The Soul Mirror (5 page)

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Authors: Carol Berg

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BOOK: The Soul Mirror
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The letter revealed no hint of the anxiety her wizardly instructor had described. I read on into the second page, a jumble of snippets scrawled in different inks.
I’ve had no occasion to post this, as Mage Bourrier has stuck me on the restriction list again—for demonstrating that his “talking door” could be made wholly inarticulate by applying a rasp to the hinges, and silenced altogether with a healthy dollop of grease. As usual, I am named insolent and self-aggrandizing. Ah, but not stupid at least!
This last scrap was scrawled with the same pen and ink that scribed my name on the outside of the letter. So she had written it the morning she died. Whatever had happened before or after she returned her magic book to the Seravain library, whatever events she had set in motion must have driven her to the mistake that killed her. How could I
ever
understand?
Hurt settled like lead weights in my bones. Its barbed edges gouged a raw and ragged wound in my heart. I had once believed no pain could be worse than testifying at my father’s trial, hearing my own words expose his treason and murder and seal his condemnation. But then I had watched my terrified brother clapped in irons and dragged to prison when he was but fifteen. And then I had watched my mother’s fractured spirit decline into madness, and I had been forced to beg her family to confine her in their mountain fortress, lest she harm herself or others. And now this . . . How could a girl of such life and spirit be lost to this world? What had frightened her to her death?
“I’ll try to be bold, little sister. Somehow, I’ll find out what happened to you. I swear it.” Though I had no idea how to go about it.
I poked at her charmed trinkets with a hairpin, as if they might yield me answers. The back of one silver nireal had been engraved with a frog—Lianelle’s, surely. She had once filled my bedchamber with no less than fifty frogs that she claimed to have called to her service with sorcery. The back of the second pendant was engraved with a single olive tree on a hill—a symbol of strength and home. My chest ached as if it might crack.
As I rewrapped the trinkets in the linen and leather, a small triangular scrap of paper fell loose. A single word,
andragossa
, was written on it. An Aljyssian word, no doubt the keyword for the ring spell. Stomach churning in rebellion, I stuffed the scrap in the packet with the rest.
Though I treasured my sister’s sentiments, not even her wizardly talented Guerin nor her revered Mage Kajetan could persuade me to touch her unnatural gifts. Had poison killed Lianelle, I would not swallow it to learn how. Had she fallen from a cliff, I would not jump after her to discover why.
Perhaps some magic was honest and worthy. Perhaps there existed some true enchantments that could not be exposed as duplicity or explained by natural laws of alchemistry, biology, or physics. I doubted it. But from my earliest memory, the very notion of spellwork—some kind of unnatural energies fermenting inside one’s veins, perverting the natural order of creation—had repelled me. As I grew older, the revulsion had become a physical thing, the merest suspicion of nearby magic unsettling my stomach. Now its pursuit had brought ruin to everyone I loved. I wanted nothing to do with it. My own mundane gifts must carry me on this wretched journey.
CHAPTER 3
1 OCET, AFTERNOON
“
D
amoselle, we really must be on our way.” Savin-Duplais hovered in the doorway of the library, poised at the edge of my leaving, as he had been all day, like a gray sparrow ready to take flight at the flick of my hand.
“My parents have lived here for twenty years, sonjeur. I cannot sort out our belongings in a few hours.”
I dropped a magnifying lens into the satchel at my feet, laid my mother’s sketch of Ambrose, Lianelle, and me in the box of her drawings, and riffled through the packet of my father’s years of correspondence with Germond de Vouger. Some collegia would surely treasure these papers, the evolving outline of an entirely new theory of objects in motion from the preeminent natural philosopher in the world.
“The driver is waiting.”
I threw the priceless letters into the empty drawer of my father’s desk and slammed it shut. As I rose from the chair, I surveyed the ranks of books, denying tears for the hundredth time since dawn. These volumes were my childhood, my education, my refuge and delight.
“The books remain with the house, damoselle,” snapped Duplais, as if he could read my thoughts. “If some particular volume has sentimental value, you may write to Sonjeur de Sejain to request it.”
Sejain would be highly unlikely to yield anything. The squinting inventory clerk had attached himself to my shoulder upon his arrival as if he were the new owner of Montclaire and I a thief. He had come near apoplexy when I made to retrieve my mother’s jewel case. Duplais, to his credit, had sent the creeping weasel off to inventory the plate and porcelain.
“One more day, sonjeur,” I said, desperation breaking my resolve not to ask Duplais for so much as a spoon. “I sit a horse well and have no need to be bundled off in a coach. If we ride to Merona instead of driving, we cut off two days, allowing me to arrive well within His Majesty’s deadline.” A stupid deadline. What urgency could be attached to a waiting woman? I doubted Queen Eugenie, deprived of my attendance, would flounder in filth and loneliness, unbrushed or undressed.
“Within the hour, damoselle.” Daylight had not thawed the frozen stick.
I would not beg a clerk for my books. Gritting my teeth, I snatched four or five volumes from the shelves of story collections and histories and slammed them down beside the stack of personal belongings to be stored in Mistress Constanza’s attic at the Cask. Among the salvaged items were the box of Mama’s drawings and the pages of Ambrose’s poetry I had transcribed through the years. Though possessed of an unlikely gift for verse, my brother had refused to write down his creations. Running, riding, and swordwork were his life’s breath. Angels protect his mind, confined for so long.
Turning back to the shelves, I pulled out Papa’s favorite manual of swordwork, a star atlas, and a book on river birds. I stuffed them into the satchel I would take with me to Merona. Perhaps I could celebrate with Ambrose on his birthday, a month hence.
Of a sudden, my despite for the King of Sabria swelled to choking. Had Ambrose’s approaching majority triggered this sudden rush to revert the Ruggiere demesne? With a father five years missing, Ambrose would, by statute, inherit the Ruggiere titles on his twentieth birthday, thus making it more complicated to strip away the demesne. Unless it was already granted elsewhere.
“Damoselle . . . the time.” Duplais’ tapping boot must surely dent the floor. His right hand, pocked with ugly red scars, pointed at the door.
“Very well.” I stacked a few more books beside the boxes of drawings and letters, and stuffed one more into my bursting satchel. Hefting the bag, I brushed past Duplais, mumbling, “Creator forbid that Sabria topple because we’re late for my brother’s disinheritance.”
Duplais’ naturally deep complexion took on a decidedly scarlet cast. The Royal Accuser knew exactly what I meant.
Mistress Constanza’s donkey cart had been waiting since third hour of the afternoon watch, and it was already half past the fourth. As I entrusted my list of the family’s personal belongings to Bernard, and spoke to Melusina about packing the garments laid out on my bed, Duplais twitched like a cat’s tail. I had scarce begun exchanging farewells with these two, a part of my family since before I was born, when his slender patience cracked. “Enough of this!” He grabbed my arm. “You may write your friends once you are settled in Merona.”
He propelled me through the front doors and up to the splintered seat beside the slouching Remy. Bernard had not even brought Duplais’ own mount from the stable as yet. Evidently that did not matter, as Duplais tossed my book satchel in the cart and slapped the donkey’s rump. I groped for a suitably scathing comment to yell back at him. As ever, it eluded me. No doubt a memorable gibe would occur to me on the morrow.
We’d not even rolled through the gates when a violent jolt jounced me out of the emotional backwash of my departure and almost out of the cart. Remy had headed off the road onto the rutted track that led through the vineyards and around the backside of Montclaire’s hilly terrain, a much longer and rougher route to the village.
“Whatever are you doing?” I said, clinging to the seat lest I be bounced out altogether. “Duplais will have apoplexy!”
“No’m. He paid me to take you down by Jaugert’s and meet him at Vradeu’s Crossing.”
“In the name of sense, why?”
Remy shrugged and bawled insults at the mule, while the wind caught our plume of yellow dust and rolled it back over us.
Goodman Jaugert owned a ramshackle stable just north of Vernase. Unfortunately, anyone desiring to avail themselves of his tender hands with horseflesh or the healthy grazing of his pasture had to travel five kilometres upstream to Vradeu’s Crossing and back again, or risk fording Pelicaine Rill, which was more kin to a rapids than a rill alongside his property. Only Montclaire’s food baskets kept his seven children from starving.
Such a circuitous route made no sense at all.
 
 
“ANI! ANI! ANI!” A FULL hour after leaving Montclaire, five dirty-faced urchins with near-white hair chased the donkey cart into Jaugert’s yard, swarming onto the step and the box before we had rolled to a stop. A gangly girl held back and dipped her knee, while at the same time snatching the collar of a freckle-nosed boy trying to climb my skirt. “Divine grace, damoselle.”
“Divine grace, Kati. I’m so sorry I’ve brought nothing today.” I patted several warm white heads and told myself guilt was irrational, which did nothing at all to cure it.
As Remy went off in search of Jaugert and the noisy swarm dispersed, I motioned Jaugert’s eldest up close. “Kati, you must get up to the house tomorrow early and tell Melusina I said to fill you as many baskets as she can. I’m called to the city, and there will be a new lord at Montclaire. A new family. Do you understand?”
“Aye, damoselle.” Though her shy flush died away, her proud manners held.
A child of eleven should not have to understand what I’d just told her. But her mother had died birthing the baby that clung to Kati’s hand, and her father was waiting for a charm singer to cleanse his house before considering a new wife to care for his brood. Unfortunately, the Camarilla, the council of master mages who supposedly protected Sabrians from magical charlatans, had the habit of branding charm singers on the forehead and hanging them up in the public markets until they confessed their false practices—or starved.
I never knew who to despise the more: the lackwit grannies and hedge wizards who perpetuated these superstitions, the brutal mages who insisted people hold faith in—and pay for—only their particular variety of charms and spells, or the believers like Jaugert who allowed magic to impoverish their lives.
“Damoselle Anne, divine grace be with thee this sweet even’,” said Jaugert from the barn door. “Guess me fair who I’ve got fer ye.” The wiry little man led out a bright-eyed little silver-bay mare, who nickered and bobbed her head in greeting.
“Ladyslipper!” The happy surprise almost destroyed my hard-won composure. Holy saints, how I detested such sentimental weakness.

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