The Soul Mirror (2 page)

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Authors: Carol Berg

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BOOK: The Soul Mirror
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ROC
Published by New American Library, a division of
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:
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First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
 
First Printing, January 2011
 
Copyright © Carol Berg, 2011 All rights reserved
 
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Berg, Carol.
The soul mirror: a novel of the Collegia Magica/Carol Berg.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-47847-9
PS3602.E7523S68 2011
813’.6—dc22 2010034844
 
 
 
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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For those who are shy, reserved, or introverted, who lack self confidence, or who just can’t ever come up with a punch line until a day late . . .
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks, as always, to Linda the Muse, aka the spirit of Lianelle, for literary lunching and launching. To Susan, Laurey, Brian, Catherine, Curt, and Courtney for their support and tough, careful reading, and especially to Glenn, fine man, fine friend, fine writer. To Markus for sharing his combative expertise. To my dear readers for their constant encouragement. And most especially to the Exceptional Spouse for love and support above and beyond.
CHAPTER 1
36 NIEBA, MIDDAY 881ST YEAR OF THE SABRIAN REALM
“
H
ere we are, Damoselle de Vernase.” My escort drew aside the overhanging pine branches so I could better view the disturbed ground. A raven flapped away, screeching, scraping my already stripped nerves. The shallow ravine was heavily wooded, preventing any glimpse of the severe gray walls or the round, slate-roofed towers my younger sister had called home for the past seven years.
Lianelle had once told me that forests were the perfect representation of magic: roots that delved deep into the rich, layered loam of all that had come before, shadow and light, growth and decay, mystery and life. All of it connected and balanced, ever changing, yet old beyond history. My sister had lived for magic. And now she had died for it—all her merry teasing, her laughter, her brilliance wasted on lies, dead dreams, and superstition.
The wiry little man shuddered and licked his pale lips with an overlong tongue. “Mage Bourrier says that for the last tenday Acolyte Lianelle has scarce been seen about the collegia. Whatever she was working on, it was certainly
not
her assigned duties or lessons. The alchemical stores were dreadfully out of order and the aviary unswept, and she had not yet submitted her essay on theoretical formulae for shape transformations. One of the tutors found her out here. Evidence bespoke a magical explosion . . . as I told you. Horrid.”
And then they had dug a hole and thrown her in without a song or a prayer or a kinsman’s touch to bid her farewell. A girl of seventeen.
Horrid
could not even begin to describe it. What of
despicable
,
vile
,
unconscionable
?
Yet another spasm of pain shivered my heart. Anger and resentment burned in my chest like fiery ingots, and I wanted to yell and weep and curse every stone of this place and every bastion of Heaven. But I swallowed the knot in my throat and clamped my jaw tight. Anne de Vernase did not crumble before strangers.
The patch of raw earth scraped out of the scorched bracken had been outlined with salt and sprinkled with herbs, likely some magical foolery intended to keep evil away—or contain it. Unbelievable that anyone could countenance such nonsense, when academicians could view the structure of a salt crystal through magnifying lenses and write treatises cataloging its properties. Every day scholars and academicians unmasked another enchantment as a fraud.
Only Lianelle had ever been able to fool me into thinking there was any substance to sorcery. “Certainly not in the common practices,” she would say with a mixture of excitement and worldly wisdom laughable in a girl who had spent almost half her life within these walls. “Most large magical workings are illusion, and anything for sale in the marketplace is a waste of good coin. But the fundamentals—spellwork, binding power, elemental linkages between natural objects—those are real. That’s what I study at Collegia Seravain.” And then an oriole would settle on top of her head or the hearth fire would flare into stringy flames the deep blue of iris, and Lianelle would swear she had not thrown lamp oil in the hearth to make it burn so strangely or sprinkled seeds in her hair to attract the bird, but had done it all with magic. Laughing.
I folded my arms in front of me as if by force of will I might not lose the last bits of her. My sister. My dearest friend in the world. How could she be dead?
Their salt barrier had not lasted even a sevenday. Rain or animals had already blurred and broken the white lines.
“You’ve not marked her burial place with so much as a stick,” I said, the magnitude of the hurt leaving privacy and dignity in ruins. “Did no one recall she had family to mourn her, to give her honor to ease her Veil journey? Why was she not taken to a proper deadhouse?”
My companion’s fluttering hands dismissed my concerns, his bony wrists protruding from his sleeves as if he had put on a younger apprentice’s gown. “The chancellor determined we could afford no delay in such untidy circumstances. A master mage came from Merona and laid heavy enchantments about her body to ensure nothing of her mistakes lingered to harm others. Being ungifted, you perhaps would not understand.”
Ungifted. Paeans to the Pantokrator and his saints that I was ungifted in the ways of magic! Better to be plain, plodding Anne than dead like my gifted sister or locked away, unable to tell day from night, like my gifted mother. With my brother four years hostage to an angry king’s vengeance, I seemed to be the only functioning member left of a family my father had once proclaimed “as perfectly balanced as the elegant ellipses of the planets.” My father, who had explained the world to me, only to prove his every word a lie. My father, the royal diplomat, the man of science, the traitor.
I squeezed my arms tighter, fingers pressing to the bone. “This land belongs to the collegia?” I scanned the rugged landscape for some fence or marker.
“Yes. Though much of our lower, flatter land has had to be sold off—a disgraceful result of the king’s new tax levies—the forest reaches and cliff-side lands remain under our hold.”
“Then certainly the mages will not object to my placing a stone marker scribed with my sister’s name here. A small thing. Out of the way.” Too little, too cold, too hard to remember a bright spirit. “She died while in the school’s care.”
“Um . . . I will have to inquire, of course. I was told only to show you.” The balding man, not a day younger than fifty years, chewed his nails like a schoolchild. The masters of the collegia had sent an aging apprentice—a nobody—to guide me here. Someone who could answer not one of my thousand questions. No adept, no mage, and certainly no master could spare the time to explain why a sixth-year student at Collegia Magica de Seravain had been found half buried in last year’s leaves, her flesh scorched and her fingers missing. I supposed I should be grateful they had notified me at all.
My guide scuttered up the slope of the ravine on his way back to the forest path.
 
 
FOR TWO HOURS I SAT outside the collegia gates, awaiting word that the mages would allow Lianelle’s grave to be marked. The autumn day waxed warm and hazy. Fibrous streaks of cloud left the sky brownish gray rather than blue, promising rain by nightfall, a welcome change. Even the leafy wood that crowded the narrow lawn appeared dry, its greens grayish, the undergrowth already dying. I crushed the surging emotions of the previous hour until they had subsided to a familiar fevered dullness. Until I felt dead, too.
“Damoselle de Vernase!” The balding apprentice called out from behind a wicket gate in the gatehouse wall. “Chancellor Kajetan agrees to the marker. The stone must be cut small and designed to lie flat on the ground. When it is ready, the stonemason should apply to the grounds-keeper, and he’ll be taken to the site. Now, will there be anything else?”
Anything else?
Everything else! My skin flushed hot, then cold, then hot again. Choked by events I could not allow myself to feel, I could spit out only the mundane. “My sister’s things,” I said. “I should take them with me.”
The jittery apprentice glanced over his shoulder. Well behind him, in the rectangle of sunlight at the far end of the dark gate tunnel, a broad-shouldered man leaned on a white stick and stared back at me. His features were indistinct, save for dark brows and thick black hair that threatened escape from a bound or braided queue. A silver band glinted from his neck—a mage collar.
“If anything of a personal nature is discovered, it will be forwarded to you along with the girl’s death warrant,” said the apprentice. “This concludes our business. Divine grace, damoselle.” The wiry man slammed the wicket and retreated into the shady tunnel. Once he exited the tunnel, the arched rectangle of light was empty.
So, that was that. The sorcerers of Collegia Seravain had not allowed me even to step inside their door. Suffering such disrepute as they were already, they likely feared my unsavory family connections would taint them irreparably.
Five years previous my father had enlisted three sorcerers of the Camarilla Magica in his scheme to overthrow his oldest friend, the King of Sabria. The three had been caught using grotesque, murderous means to “enhance their power for magic” and paid the price on the headsman’s block. My father yet eluded capture. The penalties for
his
infamy had been paid only by his victims and his family.
I hiked the long, dusty road down the hill to the whitewashed village of Seravain. As constant practice taught me, a rapid walk helped loose the knots in one’s belly.
In the village I endured another two-hour wait, this time for the stonemason to return from mending a customer’s springhouse. A contract with the stonemason to engrave a small plain marker with Lianelle’s name and embed it in the ravine took two silver kentae and no time at all.

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