Mirror Sight (26 page)

O
n the ride home, Raven grew more skittish the closer they got to the city, but Karigan now knew what to expect, and so they reached the professor’s stables without incident. Upon their arrival, however, Luke received a message from one of his lads.

“You’d best get changed,” he told Karigan. “The boys will take care of Raven. You’ve got a guest.”

“A guest?”

Luke nodded. “Apparently someone of importance. It was conveyed that I should urge you to hurry.”

The boys provided her a bucket of clean water and a towel to wash the dust off herself in the tack room. Luke once again assisted her with her dress and stashed her boy clothes in the big cabinet. She gave herself a look in the mirror and spared a couple minutes to primp her hair, which had been mashed down by the cap, and to ensure that everything was in its proper place. Satisfied, she rushed across the yard and through the back door of the house. Mirriam nearly pounced on her.

“Finally! You’ve a guest waiting on you. He has been visiting with the professor this last half hour.”

“Who?” Karigan asked, but she could guess. She’d met only one other person outside the immediate household.

Mirriam did not answer but thrust a hat and veil on Karigan’s head and ushered her down the corridor as if herding baby ducklings. When they reached the parlor, Karigan paused in the doorway and smoothed her skirts.

“It was the most amazing discovery of eating utensils ever,” the professor said with enthusiasm to the guest, a teacup and saucer balanced on his knee. “Whole place settings!”

With a certain amount of unease, Karigan saw she had guessed right. Her visitor was none other than Dr. Ezra Stirling Silk, who looked politely bored as the professor regaled him about each pewter fork, knife, and spoon found at his current dig site. A hulking man, well-dressed, stood against the wall behind Silk. A servant, or a bodyguard, or both.

Mirriam discreetly cleared her throat. “Sir, Miss Goodgrave.”

“There you are, my dear,” the professor said. Both men rose at Karigan’s entrance, but before Silk could take her hand again to bow over it, the professor guided her over to the sofa so she could sit next to him. In this case, she did not mind him being overprotective.

When all were seated, the professor poured her a tea. It was less hot than she liked, and bitter, indicating it had been steeping for a while. She glanced over the rim of her cup at Dr. Silk. Even inside he wore his dark specs. Did he wear them as an affectation, or did he have some disease of the eyes?

“I am to understand that you are quite taken with Samson. I mean, Raven.” Dr. Silk smiled.

“She can’t bear to be apart from him,” the professor said. “Must run in the family. I had a cousin with a great affection for animals, too. He took in strays, fed birds from his hands, trained dogs. He was a Goodgrave as well. In any case, we’re trying a lad named Tam to exercise Raven. The two seem to get on well, and he has my niece’s approval, doesn’t he my dear?”

Karigan played along and nodded.

“A high-tempered stallion needs his exercise,” Dr. Silk said amiably. “I hope your lad works out.”

“Luke speaks highly of him,” the professor said.

Karigan focused on her tea, sipping beneath her veil, hoping the two men would simply carry on the conversation without her, but it was not to be so. Dr. Silk turned his gaze on her, and she caught her twin reflections in the lenses of his specs.

“I am grateful for your uncle’s swift payment—the first half—for Raven, but I am now here for the second half.” He gestured, and his servant removed an envelope from an inner pocket of his coat. He crossed the room in three strides and presented it to Karigan. The fine paper and flowing ink made it look suspiciously like an invitation. “Normally I’d send Mr. Howser around with invitations, but I was so charmed to meet you yesterday, Miss Goodgrave, and anxious to hear how you were getting on with the horse, that I decided I must come myself.”

Mr. Howser resumed his station behind Dr. Silk. Karigan glanced at the professor, who did not look very happy.

“Now, now, Bryce,” Dr. Silk said. It was odd to hear anyone call the professor by his first name. “Try not to look so glum. It’s a party, not an inquisition, and you haven’t been to one of my affairs in, oh,
years,
and I can guarantee this one will be very interesting. But now that I’ve made my delivery, duty calls and I must be off.”

Dr. Silk rose and bowed in Karigan’s direction. “I look forward to seeing you again very soon, Miss Goodgrave.”

While the professor saw Dr. Silk and his attendant out the door, Karigan flipped the veil out of her face and cracked the gold wax seal on the invitation. She and a companion, it said, were invited to an evening of dinner and entertainments hosted by the Honorable Dr. Ezra Stirling Silk. The party was to be the next week at seven hour, but no location was listed—it was intended as a surprise. A carriage would come promptly on the evening to deliver her and her companion to the affair.

When the professor rejoined her, she passed him the invitation.

He scowled as he read it. “I don’t like it,” he told her. “I don’t like that he does not disclose the location or that we cannot use our own carriage.”

Karigan agreed that it sounded all very mysterious. “Wouldn’t all his guests have to do the same?”

“If there are others.”

“You suspect a trap?”

The professor stroked his mustache, deep in thought. “It does not seem subtle enough for Silk. Still, there is no way I am going to trust him. I’ll make some careful inquiries to see if anyone else has been invited, and whom, but I’m rather disposed to decline the invitation.”

“We can’t decline,” Karigan said. “It’s part payment for Raven.”

“I know, I know. I’ll see what I can find out, but no matter how innocuous a dinner party may seem, Silk’s motives never are.”

 • • • 

Karigan returned to her bed chamber with nothing to do, and she welcomed the respite. Everything that had happened, all the revelations over the last twenty-four hours, had left her numb. She tossed her hat and veil aside, sprawled on her bed, and stared at the ceiling. She worked everything through her mind once more: Arhys, Amberhill . . . If—
when
—she returned home, the first thing she’d tell King Zachary about was Amberhill. He must not trust his cousin.

She wondered about the ghost of Yates. She wondered why he had appeared to her. She’d had enough experience with ghosts to know that they did not appear without reason. What would compel him to come across time and the veil of death to her?

If there was one facet of her day that made her smile, it was learning about Cade’s aspirations to be Arhys’ Weapon. He was beginning to show depths that she had not expected, and she looked forward to their next training session. Still, all that she had learned since she’d been in this time did nothing to reveal the purpose of the gods. Why was she here? Maybe there was no purpose, maybe she was arbitrarily deposited here, but she did not think so. There was too much connecting to the past,
her
past, for it to be a coincidence.

Karigan could only ponder these things over the following days, which were, essentially, quiet and left her to brooding. She saw little of the professor or Cade and received no invitations to join them in the old mill. She spent hours with Raven, grooming him and tending the healing lash wounds on his hide. The air was too noxious, Luke explained, for even the horses to go for a run. And it was true—a cloud had settled over the city, and she was not at all disposed to open the window in her room. The sulfurous air made her cough and her eyes water. Cloudy, the cat, had not appeared at her window for a visit anyway.

Some of her time was taken up by a visit from Mistress Ilsa dela Enfande and her coterie, there to create an evening gown for her attendance at Dr. Silk’s dinner party.

“It shall be my latest, most daring design,” Mistress dela Enfande declared. “Dr. Silk is known for inviting only the most fashionable of the Preferred to his engagements.”

Karigan could only sigh. She had no choice in the matter so she gave in to her fate, as well as to the capable talents of Mistress dela Enfande.

She managed to avoid Arhys for the most part, although during the assault of Mistress dela Enfande’s assistants and their measuring tapes, she caught Arhys peering through her cracked door, scowling. Likewise Mirriam kept her distance and remained aloof. It was mostly Lorine who attended Karigan, and she’d gone from formal back to her former quiet but friendly self.

One afternoon while Karigan sat by her window, boredly gazing at another day’s vaporous clouds—hazing even the wall of the neighboring house—Lorine came in with clean linens, which she proceeded to store in the wardrobe.

“How often is it like this?” Karigan asked. Unable to ride, unable to do much of anything, she felt like a landlocked sailor in a storm.

“We once had a full month of it that I can remember,” Lorine said thoughtfully, a folded sheet forgotten in her arms. “That was when I was still . . .” She trailed off, gazing into space.

“You were still what?” Karigan asked quietly.

“I was still a slave in the mill. The air in the mills can be bad enough with all the cotton fibers flying about, but the smoky days made everything worse. The weak among us would sicken, even die. We still had to work, you see, no matter what the air was like. But that was just one of a thousand hazards in the mill.”

And here Karigan had been going mad confined to the indoors to avoid the bad air. “I’m sorry,” she said.

Lorine shrugged. “For what? You did not make slavery.”

Karigan had not made slavery, but she’d done nothing to stop it either. It was easy to forget, in the comfort of the professor’s house, how hard others labored. “Do all the mills use slaves to do the work?”

“As far as I know, miss. I heard that many years ago there were small shops that made cloth goods, owned and run by free folk, but they couldn’t compete with the big mills that came in, so they went out of business.”

Lorine finished what she was doing and closed the wardrobe doors. She prepared to leave, but Karigan called her back.

“Yes, miss?”

“How was it you came to work for the prof—er, my uncle? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want,” she added hastily.

“It’s all right,” Lorine replied. “I don’t mind telling you.” She cleared her throat before continuing. “I—I’d had an accident at the mill.” She touched the ever-present scarf covering her hair. “I wore my hair back, always, but it didn’t always stay tied. A bunch of it got caught up in the belting attached to one of the looms I tended. Tore out a large piece of my scalp.”

At Karigan’s sharp intake of breath, Lorine said, “I’m sorry, miss. It’s indelicate of me. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Please, don’t stop. I’m sorry—you must have suffered terribly.”

“The mill I belonged to, if you could not work, you were disposed of one way or another, sold off, or thrown out like garbage. I lost a lot of blood and was insensible. They left me out to die among the day’s corpses, to be picked up later by the rubbish cart. I guess my master did not want to waste money or time on my healing.”

Karigan shuddered, not able to even imagine what Lorine must have gone through as a slave in such conditions.

“I don’t know what chance brought the professor to that spot on that day,” Lorine continued, “but he found me. It’s all hazy to me, a little dreamlike, but he took me from there and brought me here. I was tended till I healed, and then he presented me with legal papers declaring me a free and sovereign citizen of the empire. I couldn’t read them, of course. I also don’t know what it cost him to buy those papers, but I know it wasn’t just a little.” A smile flickered at distant memory. “I begged him to let me serve him. Despite the papers, I thought I’d be sent back to the mills or sold off, but he just laughed and said that if I stayed, that we’d have to work out an agreeable wage. Not only did he save my life and bring me into his household, but he paid me. I live in luxury, miss! I am so happy here. To top everything off, he and Mr. Harlowe have taught me to read and write, too. I can read my own papers, now.”

Although Karigan had glimpsed slaves out on Mill City’s streets, Lorine’s story brought another dimension to it, made it all too real. “There should be no slavery,” she said.

“It is the way that it is,” Lorine replied with a shrug. “Some come to it from family that’ve been enslaved for generations, as I did. When the emperor came, he made slaves of his enemies. It has been this way always.”

No, Karigan thought, it had not always been so. But much of the empire’s populace would not know there was any history prior to the emperor.

“You have a kind heart,” Lorine said, “but it is safest not to speak those things aloud. People who are against slavery and speak of it, well, they tend to disappear.”

On that sober note, Lorine left Karigan to her ruminations. As she watched the smoky air waft outside her window, she thought about what Lorine had said about the emperor enslaving his enemies after his rise to power. She wondered about her friends, so many who must have died in the war with Second Empire, and then during the destruction of Sacor City. If any had survived, they may have been enslaved. What had become of her father and aunts? The aftermath of the war and all the destruction must have been tumultuous. People must have known great fear.