my friends, I believed myself well recovered from the ordeal at Mont Voilline. To sit at my father’s bedside and feed him, to hear that Portier had survived another day, to read the king’s proclamation that Michel de Vernase and his son were cleared of all charges, enabled me to put aside the harsh truths of that dreadful night.

  Such was clearly not the case. Five days after the Mondragon Rite, my father, brother, and I returned to Merona. From my first step into the city, the mindstorm raged through me unchecked. I was wholly incapable of rebuilding the mental barriers that had kept me sane since Lianelle’s magic had waked my tangle curse.

  By nightfall I could not stop weeping, babbling about voices screaming in my head. Lost in the mindstorm without an anchor, I repeatedly relived that night of blood, murder, drowning, and starving spectres. Terrified the murder lurking in my veins might burst out to harm those near me, I barricaded myself in my room and screamed into my pillows. When I collapsed into sleep, I dreamt of being chained in Derwin’s cellar as a savage revenant tried to reshape my body.

  The king’s physicians could not explain my frenzy and gave me sleeping draughts until I could not tell night from day or friend from spectre.

  In the end Ambrose visited Portier, imploring him to say what might be wrong with me. Portier consulted Dante. Portier wrote me later that Dante had near set him afire for not informing him of my state sooner, heedless of the fact that Portier himself did not know. “Get her out of the city,” Dante had told him. My mind had suffered from the events at Voilline like that of a soldier who had stood too close to a cannonade. I needed quiet, away from people. He didn’t mention it was because we had together expended such magic that left the world thin and gray, or because I truly experienced the passions of tens of thousands of Merona’s residents in my head and was unable to subdue them.

  And so Papa and I were taken to Ilario’s country house together, because I would not hear of being separated from him when his health was yet so fragile. It was a blessed place, comfortable and quiet. Very few servants, and those accustomed to discretion. Within hours, the world took on its more usual color. I felt whole again, even if I was not.

  Eugenie herself was recovering there, enjoying the devoted attentions of her brother and frequent private visits from her husband. She remembered very little of Voilline, she told me one afternoon as we strolled Ilario’s dying gardens. A yellow-brown fog had engulfed her party on the road not far from Merona. Philippe’s guards, unable to see, had been quickly killed or taken prisoner. We grieved together for Marquesa Patrice, who had pulled a knife from her bodice and died defending her queen. Her masked captors had forced Eugenie to drink a potion that gave her scandalous dreams she blushed to recall. I didn’t tell her they likely weren’t dreams.

  We spoke a little of Antonia, who had died the same night as the Mondragon Rite. Eugenie mourned her foster mother’s true affection, while confessing Antonia’s imperious ways had made life difficult in her household. “How could I condemn her, Anne, when I understood so perfectly her feeling of helplessness? For half a year she ruled Sabria and did many fine things, and then was told that a council of ill-educated men and a thirteen-year-old boy could do better. I thought that if I allowed her to rule me, it might make up for that a little. I never imagined her conspiring against Philippe, or, saints’ mercy, murdering Cecile.”

  No purpose would be served by sharing my suspicion that Antonia had murdered Eugenie’s children. When I made a sidewise reference to Soren, E
ugenie blushed. “I tried to tell Dama Antonia that I had only admired him, as a girl child admires any man so handsome and powerful. He was her child, as Desmond and the others were mine. Perhaps she worried about his Veil journey. I didn’t know the meaning of love—or the bitter price of loving a king—until I married Philippe. Did Soren’s visits please me? I knew he was not real, and yet . . .” She shook her head. “Life is complicated.”

  Eugenie adored Philippe and feared him, terrified to lose him and terrified to love too unreservedly, thereby, inevitably, losing herself.

  I was beginning to understand that.

  AND SO THE DAYS OF autumn passed. I slept and reveled in the quiet. Once Papa was strong enough to feed himself, I read him the nonsensical stories and essays I found in Ilario’s library. He slept prodigiously, slowly regaining strength, though physicians warned that he would never be aught but frail. His mind began to wake from its starved torpor, but he had not yet convinced himself that the bed, the food, Ambrose, and I were not dreams. We didn’t argue. Too much pain awaited him in the real world.

  My brother dealt with his own pain. He could not bear walls or any sedentary occupation. Nor could he abide being touched. For hours on end he practiced his swordwork in Ilario’s fencing yard, but without poetry or joy. I could not help him, save by understanding. Though we walked in the gardens, we rarely spoke beyond triviality. He was not ready to speak of his ordeal, any more than I could explain what troubled me.

  I didn’t know who I was anymore—reserved, scholarly Anne de Vernase, dutiful daughter and sometime mistress of Montclaire, or Anne de Mondragon, a dangerous, untrained sorceress who found power for magic in hate and vengeful murder. Who relished it.

  I believed violence and murder barbaric, yet my blood would not cool. Every thought of Jacard, Kajetan, Gautier, or the Camarilla brought my knife to hand. And why could I not stop thinking about a sorcerer who baldly confessed his violent nature and his disdain of so much I valued? I felt as if I’d left my soul on Mont Voilline, drowned in a dark river of murderous magic.

  CHAPTER 44

  A month or so after coming to the country, I received a packet from Merona. It contained a small tin of five pastilles and a terse message.

  Give her one of these each day for five days. The keyword is sallebruja. You’ll thank me.

  “What do you suppose they are?” asked Eugenie.

  “I’ve no idea,” I said. “The keyword means southern witch or something like.”

  “Burn them,” said Ambrose. “It’s that Jacard, hunting vengeance.”

  It was true that neither the king’s men nor the Camarilla had been able to locate Jacard, who had disappeared at some time in the last frenzy of the rite on Voilline, along with the Book of Greater Rites. And the script was uneven and angled oddly, little better than a child’s ragged scrawl, as if meant to disguise the writer. Yet the packet was addressed to me, thus the her must be someone other. Not Eugenie. Blooming with health and happiness, the queen had abjured all medicine, tisanes, and inhalants.

  You’ll thank me. . . . My companions likely thought me having a relapse into madness when I leapt from my chair.

  Warmth, wonder, and lunatic hope rose as one. Dante had spoken those very words in the escalon on that morning of revelation. Certainly his hand would be awkward now he couldn’t see. And I knew only one southern witch. “Ambrose, these are for Mama. Do exactly as it specifies. Yes, I’m sure. I swear I am not mad. Ride!”

  A MONTH LATER I FIRST told my father about my mother’s madness, and at the same time read him Ambrose’s letter about her astonishing awakening, as from a long fever. She would be ready to come home early in the new year. I also told him about Lianelle that day. Papa was still quite fragile. I kissed him, left him my brother’s blessedly descriptive letter, and shut the door so he could weep without shame.

  At about this same time Portier came for a visit. To our cheers and applause, he demonstrated his facility with his cane, which looked to be his lifetime companion. After dinner, the two of us left Ilario and Eugenie to a game of cards and walked out in the garden.

  We shared our stories, shaking our heads at our blindness. I was sorry to hear that he’d seen no sign of Maura ney Billard. The Aspirant had not bothered to tell him if the note was forged. Both of us, it seemed, had been left with unsettled questions.

  “As soon as I’m able to sit a horse, I’m off to Abidaijar,” he said as we sat in the weak sunshine. “Ilario told me of a man expert in the teachings of the Cult of the Reborn, but more in the scholarly line than the priestly, if you know what I mean. If he’ll have me, I’ll spend the winter with him. To say truth, I’m ready for a little desert clarity.” He stared into some distance beyond the fingers that gripped the head of his cane.

  “Go on.” Too much remained unspoken since the night on Voilline.

  “I am no reborn saint,” he said. “I don’t believe in them. Never have. Holy mercy, if I’d come back from Heaven for something important, you’d think it would be what we just went through, wouldn’t you? Instead I’m lured into a trap, and spend one night being twisted into jackstraws, and another sunk to the bottom of a puddle. Yet I must confess. . . .” He would not look at me. “I drowned three times that night. Three times I felt Dante lose hold of me. Three times he fetched me back.”

  “Creator’s Hand!” Horror at the imagining stole my breath.

  “Maybe I died,” he said, “or maybe I didn’t. I was half crazed. But the sensations were very like thirteen years ago. That pervasive smell of dead leaves, dry grass, and rot, and the feel of it—the dry air, the emptiness of time and purpose. Not the best evidence. I still couldn’t force myself to open my eyes. But this time, perhaps because it happened at Voilline or because of the magic Dante worked that night, I felt . . . others there. Not spirits, not wandering souls as I expected, but beings very like a spectre that plagued de Santo when he was trapped at Castelle Escalon. Savage things, angry, hungry . . .”

  “Ravenous. Trapped. As if they were what was left when the soul is leached away from a dead spirit.” Exactly what Lianelle had shown me as I held her nireal. “And blind, I think.”

  “Yes,” said Portier, glancing up sharply. “Dante told me that a spectre was not a soul but a lingering image of something that once lived. That’s what they were . . . what they are, for I’ve no reason to think they aren’t still just beyond the Veil. It’s not merely that they prefer being alive to being dead. They’re not where they’re supposed to be and they’re not what they’re supposed to be. And it wasn’t just that I didn’t belong there. No one belongs there.”

  A chill shivered me despite the amber sunlight. Your friend can tell you. Lianelle had truly spoken to me. She had known my friend Portier was in that place.

  “You were there,” I said. “It was all true. Roussel and Kajetan believed you couldn’t die. They intended to seal you in that pool forever, to keep the rent in the Veil open by your continual passage between . . .” I told him of my sister’s nireal then, and what I’d heard as it scalded my hand before we closed down the rent in the Veil.

  Portier blew a pent breath and shook off a visible horror grown throughout my tale. “I’ve told Dante some of this,” he said. “He believes the Mondragons created Ixtador by mistake. When the Gautieri learned what their rivals had done, they would not rest until they controlled it—and the knowledge and use of it—for themselves. And so we got Germond and his diabolical scheme. Certainly the place where I was, whether Ixtador or something else, is not divine, but an aberration, a disorder.”

  “Our beloved dead pay the price of Gautieri greed.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s from a history—Reviell de Mondragon’s warning, as he was being executed at the end of the Blood Wars. And the Mondragon rite confirms it.” Eager, appalled, I dredged up the words. “Creating a child who straddles the realms of death and life would not only cause the inversion of the natural order the Aspirant wanted, but see Ixtado
r Beyond the Veil nevermore dissolved nor shaken nor altered in its composition. Ixtador, this unnatural place, would become permanent. We stopped that—for the moment—but Ixtador remains.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “It all fits. And it does not comfort me that we’ve recovered neither the Mondragon codices nor Dante’s four remaining nireals.”

  No one had told me that. “Jacard took them?”

  “We presume so. Dante says it’s not a concern, as Jacard hasn’t power enough to work vermin wards, much less translate the books or use them.”

  Portier’s rueful head shake reflected my own misgivings.

  “I’ve had this thought,” he said, “and this is where Dante vehemently disagrees with me, that Ixtador’s existence disrupts that part of natural law that encompasses what we know as magic. Perhaps that’s why even our most reliable spells don’t work so well since the Blood Wars. Perhaps that’s why Dante’s work, the purest, most natural magic I’ve ever experienced, devours his body and drives him to this brink of control. I doubt he was ever mild mannered, and, yes, he worked hard to convince me of his wickedness, but the explosive rage was never playacting. And now this injury threatens everything he is . . . everything he values. I fear the consequences of leaving Ixtador as it is, and we need our best magical practitioner to turn his mind to the problem. But even more, I fear for my friend.”

  All my unspoken anxieties came into focus. “He’s found no remedy, then?”

  “He can find no residual enchantment to counter, and has no faith that the damage will reverse itself on its own. Worse, he is convinced that this sensory deprivation will inevitably destroy his magic. He’s at a loss.”

  Duplais massaged his leg with a grimace, then propped his chin on his cane, glancing at me in a most peculiar fashion. “How you worked with the man is beyond me. Any mention of you sets him chewing the walls worse than he does already. He damns you with profane names, then in the next breath brags how you kept him from sacrificing me, for which I thank you, or your father, for which I’m sure he thanks you. He expounds at obscene length on what you were able to contribute to the work that night, while scorning any suggestion that ‘an aristo child-woman’ might actually develop such immense potential.”