The Assassin's Tale (Isle of Dreams) (46 page)

With only the
guttering light of the candle to dispel the heavy shadows around her Mistral
couldn’t work out how far down the long corridor she had to go.  She crept
along in the near darkness, one hand lightly touching the wall on her left to
feel for the iron bound door to the training room. 

She passed
three doors, none of which had the distinctive heavy iron work she was looking
for.  At the fourth door she stopped, carefully running her hand over its
face.  It was the right one.

Holding her
breath, she grasped the heavy iron handle and turned it slowly.  In the
deathly silence the squeal of protesting metal rang out like thunder
clap.  Mistral cringed and quickly pushed the door open, stepping hastily
inside and closing it behind her as softly as she could.  Once inside, she
leaned against it, listening hard.  But apart from the pounding of her
heart there was no other noise.

Mistral stood
by the door, peering into the deep gloom of the cavernous Training Room,
allowing her eyes to adjust to the heavy darkness.  In the windowless room
her candle cast only a frail glow as far as her arm reached, doing nothing to
pierce the deep blackness that stretched out in every direction.  Mistral
started to walk to her left, the heavy padded floor swallowing any noise her
feet made.  As she walked she dragged her hand against the wall until it
came into contact with what she was looking for.  Quickly, she used the
dying flame of her candle stub to light the torch mounted in a holder on the
wall.  It flared instantly to life, spreading a welcome halo of light into
the room.

Mistral moved
swiftly around the room, lighting each of the torches in turn until the huge
room was filled with warm flickering light.  Then she turned and padded
back across to the mirrored wall.  Settling herself cross-legged on the
cushioned flooring in front of the vast mirror Mistral studied her torchlit
reflection.  It had been a while since she had looked at herself in a
mirror for any length of time and was shocked by what she saw.  Her eyes
seemed huge in her gaunt face and were ringed with dark shadows.  The
exposed skin of her arms and ankles were a myriad of fresh and fading bruises,
she didn’t care to look at the rest of her body to see what state that was
in. 

Mistral stared
into her eyes in the mirror.  They were the eyes of a stranger, cold and
lifeless.  She sighed and was almost surprised to see the stranger in the
mirror copy her.

‘Oh well, best
get on with the diagnosis, doctor,’ she murmured softly to herself, jumping at
the sound of her own voice echoing around the huge empty room. 

Mistral had
only been in the room on a few occasions and then it had been filled with the
noise of the apprentices training, their shouts and laughter and the ringing
clash of weapons.  Now it was eerily still with only the sound of her
breathing and the occasional crackle of the torches to break the heavy silence.

Breathing
slowly and deeply Mistral began to prepare to read her own aura.  Usually,
she could read auras with almost little or no effort but in recent weeks she
hadn’t been able to see even a wisp of colour, so tonight she was going through
the process almost as though Serenity was instructing her.  She stared
into her reflection’s eyes and began to methodically empty her mind of all
thoughts, allowing her body to relax, forcing all of her focus into the eyes of
the stranger in the mirror.

Nothing. 

Not even a
glimmer of a halo around her head.

Frustration
welled up inside her, which she swiftly quelled.  What was she
thinking?  Mistral knew she would never be able to see anything if she was
distracted by negative emotions. 

In a flash
Mistral had the answer.  That was the problem!  She wasn’t thinking
anything
.

Feeling more
hopeful she tried again, this time thinking of something simple, something that
she knew how she felt about.  The twins.  Mistral called up an image
of their faces in her mind and concentrated on her mirror image.

Slowly a faint
wreath of lilac coloured smoke began to appear around her reflection’s
head.  The vision strengthened and a sparkling edge of light yellow glowed
steadily into view.

Friendship and
gratitude.  Exactly the way Mistral knew she felt about the twins.

Encouraged by
her progress, Mistral redoubled her efforts, switching her thoughts to another
subject.

Training.

At once, the
smoky wreath faded to a non-descript beige colour.

Boredom. 
That made sense.  Nothing seemed to excite her any more.

With a
disdainful curl of her lip she called up an image of Columbine’s sullen
features.

Her aura began
to swirl and boil like a storm cloud, vivid reds flickered like lightning
against a smouldering backdrop of oranges and muddy browns.

Hmm.  She
hadn’t realised that not only did she detest Columbine, but the half-gargillian
also disgusted her.  Mistral ignored the flashes of anger her aura
revealed.  That was quite understandable.  Columbine could antagonise
a saint enough to commit violence.

Next she
thought of Cirrus, her free-spirited horse.

A swathe of colours
flooded through the broiling mass of brown and orange, obliterating it within a
second.  Fragile pinks, yellows and golds edged with a delicate pale blue
framed the Mistral in the mirror.  She smiled at the stranger in the
mirror.  No-one made her feel as free as Cirrus did.

Except Fabian.

Like a stone
dropped into a still pond, her aura responded to his name.  Ripples of
colour flooded out from the inside edge, turning her halo of colours to a deep
shocking pink shot through with fire all encircled by a thick border of palest
green.  A shimmering grey sheen floated like smoke across the pink, fading
its bright intensity to paler pinks wherever it passed.  Then, like the
sun breaking out from behind a cloud, a sparkling rainbow suddenly arced across
the vision, bathing her aura in a glistening light.

Mistral
blinked, astounded by what she had seen and the illusion instantly
vanished. 

What was
that?  Her mind struggled to comprehend what she had just seen. 
After a few moments Mistral convinced herself that she had been seeing a
reaction to Cirrus, not Fabian.  But it took her a while longer before she
could bring herself to retry the experiment.

Gritting her
teeth, Mistral stared deeply at the pale figure in the mirror again and forced
her pounding heartbeats to slow, her breathing to steady, and her mind to
empty.

Grendel. 
She focussed her mind on the hygiene- challenged goliath, calling up in
gruesome detail the image of his ugly face.

A startling
clash of turquoise, lilac and orange swelled instantly around her head. 
She smiled and the stranger in the mirror mimicked her.  Grendel ...
despite being slightly revolted by him, his steadfast loyalty had impressed her
over the last year and he had also been the one to find her in Cirrus’ stall on
their return from The Desert Lands.

Desert Lands.

Fabian.

At once her
aura exploded into flames of coral, fuchsia, rose all edged in pale
green.  Violent tongues of fire erupted sporadically, threatening to burn
away the bright pinks and then, as before, a rainbow erupted that blasted away
all the other colours, arcing over the Mistral in the mirror in a glorious
blaze of light.

She drew in a
deep breath and let it out slowly while she stared in anguish at the
irrefutable proof in the mirror.  There was no denying it this time. 
Mistral knew that she to face the truth. 

For some
unfathomable reason she had fallen hopelessly in love with Fabian De
Winter. 

Staring at the
vivid intensity of the rainbow in her aura she realised with a growing sense of
horror that it was actually far worse than she had first thought.  The
rainbow in her aura was something Mistral had only ever seen in one other
person, and they had been dying when she had read their aura.  Isadora,
the Bonded partner of Bali, who had chosen to die rather than live without her
soulmate.  Bonding.  The sentence of death.

The frozen
numbness of the last few weeks abruptly melted in flames of white-hot
pain.  Unable to face leaving, Mistral stayed in the Training Room staring
at the swirling colours in her aura until the torches had burned low and the
tears had dried on the stranger’s face in the mirror.

Why him
? 
Mistral wanted to scream out loud.  He neither knew nor cared that he had
sentenced her to a life of emptiness to become like Isadora, waiting for the
release of death.  Fresh tears fell from her eyes then Mistral felt her
stubborn streak rear its head, filling her with anger.  Embracing its
cleansing power Mistral lifted her chin and glared defiantly at the gaunt face
in the mirror.  She refused to fade to nothing.  She was Ri. 
She would fight. 

The spark of
determination flared brightly and then died almost as suddenly as it had come.

Fight for
what?

Desolation won
where the pain had been defeated, overwhelming her, choking her, and making the
stranger in the mirror cry once more. 

She finally
crept from the room before the apprentices rose to spend the rest of the day in
a haze, curled in a ball on her bed.  Sleep came and went in fitful
bursts, bringing with it none of the relief of oblivion.  Her mind had
finally given up its secret and in doing so, something had unblocked,
unleashing vivid dreams of only one subject. 

Over the next
few days Mistral came to yearn for and dread sleep in equal proportions. 
The overpowering longing to see his face, to immerse herself utterly in a
reality where she felt whole again was cruelly tempered by the waking agony of
realising that it had all been a dream. 

November
announced itself in a series of bleak and grey days to match her mood.  Mistral
barely noticed the days passing, forcing her body to function in a mechanical,
emotionless state.  Eating became something that happened when she
remembered to, or when the twins forced her to.  She avoided the other
apprentices and shunned The Cloak and Dagger, knowing she was poor company,
lifeless and distracted. 

Mistral
withdrew from the twins as much as she could, desperate to conceal her pain
from their perceptive eyes.  Despite her efforts Mistral caught them
casting concerned looks in her direction and sharing rapid whispered
conversations when they thought she wasn’t looking.  Mistral knew they
deserved her honesty but to admit how she felt to another living soul was more
than she could bear.  What could they say to help her?  And to feel
their pity would be like a knife wound to her already maimed heart.  So
she spent as much time as she could out of the Valley, taking any work offered
or, when no Contracts were available, riding up alone into the mountains,
wrapped in her own misery for company. 

At times the
stubborn side of her fought against her despair and argued, demanding for her
to at least fight against the pain.  Mistral listened to its reason with a
sense of futility, arguing back weakly that Ri warriors were fated to a fairly
brief existence by the nature of their work anyway.  What would it matter
if misery claimed her end before one of the Contracts did?  

At her lowest
points she envied Isadora being able to make the choice to die.  Her will
was too strong to simply let her give up.  Trapped inside her own mind and
unable to share her pain with anyone else, Mistral spent more time
contemplating death than life.  Religion had not formed a part of her
upbringing in Nevelte and it was not taught or practised in the Valley either, but
the shadowy figure of the Divinus was never far from her thoughts.  The
mysterious head of the Magnate was widely rumoured to be a Necromancer. 
It was said that he communed with wraiths and spirits.  Was that then
proof of an afterlife?  Were the spirits free-thinking or just echoes of
their living souls?  Fated to repeat their existence over and over. 
Mistral brooded morbidly on the subject for hours, overwhelmed with despair at
the prospect of leaving this life only to spend an eternity in equally abject
misery. 

She utterly
refused to let herself think of Fabian De Winter, to do so gave rose to a
powerful yearning and mad half-formed ideas of riding off to find him. 
And
what then
?  Her stubborn side would argue.  He obviously had no
clue that some impetuous half-breed had lumped a portion of her soul on
him.  He was a Mage, tempered by reason and therefore not prone to the
instinctive Bonding her kind was.  A small part of her mind reasoned that
Fabian didn’t quite fit that mould.  He was a warrior too, and as much
ruled by passion and emotion as she.  He had travelled across half a
continent just to see Emiror again, how reasonable was that?

Ah, tears
again.
  Her stubborn side chided with satisfaction.  
Making up
for all those years you never cried?

She would
argue with her sub-conscious like another person, suffer its painful reasoning
and reprisals then fling all of her pain back in its too-knowing face. 
Without that outlet for the huge emotions Mistral was trying to cope with, she
had no doubt that she would have simply exploded. 

In a final act
of desperation Mistral forced herself to visit Serenity in the Infirmary after
training had finished.  She had questions that she needed the answers to.

Pushing open
the door to the Infirmary Mistral was relieved to find the room unusually empty
of patients.  Serenity was sat behind her table, the entire surface of
which was littered with bottles of brightly coloured liquids and an open tin of
yellow powder which Serenity was in the process of spooning onto a large set of
brass scales.  She looked up and smiled as Mistral entered.