The face that Yriel saw in the glass disc was recognisably her own. Somehow though, her pinched features in the glass seemed… distinguished, almost aristocratic. In the glass, she looked older than her seventeen years, but not too much older. Her hair, straw-coloured and lank in real life, was spun from lustrous golden threads in the glass and the mole on her left cheek was no longer a blemish but a beauty spot.
In real life, Yriel was a fisherman’s daughter, orphaned at nine and a washerwoman since then. In the back-to-front world inside the glass, she was a princess.
A harmless glamour, was how the shopkeeper had described it, and it certainly gave Yriel a secret thrill to see herself as she might have been.
A guilty thrill, she recognised.
She let out a little shriek as an armoured fist attacked her door.
She leapt across the tiny room and thrust the mirror back under her pillow. It was a poor hiding place, but she could think of none better.
Her attention had been so taken by the mirror that she hadn’t realised how much closer the engine-spirits of the tanks had come.
Yriel snatched up her rumpled everyday smock. She pulled it over her head, on top of her threadbare shift. She pushed her feet into her sandals.
She eased her door open, cautiously. No one stood on the threshold, but the narrow wynd outside was thronged with half-dressed, bleary-eyed neighbours.
The witch hunters and their army were following the road around, climbing the coastal cliff face into which Icthis was built. As well as their engines, Yriel could now hear an augmented voice booming praise to the God-Emperor and promising that the properly devout need have no fear of His judgement.
The red and black troops were spreading out across the village, into crannies like this one that the tanks were unable to penetrate. They were making sure that everyone was roused to hear their message.
Yriel felt relief that hers hadn’t been the only door knocked on. She saw that same emotion reflected in the faces of the folk around her.
She could hear her own questions echoed in their voices too. ‘Why here?’ they were asking in hushed, fearful whispers. ‘Why us?’
They had known – they had all known – that the Inquisition was on their world. None of them had ever dreamt that it would turn up on their doorsteps.
Yriel couldn’t tell what worried her neighbours more: the possibility that dark forces had taken root in their village, unseen, or the possibility that they hadn’t. She only knew that, at this moment, very few of them were secure in their innocence.
The mirror!
Yriel looked around, checked that no one was watching her. They weren’t. No one ever really looked at Yriel Malechan.
She slipped back into her cabin. She ran straight to her cot, to her pillow, to the mirror. She snatched it up and transferred it to the inside folds of her smock. She had to get rid of it before she was caught with it. What had she been thinking, accepting it in the first place? She had to take the mirror back. Back to where it had come from.
Yriel made her way downwards through the village, towards the docks. She squeezed through fissures in the cliff face and clattered down rough-hewn steps. She knew this maze of back ways well and could avoid the Inquisition’s troops with ease.
She could feel the cold, hard disc of the mirror pressed up against her breast.
She knew there was something wrong as she approached the market plateau. As was usual for this hour, it teemed with shoppers come to intercept the pick of the dawn’s catch before the rest was pickled for transport inland and off-world.
This morning’s crowd, however, had weightier matters on their minds than the freshness of their fish. Something had drawn them to the westernmost edge of the markets. Something that had struck the majority of them dumb.
Yriel’s mind began to form a dreadful suspicion. She elbowed her way through the crowd – she had to see what was happening, she had to know – and that suspicion, that dread, grew until she felt as if its icy grip would suffocate her.
The curio shop stood apart from its neighbouring cabins, on the edge of a precipice.
There were red and black soldiers swarming all over it.
Four soldiers – all women; the soldiers were all women, Yriel noticed – appeared in the shop’s doorway. They were dragging a prisoner between them: the wretched, disfigured shopkeeper. ‘I knew it,’ some people in the crowd were crowing. ‘Didn’t I always say…? …Never fitted in around here… Always something creepy about him.’
The shopkeeper was forced to his knees. His misshapen head was stooped, but then it always had been. A soldier drew her sword and flicked a rune to make it blaze with holy fire. A low gasp was raised from the crowd, part horror, part anticipation.
Yriel missed the moment of the shopkeeper’s execution. She had flinched away as the blade began its downwards swing towards his neck. She had closed her eyes.
She had seen the shopkeeper’s face for an instant. His rheumy eyes, staring out from around the suppurating wart on his nose. He hadn’t looked afraid.
He had almost seemed relieved.
The executioner kicked the shopkeeper’s body over the precipice. It plunged towards the uncaring waters below. The decapitated head was summarily sent to follow it. Before it landed, Yriel was already running. She didn’t know where to. She only knew she had to get away from that place, away from judgemental eyes.
She came to rest, when her heart and lungs could take no more, on an isolated outcrop. She took the mirror out from under her smock. I should throw it into the ocean, she thought. Bury it with its owner… its former owner.
The shopkeeper had been so eager to sell the mirror to Yriel. He had asked only four coins for it, and accepted two. I should have seen it then, she scolded herself fiercely. I should have realised that the mirror could bring me nothing but ill fate.
Yriel looked in the glass a final time. She saw the princess smiling back at her. She heard a soft voice that sounded like her own voice in her own head, and it was saying to her, Why should you feel guilty?
The Emperor knows, you’ve worked hard all your life. You’ve always said your prayers. Don’t you deserve something? Just one nice thing to call your own?
She didn’t want to listen to the voice. She couldn’t help but listen. She held the mirror out over the distant water. Her arms were trembling.
And what harm can a simple mirror do to anyone, if no one even knows you have it?
Why should anyone have the right to deny you this simple pleasure?
No one dared skip temple that morning. The draughty hall was packed from floor to rafters. Yriel had to stand in the gallery, wedged between brawny fishermen whose sea-salt and tobacco reek reminded her of her dead father.
They were addressed by an inquisitor, silver-haired and frail of limb but whose bearing and voice exuded the highest possible authority. The same man, Yriel was sure, whose gaze she had met briefly through her spy hole.
She avoided that gaze as it swept across the congregation.
The inquisitor declaimed against the insidious lures of the Ruinous Powers. He urged the faithful to turn their own gazes upon their neighbours, to recognise the subtle signs that they may have given in to temptation. A blight, he said, had gained a foothold in this village, and it must not be allowed to spread.
Icthis, the inquisitor declared, might yet be saved.
Yriel felt relieved that she had cast away the mirror.
She had only had it for a day, she told herself. Even less: a single evening and a night. And no one had seen her with it. No one but the shopkeeper, and he could tell no tales now. What harm had she done, anyway?
She heard the echo of the princess’s voice in her head: Why should you feel guilty?
They have no right to judge you!
Yriel raised her chin from her chest. When the inquisitor’s eyes next roved in her direction, she met them with her own gaze, defiantly.
She walked home with her head held high. She h
ad no reason to feel ashamed, and even less to fear. She was sure that no one would see the signs of corruption in her. No one ever really looked at Yriel Malechan, after all.
She found a day’s work piled up on her step. She pushed open the cabin door and hauled in the overflowing baskets one by one. She lit a fire in her hearth and filled a pot with the last of her water. She didn’t think about the mirror.
She picked up two empty buckets. By the time she had returned from the well with both filled, the first pot would be nicely heated.
It would take four pots – six buckets’ worth – of water to fill the old tin bath. Then, Yriel would launder her neighbours’ clothes and bed sheets, then her own, then at last she would bathe herself if there was time.
She would have to hurry. If she didn’t return the laundry to its owners – and claim her meagre payment from them – before the markets closed tonight, she wouldn’t eat. Thanks to the lengthened service at the temple, she was already running late.
She hesitated at the door.
There was something under Yriel’s smock. It was a cold, hard disc, pressed up against her breast. Her heart knew what it was even as her head denied it.
But it can’t be… I cast it away… didn’t I?
She pulled the mirror out into the light. Her reflection – the image of the princess – almost seemed to be mocking her as she remembered holding the mirror out over the waiting ocean. Her fingers had felt stuck to its frame as if glued, but she had been determined to shake the cursed thing free, to be rid of it forever.
She didn’t remember letting the mirror go.
But that meant…
She must have had the mirror with her all along. In the temple. In the presence of the stern inquisitor and his retinue. Yriel felt a breathless terror at how easily she could have been exposed. She felt exhilarated too, because she hadn’t been.
She had to find a better hiding place. She dropped to her knees and scrabbled at the cabin’s floorboards until she found one loose that she could pry up with her fingers. Tiny, crawling insects scattered as daylight spilled into their cold, damp under-space.
Yriel wrapped the mirror in tissues to protect its lustre.
She was about to lay it down when a tissue slipped away, and she caught a glimpse of something ghastly underneath. She let out a startled shriek.
The mirror slipped through Yriel’s fingers. It fell through the gap in the floor, landing face-up in the dirt. It was a moment before Yriel dared look at it again. When she did, she saw the face of the princess looking back at her. But she knew…
She knew there had been another face in the glass. Just for the briefest instant.
The face of an old woman, her skin wizened and blemished, her nose a misshapen canker, but her eyes… Her eyes had been like the inquisitor’s eyes, burning deep into Yriel’s soul. Hard, greenish-black eyes. Malevolent eyes.
Yriel reached down. She folded the tissue paper back over the mirror. She replaced the floorboard and moved the tin bath to stand on top of it. She was confident that no one would find the mirror now. It was safe, but close at hand. Her little secret.
She pretended that she must have been imagining things. The only face in the mirror, she told herself, was mine. All else could only have been a trick of the light.
She pretended that, when she had been looking into the glass, looking at the princess, she hadn’t seen the shadow of the crone behind her.
Yriel retrieved the mirror the day the Inquisition left.
Their stay had been a short one, but it had left her village scarred.
Sixteen people, sixteen members of the church, had been charged with vile heresies, tried and executed. Their homes and workplaces had been torched to burn out the Chaos taint that may have clung to them. Families, friends and neighbours of these sinners had been subjected to merciless interrogations.
But, at last, the intangible trail of rumours that the witch hunters had been following had led them away to a more populous town inland.
Icthis had faced its judgement, and the Emperor had not found it wanting.
With almost indecent speed, village life returned to normal – for all but Yriel Malechan, that was. Her life had been forever changed.
It was a subtle change, at first, one that few people would have noticed.
Yriel’s routine, her daily drudgery, went on. Her knees still ached from kneeling, scrubbing other people’s clothes. Her back ached too, from hauling water from the well, and her shoulders from turning the handle of her stubborn old mangle.
But Yriel endured all this with a hopeful heart, because she knew…
She knew that she was special. She took the mirror out from underneath her pillow every hour, and it told her so.
And, because she was special, because Yriel had been chosen, she knew that good things were going to happen to her. And they did.
They were small things to begin with. A market trader who had short-changed Yriel had his stall collapse and much of his produce damaged. A rude old woman who barged past her in the wynd fell over and bloodied her face. A customer who criticised her work and withheld payment suffered a nasty accident.
Nobody could explain what had made his carriage wheel fly off like that.
Yriel took pleasure in every one of these minor victories. After all, the mirror told her, they were no more than a princess deserved. She never wondered why the only fortune she was ever granted was the misfortune of others.
Sometimes, when Yriel looked into the mirror, her eyes strayed past the princess to seek the other face in her shadow. Sometimes, she thought she glimpsed it, but then she always looked away before she could tell for sure.
The thought of the withered crone made Yriel feel afraid. But, on some buried level, she had come to accept the fact of its lurking presence.
There could be no princess, she understood, without the crone.
And, in the meantime, there was another way in which her life had been transformed. One wonderful, breathtaking, heart-fluttering way.
Yriel had met a boy.
She had bumped into Jaresh on her way back from the well.
It had been her fault, but he had apologised anyway. He had refilled her buckets and insisted on carrying them for her.
They had talked on their way back to her cabin. Jaresh, she had learned, was born in Icthis but had left with his grandparents as a child. He had recently returned to help care for an ailing great-aunt. Yriel knew of his family and had seen the plague warning daubed in red on the great-aunt’s door.
At nineteen years old, she had almost given up hope of finding herself a husband. Most of the eligible men of the village had been taken by the draft and were dead by now. The few that remained had been ensnared by grasping hussies, without a one of their heads ever turning in Yriel’s direction.
Jaresh was different. He didn’t only talk about himself. He had asked questions about Yriel too and had appeared to be interested in the answers.
Her heart had pounded as she had watched him receding down the wynd. As soon as he was out of sight, she had run inside her cabin, to seek the mirror’s reinforcement. The reflection of the princess had filled her with high hopes.
Is it possible, she had asked herself, that another might see me as this special glass does, see what I truly am? Might Jaresh be able to see the princess too?
She saw a great deal more of Jaresh in the following weeks and months. She had made sure that she would.
She watched him, building up a picture of his daily routine and changing hers to match it. She found a new route to the well that took her close to his great-aunt’s cabin, and always dawdled with her buckets in the hope of seeing him there. She often ‘ran into’ Jaresh at the markets as they shopped for the same things, and each time he had a smile and a cheery word for her.
It wasn’t enough.
Yriel longed for more than just these stolen moments with him. But the more encounters she contrived with Jaresh – the more opportunities he p
assed up to declare any finer feelings for her – the more futile her fervent hopes began to seem.
You can make him yours, the mirror told her, if you truly wish it.
And Yriel decided that, yes, she was tired of waiting. The next time she saw Jaresh, she would ensure that he saw her, really saw her and heard what she had to say. She would ask him to take her to the tavern, and of course he wouldn’t turn her down, because Jaresh was a gentleman and anyway, who could refuse a princess?
The following afternoon, Yriel saw Jaresh at the market plateau.
Holding hands with another woman.
Jaresh’s great-aunt had been a respected member of the Icthis community. So, her funeral on the clifftop drew a highly respectable crowd.
Yriel stood at the back, where Jaresh was unlikely to see her. She wanted desperately to go to him, but she had no words to comfort him. Anyway, he had Shorea by his side to share his tears. The silhouette of their two bodies entwined was burnt into Yriel’s eyes by incandescent orange flames.
Due to the manner of the great-aunt’s death, her possessions were cremated with her.
After all the elegies were said, the mourners tramped back down the cliff path, headed home. But Yriel stayed behind. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but she found it all the same. A small white square, fluttering on the coastal breeze.
A facecloth. She stooped to examine it more closely.
It must have fallen from the bag of the great-aunt’s clothes, unnoticed. The facecloth was nothing special. It was perfectly plain, in fact. Yriel saw three or more like it every day. She had one like it herself.
As did Shorea, she recalled. Yriel had taken a special interest in Shorea’s laundry ever since she had recognised her love rival as one of her customers.
She picked up the facecloth, gingerly. Of the funeral pyre, only embers now remained, so she undertook to take the cloth home and burn it in her own hearth. She dropped it into her pocket, making sure it was the only thing in there.
How terrible it would be, mused Yriel, were somebody to confuse this infected facecloth with another.
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