glittermgly polished, was smeared up and down with blood.
9. A Gleam of Pale Wings
MOUNTAIN SPIRITS BELT:
He is cloaked in mistletoe and the musk of bees
Lightning makes the trees grow
And makes the earth cry out
“Toby!” the physician bellowed as he staggered through the door. He did not know whether to weep or scream or beat his head against the wall—he had been restraining his feelings too long. “Curse you, where are you hiding?”
The other two servants, his old manservant and his housekeeper (who had just barely managed to beat Chaven home, hurrying back from a gathering of worried citizens in the torchlit square between the West Green and the Raven’s Gate) scuttled away down the corridors of Observatory House, grateful that their masters unhappmess had settled on someone other than themselves.
The young man appeared, wiping his hands on his smock. “Yes, Master?”
Chaven made a face at the black smears on Toby’s clothing, but was surprised to find the young fellow at his tasks so early in the morning; it was usually hard to get him to work even when the sun was high in the sky. “Bring me something to drink. Wine—thatTorvian muck is already open on my bedside table. By the gods, the world is falling apart.”
The young man hesitated. Chaven could see fear behind the usual sul-lenness. “Is… will there… will there be war?”
Chaven shook his head. “War? What do you mean?'
“Mistress Jennikin and Harry, they say the older prince is dead, sir Murdered My da’ told me once that when Olin’s brother died there was almost a war.”
The physician fought down the urge to berate this poor blunt tool. Everyone in the castle was terrified—he himself had not felt so desperate in all the years since fleeing Ulos Why should the boy feel any differently? “Yes, Toby, the older prince is dead. But when Olin’s brother Lorick died, the country was rich and unthreatened, and it was worth the time of any number of ambitious nobles to try to put themselves or some useful puppet on the Southmarch throne instead of a child heir. Now I suppose it will be young Barrick earns the regency, and no one will want the blame for what is about to happen here, so they will gratefully let him have the honor of keeping his father’s chair warm.”
“So there won’t be a war?' Toby ignored Chaven’s bleak sarcasm as though it were a foreign language. He could not meet his master’s eye directly, and had his head down like a stubborn goat that would not be forced through a gate. “You are telling the truth, Master? You are certain?'
“I’m certain of nothing,” Chaven said. “Nothing. Now go fetch me the wine and perhaps a bit of cheese and bread and dried fish, too, then let me think.”
He let the hanging fall back across the window. It was still dark outside, although he could smell dawn on the breeze, which should have been reassuring but was not. The wine had done nothing to relieve the pressure in his skull, the fear that he was watching the first moments of a collapse that might soon begin to spread so quickly there would be no stopping it. He had been in the middle of such a frenzy before, although not in Southmarch he never wanted to experience it again. And of all the people who had been in the castle tonight dealing with the horror of the prince regent’s death, Chaven alone knew of the movement of the Shadowlme.
He had questions he wanted to ask before he slept—
The idea had been preying on him since the first dreadful moment looking down on Kendrick’s murdered body and had kept tugging at him since, far more powerful than the urge for wine he had just satisfied. He had tried to fight it down because there was more than a little shame in his hunger and he had promised himself not to indulge again so soon, but he reassured himself that it was clearly an exceptional night, a night for suspending his own rules. And (he also told himself) the things he might learn could save his life, perhaps even save the kingdom.
“Kloe?” he called quietly. He snapped his fingers and looked around. “Where are you, my mistress?” She did not appear immediately, upset perhaps that after a rude and hurried excursion from their shared bed earlier he had been back in his house for an hour, but this was the first time he seemed to have thought of her. “Kloe, I apologize. I have been discourteous.”
Mollified, she appeared from behind a curtain and stretched. She was spotted like a pard, but all in shadow- tones of black and gray, with only a little white around her eyes. Chaven could not have said exactly why he found her beautiful but he did. He snapped his fingers again and she came to him, exactly slow enough to demonstrate whose need was greater. But when he scratched under her chin she forgot herself enough to purr.
“Come,” he said, and gave the cat the last bit of dried fish before lifting her. “We have work to do.”
It was a room that no living person in Southmarch Castle except Chaven had ever seen, a small dark compartment deep beneath the observatory, with a door that opened off the corridor where he had let in the Funderling Chert and his strange ward. On one wall a row of shelves began near the flagstone floor and stretched to the low ceiling, and every shelf contained a row of objects covered with dark cloths. With the door safely closed and bolted behind him, Chaven put down his candleholder and picked up a covered object too large to rest beside the others, which had been leaning propped against the wall Kloe, after a brief sniff around the room, leaped up onto one of the upper shelves and curled into a ball, her eyes bright and watchful.
He took off the velvet cover very carefully, then unfolded the wooden wings so that the mirror could stand by itself. It was one of his largest: with the base on the floor, the top reached almost to the physician’s waist.
Chaven lowered himself into a sitting position on the flags in front of the mirror and for a long time said nothing, staring deep into the glass.The candlelight made strange angles of things and cast long, swaying shadows: if something had actually been moving in the nnrror s depths, it would have taken an observer a little while to be sure.
Chaven remained silent for a long, long time. At last, without turning from the glass, he said, “Kloe? Come here, now, Mistress. Come.”
The cat stretched, then jumped down from the shelf and stepped delicately across the floor toward him When she stopped, he reached out and tapped on the mirror.
“Do you see that? Look there, Kloe! A mouse!”
She brought her blunt gray-and-black face close to the glass, staring. Her ears twitched. Indeed, there was something moving in the dark corner of the room, but only in the room as it was reflected. Kloe hunched lower, tail kinking and unkinking as she watched the scurrying shadow in the depths of the mirror Chaven stared at it, too, fixedly, as though he dared not close his eyes or even breathe Oddly, the mirror seemed not to reflect either the cat or physician, but only the empty room behind them.
Without warning, Kloe lunged forward. For a moment it actually seemed that her paw passed through the reflecting surface, but she hissed in frustration as though she had struck only cold glass Chaven abruptly picked her up, stroked her, and then unbolted the door and put her outside in the corridor.
“Wait for me.”
Balked, but by what it was hard to say, Kloe let out a warble of irritation.
“You would not be happy in here,” he told the cat as he closed the door. “And you would never have tasted that mouse anyway, I fear.”
Now he sat before the mirror again.The candle was apparently burning low because the room swiftly grew darker. All that showed in the mirror were the reflected walls, except that the mirror-chamber contained a tiny bundle of darkness lying on the mirror-floor near the front of the glass.
Chaven sang a little in a very old language, was quiet for some time, then sang a little more. He sat and stared at the small dark shape. He waited.
