The Soul Mirror (19 page)

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Authors: Carol Berg

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BOOK: The Soul Mirror
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I didn’t even know what to look for. I picked through the wide drawer in her writing desk and found no correspondence, no lists, no sketchbooks, no notations of any kind. Her bookshelves revealed a preference for romances and travel memoirs, none of which exhibited any quality of interest beyond any other, and a somewhat surprising interest in physics. She owned every one of Germond de Vouger’s works.
I was searching her armoire, thinking I might find clues tucked among her scarves or undergarments, when a door shut softly. My heart near stopped.
“It must be here somewhere.” The woman’s voice, sharp as struck brass, came from the sitting room. “Orviene babbled to her incessantly. She’s the only one who could have taken it, the meddlesome thing. What interest could she have had? Why is it
you’re
the first to tell me? They should have come to me four years ago.”
A lower voice, a man’s voice, mumbled a response I could not decipher. Orviene had been one of my father’s sorcerers, executed for treason. Silently, I closed the armoire and ducked behind a folding fabric screen in the corner beside the doorway, the best of bad alternatives.
“You can’t be seen here,” said the woman. “It would be remarked. I don’t know why you insisted on coming.”
Fabric rustled—satin skirts and softer fabrics. Hinges squeaked. Cabinet doors slammed, followed by a series of muted thuds.
As the litany of noises continued, I peered cautiously past the edge of the screen and through the sitting room doorway. Though her back was to me, the piled curls were unmistakable. Lady Antonia. She was pulling books from the shelves, flipping through the pages, and tossing them onto the floor alongside cushions, pillows, and shawls.
Her male companion was no more than a darker mass in the shadows by the outer door. Yellow light streamed from his extended hand. I could see no lamp. My eyes must be playing tricks. My stomach heaved, and the noise in my head threatened to swamp my barricades and engulf reason.
When Antonia had tossed aside the last volume, she spun around. The yellow light danced across her face, her painted lips thin and angry. “Stupid cow. Where could she have hidden it?”
She charged straight toward me, the screen quivering as she swept into the bedchamber. The yellow light followed, gleaming from the doorway.
Holding my breath, I pressed myself into the corner. Through the stretched, painted gauze of the screen, I watched her poke and prod the pillows and bedding, shaking out the hangings, and even kneeling to peer underneath. She pulled every drawer out of the armoire and dumped out its contents. Discarded cases and enameled boxes spilled jewelry, pens, buckles, and keys onto the floor. She pawed through the debris, mumbling curses. Clothing followed, gowns, shifts, undergarments, hose, skirts and sleeves. She examined every fold and pocket.
Unlike me, she seemed to know what she was looking for. The little red book, perhaps?
Angry and frustrated, the dowager and her companion soon retreated to the sitting room, and I breathed again.
“All right, so it’s not here. I’d best get someone to straighten these chambers, or we’ll have another scandal.”
“So she didn’t have it. You’ve been too hasty . . . endangered your plan . . .” I could only hear a few of the man’s whispered words, but his tone of reproach rang clear.
Lady Antonia joined him at the door. “Easy for you to quibble. We intercepted a letter she wrote to her scholar friend in Tallemant. She claimed to have
the key to unravel the conspiracy and root it in the Blood Wars
. Perhaps she knew. Perhaps she lied. Either way, she was getting too close. The damnable woman was talking of going to Seravain to get the truth of the girl’s death! No one would be able to silence the rumors once word got out. It
had
to be done.”
Revelation rocked me on my heels. This woman, once Queen of Sabria, Queen Eugenie’s own foster mother, spoke of murder.
The two stood by the door, arguing in whispers, not even half of their words audible. “. . . not afraid of taking action,” said Lady Antonia. “We’ll settle this tomorrow night . . . after cards . . . examine the codices. . . .”
“I’ll go first,” said the man.
As soon as Lady Antonia had followed her companion out the door, I scuttled across the room and peered into the passage, hoping to identify the man. But the corridor was deserted.
The certainty that I’d been right to come, right to suspect that this death was linked to Lianelle’s, that all these terrible events were connected, cleared my head for the moment. An idea had struck as Lady Antonia emptied the wardrobe. The
key
, she had said. I thought I might know where to look.
I first picked out every key from the litter on the floor. She’d paid no attention to them, so clearly she had known these weren’t the type of key she sought. Clutching the slips of brass, bronze, and silver, I poked around the decorative corners and scallops of the painted armoire—quite an old piece. Sure enough, behind a piece of green-painted scrollwork, similar to that in my own wardrobe, I found a keyhole. Many false starts later, I pulled open a long, narrow drawer. With a fierce joy, I snatched up the sole article in the drawer—a small pouch. I relocked the drawer and tossed the keys in the scattered debris.
As I slipped into the passage, Morgansa, Lady Antonia’s red-haired waiting woman, rounded the corner with a pale, scrawny serving girl in tow. I flattened myself to the wall, skin awash with sweat, floundering for excuses. I’d no idea how much time had passed. The potion would wear off at any moment.
The woman bustled past, murmuring sharply to the child. “. . . tell no one or we’ll have your mam thrown into the deepest dungeon in Sabria.” Neither of them looked my way.
I sped through the corridors. To my dismay, a guard had taken up a post, blocking the passage to my bedchamber, and, of all people in the world, Portier de Savin-Duplais stood talking with him. There was no alternate route. My head throbbed so viciously, I was near screaming.
I slipped around the guardsman, and edged carefully past Duplais.
The Royal Accuser whirled in my direction. No more than three paces from him, I dared not move or breathe.
“Who’s there?” he called, his glance attending the crossing passage, the silent doorways.
“N-none’s here, sonjeur,” said the guardsman. “Who could be here?”
I crept a step backward. Duplais shook his head. “Someone . . .”
Eventually he moved into the main passage. The guardsman pulled some kind of amulet from underneath his armor and kissed it. I ran.
By the time I reached my bedchamber my entire body shook with exhaustion. I threw myself on the bed, pulled a pillow over my head, and fought to hold on to my defenses. But fabric and feathers could not hold off chaos.
Confusion, terror . . . those were my own. But the voices themselves encompassed every possible expression: a child crying with a nightmare, a mother’s comfort, a lover’s whispers—oh, sweet heaven, I had never imagined such tender eloquence—a husband’s grief, a woman’s hunger, an argument over money, a drunken tavern tale . . .
Wonder and amazement nibbled away at my terror, and I began to truly listen, thinking of each voice as a distinct mind that existed somewhere in the encompassing night beyond my window. Madness! Yet as the clamor began to fade, I found myself straining to hear more, opening my ears, my mind, my soul—wherever this strange phenomenon was occurring. Two distinct presences lingered long after the rest.
One was little more than a cool stillness, quiet and wary. Surely it was my own mind that shaped unspoken curiosity into a word.
Who?
And the second, so faint, yet clear as honed steel, embedded a dagger in my soul. A voice that testified to pain beyond bearing. A voice—great Creator of Heaven and Earth—a voice I knew, though I had never heard it so bereft of hope or joy:
Impossible. Impossible. Yet you feel so near tonight. Hear me, child of my mind, daughter of my heart. I am not what they name me. Help me. By the bones of Heaven’s Gates, Ani, help me. . . .
It was my father.
CHAPTER 12
18 OCET, MIDMORNING
“
P
apa!” The cry burst from my lips as I shot up from my pillows, my heart galloping. Sunlight glared through my window, accusing me of loitering while lives hung in the balance.
Doubt, skepticism, all those things I expected to overwhelm me as I roused to the new day were nowhere in evidence. Scarce more than a dozen words sorted from chaos had shattered Reason—the truest god of my two-and-twenty years. The sense of my father’s presence had been immense, so vivid, so
real
, as if for that moment I had lived inside his flesh. Somewhere he existed in torment, captive, innocent of the crimes the world laid at his feet . . . that
I
had laid at his feet. Neither wish nor dream, that moment had borne the undeniable, sharp-edged clarity of truth.
Beyond the horror at his state, beyond the guilt of my own betrayal, the certainty of his life limned every moment with a joy I had not felt in five years. I had to find him. I
would
find him.
The green glass vial stood innocent on my dressing table, tempting me to taste its contents once again and open my mind to mystery. Was the potion magic? Did it spur some intervention of the saints and angels I’d scorned since I was fourteen? I had to consider, for what science could explain my walking about unseen, or hearing the prayer of a man I believed more vile than any daemon?
I had succumbed to the temptation repeatedly on the previous night—twelve more drops, three more hours of racked senses. The unceasing battery of human joy and grief, anger, longing, hatred, and ecstasy near shredded my mind, yet I had held together, listening, tasting, examining every word and emotion until exhaustion hammered me to sleep. Not another whisper of my father had I sensed. Yet still, on this bright morning, I believed. Magic. In the result, if not the act.
Though shallow sunlight insisted that half the day was gone, I was not late for my duties. All was changed this day. Lady Cecile was dead—murdered.
Amid the turbulence of my spirit, I could scarce grieve for a woman I hardly knew. Yet she had not deserved to die in the vigor of her middle age. Justice demanded that I report what I knew, but who would believe it on my word alone? The dowager queen, once the Queen Regent of Sabria, a murderer. And for what?
I patted the empty pockets of my skirt, searching for the prize I’d snatched from the ducessa’s wardrobe. I surveyed my floor and the dressing table, yanked open the armoire and the night cupboard. Anxiety rising, I rummaged among the bedclothes I’d rumpled in my restless night. And there it was.
A palm-sized pouch of gray silk. Familiar, though I couldn’t recall where I’d seen one like it. But inside . . . I unclipped the brass ring at its neck, tore at the laces that held it closed, and upended it over my palm. A tight roll of thin paper slipped out.
I smoothed it on my table. Three diagrams appeared on the flimsy page, not printed but precisely scribed in ink, and not recently, from the faintness of the marks. Each was a triangle, embedded in a circle. Words and symbols annotated the circled triangles, but in a language and symbology wholly unknown to me. Beneath the diagrams was a single line scribed in Lady Cecile’s florid hand, this in common Sabrian.
“M vitet” or “G vitet”—the essential question is which?
Perhaps it was only because I’d read Lady Cecile’s book that I immediately associated the
G
with the Gautieri and the
M
with the rival Mondragon family.
Vitet
was the Aljyssian word for
life
, which illuminated nothing.
Disappointed, I replaced the little roll in the silk bag. No word leapt out as a spellkey, and the drawings made no sense, especially as a cause for murder. Yet I could not discount them.
These events were all about sorcery and, even as a skeptic, I had learned enough throughout the years to comprehend the enormity of what Lianelle had stumbled into. My sister’s spellwork had profoundly altered nature, the test of true magic, so she’d always said. I had merely mixed the powder and spoken the keyword she’d given.
Spirits of night! In moments I had unlocked my own hidden drawer and pulled out the scrap of paper fallen from Lianelle’s leather packet, along with her lockets and wardstone ring. On it she had scribed a single Aljyssian word:
andragossa
. I had assumed it the spellkey for Lianelle’s wardstone ring. But she had written the keywords for the vanishing powder and the lockets in her letter. Why would she not mention the ring’s keyword in the letter, too, if it needed one? This was for something else.
As a story depicted on Syan screen paintings, the tale of my sister’s murder began to unfold. On a morning twenty-five days ago, Lianelle, frightened and agitated about something she had discovered in an encrypted book of magic, had reclaimed her red leather packet from Adept Guerin, scribbled a warning note to me, and inserted this scrap—perhaps the keyword to open that very book. After returning the packet to her friend, she had raced through the ravine behind Collegia Seravain to the village and posted the book to me at Montclaire. On her return journey through the ravine . . . Perhaps the murderer had laid an explosive trap, or perhaps he drove her to mistakes that destroyed her. But sure as sunrise, Lianelle’s death was no simple accident.

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