The Dark Mirror (32 page)

“What part do you expect to play in such grand and momentous events?” the leaf man asked with brutal bluntness. “That is the question you must ask yourself, for it may not be long before Pitnochie is closed to you forever.”

“Stop it,” Tuala muttered, putting her fingers in her ears, but she went on listening; after all, she had come for answers,
and that was what these were, for all they were not those she wanted.

“Broichan faces a dilemma,” the forest girl said. “He can’t simply abandon you. Bridei’s good opinion means a lot more to him than he’d ever let anyone know. The king’s druid has one weak spot, and that’s his affection for the boy. Besides, Broichan is nothing if not loyal to the gods; he would not wish to fall foul of the
Shining One by casting out her daughter. Fortunately for him, there’s a solution. If I were Broichan, and my mind worked in the way of a mortal man’s, I would be glad you have reached childbearing years. Now he has only to find you a husband and he can be rid of you quite respectably, without offending anyone.”

“Don’t look so horrified,” the leaf man said, licking his lips with a long, greenish
tongue. The sight of it made Tuala’s flesh crawl. “It’s the usual thing for human girls once they’ve begun their bleeding. Haven’t you been trying to convince us you are just like a human girl? Of course, a suitor for such as yourself could be tricky to find. Any man who knew the story of Amna of the White Shawl would be a fool to take you. But a lonely widower, an older fellow perhaps, might well
be persuaded by a glimpse of that delicate flesh, that fresh little figure. And Broichan’s a man of means; he can offer a solid sort of dowry. I’ll wager you’ll be off his hands by Midsummer. That’s if you don’t take the other option, the one we can offer you.”

Tuala felt she might be sick. “Bridei wouldn’t let him do it,” she whispered. “He would stop it.”

The man smiled again. “Bridei is much
occupied with other matters,” he said, and gestured toward the pool, where images sprang up in an instant shimmer of movement. “Life and death matters whose course will influence not just his own future, but the future of Fortriu. Should all unfold in accordance with Broichan’s plan, Bridei’s destiny will take him far from you. See for yourself.”

“I won’t look,” Tuala said, and heard the tremor
in her voice. “You can manipulate these images, you’ll only show what you want me to see. You can’t make me look.”

“Why do you come here, if not to see him?” the girl asked softly. “Why linger in this lonely place, if not to be close to him when he is far away? When these waters show you his face, you cannot but look.”

Tuala bowed her head. They were right: to come here in the cold, all this
way, and not to see Bridei when she knew his image waited there on the surface of the Dark Mirror was indeed beyond her. Yet she felt awkward as she bent over the pool once more. It was not so long since her own naked form had gleamed pale and strange there in the water, and it unsettled her to be searching that same still surface for a picture of the dear friend of her childhood. There was something
not right about it. She did not believe for a moment that her Otherworld companions would not change and distort the message of the Dark Mirror to their own ends. Still, she must look.

They were little glimpses, each gone almost before she had time to absorb it: Bridei riding with Gartnait beside him, the two of them pushing their horses fast in unspoken rivalry. That did not surprise Tuala.
There had been plenty of opportunity to observe Talorgen’s laughing, red-haired son during the summers Gartnait had spent at Pitnochie. Behind his clownish facade Tuala had seen something else: a passionate striving to be Bridei’s match in feats of strength and skill, since he knew he could never come close in matters of learning. She had recognized the desperation with which Gartnait sought to prove
himself before his father, and understood what Bridei did not: that his easy-going, jocular companion had fierce ambition in his heart. To a boy such as Gartnait, perhaps it might seem that things came too easily for Bridei. Gartnait knew nothing of the long times of loneliness, the patient hours of self-discipline. He did not understand what it meant to be sent away when you were too small to
understand why.

The image changed, and Tuala saw Bridei wrestling with another man, a life or death struggle with knives. It was only a moment. Then Bridei alone at night, staring into the dark, a solitary candle showing his shadowed eyes, the little crease between his brows, the tight set of his mouth.

“He needs me,” Tuala whispered.

Then it was not night but day, and he was sitting on a bench
beside a fish pond, and there was a girl. The girl had red hair like Gartnait’s and freckles sprinkled becomingly across her delicate nose. She was dressed in a way that marked her as a lady, the hair held back by an embroidered band with a single artful wisp allowed to escape over one ear, the gown a soft red-brown embroidered in the same green and blue as the headband. Her feet were shod in
soft kidskin. The girl was seated beside Bridei; she seemed as solemn as he was, and she was listening attentively as he talked. Bridei bent his head courteously and she said a few words, raising her face to him. In a sharp-featured way she was very pretty, a little like a vixen. Tuala could see in Bridei’s eyes that he admired her.

“Highly suitable,” the leaf man observed drily as this image
fractured and dispersed. “The daughter of a family friend, of royal connections, healthy and presentable in every way and but a year or two his junior. He must go to battle first, of course; this spring he must prove himself in the field. But it can be seen how this will unfold. Already he confides in her.”

“He needs me.” Tuala was shivering, for all the warmth of the strange cloak they had wrapped
her in. “He needs to come home.” No elegant girl of royal connections knew how to listen as she did, how to coax a smile to that solemn face, how to be there beside him as he wrestled with the great questions that beset him, and would do more and more. No dazzling vision could convince her otherwise. All that it meant was that nobody understood the bond between them; nobody but herself and
Bridei.

“No, Tuala,” the forest girl said. “Already he flies far from your grasp; would you seek to clip an eagle’s wings?”

“Even the eagle cannot fly without his times of stillness.” Tuala worked to keep her voice confident. “He needs rest, so he can go on with courage. For that, he needs me.”

“How can you be certain of that?” asked the leaf man. “Would you not be better to make your own path
and use your own talents? You have barely begun to discover what you are.”

“Bridei no longer needs you.” The girl’s voice was soothing as honey mead, gentle as a mother’s. “This was a friendship of children and it did you both some service. Those times are over now. He moves ahead on his own journey. It is time you gave thought to yours.”

“You seem to fear Broichan’s plan for you,” the man said.
“You need not do as he wishes. Choose the other way. That is why you came here to us. Don’t try to deny it. You know there is a path for you here in the forest. We will show you how to find it. We will open the gateway so you can step across.”

“We will bring you home.” Now the girl’s voice was like the chime of a sweet, unearthly instrument, ringing across the dark waters. Tuala’s scalp prickled.
A charm, that was what this was, a spell, a trap; she had been wary
of the leaf man with his sly smiles and his salacious looks, but it was the other, the seeming fair and sounding kindly, who was the more dangerous. She had been foolish to let this go so far, to let that soft voice, those taunting visions influence her. Her hands scrabbled to push the cobweb garment from her shoulders. Her body
tensed itself, ready for flight. All she needed to do was get up and run, she knew the way, up the path, along the rim of the vale, down under birch and oak and holly, back to the borders of Broichan’s land and safety. They would not follow, not once she passed the white stones at the entry to the Vale of the Fallen. At least, she hoped they would not follow.

But if she fled, they would know
their barbs had hit their mark. They would know they had managed, at last, to frighten her. She would not allow them that small victory, not after they had hurt her with their cruel comments. They were not the only ones who could twist and turn the images of the seer to illustrate a particular point. Tuala took a deep breath and looked again into the waters of the Dark Mirror. She fixed her mind on
the Shining One; she imagined the silver orb of the Lady’s fullness, conjured a picture of a woman tall and lovely, bearing a tiny fur-swathed infant in her arms. The water shimmered, rippled, grew still again. There on its reflective surface was the child Bridei, small bare feet blue with cold below the hem of his nightrobe, standing on the doorstep at midnight. He looked down. The mirror did not
show what he saw, only the wondrous change in his face, a face too solemn, too wary for such a child, whose mind should surely have been all on sunny days and games and family. In the water, he knelt and looked and his eyes were suddenly filled with light, his somber, small countenance suffused with joy. He rose to his feet and gazed up, and the Shining One looked down at him, touching his face
with unearthly silver. Tuala could not hear what he said, but she recognized its meaning in her heart; it was a promise deep and binding, an affirmation of responsibility. He bent to gather up what lay at his feet; he smiled. Now there was a different look in his eyes, a look that was just for her. The image faded and was gone.

It was suddenly very quiet in the Vale of the Fallen, so quiet it
was as if time had stopped while this image inhabited the Dark Mirror. Tuala blinked and rubbed her eyes, looking to right and to left. She was alone. As subtly and silently as they had arrived, her Otherworld companions were gone. Her chosen vision had displeased them, that much was certain. She did not entirely understand that; were not they themselves loyal to the Shining One? Perhaps it was her
own stubbornness that had driven them away. Perhaps
they had expected that she would take their hands and walk off into the forest this very day, never to return to the mortal realm. She had not even asked them for their names.

Rain began to fall, increasing with alarming swiftness to a drenching downpour that soaked her through cloak and shawl and tunic. She put up her hood and kept on going.
Her boots were soon thick with mud. She had long wished the Good Folk might manifest themselves and begin to give her answers. Now at last they had done so, but she had learned little. Perhaps there was a kind of home for her among such folk.
We will open the gateway so you can step across
, they had said. She would like to find out what that meant, but only if she had a guarantee she could step
back again. And Tuala had heard too many old tales to believe such a course would be possible. Cross into that other realm and you’d be trapped there forever, or you’d stay for a day’s feasting and dancing, then come home to discover your family had been dead for a hundred years. Besides, she would not step across to anywhere without Bridei, and Bridei’s path most certainly lay in the world of human
affairs, of druids, kings, and battles. And she would not believe, however many charming fox girls she was shown, that anyone could fill her own place in his life. The two of them belonged together; it was as simple as that.

She arrived home after dark, cold, wet, and exhausted. As she emerged from the path under the bare oaks, her boots squelching, her saturated cloak hugged around her, she
saw the pale faces of the men on watch, gathered by their little fire, turn toward her and turn quickly away.

The kitchen door was bolted; Tuala did her best to knock with frozen, aching hands. She thought of the image in the pool, a child standing in this very spot, gazing down at a babe abandoned in the snow of a solstice midnight. She waited, her body wracked with waves of shivering. This
time there was no Bridei to let her in. She lifted her hand to knock again, but before she could do so the bolt was slid across and the heavy door opened on lantern light, the warmth of the fire and Mara’s dour countenance. Tuala stumbled inside.

“Erip’s taken very bad,” Mara said, ramming the bolt home again. “Get out of those wet things and bring them back to me, then you’re to go in.”

“How
bad?” Tuala asked through chattering teeth. The sudden shock of the fire’s warmth was making her faint and dizzy.

Mara tightened her lips. “It could be a long night,” she said. “Go on, get into your dry things. Give me those boots right now. You’re leaving a trail on Ferat’s clean floor.”

Tuala eased numb feet from the sodden boots, grasped the lighted candle Mara proffered, then fled to her
own small chamber. She stripped, trembling with cold, rubbed herself tolerably dry on a cloth and scrambled into clean smallclothes, a woolen gown and an old shawl of Brenna’s that still hung on a peg by the door. She bundled her soggy garments and returned to the kitchen. She felt a certain gratitude to Mara; one could not call the big woman kind, but at least she was consistent. But Erip: how could
Tuala have stayed out so long, when her old friend was on the threshold of death?

Mara took the dripping clothes without comment and began to hang them up by the fire. A pot of soup was steaming on the hearth, and a bowl of it had been set on the stone shelf Ferat used for his preparations, with a hunk of dark bread beside it.

“Eat up,” Mara said. “I can’t be troubling myself with you sick as
well, and for nothing more than a mad notion to run off into the forest on your own. Get it into you, it’ll warm you.”

“You said I was to go in,” Tuala managed after most of the soup was gone. “Does that mean the rules have changed again?”

“Rules? The only rule I follow is common sense: an old man, a small chamber, no need for a gaggle of folk in there exhausting him. It’s no thanks to me that
you’re bid go in tonight, it’s thanks to him. He asked for it.”

“He would have asked before, he would have wanted me there,” Tuala felt bound to say. “He was too weak, that’s all. I told you.”