Mirror Sight

  MEOW!

  Karigan glanced down, and there was Ghost Kitty rubbing against her legs, leaving a trail of white and gray fur on her trousers. She picked him up, and he butted his head against her chin. She laughed.

  “The menders had to keep shooing him from the mending wing,” Mara explained. “He knew you were back. Condor has been just as ridiculous, jumping the pasture fence and trying to run into the castle.”

  Karigan froze with Ghost Kitty purring in her arms. Condor! But what she saw in her mind was a bay stallion rearing in the palace. Palace? There had been a palace. And a horse. But she could not recall the horse’s name or why she thought of him.

  Mara, mistaking her reaction, said, “Don’t worry, we’ll go see Condor next. And all the others.”

  “All the others?”

  “The horses Damian Frost brought while you were in Blackveil.”

  “Oh!” She couldn’t wait to go see them all, especially Condor.

  Ghost Kitty leaped out of her arms and trotted ahead of them into the Rider wing. Karigan passed familiar doors, including the one to her old room. She peered into the common room with its big table, which looked just the same as she remembered. That not everything had changed was very comforting.

  Mara took her all the way down the corridor and around a corner. This was an ancient section of castle they were re-inhabiting, the ceilings lower and stonework cruder, the air currents smelling of must, and the dark corners full of secrets.

  “Sorry to say,” Mara said, “but we ran out of rooms on the main corridor, which is a good thing if you think about it.”

  It was. It meant more Riders had answered the call. Riders she had yet to meet. For all that it was good, the old corridors made Karigan uneasy. They were restless with whispers and creaking and shifting shadows.

  Mara stopped at the first door. Lamps were lit on either side of it and across the hall to fight off the gloom. Beyond the pool of light lay a wall of dark.

  “Anyway,” Mara said, “you are the first to have a room down this way, so the whole corridor is yours until we get more green Greenies.”

  “All mine,” Karigan said with trepidation. It was going to be a little too quiet, or perhaps un-quiet?

  Ghost Kitty scratched the thick-timbered door.

  “Go on in,” Mara said.

  Karigan did and found a large chamber—large, anyway, compared to the other rooms of the Rider wing. There were support pillars of carved wood, four arrow slit windows with drapes pulled aside, and an actual hearth.

  “Fastion thinks this could have been a meeting room or common room at one time,” Mara said.

  Fastion liked investigating the more ancient parts of the castle.

  Karigan’s friends had gone to some lengths to make the room comfortable. It was impossible not to miss the large bed with a gaudy gilt headboard elaborately carved with unicorns and a young girl sitting by the bank of a stream. Garth, Mara had told her, had been particularly pleased when he found that piece.

  “Ah,” Karigan replied, trying not to burst out laughing.

  They’d found her a wardrobe almost as large as her old one. Someone had built bookshelves.

  Mara, following Karigan’s gaze, said, “New Rider built those. He was apprenticed to a carpenter when he was called. Your friends chipped in for some books, which I took the liberty of picking out for you.”

  Karigan went to the shelves and looked through the books. Some were brand new, novels she hadn’t read. Others were used, including The Journeys of Gilan Wylloland. It was dog-eared but clearly well-loved by its previous owner, and the illustrations were as vibrant as ever.

  They’d also found her a plain, but serviceable vanity. Mara had purchased some small necessities for her, like a comb and brush, and a hand mirror.

  “Extra uniforms are in the wardrobe,” Mara said, “and the quartermaster said to just ask if you had any needs.”

  Karigan took it all in, then flung her arms around Mara. “Thank you.”

  “You like it then?” a voice boomed from the doorway. It was Garth.

  Karigan hugged him in turn, and he being the bear of a man he was, lifted her off her feet and practically crushed her in his arms.

  “I almost wasn’t here to see you,” he said after gently setting her back on the floor. “I was due to leave for the wall on the solstice, but all the snow came. Now when I go to the wall, I can tell them all the good news. Not that Connly hasn’t already done so.”

  Garth and other Rider friends of hers, had been assigned to the towers of the D’Yer Wall. Connly could communicate with Trace Burns in Tower of the Ice with his mind. Trace could then convey the news to the others. Distance did not matter with such an ability.

  “How do you like the bed?” Garth asked.

  “It’s um . . .”

  “She’s stunned,” Mara provided.

  “Yes, stunned,” Karigan echoed.

  Garth beamed.

  They talked away, Karigan catching up on the doings of her friends, the romances, the feuds between the tower mages, the parties. Meanwhile, Ghost Kitty watched them with disinterest from the bed, busily licking his paw.

  They spent time in lighthearted conversation until Garth said in more sober tones, “In the fall, the reconstruction at the breach was knocked down again. Something came in from Blackveil, and left nothing behind but a bit of grubby yarn.”

  Karigan stilled. Grandmother. It had to be.

  “Let’s not worry Karigan with the wall,” Mara said. The significant way she looked at Garth made Karigan think they were under orders to keep her from worrying about anything at all.

  Garth hunched his shoulders and sank his hands into his pockets.

  “In fact,” Mara said, “I think it’s time to go see Condor.”

  “Excuse me.” Ben poked his head through the doorway.

  Maybe, just maybe, Karigan thought, her new room wouldn’t be so quiet after all, if she was already receiving visitors.

  “Before you go,” Ben continued, “I just need to take a look at Karigan’s eye.”

  Garth and Mara waited out in the corridor while Ben had Karigan sit in a chair beside the vanity and undid her bandage. He bit his lip while he examined her eye. It seemed to her he looked at it while trying not to look into it.

  “I will get more ointment for the irritation. Can you see any more than you did?”

  “Less,” she said, realizing her sight had gone darker than even when Somial had looked at it.

  Ben chewed on his lip again. “I don’t know, Karigan. I’ve tried everything. The particle appears to be . . . It appears to be permanent. Forcing it out would certainly damage your eye beyond repair and ruin your vision for good. It’s like it’s clawed its way in there, so I’m not sure we could even force it out. It seems, well, it seems determined to stay lodged in there.”

  He did not meet her gaze as he spoke. She guessed it was less the news he delivered than what her eye looked like, which was odd for a mender. Menders looked at everything.

  She reached for the mirror. He grabbed her wrist.

  “I want to see it,” she said.

  “I think it’s better if you waited—”

  “Now. I want to see it now. Everyone is tip-toeing around me, and I want to find out why.”

  “You’re sure?” Ben asked.

  “Yes.”

  He released her wrist, and took a step back as if to absolve himself of any fault she might hurl his way. When she finally looked into the mirror, she saw that this could not be his fault. None of it. This went far beyond Ben.

  MIRROR SIGHT

  The mirror reflected her eye. Her eye reflected the mirror back and the image within it, unto infinity. Her eye, her entire eye, had turned silver, the silver of a mirror. No wonder Ben, and even Somial, had had a difficult time looking a
t it.

  The mirror man, it seemed, had the final say, had called her bluff one last time. This she could not shatter like the looking mask, or even give away. It was a part of her.

  “Karigan?” Ben asked. “Are you all right?”

  “No,” she replied, “but yes.” Ben had, she thought, matured a great deal since her departure for Blackveil.

  “Somial called you Mirare,” Ben said.

  Karigan glanced sharply at him. “I remember him using that word.”

  “He said there were once people who could see far, as he put it. The Mirari. They wore the looking masks in ancient times. He thought perhaps your ability to cross thresholds was somehow aligned with the mirror sight.”

  As usual, everyone had been talking about her to everyone else, but avoided speaking to her directly. It no longer annoyed her that much. She understood how difficult it would be for them to broach the subject with her.

  “I’ve tried not to look you directly in your eye,” Ben said, “because I saw images once, confusing images, some not pleasant.”

  “Just like a looking mask,” Karigan murmured.

  Ben nodded, and she lowered the mirror. It was then she realized the vision in her silver eye had gone black. Black and deep and . . . She saw stars. Their light stabbed into her eye, into her head, like a thousand needles. She cried out and closed her eyes, and the pain ebbed.

  “Karigan?”

  “Would you put the bandage back over my eye?”

  He did so. This way no one would have to see the oddness of her eye, and it stopped the pain.

  “Let me know if there is anything I can do for you,” Ben said. “Master Vanlynn has made the captain and king aware of your condition. I think the captain wanted to tell you herself, but you wanted to look . . .”

  “It’s all right,” Karigan told him. “I’m glad to know.”

  He left then, and Mara and Garth returned. She hated the pity on their faces. It would take her a while to adjust to this “condition,” as Ben called it. The anger had yet to surface. Maybe she was in shock, numbed of emotion. When the anger did surface, she was reserving it for the mirror man and the gods.

  “Shall we go see Condor?” Mara asked, a little too brightly.

  They bundled up for the trek outdoors. Garth hung back saying he had work to do elsewhere. Outside, the storm had settled to large fluffy flurries dropping in lazy swirls. The castle groundskeepers had worked long, hard hours to keep the stairs and paths shoveled. Some of the snow piles were as high as their shoulders. They had to trudge through deep snow to reach the pasture. Karigan didn’t mind—the winter air was clean, refreshing, lifted some of the care from her—and there were all the horses, the new ones and the old ones—snuffling through the snow for some tidbit of grass beneath.

  One horse’s head went up high. He issued a shrill whinny and galloped toward them. Karigan stepped between the fence rails to get at him. When he reached her, he nuzzled her shoulder, her hair. She wrapped her arms around his neck. Mirror eye be damned. She pressed her face into his chestnut hide, all warm and furry with his winter coat. As long as he was there, everything would be all right.

  “He missed you,” Mara said. “Was off his feed and moping, but as soon as you came back, he started eating regular. He’s a changed horse.”

  “I missed him, too,” Karigan said. All the way through Blackveil she had. She assumed she had missed him in the future, as well. A Rider should never be separated from her horse.

  She clapped his neck and tugged on his ear. He turned on his haunches and ran off bucking, which got some of the other horses playing. He cantered around, coming back to her more than once, as if to make sure she was really there.

  “I am sorry I missed Damian Frost,” Karigan said wistfully, as she returned to Mara at the fence.

  “I enjoyed meeting him. He actually brought more horses than we requested. He said he knew we’d need them. Horsemaster Riggs is working on gentling the unclaimed ones, and we all take turns exercising them and helping in the stable. The stable is, by the way, filling up just like the Rider wing.”

  It gladdened Karigan that the messenger service was on its way to reaching its full strength, but she also wondered if it was the will of higher powers that Sacoridia be prepared for greater conflict.

  After a while, Mara excused herself to attend to duties. Karigan lingered at the pasture watching the horses. It was comforting to see them play, or just dig for grass beneath the snow. Condor periodically returned to her to be scritched, and she stayed until she could no longer feel her toes or the tips of her fingers.

  • • •

  Karigan’s first night in her new room proved restless. Half-remembered images of people and places and nightmarish mechanicals reeled through her mind. When she awakened in the morning, her bed clothes were twisted in knots, and she felt spent, as though she’d been running all night, not sleeping.

  Shortly after breakfast, a Green Foot runner found her in the common room and delivered a message directing her to attend Captain Mapstone in the records room. The records room resided in another old section of the castle. Karigan checked that her uniform was neat and proper, and she set off.

  When she reached the records room, she found it busier than ever. Workers appeared to be disassembling scaffolding from beneath the stained glass dome. Dakrias Brown, the chief administrator, noticed her right off and came over to greet her.

  “So good to see you, Sir Karigan,” he told her. “You were missed.” In a whisper, he added, “And not just by the living.”

  Mara had alluded to the disruption at the memorial circle they’d held for Karigan. Karigan wished she could have been there to see it.

  “They,” and Dakrias pointed vaguely in the air, “calmed right down when you returned.”

  “What is with all the scaffolding?” she asked.

  “A special cleaning of the glass,” Dakrias said. “Here, let me introduce you to the glass master, Master Goodgrave.”

  Karigan almost missed a step behind Dakrias as she followed him. Goodgrave. The name was familiar. She had been called “Goodgrave” in the future, though she’d forgotten why.

  She shook hands with the master, distracted by a familiarity about him, his bushy side whiskers and almost wolfish features, while he explained the meticulous cleaning he and his workers had given the glass.

  “A masterpiece this dome is,” he said. “Few samples of such proficiency have survived time. I believe your captain is planning a ceremony to reveal it anew in its full splendor.”

  “Indeed I am, Master Goodgrave.”

  They turned to find the captain striding toward them with a sheaf of papers tucked under her arm.

  “But I thought,” she added, “I’d give Karigan a little preview. She helped, after all, to bring it back to light in the first place.”

  “Well then, now is a good time,” Master Goodgrave said, “with us being finished and the scaffolding coming down.”

  “Fastion is above,” the captain said.

  A lantern backlit the glass above, and rippled across scenes in a blur of fabulous color as it moved along. Then it paused and more lights were lit, illuminating the panel of the First Rider riding in victory after the Long War. The colors were stunning, so bright, and the images so crisp.

  “Not bad, eh?” Master Goodgrave said, face shining with pride.

  “It’s beautiful,” Karigan replied.

  “We discovered,” the captain said, “that the three-fold leaf meant to symbolize the League that brought down Mornhavon was actually a four-fold leaf.”

  “Four?” Karigan asked. “There was another ally?”

  “Apparently. If you look behind the First Rider, you see what we always thought were horsemen in the far distance, but they aren’t. They’re p’ehdrose.”

  The image in glass was far above,
but Karigan could see it now, the many p’ehdrose. The dirt had obscured that detail.

  “If only they were more than legend,” the captain said. “We could probably use some help against Second Empire.”

  “They’re real,” Karigan said.

  “What did you say?”

  “The p’ehdrose. I saw stuffed and mounted specimens in the Imperial Museum.”

  She and the captain stared at one another in shocked silence, Karigan for remembering such a detail, and the captain for hearing that p’ehdrose were not mere legend.

  “That is . . . very interesting,” the captain said. She glanced up at the glass, and Karigan could almost see the wheels of speculation churning in her mind.

  Master Goodgrave, meanwhile, left them so he could bark orders at his workers as the last piece of scaffolding came down. “Move along, Harland, I have no use for laggards.”

  Karigan stepped back, stunned. For a moment she thought he’d said “Harlowe.”

  Cade, Cade, Cade . . .

  She had not allowed herself to wonder if, in the future reshaped by her coming home, Cade would still exist. She tried to ignore it, but whether he existed in the future or not, it felt to her like he had died. Maybe she should just let his memory go and forget the little she remembered of him, like so many other details. But no, he was not just a detail. He had been important to her. She was sure she had loved him. She hoped he would exist in the future, that she had not ruined that possibility, and that his world would be a better place than the one she had left.

  “I asked you here not just to see the glass,” Captain Mapstone said, “but to give you this.”

  “This” was a sheaf of papers, and with a glance Karigan realized it was the transcript of her notes. As she looked through the pages, she found an addendum of the captain’s own memory of what Karigan had told her and the king about her experiences.

  “I know you’ve been having a hard time with recall,” the captain said, “so I wanted to make sure you had this to refer to. It isn’t quite fair to go through what you did and not remember it.”

  “Thank you,” Karigan replied. “There are people I met, and even if their futures have changed, and they never exist now, they still deserve to be remembered.”