Mirror Sight

by Kristen Britain

  Leese placed her hand on his shoulder and squeezed it before moving off among the tents with her mender’s satchel slung over her shoulder.

  Alton took a deep breath and plunged back into the dim interior of the tent. Estral lay on the cot on her side, the peace of sleep erasing the torment and worry from her features. He sat on the stool next to the cot and caressed her hair back from her face, the hands that had been so ready to kill just moments ago now gentle.

  He would find her answers. They would get her voice back—they had to. He wasn’t sure if, even with all the love in the world, she’d care to live without the ability to sing.

  Maybe if the Blackveil expedition returned—Karigan was Estral’s best friend. Maybe Karigan’s return would brighten Estral. But they’d had no sign from the expedition. Alton worried for Karigan. Stepping into Blackveil was placing oneself in mortal danger, and she’d been in there since the spring equinox. He loved Karigan, but his feelings had gone in a different direction than they had with Estral. Come back, Karigan, he thought. Estral needs you, and so do I.

  He leaned over and kissed Estral’s cheek. She did not stir, and her soft, deep breaths indicated she was well asleep and would be for a while. It was time for Alton to attend to his duties, so he left Estral to her peace. He would check in often, and when she woke, he would get her to take broth as Leese instructed, and if love could heal, he would give her as much as was possible. He’d give her everything.

  In the Present:

  YOLANDHE’S ISLAND

  Yap was left to his own devices as Yolandhe the sea witch tended Lord Amberhill in the cave. Yap did not stray far, meaning to keep an eye and ear open for any change in his master’s condition, or for any harm Yolandhe might tender him. So far, however, Lord Amberhill remained unresponsive, and all Yolandhe seemed to do was sing to him in wordless tunes and rearrange the furs spread over him to keep him warm.

  So Yap roamed the shore looking for driftwood with which to make fires—not just for warmth and cooking but to signal passing ships. Not that any ships came close enough to Yolandhe’s island, thanks to the currents and superstitions surrounding the place, though he was sure she could sing them in if she wished. That was part of her power, drawing in the unwary to crash upon her shore.

  He searched for flotsam and found pieces of their own ruined gig rolling in with the tide that also brought in lost fishing gear and an empty bottle or two. His rumbling stomach also kept him busy. He liked his vittles as well as any other fellow, but after he’d retched up Yolandhe’s treasure, it had left a yawning pit in his belly waiting to be filled. So he sharpened a branch with his belt knife. The branch he turned into a spear, and he attempted to stab fish in the shallows.

  If there was land flesh to be had on the interior of the island, he had no idea. He didn’t know how to go about hunting, and he dared not abandon watch on his master. So he fruitlessly stabbed the water, nearly impaling his own foot in the process. It looked like he’d be eating dulse and mussels and snails again, which was getting a little old. It was more than he’d eaten, however, when he and his shipmates aboard the Mermaid had been trapped in the dead calm of Yolandhe’s spell for untold years.

  When his spear failed once again, he was startled to see the sea witch’s reflection rippling beside his own. He glanced up. She looked outward, seemingly to gaze beyond the horizon. She stretched her hand out before her, fingers splayed, and she spoke-sang.

  Yap prepared to run to take cover, for this looked like witchery, but he was too transfixed to move.

  Waves roiled up before Yolandhe. Not huge, but larger than the others, and definitely not natural. They just hung there stationary. Then she jerked her hand back and a fish flipped out of the wave and smacked Yap in the face. He was too stupefied to catch it, but when he realized what was happening, he was ready to catch the next, and the next, and the next. Many others landed on the shore. It wasn’t that the fish were jumping out of the water, but that they were being spit out of the waves.

  When Yolandhe released the waves, the fish stopped flying. She turned to Yap. “You will watch over your master tonight. I must cleanse myself in the moonlight.” And she walked away across a beach alive with flapping, silvery bodies.

  “I’ll need to dry ’em,” Yap murmured. He may have a yawning pit of a belly to fill, but even he could not eat so much in a single sitting. Unfortunately, he had no salt.

  Yolandhe paused. As if she knew Yap’s thoughts, she said, “There is a barrel of salt near the back of the cave.” With that, she vanished into the forest.

  Yap set to work, immediately impounding as many fish as he could in a tide pool, and then gutting and boning the rest and spreading them to dry on makeshift racks of driftwood, even hanging them over the silvered branches of a still-standing, dead tree. He must work fast before the incoming tide reclaimed the tidepool and most of his bounty.

  Hours later, he stumbled into the cave covered in sticky scales and viscera. In the back of the cave, fingers of the setting sun revealed a clutter of objects—wreckage, chairs, a chest, casks and barrels, coils of rope, and even a ship’s figurehead of an armored knight. Other items were lost among dusky shadows.

  Instead of searching for the salt right away, he knelt beside his master who slept peacefully beneath his furs. Yap did not know what injury plagued Lord Amberhill, just that he did not wake. There was no wound Yap could see, but he knew not all wounds could be seen. Sometimes they were on the inside. They’d both been knocked around in the stormy waves after their boat had failed them.

  Lord Amberhill’s hands lay across his breast atop the furs. On his thin, pale finger was the dragon ring with the ruby eye. The dragon’s tail wrapped around its neck, forming the ring part. The ruby, though, that caught the eye. Yap did not know if it was how the sun glowed upon it, or if it was some innate quality of the gem itself, but it flickered with blood-red intensity.

  “Sir,” Yap said in a hushed voice, hoping against hope that Lord Amberhill could somehow hear him. “Sir, you’ve gotta wake up. This is the sea witch’s island. Y’know, the one that kept me and the other lads of the Mermaid trapped in the bottle. We gotta find a way out of here before she curses us, or worse.”

  Initially there was no response. Then Lord Amberhill’s hands struck out and grabbed Yap’s shirt and pulled him down as Yap cried out in surprise. Lord Amberhill’s eyelids peeled back, and his irises, usually a striking light gray, were clouded, smoky.

  “You do not command me!” His voice was strange, lower, harsher, not at all the refined manner Yap remembered. “Do you hear me?” Lord Amberhill demanded.

  “Aye, sir! I hear ya!”

  As quickly as the outburst had come, it dissipated. Lord Amberhill’s hands dropped back down to his chest, and his eyes closed, and once again he rested at peace.

  He saw the man standing over him in wavery ripples. It was like looking through water.

  But Amberhill was not in water. He was pretty sure about that. He had been, but his present existence felt warm and dry. He reached out and felt a rough fur blanketing him. He closed his eyes thinking he should know the man. One part of him thought so, anyway, and another part said, “stranger.” He wasn’t sure if he remembered who he was himself—king or serf, farmer or fisherman.

  Beneath the surface of wakefulness, it was not all dark, nor was he alone. Not far off were the slumbering shadows of those whose dreams leaked into his own. Dreams of soaring high above the land and swimming the depths of the sea. Of burrowing into the earth. Their desires became his, and he sensed their great power, their strength and ferocity, they, the changers of worlds. He felt himself drawn to reach out to them, to touch them, though he feared them. But they slept, and so must he.

  He drifted until he settled into the still of dark.

  BRIMMING WITH SECRETS

  Karigan kept gazing into the shard of the looking mask in hopes of seein
g something of her own time, but try as she might, she saw no new visions.

  She concealed the fragment beneath her pillow when Lorine knocked on the door to help her prepare for supper. Supper entailed another change of clothes into a more formal black and gray affair. It seemed a waste when she realized she’d be dining alone at the big table, with only the company of the servants waiting on her. The professor, apparently, was still out and attending to his duties. She felt conspicuous and out of place, and ate as quickly as good manners permitted, retreating to her room when she finished.

  She changed into her comfortable nightgown, doomed to wait again till it was time to meet the professor. She did so, pacing as dark gathered outside her window. Mirriam poked her head in to check on her and to ensure she was ready for bed. Karigan obediently climbed in beneath the covers and turned off her lamp. Mirriam made a grunt of approval and left.

  Just like when I was a child being raised by my aunts, Karigan thought a little resentfully. It was difficult enough to lose her freedom as a female, much less as an adult, but it was the façade she must maintain for now.

  And so she waited for the house to quiet down, her eyelids drooping. She kept shaking herself awake, and eventually crept to her door and listened as the household settled down for the night. This time when she slipped out, shawl once more draped across her shoulders and bonewood in hand, she had a much better feel for the layout of the house, and in the dim light, picked her way down to the library without hesitation.

  She found the professor sitting in the glow of the low lamplight, a book open on the table before him. He glanced up as she entered.

  “Ah, good evening,” he said in a quiet voice. “My apologies for missing supper, but I had some details to attend to at the university. Are you ready?”

  Karigan nodded, and he closed the book. He extinguished the lamp and, taking up a taper, gave the dragon statuette on its shelf a twist of its tail, opening the secret passage. Neither of them spoke until they were securely through the second door and on the spiral stairs winding their way downward.

  “Er, you have nothing else to wear down here than your nightgown and slippers?”

  “The dresses you had made for me are very fine,” Karigan said, “but too fine. Mirriam would have a fit if I got dirt on them. The nightgown is bad enough.”

  “I see,” the professor said. “I had not thought of that. She is, you see, accustomed to dirt on me.” His chuckle was muffled in the close confines of the shaft that contained the stairway. The taper he carried, bobbing up and down, cast weird shadows on the rough stone walls.

  “Which brings up something else,” Karigan said. “Mirriam will not tolerate my visiting Raven at the stables, and she especially won’t tolerate my riding him.”

  “Do you know that Arhys now demands a stallion of her own?”

  “I . . . heard something about that,” Karigan replied, recalling the ruckus outside the bathing room earlier in the day. “I need to spend time with Raven, even if it causes trouble. I hate to draw attention, but I will if I have to.”

  “Yes, yes, I do not doubt it. I have gathered there is a certain willfulness of character about you. And yet it does not come from a spoiled place as it does with Arhys. I grasp that Green Riders were great horsemen and that it in part came from love of their steeds.”

  Were. She tugged her shawl more closely against the chill of the stairwell. She still could not think of her friends in the past tense. They remained alive to her, robust and carrying on their duties as Riders. To her it was more like they were somewhere rather than somewhen.

  “Let me think on it, my dear, and see if we can’t come up with a solution that won’t tax poor Mirriam’s propriety or draw unnecessary attention to you or my household.”

  “Thank you,” Karigan said. She’d have to be satisfied with his response for now but promised herself that even if he found no acceptable solution, she’d find one of her own. And, she thought, if the professor gave her enough information tonight about what had happened to Sacor City, she could work harder at finding a way to deliver that information home to her own time. It might mean that fitting in with this world would eventually become unnecessary.

  Finding home would be the hard part, she thought with a sigh. All the other occasions she had transcended time had been with the aid of some supernatural force like the ghost of the First Rider, or Laurelyn, queen of Argenthyne. She had not achieved it on her own, but there had to be a way.

  Their descent down the stairs seemed to go much faster than her last journey into the underground. Their feet thudded almost rhythmically on the stone steps. The bonewood kept her from straining her leg too much.

  When they reached the bottom of the stairs, passed through the door at the landing, and entered the underground, its existence still shocked her. Even though she knew it was there, had seen it herself and pictured it in her mind since, she still could not believe it. She shied from her reflection in dusty, cracked windows. Mourned once again for the city, her home, that was no more.

  The professor watched her, his taper casting a half-shadow across his face. “Yes, no matter how often I travel this way, I, too, feel unsettled.”

  They continued on past the facades of buildings that were familiar, but were not. Walking in the underground oppressed Karigan as though all the weight of the earth that covered it also bore down on her shoulders.

  “I also fear,” the professor said, “that some day some catastrophe could do the same to Mill City. It is not the most beautiful of places, but it is my home.”

  That, she could understand. They went on, saying no more as if afraid to break the melancholy silence of the underground. She tried to remember this section of the city as daylit and full of travelers afoot and on horseback, riding in carriages and wagons, the traffic streaming up and down the street as shoppers paused to peer into windows, but she could not quite get past the deadness of it all.

  Eventually they came to the building that contained the stairs that led into the bowels of the mill. They climbed and climbed, and kept climbing until they alighted on the landing of the second floor where the professor kept his library and Cade Harlowe had practiced his fighting technique. This time, however, Cade was absent, and all was dark except for the professor’s taper, which was no more than a firefly glow in the vast space. In moments he raised a lever that ignited the phosphorene lights, leaving the pair of them blinking for several moments.

  The professor shed his somber mood and strode across the floor. Karigan hurried after him, once again amazed by the grand scale of the room with its velvet draperies, polished floor, and fine furniture occupying an otherwise rough interior. She glanced at Cade’s wall of practice weapons with some longing. Staves, swords, knives, axes, and daggers she understood; the cabinet with a few of the snub-nosed weapons—the guns like that which the Inspector had brandished earlier in the day, she did not.

  When they arrived at the professor’s sitting area with his desk and shelves of books, he turned to her. “You have questions about the rise of the empire. I will tell you what I have discerned from accounts that were long ago outlawed. There is so much that remains unanswered, but I will tell you what I know. Perhaps you’ll be able to answer a few things in exchange.”

  At that moment, Karigan did not see the sometimes preoccupied professor, befuddled by women and the dictates of society. She didn’t even see the man made solemn by memories of the fire that had destroyed the other mill buildings of this complex and killed hundreds of workers. No, she saw a man with a canny eye and a sharp wit, the man who had been able to hide his anti-empire activities and cache of artifacts from imperial authorities for a very long time. She saw a man brimming with secrets.

  “I need to know,” she said. “How did Sacoridia fall?”

  THE FALL OF SACORIDIA

  The professor gestured for Karigan to take a seat on one of the overstuffed l
eather chairs while he remained standing, his hands clasped behind his back as if he was about to deliver a lecture before his students.

  “You are aware of the dissidents that called themselves Second Empire?” he asked.

  “Very,” she replied.

  “They built up their army by conventional and . . . magical means, enough to actually challenge King Zachary’s forces.”

  “The king has been working to counteract them.”

  “He failed.”

  The words fell as a blow that would have knocked her to her knees had she been standing. Rationally she’d known King Zachary must have failed for his realm to have come to this end, but hearing it spoken so baldly? She closed her eyes wishing it was not so but knew wishing would change nothing.

  “By whatever means,” the professor continued, “the forces of Second Empire grew to be a serious threat. Battles were won and lost, but the fiercest and bloodiest happened right here.” He flung his arms wide to encompass the area around them. “Mill City not only stands on parts of the Old City, but also on a battlefield. The last battle took place before the Old City’s gates. It is said the conflict raged for months with Second Empire seeking to breach the city walls.” He paused, as if deep in thought, then added, “They don’t make walls like that anymore, do they. Clan D’Yer’s work, if I’m not mistaken?”

  “You’re not,” Karigan replied. Clan D’Yer, renowned masons, had also built the vast wall that separated Sacoridia from Blackveil Forest; a wall that had withstood the forces of nature and magic for a thousand years. There had been no better stoneworkers than Clan D’Yer, and yet, as she had seen today, Sacor City’s walls, and the castle itself, had been more than breached—they’d been pulverized. “How did . . . how did they overcome the walls?”

  “I’ve the diary of one named Seften, a guard at the gate who witnessed the final battle. His words are better than mine.” He raised a finger, indicating that she should hold her questions, and dashed over to his shelves, scanning his collection of damaged books. He hummed tunelessly as he ran his fingers across creased and tortured spines, finally pulling out a small volume with a cry of triumph. It was, Karigan saw, half-charred, the remaining pages stained and stiff from water damage . . . and something darker.