Vanessa frowned at that. “I don’t believe that will happen,” she said. “I have done my due diligence on the Lord Sorcier, and if there is one thing everyone can agree upon, it is that he is even more stubborn when he feels he is being thwarted. Perhaps this is a good thing, Dora—if the countess makes everything very difficult on him, then he shall not lose interest in your curse.” Vanessa smiled at a stray thought. “Perhaps he might even marry you! He did come courting today, after all.”
“That much was an outright sham, Vanessa,” Dora said. “And I would not recommend that you set your heart on such a silly thought.”
Dora pushed Vanessa out of the room after that, forcing her to bed. Her cousin had received more than one set of flowers today, which meant that she was likely to start receiving suitors any day now. It wouldn’t do for her to be rumpled and tired-looking when they arrived.
Dora was just preparing for bed herself... but before she could put her head to the pillow, she found herself pulling the Lord Sorcier’s mirror from the dresser, holding it before her as she settled on the edge of her bed again.
The memory of the awful scene she had witnessed earlier that day still gave her a faint sense of nausea. But the Lord Sorcier had implied that there was a connection, however tenuous, between Dora’s curse and the things that she saw in the mirror. She knew it would only benefit her if she could manage to bring on those visions more reliably.
The mirror’s silvered back remained stubbornly visible, however, no matter how much she tried to force it into that dull blackness.
Dora chewed at her lip. I saw the future once, and then the past, she thought. Both times, it was something to do with the Lord Sorcier, even if he was only present.
Perhaps, Dora thought, she ought to focus on trying to see something more to do with him.
Even as she had the thought, the silvered back of the mirror rippled like a pond. Dora focussed her thoughts on the Lord Sorcier—she imagined him standing before her as he had done earlier in the day, with his wild hair and golden eyes and careless manner of dress.
Blackness encroached upon the mirror’s back. Slowly—ever so slowly—the figure of the Lord Sorcier solidified, becoming more real than before. He was sitting at a writing desk, looking over one of the tomes he had bought from the magic shop by the light of a candle. His jacket and his neckcloth were gone, however, and his waistcoat was unbuttoned. Had Dora been capable of the emotion, she might have been mortified to see him in such a state of undress. Even so, she couldn’t help but stare.
“Ah, there you are,” Elias said briskly. He still had his eyes upon the book in front of him, and it took Dora a moment to realise that he was addressing her. “I was beginning to think I’d need to send you step-by-step instructions, Miss Ettings.”
“Step-by-step instructions would have been nice,” Dora said. She paused, realizing that she had just managed to speak. That had never been the case before, in one of her visions. “May I ask what on earth is going on?”
Elias turned in his chair. “Visions of the past and future are unpredictable, at best,” he said. “But one may scry distant lands or distant people with better reliability. I normally protect myself against such intrusions, but the mirror that you hold may bypass those protections if I please it to. It was a tricky bit of magic, if I do say so myself.”
Dora knitted her brow. “Then you are at home right now?” she asked. She glanced down at herself, and saw that she was wearing only her nightgown. This was, in many respects, far worse than being caught by the Lord Sorcier in her stays and underthings—but he did not seem the least bit fazed, and so Dora decided that she shouldn’t be fazed either.
“I am at home,” Elias agreed. “It has been a very long and very awful day, I might add. I will be glad to divert my attention to something less hideous for a brief time.” He closed the book on the desk and leaned back in his chair to consider her. “I will admit,” he said. “I was worried that you might be scared away from further scrying after what you saw today. I must apologise again for that.”
Dora knitted her brow. The words were utterly sincere. But of all things, the Lord Sorcier had finally chosen to apologise to her when she didn’t require an apology. “I do not know why you should apologise,” she told him. “It was a true thing that I saw, for all that it was ugly. I am sure that it pained you far more to live through it than it pained me to watch it.”
She glanced away from him, unable now to look him in the eyes. “I am glad to have seen it, for all that it disturbed me. I realise now how awfully I misconceived the war. I had the notion that it was all men in bright uniforms and neat lines, simply being brave all the time. I must instead apologise to you for my own wretched silliness.”
A long silence extended between them. Eventually, Dora looked back up at the Lord Sorcier, and found that he was studying her with a strange look in his eyes. “...you were not silly,” he said finally. “You had no way to know. Pleasant-mannered men will not tell you of that side of the war, because it is
