None of these thoughts changed anything. The Matt Tinwright who read the invocation seemed almost a different person than the Tinwright who had such frightened thoughts. The garden in the mirror before him was like something in a dream, distant even where it was close. He was no longer aware of the words from Ximander’s book, though they still flowed unceasingly from his lips; he heard them only dimly, as if someone behind him was whispering.
Now something pale fluttered down and landed on the nearest bough of the almond tree, something as gently rounded as a tiny boat, but alive, with bright eye and soft, powdery feathers. A dove, Zoria’s sacred bird.
“Now reach for it,” Hendon Tolly whispered. His voice might have been blown to Tinwright’s ears down a long, windy valley. “Reach for it! Okros said there must be a sacrifice to open the way—there must always be a sacrifice!”
He didn’t want to—the sense of the mirror as a doorway or a window had grown even stronger now, and either way, it was an entrance to a place he did not belong—but he felt his arm moving forward, his fingers spreading as his hand reached out for the mirror’s cold surface…
... And passed through.
For a moment Tinwright lost all sense of where he was—outside the mirror reaching in, inside the mirror reaching out, he could no longer say. A chill ran up his hand, a cold as fierce as if he had plunged it into an icy mountain stream.
It seemed that Hendon Tolly was still talking to him. If so, Tinwright’s ears could no longer hear him, but his hand could. As if it had a life of its own, it stretched toward the dove, which had tucked its small head beneath one wing. As his thumb and fingers curled around the bird’s small, delicate neck, he suddenly realized what he was doing. He tried to stop, but his hand moved as though it were no longer his own. He tried to shout a warning, but the incantation went on in his own voice and no other words passed his lips. He closed his eyes, but he could still feel the horrible fragility of the dove’s neck as he squeezed it, and then the terrible percussion of its breaking. Then, as he raged uselessly against whatever held him, he felt something change in the place where the almond tree grew.
The dove was no longer the only other creature inside the mirror.
But just as he had not been able to stop himself from snapping the beautiful, pale bird’s neck, now Tinwright could not withdraw his hand from that strange junction, no matter how hard he tried. His own voice droned on in a language that had become meaningless again, but he could not stop it, nor could he make his own sinew and bone act for him in any way. But his hand was not the only thing at risk; all of him, he somehow understood, was now naked and vulnerable to a thing he himself had attracted, some hunting thing that glided through the mirror-world as a ferret shark knifed through the waters of Brenn’s Bay. Whatever it was had not found him yet, but it was looking.
He groaned, or tried to. The drone of his own voice had stopped. He tried to make his mouth speak, tried to shout to Hendon Tolly for help, but his voice seemed a thing without air or force. He could not even see Tolly any more: the mirror had become all the world—the blackness surrounding the almond tree branch, the dove with the crooked head clutched in his hand, all only a tiny shadow of reality. Then even those few familiar things began to fade into the growing darkness.
Afraid his very heart would burst, Matt Tinwright found a little voice, somehow, and croaked, “Help me… !” He could hear no response.
The sense of exposure was so great that he now began to weep with terror. This is how Okros must have felt just before his end, watched, hunted… ! At the same time he was as light-headed as if a fever had taken him.
Without warning, a sensation crept up his arm from his mirror-hand to his heart, a wild arousal, something too powerful to be called love but too all-compassing to be lust. Tinwright had only a moment to sense the newcomer, to feel its scalding, exhilarating power, before he was flung away from the mirror like a man struck by lightning.
Matt Tinwright felt a moment of terrible loss, as though he had been separated from everything he had ever loved, then his thoughts flew away.
When his senses came back to him, Tinwright was lying on the floor of the Eddon vault, staring up into the shadowy places where the torch’s light did not entirely prevail. His shoulder was tingling as if it had fallen asleep, or had been plunged for a terrible length of time in an icy pool, but when he groped at it in panic, he was relieved to find that his arm was still attached to it. He rolled over and found himself staring up at Hendon Tolly—but no Hendon that Tinwright had ever seen. The lord protector stood swaying and moaning before the mirror, his eyes half-closed, his body shaking all over in the grip of some unimaginable pain or ecstasy. His guards could only watch, sweaty and terrified, as their master danced helplessly in the overwhelming embrace of Heaven.
7. The Battle of Kleaswell Market
“One of the bandits’ women took pity on little Adis and gave him food from her own store. One day she and her man took the boy and escaped from the other bandits ...”
As they drew closer to Southmarch, Briony’s heart grew heavier. It had been one thing to talk about recapturing the throne at the Tessian court, surrounded by idlers and courtiers, many of whom sympathized with her (or pretended to), but quite another to contemplate real action. However willing Prince Eneas might be to help her, she had embroiled the son of Eion’s most powerful king in her own fight without his father’s permission. Even with the best will in the world, what chance did Eneas have to take back high-walled Southmarch, perched on a rock in the middle of a bay, with no ships and fewer than a thousand men at his command?
“Do not fret yourself,” the prince told her. “We go to see what we will see, and only then will we concern ourselves with tactics. Your father was a famously clever man—surely he taught you not to make plans without some idea of the land and conditions ...”
“Is,” she said. “He still is. I know he lives—I know it!”
“Of course, Princess.” Eneas looked genuinely pained. “I did not mean… I spoke clumsily. ...”
“It is not your fault.” She shook her head. “Sometimes I speak that way, too, and even think that way. It has been so long since I saw him! My friend Dowan said he felt certain I would see my father again, at least once ...” She had to stop speaking for a moment, for fear of crying. The thought of poor, dead Dowan was too much for an already overburdened heart.
Prince Eneas was strong and kind and reassuring. It would have been easy for Briony to give everything over into his care—her promise to take her kingdom back, her other hopes and fears, even herself—but she just could not do it. Something perverse was always at work in her, she feared, the same perversity that had so often put her at odds with her counselors and even her own attendants. She would not let anyone, even someone as reliable as Eneas—especially someone as reliable as Eneas—take her burdens from her. She found it hard enough trusting Dawet dan-Faar to do things she couldn’t or wouldn’t do herself, but at least the Tuani adventurer did not treat her the way a benevolent uncle would. In fact, Dawet seemed truly to admire her stubbornness.
Briony could not help wondering what kind of husband the dangerous Dawet would make. He would demand his own freedom, but he would give her freedoms of her own.…