The Mirror Prince Read online

  “Say, rather, you do not recognize me, for you do know me. I am Hearth of the Wind, the Last Born,” he said, “and the Earth guides me. The Shadowfolk call me Diggory,” he added, and waited.

  “Cassandra,” she said, inclining her head once more in acknowledgment that she had, indeed, met him before—though then he hadn’t looked anything like a young boy with a skateboard.

  “And my people say that Riders have no sense of humor.” Diggory bowed and turned his stone-colored eyes to the open chest. “For you’re well named, then, Truthsheart.”

  Cassandra lifted her eyebrows and deliberately turned her back on him, though it made the fine hairs on the back of her neck shiver. She put out her hand to close the chest’s lid.

  “Best leave it open, I think. You’ll have need of what you keep there.”

  Cassandra turned back to face the boy with old eyes.

  “You’ve said that already.”

  “I bring you word from Nighthawk.”

  Possible, Cassandra thought, since it was in the company of her fellow Warden that she’d met this Solitary before, but . . .

  “Why send you?” she asked, her glance, before she could stop it, flicking to the phone on her worktable.

  “Because he cannot come himself, and I am surer than the technology of humans.” The Old One took a step closer to her. “Your Oath calls you, Warden. The Exile is in danger of his life. Take your weapons and go to him.”

  Cassandra’s heart leaped, but she leaned back on the edge of the chest, crossed her ankles, and folded her arms. Offhand, she couldn’t think of any reason why a Solitary would want to trick her into tearing off armed into the streets of Toronto, but that’s exactly why she had to be careful. Being tricked by a Solitary was humiliating at best, fatal at worst—then again, be too careful and she might trick herself. Slowly, she had to go slowly.

  “I find this hard to believe,” she said.

  Diggory smiled, showing far too many teeth for a human boy. “Of course you do. After all this time? When no steel has ever touched him, no bullets found him? Why,” the Solitary leaned forward and lowered his voice as if sharing a secret with her, “even earthquakes and plagues wait until he has gone his way before they begin their feeding. He has forgotten his dra’aj, but it has not forgotten him.”

  “And so?”

  “And so that was humans, and it’s not humans my lord the Exile needs to fear and never was, there you’re right. But the Banishment nears its end, and the Basilisk Prince moves his pieces upon the board, and they wear the shape of the Hunt. Do you tell me the Exile has nothing to fear from this?”

  Cassandra stopped in mid-shrug, allowing the knife to slip back into her hand from its sleeve sheath. “The Hunt? I had always understood the end of the Banishment to be a good thing.”

  “And so it might have been. But the Basilisk Prince builds his Citadel in the Vale of Trere’if. Yes,” Diggory continued as Cassandra stifled an involuntary movement, “he has dared so much. Now he knows that which he has sought to know this long time, and now he seeks to know what only my lord the Exile knows. And he cares not what means he uses to learn it. And it’s for you to keep the Exile safe, as always.” Diggory smiled like the sun coming through clouds and Cassandra almost found herself smiling back.

  What he said was true. The Basilisk Prince had grown in power and importance since the time of the Great War; some said he was High Prince in everything but name. Even Cassandra, who had not set foot in the Lands of the People the whole time of the Banishment, had heard that much. Still . . .

  There was only one thing the Exile might know that the Basilisk Prince wanted: the whereabouts of the Talismans—but that didn’t make sense. What had happened to make that knowledge so important now? Frowning, Cassandra studied the open, guileless face of the Solitary.

  “I come to you almost too late,” the Old One said, as if in answer to her unspoken suspicions. “I do not need to tell you the end comes, but you must act or your Oath is forfeit. Come, Truthsheart, would I trouble to lie? To you?” Diggory shook his head. “You think it was a jest, what your mother named you? Younger Sister, listen to your heart. You know I speak the truth.”

  Cassandra studied the Troll eyes in the boy face. Even if she did know the truth when she heard it—and right now that seemed like a mighty big if—she wouldn’t be quick to let this one know it.

  “And what is the price of this truth, Elder Brother? Or has Nighthawk paid it?”

  “I seek no payment,” the Old One said. “I have given my all without need of bargain.”

  The cold spot in Cassandra’s belly dropped several inches. What Solitary would give anything without bargaining first? “You want nothing, then?”

  The Old One suddenly loomed over her, his disguise fading as his skin became a darker gray-brown, and his eyes lost their human irises and pupils. Cassandra was glad of the chest behind her—it stopped her from shaming herself by backing away.

  “What do you know of what I might want? What would any Rider know, except the Exile?” He snarled with his mouth full of teeth, but he was already shrinking back down to human scale. “I will tell you this, Younger Sister. If you do not save the Exile, it will not matter one tenth part of an ant’s whisker what you, or I, or any being wants. We will none of us be safe. No Solitary, no Natural, no Rider of any Ward. Not even here in this place—the Basilisk Prince will find even these poor Shadowfolk useful to his hand.”

  The room seemed suddenly cold, and Cassandra folded her arms again, hugging her elbows. “I will consider your words,” she said.

  “Don’t take too long,” said the voice of the skate-boarder, as the Solitary gave her a last grin, turned on one sneakered foot, and was gone. Cassandra waited, listening to the clatter of his feet on the staircase, until she could be sure she was alone.

  “Get a job, I said. See the Shadowlands, I said. What could go wrong?”

  Cassandra rubbed her eyes and sank into the old oak captain’s chair behind her worktable with a sigh. Her whole day had started out badly, startled awake, trembling and cold, out of a dream of storm and lightning. Thunder that seemed somehow to be calling her name. She hadn’t been asleep long—it wasn’t more than one o’clock in the morning when the dream’s thunder woke her—but she’d been wired, so energized that she couldn’t fall asleep again. Now here it was almost bedtime, and it looked as though she wouldn’t get much sleep tonight either.

  She gathered up her hair in one hand, snapping her silver hair clip shut over it. She closed her eyes and breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth until her hands were relaxed on the arms of the chair, her breathing slow and regular.

  Her stomach was clenched like a fist and she could taste acid in the back of her throat.

  All the old Songs told how Solitaries—whether Troll or Giant, Ogre or Siren—were liars and tricksters. How they were at their most dangerous when you could not see what they would gain from tricking you. There were questions she should have asked, questions she had not even realized she had until the Old One was gone. She knew truth when she heard it, fine and good. But what he’d told her couldn’t have been all of the truth. Where was Nighthawk and why hadn’t the old Warrior come himself? Or called? Did the Troll Diggory mean what he said when he named the Hunt? Was that the danger? But how—

  And most important, what should she do, when she’d sworn her own private oath—Warden or no Warden—for her own private reasons, never to be in the presence of the Exile again?

  Not that she was afraid to. Of course not. She was sure that so much time had passed since the last time she saw him . . . in fact, Cassandra considered, she hadn’t seen him since he came to Toronto in his current persona. Still, she knew just what he’d look like. Just how green his eyes were when he laughed; just how his hair, raven-black, grew curled behind his ears. How his voice sounded in the dark. How his skin tasted of vanilla. How her lips could feel his heart beat in the hollow of his throat—

  Cass
andra jerked her head up out of her hands. Maybe she should be worried after all. She took another deep breath in through her nose, slowly, pushed it forcefully out of her mouth, and reached for the phone. Regardless of what the Solitary had said, she would call her fara’ip. Blood of her blood they might not be, but the other two Wardens were the closest thing she had to family here in the Shadowlands. Whatever this danger was, they would face it together. That was what being fara’ip meant.

  Out of habit, Cassandra glanced at the clock on the wall. The six-hour difference made it all the more likely that Nighthawk was at home and in bed. She punched fourteen digits into the phone and waited, impatiently tapping the tabletop with her fingers until she realized what she was doing and stopped, laying her hand flat. Finally she heard the soft tuneful buzz that was a phone ringing in Nighthawk’s flat in Granada. She opened her mouth when the click came, but caught herself when she realized it was the answering machine.

  “Diego,” she said, when the beep came, in case some friend or cleaning lady would be the one to pick up the message, “I’ve just had a visit from a gray man—a bridge builder—who said he’d come from you. Call me back as soon as you can.”

  Cassandra placed the handset back in the cradle and thought, lower lip between her teeth, before picking up the phone again and dialing another fourteen digit number, ready to leave the same message on Diego’s mobile phone. The soft buzz was cut off not by the message service, but with a burst of static, from which all she could make out were the words “fuera de servicio.” It was possible, she thought, as she cut the connection. There might be three or four places where mobile phones didn’t work in Spain. But what were the odds that Nighthawk was in one of them? She glanced at the clock again. Even if she could Move that far—and she couldn’t cross the ocean without a crossroads—if Nighthawk wasn’t in his apartment . . . She punched another number into the phone, this one with only eleven digits. Malcolm’s machine answered immediately, but the outgoing message was not in the voice she expected.

  “If you’re trying to contact Dr. Malcolm Jones,” a gentle contralto instructed, “please call Detective Sergeant Sonia Rascon at—” followed by a number. Cassandra dropped the handset back into the cradle and drummed her fingers on the varnished tabletop. It looked as though the Old One was to be trusted after all. She stood up. It was dinnertime in Seattle, and Seattle she could reach without a crossroads.

  She turned again to the chest behind her worktable, this time opening it and unfolding the layers of thick silk that covered her gra’if weapons. She hesitated over the swords but finally settled on a poniard, easy to conceal if she had to, and a pair of finely mailed gloves with attached gauntlets which she pulled on her hands. She had a leather suit jacket hanging on the back of her door, and she slipped it on before checking her reflection in the window glass. It was dark enough outside for the window to act as a mirror. She nodded. With the jacket on, her gauntlets could pass at a glance for ordinary driving gloves.

  She stood, closed her eyes, and thought about Malcolm Jones’ front door. In her mind was the image of her room. She began to erase the image, piece by piece. Subtracted the oak captain’s chair, the carved chest. The little crystal paperweight in the shape of a dragon with its paw on a sword. The fountain pen leaking ink onto a pad of paper on the table. Subtracted the pad of paper and the table. The hand-knotted wool carpet under her feet, the oak floor under the carpet. Into the image she added heavy granite flagstones, neat short grass carefully edged, a prizewinning rosebush still wrapped in burlap for the winter. The wooden raised-panel door painted a bright raspberry, with its egg-shaped agate knocker.

  The air CRACKED, the temperature dropped, and the wind blew raindrops into Cassandra’s face. She shook her hair back out of her eyes. It was early evening in Seattle, but even with the overcast sky and the rain, it was much too dark. She stepped back and frowned when she saw there were no lights on in the house. Malcolm and Jenny wouldn’t have taken the children out on a school night.

  Cassandra reached for the doorbell and stopped. The luminescence given off by her gra’if-mailed hand was faint, but it was enough to show her the padlock on the door, the crime scene tape, and the police seal.

  Once she’d twisted off the padlock, the seal presented no problem. She stepped into the foyer and held up her hands, waiting as her pupils adjusted to the soft glow. Even for her eyes there was not enough light to show color, but Cassandra didn’t need light to tell her what color the dark areas on the floor and the spray of splashes up the staircase really were. Blood somehow manages to have color, she thought, even when there is no light, and even when it’s hours old.

  The Rider known to humans as Malcolm Jones was a Singer, more interested in tales and histories than blades, but he had stayed alive without difficulty for the whole of the Banishment, just over a thousand years. He was not slow or unskilled by human standards, and it could not have been humans who had killed him.

  Of the three Wardens who guarded the Exile, only Nighthawk had started the Banishment as a Warrior, and he had spent much of their early years training the younger Wardens until Cassandra and Malcolm had met his standards. Cassandra had loved the art more than Malcolm, but she wasn’t in Nighthawk’s league and never would be. But he hadn’t come himself; he’d sent the Troll. Was it possible that their time here in the Shadowlands had slowed him? Cassandra shook her head, the cold lump that had been in her stomach since the Troll came into her office growing larger and, if possible, colder. Would she find crime scene tape and evidence of slaughter at Nighthawk’s home as well?

  A whisper of sound to her left, and Cassandra slipped into a shadow, blade once again in her hand as she extended her hearing around her, making sure this wasn’t a distraction to keep her from noticing as something snuck up behind her. A small white dog with dark red markings came into the room from the kitchen beyond, its claws ticking on the hardwood floor, passing through a shaft of cold moonlight that filtered through the sheers on the front window. The dog halted there, in the moonlight, moving its head from side to side, its muzzle wrinkled, smelling the air she had walked through. Cassandra grew more quiet, more ready, trying to breathe out the shock she felt.

  No, the Troll Diggory hadn’t lied. The Hound explained what had happened to Malcolm and his human family. The Hound meant the threat to the Exile was real.

  Cassandra wished she’d grabbed her swords after all. Both of them, no matter how odd it would have looked if she’d been seen. She wasn’t at all sure that she could kill a Hound with her little poniard, gra’if metal or no. The Hound took another step in her direction, morphing into something with longer legs and a toothier muzzle. It sniffed the air again and lowered its muzzle to the stained carpet. If it wasn’t Hunting for her . . .

  As soon as its eyes were elsewhere, Cassandra Moved.

  Max Ravenhill didn’t think of himself as the kind of guy who daydreamed about a girl. Not that there was anything wrong with it, exactly. It was just something a person was more likely to do as a teenager, when daydreaming, particularly while bored in school, and was part of a normal life. And Max was certain that if he’d had anything like a normal life as a teenager, he’d have been daydreaming with the best of them. But since his normal life waited until he was in his twenties to begin, perhaps it wasn’t so strange that he should wait until now to day-dream about a girl, not because he was bored, but because he didn’t want to think too much about the meeting he had just left, where his first graduate student had successfully defended her thesis. Max had found reason to wonder, over the previous few months, how professors who weren’t experts in the history of warfare managed all the strategies, the intrigues, and the reversals that made up the average pursuit of a PhD.

  Shari’s defense was too recent, and the triumph connected with it too fresh, so as he walked along Queen Street whistling, his hands in the pockets of his jeans and the tails of his long open coat swinging behind him, Max escaped into other thoughts, thoughts that un
til now had been too exciting to indulge.

  Three days before, Max had gone to his Department Head’s monthly wine and cheese party, and he’d seen someone. He’d recognized the feeling that shook him right away, even though he could say with certainty that he’d never felt it before. He remembered thinking, as he sipped his pineapple juice, that it must be some kind of racial memory, one that allowed people to understand without panicking when their bones and blood, heart and mind, woke up—to understand and welcome all the possibilities that stretched out from the moment that rang like a bell, the excitement, and the longing, and the fear that stops the heart.

  Nothing else gave you the bell-ringing feeling so powerfully as that meeting of the eyes—across a crowded room, as it happened—when you saw your Beatrice, your Laura, your Dark Lady.

  Except this lady wasn’t dark. She was a pale honey-blonde, with eyes like a cloudy sky and skin like rich cream. And for that magic instant, seeing him looking at her, those stormy eyes had flashed, and that skin had flushed the merest rosy flush and her lips, a little too wide and a little too full, had begun to smile, before she’d gotten her face under control, and the mask of polite interest she’d worn before catching his eye slipped back over her perfect features.