The Universal Mirror (6 page)

Asahel watched as Felix walked towards the hall that led out of the room, pausing at its entrance.

“You’ll give me a moment to get dressed?”  Felix asked.  Asahel nodded wordlessly as the other man disappeared.

Felix was right—it was an odd request for him to have brought to an acquaintance’s door, much less one who disliked Quentin and who hadn’t involved himself in any of Asahel’s unchosen battles.  But even then, Asahel had believed that there was something decent about his fellow student, a kindness Felix was too fearful to express.  And for good reason.

And maybe I was right, Asahel thought.  At least… he opened that door.  He tried not to think about the ease with which Felix had done so, an ease never mirrored by the man who was his best friend. Quentin had never invited him into his home—it was, in fact, an unspoken compact that Asahel would never ask to be let into it.

He crossed his arms over his chest, curious eyes examining the sitting room.  It had an aura of cold considering that it was a place where most men would receive visitors.  There was no sense of care or decoration within the walls that surrounded him.  While the furniture was richer than anything Asahel could afford, the chairs were stripped bare down to the heartwood.  There were no elegant embroideries or lush curtains as he would have expected. 

The entire room had the sense of being very little used, something at odds with Felix’s easy demeanor and the culture of Cercia’s upper class.  There was little else to do with their time, Quentin had once told him, beyond place social call after call.  His friend had often bemoaned the fact that he spent more time at other houses than his own.  This house, however, was not equipped for that.

Perhaps, Asahel said silently to himself as he walked over to a shelf, eyes now scanning dust, He’s alone.  Most men of fortune their age had wives—Asahel himself might have managed it had it not been for the ill tides that had lost the Serenissma.

“It doesn’t matter how long you look, Soames.  No books are magically going to appear on an empty shelf.”  Felix’s voice entered the room before he himself came into view.  “Unless you’ve learned magic we weren’t taught at school.”

“None at all.  I was just pacing.  I reasoned it better than just sitting about.”  He noticed that Felix’s “dressing” had consisted mostly of buckling on a broadsword and hesitated.  “Your sword’s a bit…”

“Large?”  Felix supplied, laughing at the look on Asahel’s face.  “Well, it’s the smallest one I have.”  Holding up his hands in mock dismay, he added, “Seriously!  And you can’t expect me to go armed only with the cutlery at a time like this.”

“Aye, but I’d not want to be attacked because you’ve that much steel waving about.”  He was answered only by a laugh.  Asahel simply sighed in response.  “It’ll be what it’ll be then.”  Following Felix to the street, he hoped that his old schoolmate remembered how to run as well as fight.

“Over the ocean—is where you will—fiiiind me—”A woman’s voice, high and flat, was what brought Quentin to his senses.  He lay still, not opening his eyes.  Instead, he concentrated on the sensations coursing through his body—the slow, heavy throbbing in his head and the pulsing red behind his eyelids.  His wrists felt chapped and swollen, the rope that bound them over his head coarse.  But not, Quentin could feel as he tensed against it, thick.

He wasn’t close enough to the earth to pull the magic from it.  There was at least a mattress separating him from the ground beneath.  The pressure in his head made concentrating difficult.  Still, there was hope.

“Over the ocean and over the sea—”The cracking notes shattered his concentration still further.

“It’s ‘over the lea’,” he corrected, still not opening his eyes. 

“Lea?”  The woman had stopped singing at least.  Her voice was slightly familiar but he couldn’t place it.  “That don’t make a bit of sense.”

“Lea.  It’s an old word for meadow.”  A tutor had drilled that into him once.  Odd, that he should remember that when he couldn’t think of the man’s name.

“Lea,” she repeated.  He could tell she didn’t believe him.

Quentin cracked one eye open, peering at her through the slit of eyelid.  Meg.  The memory of the night was beginning to come back to him now.  He hadn’t taken a good look at her in the Thana and his eye focused on her now to correct that fault.  Her hand lifted up, shielding her face from the look.  Both of Quentin’s eyes snapped open, blinking in surprise.

“Don’t stare.  It’s not proper.”  Her fingers tugged at her dress, faded brown fabric yanking up higher with her grip.  There was little else about Meg to distinguish her—she was nothing more to Quentin than brown hair and brown eyes set into a humble face.  Were she not one of his captors, Quent would have simply blurred her in with the women he saw begging coin in the street.

“Excuse me,” he said, although to apologize felt unnatural.

“You’re dazed,” Meg said, distracted.  “Embr knocked your head hard, he did.”

“Is that what that was?  I don’t remember much beyond the blackness.”  The redhead flashed her a grin.  “I’ve got an incredible headache, at least.  Do you mind if I sit up?”  He was used to his smile making the argument for him that he took her consent for granted.  It seemed, as she leaned over him, that he’d been right.

Her warm fingers brushed the inside of his wrist, then she stopped, pulling away.  “No.  I’d best not.”

“You don’t have to untie me.”  His smile was plastered on now, tight on his skin.  “Just… let me sit up straight, get my feet back on the ground.”

She shook her head.

“No.  Pig said not to.  You’ve a trick or two about you.  I’ll not do it.”  She moved further away from him, returning to the other side of the small room.  He noticed a basket of laundry at her feet.

“I’ll fold those clothes for you,” he said teasingly, gambling again on a smile.

“You?  Fold clothes?”  Meg snorted.  “What would one like yourself do with them?   No.”  She leaned down, skirts swishing against her ankles as she tugged another shirt free of the basket and hung it up on the line.  He noticed a small pool of mud forming beneath it as water dripped down from the sleeve and into the peat floor.

“That’s a lot of laundry you have there,” he tried again, trying to find some sort of ground for a conversation.  He needed to find a way to convince her that he was harmless.  Quentin swallowed, feeling the dry rattle in his throat as he saw her lips fight a smile.  Meg leaned down, picking up another shirt, and he saw that, beneath the dirt and exhaustion that wrinkled her face, she was actually much younger than he.

“Well.”  He expected her to follow it with a flirtatious remark and tilted his face a little with a smile.  She glanced over at him, her expression now firm and said, “There are a lot of dead men in this city.”

What do you mean by that?  He stopped, not quite daring to ask.

The smile returned to her mouth, this time knowing.  Meg continued with her work, as steady and silent as any of his servants.  He knew little of domestic duties—her casual movements took on new meaning with her comment about the dead.  He watched as she lifted and sorted through the pile of clothing, noticing now that it was of finer quality than most of the apparel that he’d seen worn by the poor.

She resumed singing, this time under her breath so that he couldn’t quite make out the words.  He turned his head, staring at the wall on his right side.  The bed was shoved up against the peeling paint—he could feel a draft through the cracks in the wood.

“Whose clothes are those?”  Quentin asked, no teasing now in his voice.

“They’re not mine,” she said.  She’d finished hanging them now, wiping her palms against the coarse linen of her skirt.  “Nor Pig’s, nor Embr’s.”

Quentin wondered why she was so free with the men’s names.  Then he understood.

“Those are dead men’s clothes.”  And you intend mine to join them.

“Sure, and they’ve got no need of them.”  Meg spat the words, too young of face for the tone in her voice.  She wrenched at her hair as she spoke, fingers twisting it as if she was coiling rope.  “Why’s the best dress you ever wore in your life the one you get to bury in?  There’s no life after this.  It don’t matter none to them.”

“No, it doesn’t,” he agreed cautiously.

“Waste not, want not.”  Meg’s brown eyes hesitated as they surveyed his body, still tethered to the bed.  “Figure someone like you don’t know much about want.”

I hope that’s not a threat, Quentin thought, but he knew that it was.  He stretched, trying to ease the ache in his joints.  It was money that she needed.  Killing him wouldn’t get her—or her companions—much of that but he doubted that they realized that ransoming might not be any better.

“Maybe I don’t know about want,” he agreed.  “But I’ve got some idea of how I can help you.”  This time, Quentin didn’t ask for release.  Another idea was forming in his head, uncertain though he was that what he guessed about their midnight digging was correct.

Meg didn’t look at him as if he’d said anything worth consideration.  She was thin under her layers of clothing, Quentin realized as she sat on the edge of the bed, barely making an imprint in the mattress.  Her hands clasped together in her lap, fingers locking around one another.  A stray curl had slipped from the nape of her neck and he noticed a flea clinging to one of the hairs.

“I said I could help you,” he repeated, trying to pull himself up.  The throb in his head made it impossible to fight the rope.  He sank back down, head flopping back against the lumpy mattress.

“You’ll need to talk to Da for that,” Meg replied.  “I’m not the one makes decisions here.”  She stood, but slowly—the movement of a woman who’d spent the entire day on her feet.  “I’ll ask for him.”

Quentin closed his eyes in relief, opening them again when he heard the sound of footsteps nearing the headboard.

“Hmph.”  The man he remembered as Taggart was standing over him, bushy dark eyebrows knitting together as he reached for Quentin’s bonds.  “You’re a magician, Pig says.  I let your hands free, you’ll not bring down a curse on me?”

“I can’t,” he replied by rote, the force of long-instilled teachings behind it.  “It’s Heresy.  Haven’t you heard the stories?  Seen them parade Heretics in the square?”

“Heresy, eh?  Don’t know exactly what that means, whatever the law says.”  He spat on the floor, to make it clear that law had little force here.  “But my girl, she seems to think you’re one what can be trusted.  Far as that goes.” 

Taggart worked at the knots with fingers made crooked by time, speaking as he did so.  “Taggart’s the name.  As much of one as I’ve got left.  We don’t put much stock in the names a man’s born with down here.”  His thumbnail scratched Quentin’s left wrist which was too numb to feel more than a slight sting.  “My dear mother…. she’d like to have forgot mine.  If she was still alive.”

“I’m sorry,” Quentin said, glancing nervously at Taggart’s clumsy hands and dirty, jagged fingernails.

“Don’t be.  Was the Plagues.  Couldn’t ask a fairer death than that for the hag.”  He jerked at the rope and Quentin felt it ease.  “Her whole mouth covered in boils.  No last words for her.  Kindest thing earth could’ve given.”

“But the Plagues were horrible!”  Quentin exclaimed, unable to help himself.

“Life’s horrible.  Then we die and who knows what’s given.”  With a final wrench of Taggart’s fingers, Quentin’s hands came free, arms falling over the side of the bed.  His skin tingled too strongly for him to move them easily and he contented himself with flexing his palms.  Taggart gently helped him sit up, his touch more gentle in this gesture than it had been in granting freedom.  His hands might be those that dug graves but they had also once rocked children.

Quentin thought of Catharine.  She rarely spoke of the Summer of Plague and the weeks that had destroyed her physical beauty, leaving angry red scars in its wake.  It had been Renier Gredara who had taken his future son-in-law aside before the wedding night to tell him in curt words about Catharine’s eleventh year.  As if Quentin hadn’t grown up with her, watching her change firsthand.  Now, as then, it wasn’t the physical change that he regretted from that time.

“No one should have to suffer like that.”  His conviction was more emphatic than he’d intended.  After all, he was planning Heresy against the law and order of magic.  The thought took his breath for a moment and he flexed his fingers tighter, willing himself to stop talking before he could let his whole secret spill.

“No,” Taggart agreed, his wrinkled brow lifting.  “But… I don’t have learning.  Not one for studying the mysteries.  Never put much thought into who gets to suffer, who doesn’t.  Down here, we all do.  Fool’s game to pretend we don’t.  That’s for your kind.”  Quentin stiffened but the other man continued.  “My Meg—she did say you’d a deal of some sort.”

“Aye—”  Blast.  I’m starting to sound like these people.  “Yes.”

 “And what is it?  If you don’t mind me saying, you’ve a fair value for ransom.”  He glanced at Quentin’s bare feet.  “Got a nice sum for the boots.”

“Not from my wife, I’ll wager,” Quentin said dryly.

Taggart laughed at that.  “No.”

“The way I see it,” the redhead paused.  “Ransom’s a one-time thing.  And it depends on someone being willing to pay your price.”  He sighed.  “You may as well know—my wife hates me.  Ask around and you’ll find that out soon enough.”