The Dark Mirror (31 page)

As she grew up, it had become apparent to Tuala that there
were certain talents she possessed that did not come readily to other people. From earliest days she had recognized that such skills should be kept concealed, since to demonstrate them would only underline the fact that she was different, and she did not want to be different, she wanted to belong at Pitnochie. Erip and Wid knew a little of what she could do, and so did Bridei. Her full range of abilities,
and the ease with which she could use them, she kept to herself.

It might have been better, she told herself with some bitterness as she struggled up the track, boots sinking deep into the layer of damp and decaying leaves under the bare oaks, if she had never practiced those secret arts at all, if she had pretended even to herself that she had no such powers. Then she might have lost the knack.
She might have forgotten how to use it, how to conjure images of queens and dragons and giants out of a ray of light through colored glass, how to coax a squirrel out of its hiding place and greet it in a way it understood in its small creature-mind, how to shape rushes and grasses and seed pods into a doll or a basket or a chain that held, not just the pattern of plaits and twists and knots,
but a living power. She might have lost the ability to read the signs in the forest, signs left by the other kind, the Good Folk. Then she could not have found them, however much she felt the compulsion to seek. Their subtle scratches on bark or boulder, their small twistings of grass or bunchings of leaves were all messages and, without ever
being taught their meanings, Tuala had long understood
them. Their makers still eluded her. Those half-glimpsed shadows, those whispering voices were as close as they had ever come. Yet their messages were for her, she knew it. They called her; they wanted her as it seemed the human kind did not. With them there might be a home. It was one way; an impossible way. Step into that world and she must leave Bridei behind. To part from him was impossible.
It would be like tearing herself in two.

Deeply enmeshed in her thoughts, Tuala covered the long distance from Broichan’s house to the hidden vale almost without noticing. The mist was thick today; she could barely see her own feet as she made her way down the steep path to the pool. The vapor seemed to close in above her, a suffocating, oppressive blanket. Somewhere in the woods a dog was howling,
a sound of pure desolation.

On the rim of the Dark Mirror Tuala crouched down. At first she did not feel the cold, for the brisk walk had warmed her, but before long her nose, her ears, her fingers and toes began to tingle and to ache with a bone-gripping chill. Her teeth chattered. This had been foolish; she was a long way from home and nobody knew where she’d gone. Not that they would care,
Tuala thought. If she never came back, Mara and Ferat and the others would probably welcome it. No irksome presence among them; no Otherworld temptress at hand to carry off their young men. That was so foolish she still could not come to terms with it. Herself some kind of unearthly beauty? Tuala casting spells to drive men mad from desire? She would simply laugh such a misguided theory off, were
it not for the terrible reality of what it seemed to mean for her. She would scorn it entirely had not Erip and Wid, whose common sense was plain to her, told her that this was indeed how the household now perceived her.
Look in the mirror
, they’d said. So she did, leaning over the pool’s still waters, seeking not visions or portents this time but simply her own true reflection.

She didn’t seem
much different from before. Her face was oval, the dark brows arched, the eyes large and light, perhaps blue if one had to give them a color. The eyes were questioning, and there were shadows around them; she had wept for Erip, and for Wid, and just a little for herself. The nose was straight, the mouth small and neat, pink as a rosebud. She was certainly pale. Tuala was forced to concede that
in this respect, at least, she did somewhat resemble Amna in the story, for her skin had always been white and transparent, as if the Shining One lent her the gleam of moonbeams. Her hair was
coal-black, long and glossy for all her neglect of brushing. That, too, made her like the girl in the tale. But she was young yet, not long come to her bleeding, and she shrank from the idea of what Amna
had done with her lover under a full moon. Amna had been a seductress, a woman of sensual awareness and earthy passions. How could anyone think she, Tuala, had the same power as that dangerous creature of the night?

Tuala’s practical outdoor clothes, cloak, shawl, tunic, and long skirt over sturdy winter boots, quite concealed her true form; the girl who looked back at her from the dark water
could have been of any shape at all. Yet now, as she gazed, the image changed and she saw, shockingly, herself with not a scrap of clothing to cover her, standing there without the least shame, arms raised, neat, round breasts displayed like twin small moons, pink-tipped; curving contours of delicate waist, rounded hips, slender thighs all exposed for any eye to see. Even the small, new triangle
of dark hair between her legs was visible. Horrified, Tuala clutched her hands across to shield her body, although here on the water’s edge she was still well wrapped in her layers of wool. There in the Dark Mirror, her naked image turned and smiled and beckoned, and she recognized with sinking heart that a man might indeed find such a creature of pearl and ebony and rose enticing. She saw her own
innocence in the vision, and the danger it carried in its very nature.

“Go away,” Tuala muttered, angry tears welling in her eyes. “I don’t want to see you! This isn’t what I came for!” She squeezed her eyes shut, willing her own image into oblivion.

“Afraid to face truth?” said someone on her left. “That’s not like you.”

Tuala’s eyes sprang open. This was not a subtle, hissing voice like those
she had heard before in this secret fold of the land. This was confident and real-sounding, surely the voice of a flesh and blood woman. She had time only to blink and take in a glimpse of a cloaked figure standing beside her, close enough to touch, when a second voice spoke. Tuala jumped to her feet, turning the other way.

“Besides,” observed the second personage, “this sight is pleasing. You
cannot deny that. A fair image. Take one look at it, and a man would be eager to discover if the reality were fairer still.”

It was a young man who spoke. Tuala’s skin broke out into goose bumps at his words; she could imagine what Donal or Bridei or even Broichan would have to say about her foolishness in coming all the way up here alone in winter without telling anyone. She held herself very
still and tried to
breathe slowly. She made herself observe, as Bridei had taught her to do. This was not a man, not exactly. He was not so very much taller than herself, and his wild, straggling hair had a mossy, greenish hue. Here and there his locks seemed to wander into the shape of tendrils and leaves, ivylike. The eyes were bog-brown and round as an owl’s. Definitely not a man, although
the mischievous grin he turned on her as she assessed him reminded her painfully of Erip in his better days.

“You’re shivering.” The other spoke and Tuala felt, as she turned back, the soft weight of a cloak settling around her shoulders. It seemed a thing of thistledown, fragile and insubstantial, yet it rendered her instantly as warm as a cat curled up before a hearth fire. The girl met her
gaze calmly. She was somewhat taller than the young man, if man he could be called, and her hair was long and silvery fair, plaited and knotted elaborately with glinting threads and skeleton leaves, cobwebs and tiny white berries threaded through the strands. Her hooded cape was of a blue-gray cloth that moved about her like wood smoke. She, too, seemed young; her skin was winter-white, as pale as
Tuala’s, her figure slender, her bearing graceful. “You feel the cold; that is not so surprising. You have been raised among human folk; their tides are shorter and move with more violence. Already your body tunes to their patterns. You have come to us just in time.”

The words Tuala had prepared for such an occasion were abruptly gone. She had wanted this so badly, had rehearsed the questions:
Who am I? Who was it abandoned me, and why?
Now, afraid of the answers, she could not bring herself to ask. At length she said, “Why now? Why show yourselves now? I’ve been here over and over; I’ve seen visions in the Dark Mirror, I’ve been teased by others of your kind who would never quite reveal themselves. What has changed?” The answer was in her head even as she spoke, the same answer others
had already given:
You have changed
.

“Those whom you encountered were not of our kind,” the leaf man said. “They are a lesser breed; many share our forest. Those others, they would not let you see their true form. Not while you still have one foot in a world of druids and heroes, kings and councillors.”

“
One
foot?” Tuala could not help asking. She did not think what she felt was fear, despite
the utter strangeness of this appearance, only astonishment that at last they had decided to reveal themselves to her, and a wariness that was bred of her knowledge of tales. “I live at Pitnochie; I belong in Broichan’s house. Nobody really knows where I came from. I could be some
poor lass’s by-blow. I could be an ordinary human girl.” She should ask them straight out. She wished she could make
herself do so.
Do you know who I am?
The laughter that rang out now stopped these words before she spoke them aloud. The sound of their mirth echoed around the little glen like seeds rattling in a pod, making Tuala’s neck prickle with its strangeness.

“Ordinary?” the girl mocked. “You believe that no more than we do. You are ours, a child of the forest. You have magic in every hair of your head,
in every touch of your fingertips. Tell us why you have come here today, Tuala. Tell us why you sought us out.”

The young man squatted down; his garments, like his hair, seemed an extension of the woodland foliage, mats of verdant, tangling growth. He smelled faintly of leaf mold. With long, knobbly fingers he patted the ground invitingly; the gray-cloaked girl was kneeling now on Tuala’s other
side. Tuala sat down, cross-legged, every sense alert. If she needed to run, she wanted to be ready to do it instantly. Her heart was pounding; there were many possibilities here, and she must be ready for any of them.

“I came for answers,” she said. “And the questions are not the same I might once have asked you, had I had the chance. Folk have changed; those who were friends are suddenly afraid
of me, wary and strange. My teachers said it’s because . . . because, as a woman, they see me as dangerous.” She swallowed. “Like Amna of the White Shawl,” she added reluctantly. “And now my old friend is dying and they won’t let me in to hold his hand and say good-bye.” She would not give way to tears; it was important to remain in control of the situation. There would be plenty of time for
weeping before long.

“Amna, hmm,” the leaf man said. “Human women invent such tales to keep their men from straying, you know”

Tuala stared at him. His cheeks were as brown and shiny as ripe chestnuts. “Invent?” she echoed. “You mean it’s just a made-up story? What about the owl-wife, is that the same?”

“Maybe yes,” the man said. “Maybe no.”

“That’s not very useful,” Tuala retorted. “I need
some answers. I need to be able to show people that I’m no threat to them. I need to convince them that . . .” Her voice tailed off; this was just too embarrassing to put into words.

“That you’ve no desire for a man?” The girl slipped back her hood and folded her hands in her lap; there were many rings on her long fingers, intricate silver constructions in branching shapes studded with pale stones.
“That’s of no import, Tuala. The danger, as they see it, is that a man should
desire you. They avoid you because they believe it perilous, from now on, to look or to touch. They think that to allow you too close may become a death sentence. We know your story. Bridei took you in. He was a child then and quite innocent of what it meant. The druid saw how it would be, but he saw it too late. He
cannot allow you to stay at Pitnochie. To do so would indeed bring death: the death of his vision. So he believes.”

Tuala’s heart was cold. “But you said Amna was a made-up story. Anyway. I’m not like that. I’ve been brought up like a human girl, I will just live my life as an ordinary girl does. I won’t harm anyone.” The future she wanted contained herself and Bridei and Pitnochie all together;
how could she bear anything else?

Neither of her companions spoke. In the lengthy silence, Tuala heard the echo of her speech and recognized how childish it sounded, how simple. It was too late for such easy solutions. She could never be a child again. “How do you know all this, anyway?” she challenged eventually, although the answer to this was here before her, in the still water of the Dark
Mirror. “What is it to you?”

The forest girl smiled. It was an odd smile, in which sorrow and resignation were tempered by a kindness that seemed almost reluctant. “You surprise me, Tuala,” she said. “You do not ask the one question that most troubles you. Is not that question the answer to this one?”

Tuala did not respond. These people were Other; they were as unlike her as wild creatures were.
If they were her kin, she would almost rather not know.

“Ah, well,” the girl said on a sigh, “you have not yet earned the right to such an answer, so I could not give it even if I knew it. That truth is for later, when you have shown that we can trust you. The time will come when you need us so badly you will do anything to know As for the source of our knowledge, we watch you and we watch Bridei.
Our patterns are longer than those of the humankind, but that does not mean we have no interest in kings and druids, in battles and struggles and the governing of Fortriu. There’s great change coming. Your friend is at the center of it, or will be. You are aware of that, we suspect.”

Tuala nodded, though she would not put an answer into words. Even as a small child she had understood the kind
of future Broichan had mapped out for his foster son.