The Mirror Prince (42 page)

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Authors: Violette Malan

BOOK: The Mirror Prince
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The bottom of the tower had two exits. Max went without hesitation to the double doors at the left of the stair. Cassandra took hold of his sleeve in her fingers.
 
“Outside?” she whispered, a worried frown creasing her brows.
 
He nodded, and mouthed the word “courtyard.” She shrugged and went to the left leaf of the carved wooden door. Again, this was Wood, not darkwood, and Max felt his stomach lurch with nausea. The door’s bolts and hardware were darkmetal, new, and perfectly fitted. Cassandra grimaced, lips pulling back from her teeth as she reached for the door. Managing not to touch the Wood, she slid the bolts back, taking such care that Max only heard the smallest “snick” as the last bolt slid free.
 
The doors opened into an interior patio, a large rectangular space surrounded by a pillared arcade. The pillars held up a covered gallery fronted with an elaborate lattice, as if there were a harem to be hidden from public view. Colored flagstone paths radiating out from a central fountain divided the patio into sections. Each section was itself a different color, created by a careful choice of flowers, small shrubs, and a single tree. Stone seats invited people to rest and listen to the beauty of the water.
 
“Is there anyone in the water?” she breathed as she followed him down the path.
 
Max shook his head. “This is plumbing, not a Natural, and there’s not enough water to hide anyone else.”
 
The tree farthest from the doors was a slim ash, and Max approached it slowly. He knelt before it, and placed his palms on the silver-gray bark. The tree shuddered, exactly, Cassandra thought, as a woman might shudder under her lover’s hands.
 
Max stood, and the tree was gone. In his hands was an ash wood spear.
 
“It’s a war spear.” Cassandra’s hand was out before she was aware of moving, already imagining the feel of the spear’s time-smooth shaft under her fingers. Its head, gleaming like
gra’if,
though she couldn’t guess whose
gra’if
it might be, was fully the length of her forearm.
 
“Hence the name,” Max said. “
Porre’in,
Spear of War.”
 
Cassandra looked at him, her mouth twisted sideways. “I meant,” she said, drawing back her hand, “that it is actually a war spear. For some reason I expected it to be,” she held her hands a few feet apart, “symbolic in some way.” It was, in fact, longer than the human war spear, almost a lance. “It seems so ordinary,” she added.
 
“Touch it,” Max said.
 
Cassandra took hold of the shaft in the middle, between Max’s hands, and for a second, he let her bear the weight of it. At once she felt it warm and pulsing, like a living thing, and felt herself flying through the air, not like a bird, but like a missile, the rush of wind created only by her own forward movement intoxicating, sucking the air away from her before she could breathe it in. Her blood sang, and she felt herself gasping. She took a step back to keep herself from falling, met Max’s shining eyes above the spear he held between them.
 
“Did you feel it?” he said.
 
“It’s in flight,” she said, clearing her dry throat with difficulty.
 
“It always is,” Max said. “It’s a true symbol.”
 
“Who holds it can call the People to War,” Cassandra said.
 
Max shook his head, his lips pinched thin. “You heard
Trere’if.
The People won’t fight. And they’re right. I used this once already, thinking I was doing the right thing, and you know how well that worked out. There’s a lesson in that bit of history, and I have to listen to it. Whatever else—” he paused.
Ravenhill would go with his instincts,
he told himself,
and you are fundamentally the same.
“I believe the Talismans have their own plan and I—we—will have to wait and trust in them.”
 
She scanned the covered gallery uneasily, took in the slant of sunlight on the flagstones. “Max, where to now? I think the Sun is turning.”
 
 
Walks Under the Moon had gone home, to Lightstead, to where she could think without soldiers and Wild Riders and Exiles to distract her. She could not stay seated in her workroom chair more than three heartbeats before she was once more pacing about the room. If her movement could even be called pacing as she edged around the crowded dusty furniture, twitching her skirts out of the way as her hands touched, turned over, and replaced long disused objects. Bowls, stones, knives for paring fruit and cutting leather, hair ornaments, misplaced shoes, and on one table by the door, scraps of paper from the Shadowlands and old pens, the ink long-dried, remnants of her failed experiments in adapting the Shadowfolk’s invention of writing to the Rider language.
 
Finally, she made her way to the windows and sat there, stared unseeing out of the window, and thought of her father. He had sat thus for months after the death of his wife, their mother, and after Truthsheart’s departure to the Shadowlands he had continued, dozing in his chair, barely touching his food, responding to his remaining child less and less until one day his chair was empty and he was gone. Faded.
 
Moon sat now in her own chair. Was this what she had without her sister, she thought. A chair. A window looking out on nothing?
 
Moon could see now that she had not thought about the Exile in the right way. She had thought of him, when she thought of him at all, as a piece in the Basilisk’s game. But he was real. Living, breathing, and real, and the hold that he had on Truthsheart—though based in falsehood and trickery—was a real hold. Merely separating them would not be enough. If her sister would not—or could not, a softer voice said inside her—listen to reason, the Exile would
have
to be killed. Then her sister’s eyes could be opened. Moon shivered with more than cold. It might not be what the Basilisk wanted, but she could do this, and more, to save her sister.
 
She must go again to the Citadel, and await her chance.
 
 
The other doors, darkwood Max saw with relief, and as elaborately carved but nowhere near as heavy as the ones leading onto the patio, opened into a large room, sunlight streaming in from openings high in the walls. After Cassandra’s words outside, Max automatically measured the angle of the light. There was still time, he thought. Just. He studied the room, frowning. The space was not large enough to be the great hall of the whole Citadel, and Max thought it was more likely a throne room or audience chamber as yet unfurnished. Here, again, the decor was crammed with details. From their vantage point at the doors, a few steps above the floor, he could see that every inch of it was covered with mosaic tiles, like a great Velazquez painting laid down to walk on. It was a battle scene, not conventional Riders with Cloud Horses, however, but a battle of Guidebeasts, as if this was taking place early in the Cycle, when the
dra’aj
was so great that Guidebeasts were commonplace. Even so, Max knew that this wasn’t a battle as old as the use of Guidebeasts might suggest. He recognized the central figures. A Phoenix was raising its sword in one flame-tipped claw, just as a Basilisk was bringing its petrifying vision to bear. The Phoenix was turning to stone even as it lifted its sword.
 
This was a rendering of the final battle of the Great War. The final encounter of that battle.
 
Max walked out into the center of the floor, drawn by the tiled depiction of himself.
 
“Is this how it was?” Cassandra whispered from behind him.
 
Max looked around, shaking his head. “I never crossed swords with Dreamer, but otherwise it’s accurate enough, I suppose. Look, there are the Trolls and Elementals, and there a few Naturals, both Springs and Trees, on my right flank.” The artist, Max saw, had played with the perspective somehow, so that though the participants were not shown as life-size, or even as properly proportioned relative to each other, somehow the sizing worked, and the field of battle looked natural. Or as natural as a field of battle can look.
 
He nodded again. Yes, accurate enough. Except . . . Max squatted, traced the outline of the Phoenix with his fingertips, feeling a hot flush rise from the cold tiles. He was not, after all, raising his blade to strike. He was reaching for it. It had clearly been knocked from his hand. Now Max frowned and reached out to touch the mosaic sword and found the warm pommel of
Ti’ana
in his hand.
 
“Max?” He could hear the awe in her voice. “Is it . . .”
 
He could understand her hesitation. It seemed no more than any old sword, a bit longer than a rapier, with a broad, double-edged blade, and a plain hilt covered with braided leather. Not so long as the great two-handed swords made for those who wore
gra’if,
the swords they had left behind in Blood’s camp, but with the same kind of curved cross guard. It fit into his hand like his own
gra’if.
 
Max reversed his grip and held
Ti’ana
out to her. “See for yourself,” he said.
 
“It’s not just a thrusting blade,” she said as she reached for the rounded hilt.
 
“No,” Max agreed. “It cuts.”
 
With her hand inches from the grip, Cassandra froze and lifted her head.
 
Max didn’t argue when she pushed him toward the tapestried wall. He’d heard the footsteps, too.
 
 
Lightborn’s orders were very clear. “Follow them,” the Basilisk had said. “Be prepared to take them once the Talismans are found. Until that moment, keep them under your hand, but lightly.” Lightborn knew perfectly well that the Basilisk was once again making sure of him. The Basilisk never let Lightborn forget that he was a traitor, he lost no opportunity to use Lightborn against Dawntreader, to remind him that he had betrayed his friend. Even now, when his treachery was known, it would be Lightborn who would follow the Prince Guardian at a distance, Lightborn who would capture him once the Talismans were found, and Lightborn who would hand him, and the Healer Truthsheart to the Basilisk.
 
The Basilisk trusted no one’s loyalty, but asked for proof after proof. Lightborn touched the spot over his heart where the scar from his arrow wound still puckered the skin. What, Lightborn wondered, would the Basilisk use to make him prove his devotion when Dawntreader was dead?
 
Lightborn had left his own instructions that if Walks Under the Moon presented herself, she should be brought to him, and not to the Basilisk Prince. No one would see anything unusual in that. Over time, Lightborn had fallen into the habit of giving instructions and orders, in part to remind the Basilisk’s followers that he could, and in part to check that his authority still existed. The Basilisk did not always tell you when you had fallen out of favor, sometimes you found out when it was too late. It paid to be very careful, and to take nothing for granted.
 
The last few sunwidths Lightborn had spent talking to certain guards and soldiers. Talking so carefully that many would not even be aware of the real purpose behind their discussions. When Walks Under the Moon was ushered into his salon, Lightborn was ready.
 
“I have been thinking,” she said, “and the Basilisk will not give me what I want.”
 
“How then can
I
help you?” he said.
 
“I want the Exile dead,” she said. “What if the Basilisk does not kill him? What if they make some pact? I want only my sister, and while the Exile lives, she will never turn away from him.”
 
That was very true, Lightborn thought. More true than perhaps anyone but himself would understand. However, Walks Under the Moon refused to see that even without the Prince Guardian, Truthsheart would not necessarily be the person that Moon wanted her sister to be. But would any of them be themselves for long, if the Basilisk bound the Talismans? He indicated the chair to his left. “What do you propose?”
 
 
Max stood frozen with Cassandra’s hand on his arm, his shoulder blades pressed tight against the wall behind them and the tapestry inches from his nose. Was he trembling? He wondered if she could feel anything through the layers of leather on his forearm. She seemed not to be breathing at all, but Max was certain that the Riders who were now standing in the great hall, perhaps right on the figures of Dawntreader and the Basilisk Prince inlaid in the floor, would hear the pounding of his heart, and the rush of air forcing itself through his lungs.
 
Would the soldiers notice the hole in the mosaic?
 
They seemed to take hours to stroll through the hall. Their murmuring voices faded away as they finally reached the doors on the far side. Cassandra released her grip on his forearm.
 
“Which way now?” she whispered as they emerged from behind the tapestry.
 

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