The Soul Mirror (7 page)

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Authors: Carol Berg

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BOOK: The Soul Mirror
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“Baggage seems a mite scant for a lahddee traverling.” Though its molded expression remained serene, his displeasure battered me like hailstones. He jerked his head at his men. “Outen their pockies ’n see what’s else hid. Soft wi’ the lahddee. Nae want ’er mussed till we scoff’er
spiniks
.”
What were
spiniks
? My head was spinning. Not jewels. Treasures? No. Something to be
scoffed
—stolen. Thank the stars that the cart carrying Lianelle’s letter and charms had lagged so far behind us.
As he dumped clothes and sundries from Duplais’ case, two of the others sheathed their weapons. While the fellow with the hoop earrings stood behind Duplais, the Fassid searched the secretary from neck to boots. Duplais stood rigid, as the brigand tossed a slim leather-bound book, an overlarge silver coin, and a small, tarnished brass case to the ground.
Then it was my turn. The man with the hoop earrings laid his thick-knuckled fingers on my shoulders and slid them down my arms all the way to the wrists.
My flesh shrank away from my skin.
When he returned his creeping hands to my shoulders, his thumbs strayed above my bodice to my bare throat, and stroked the skin with a slow, discomforting pressure. Then his fingers splayed wide and his thumbs circled downward. The fire in my gut blossomed.
“Don’t touch me!” I said hoarsely, bringing my forearms up sharply between his and slapping them outward, knocking his hands away. At the same time I lurched backward, right into the arms of the Fassid. I flailed at him and dodged to the side before he could grab me. “I’ve no pockets and nothing you would—”
A guttural screech split the gloom. Something huge and dark swept out of the trees. A rider.
Pandemonium erupted as someone’s grunting curse turned to a bubbling shriek. Duplais’ chestnut reared. Ladyslipper whinnied. With frightened snorts, our horses vanished into the wood.
As I strained and twisted, Duplais enveloped me in his arms and slammed me to the ground. A second horse and rider charged into the fray, so close the wind of their passing fluttered Duplais’ collar into my eyes. They must have crossed the very spot we’d been standing.
Duplais’ heart drummed through his coat as I tried to wriggle out from under him. Two steps away, the Fassid lay unmoving, an arrow protruding from his eye.
“Into the trees,” Duplais growled into my ear, before rolling off me. Gripping my hand and pressing my head low, he half led, half dragged me deep into the twiggy underbrush.
“Fitch the lahddee! Fitch ’er!” The breathless Norgandi sounded as if he were too busy to
fitch
me himself. Savage grunts accompanied the clank and scrape of steel.
Duplais gave me no chance to heed my footing. When I tripped on a mass of roots, he had me up again before I could spit out the dirt and dead leaves. We’d gone perhaps twenty metres from the road when he backed me against a tree. Stronger than he appeared, he forced me still and pressed a finger to my lips. I shoved his finger from my mouth, but bit my lip and stayed quiet.
The weapons fell silent. Hoofbeats retreated toward the crossing. But Duplais did not move until a nighthawk, which did not sound exactly like a proper Aubine nighthawk, trilled plaintively.
“I believe we can go back now.” Duplais stepped away and straightened his doublet.
The Fassid and two others lay dead. My eyes dwelt on the bloodslathered bodies only long enough to see that neither the leader with the shaped mask nor the man with the earrings was among them. I hoped they were collapsed around the next bend.
A broad-chested, mustachioed man, his sweating skin the rich golden tan of long-brewed tea, moved from one body to the next, kicking them to elicit signs of life. He carried himself soldierly, and his leather armor was spangled with steel plates, which spoke of true battle experience, so my father had taught me. But his hair fell all the way to his jaw—most unsoldierly. I knew why when his head whipped around at our approach. Slow and purposeful, he drew his black locks behind his ears—horribly mutilated ears.
I quickly dropped my gaze, my skin flooded with shame. Only a determination to decency forced words out of me. “Captain de Santo, it appears you and your”—I glanced about in vain for the rider in black—“friend saved our lives. Thank you.”
“I was asked,” he said, jerking his head at Duplais, “else I might have thought different.”
My father had done this. To hide his own duplicity, Papa had made a distraction of de Santo, once captain of the king’s guard, by accusing him of jeopardizing the king’s life. He had badgered and bullied and rushed the captain to judgment, cropping his ears with an ax, thus condemning him to everlasting humiliation and disgrace far worse than the pain of the mutilation. It had cost a good soldier his honor, his livelihood, and his family.
De Santo had testified at Papa’s trial, as I had. I hoped bearing witness against his tormentor had restored his honor in his own mind, even if no one in the world would ever see past the testimony of his cropped ears.
“The others got away?” Duplais was examining the bodies, yanking off the masks, searching for anything to identify them.
“The shadow man took after them,” said de Santo. “The henchman’s skewered already. I doubt he’ll tell us aught when he stumbles. I stayed back, lest they’ve friends about.”
Indeed, moments later, the black horse dragged a fourth body—that of the man with the earrings—into the trampled glen.
“No luck with the leader?” said Duplais.
The “shadow man,” dressed and cloaked in the color of midnight, shook his head. A black silk scarf wound around his face and neck hid all features save his eyes, and a flat, wide-brimmed hat shielded those from view. As soon as de Santo untied the rope, the rider moved off into the trees, denying me any chance of identifying him in the future, except that he was more graceful in the saddle than any horseman I’d ever observed. More even than Ambrose, whom my father had forever sworn to house in the stable.
Duplais yanked the mask off the newly arrived body.
“Welther!” The name popped out of my mouth the moment the scarred cheek and bristling jaw came into view.
“Who?” Duplais’ question rang sharp as a bell strike.
“Welther de Ruz. One of my father’s aides, years ago.” The burly soldier’s stares and insinuating smiles had blighted a year of my girlhood, until Papa noticed my increasing reluctance to leave my bedchamber. “My father dismissed him for impropriety. Not . . . kindly.”
“So these might be your father’s rivals, and yet . . . tell me, damoselle, did you recognize the leader?”
Glad he didn’t force me to dredge up more, I answered readily. “The Norgandi? No.”
“What if the accent was false?”
False? I tried to think back to the Norgandi’s diction. The dialect had been pervasive and perfectly accurate. And without seeing the man’s face—Heaven’s lights, the mask! At the trial Duplais had described a mask worn by the villain he called the Aspirant, the man he judged to be the ringleader of the conspiracy—my father. Duplais’ unwavering gaze scrutinized me as he might a treasure map.
“That man was not my father. I would know.”
But would I? Frightened, confused, and grieving as I was? After five years’ absence? With his being cloaked and masked, voice disguised by the thick patois? As I reviewed the scraps and snippets of his Norgandi phrases, I could detect a false perfection. No one, especially a man of common background as the masked man’s words bespoke, enunciated his own language without some local or regional variation. So he had learned the Norgandi language later and was better educated than he seemed. But Papa? I called it up again and listened.
“He was not my father. His voice’s timbre was all wrong. But neither was he a native speaker.”
“Good enough.” Duplais seemed surprised at my offering so much. “What was he after? If he’d a mind to abduct you, he would have clobbered me, dragged you off, and searched your baggage later. If he had wanted blood to leech, they would have taken both of us and to perdition with baggage. He was hunting
something
.”
The three of them waited. De Santo glaring. Duplais calculating. The black-cloaked man in the shadows listening.
“I’ve no idea.” I knelt on the soft earth and began to collect my belongings, brushing off the dirt and flattening what had been trampled before placing each item back into the satchel. The Norgandi had gotten off with my journal, Montclaire’s planting book, and my magnifying lens, but he had dropped the scissors and the other books. “Perhaps they were like you, sonjeur, digging where there is nothing.”
My lies glared like a temple dancer’s spangles. Duplais expelled a disbelieving epithet, and stomped into the wood to consult his shy friend.
Self-discipline rid me of the shakes and set my mind to work again. The marauders had been after a book. Lianelle’s own journal, perhaps? Or had she never returned the doubly encrypted Gautieri book? Considering their interest in the scissors and magnifier, I surmised they were also interested in anything Lianelle had made
using
the books. For certain they hunted the same thing as Duplais:
spiniks
. . . secrets.
CHAPTER 5
4 OCET, AFTERNOON
A
s Duplais, my chaperone Margriet—an old friend of Captain de Santo—and I crested yet another scrubby hillock, journey’s end spread out before us. Beyond yellow-gold grass dotted with rust-colored poppies lay the broad bronze loops of the river Ley and the royal city of Merona, glowing this afternoon in a golden haze. Sketchy shapes of sails and barges clustered at the crescent harbor, whence Sabrian ships sailed into the unknown reaches of the world. Atop a modest bluff overlooking city and river sprawled shapely walls and towers of pale yellow stone—Castelle Escalon, where the kings of Sabria had held court for more than four hundred years.
I dreaded the place. Tens of thousands of people lived inside Merona’s walls.
My parents had assured me that my aversion to crowds was merely excessive shyness certain to be outgrown, like my belly-churning reaction to magic and my spring sneezing fits. So far I’d seen no relief from any of them. The few towns and villages on this journey had already left my ears itching and buzzing, as if a swarm of insects had been trapped inside my skull.
In contrast, Duplais’ spine visibly uncoiled as our path hairpinned down the hill toward the Caurean highroad. For three days the tight-wound librarian had pursued a convoluted route of game tracks, bridle paths, and roads little more than faint wagon ruts. We had spent our nights at deserted loggers’ cabins and a meager hostelry that had likely not hosted a customer since the Blood Wars. Captain de Santo and the black-cloaked man had never left us, lurking among the trees or behind hillocks. Indeed, we had traveled from Montclaire to the royal city without being abducted, slain, or even noticed—whichever the danger Duplais feared most.
None of this odd behavior ruffled Margriet. Truly, I doubted an outbreak of man-eating wasps could have made the formidable woman blanch. She ate her own provisions, slept like a fallen tree trunk, and jogged along on her mule, exhibiting not the least trace of curiosity.
As we rounded a curve on the lower slope, the view expanded to include the dark thumb of rock protruding from the river’s deepest channel.
Ah, saints have mercy, little brother.
Bleak, harsh, isolated, the Spindle Prison had been Ambrose’s entire world since he was fifteen. The sight choked my heart beyond bearing and roused a guilty urgency that distant imagining could not.
“Sonjeur, will I be permitted to visit my brother?” I said, nudging my mount up beside his. My ingrained hostility to Duplais suddenly seemed childish. “He is a hostage, not a convict. Yet he’s been allowed no visitors. I’ve petitioned, written letters . . .” Everything I could think of. Few had even bothered to reject my petitions.
“I’ve no influence with the Spindle warder, damoselle. You’ll need to take it up with him if your duties permit. Move along faster, if you please. Prod that balky ass, Mistress Margriet.” He spurred his mount well ahead of me.
If eyes could truly launch daggers, mine would have pierced his straight, slim back.
The highroad stretched like a braid of dust toward Merona. “The city gates are closed at sunset,” said Duplais, as our course merged with the city-bound traffic, “and the only hostelries outside the gates are wholly unfit—especially for women. Worse than we’ve seen.”
I doubted they were so dreadful. Duplais clearly detested traveling. His mouth had hardened at the rough accommodations, and he did naught but pick at the food we carried with us: dried meat, sweating cheese, and fruit sorely bruised by heat and saddle packs. At each juncture, he had offered terse apologies, as if I were a discommoded queen.
Unwilling to ease his discomfort, I had chosen not to mention that my father had often taken Lianelle, Ambrose, and me into the wild to sleep on the ground, snare our supper, and live “rough” when we were children. We had called ourselves the Gardia Ruggiere, and considered ourselves well prepared to take on King Philippe’s worst enemies. Who would have imagined a day would come when our goodfather would regard us as those very villains?

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