Looking Glass Girl

Davir sin Porphyros sauntered into the room like a tiger prowling across the savannah. There was something of the predator in his fluid movements and hooded eyes, dark and simmering as the blackest coffee. And no one who’d known him longer than ten minutes could fail to miss the threat implicit in his curling smile.

The girl sitting by the window didn’t notice him. She was peering into a mirror, which didn’t surprise him, touching colour to lips which needed none, vanity upon small vanity.

Turning, he shoved the wooden door so hard that it smashed against the frame with a splintering crash.

And then he had her attention.

“Bruna of Farbrook,” he purred.

Even her frown was practiced, barely marring her smooth face. If he hadn’t heard her cruel words earlier, he might have thought her an idiot. “Lady Bruna to you,” she corrected sharply.

“You may have your title from me when you have earned it,” he replied dismissively, seeing an answering glitter of anger in her face.

It was a beautiful face, but one that was so very proud and cold and knowing. He would bet she had arranged every wave of her curling black hair, so carefully styled to slip over one eye so the full power of her gaze could be unveiled with a flick of her head. The same painstaking taste had picked out the white gown that fit so well, slashed at the bodice in a deep red, and posed until her every expression was a work of art in itself – in making her beauty so effortless, all her exertions became painfully apparent.

She hungers to be beautiful more than anything else. And anyone else.

“I don’t think I need to earn anything from Carthaki dogs,” she murmured, keeping her voice controlled and cool and venomous. But he saw her flush.

“If a dog I am,” he drawled, “then I am more than qualified to recognise a bitch when I meet one.”

“You dare-”

“Since when is speaking the truth daring?” he interrupted. “Or is it just that you don’t hear it often?”

Odd: fury brought a wilder, fiercer beauty to her, one he found a hundred times more genuine. She leapt to her, and the mirror smashed to the floor though she barely seemed to notice, stood there among shards of glass. “Don’t speak to me of truth, you vile foreign maggot-”

“I hardly think you are in a position to speak to me of parasites, my lady.” Sarcasm rung on the last two words. “Not when you feed so palpably on the misery of others.”

There was no comprehension in her eyes and it further disgusted him. How many small, casual cruelties did she inflict that she could not recall any particular one?

“Or have you forgotten your words to Andrea Kirisra?”

Realisation – she sputtered, eyes blazing. “That Northern slut?”

“Astounding,” he remarked, matching her contempt with icy severity. “I had no idea you were such a paragon of propriety. Perhaps all the gossips are wrong – are you so irritable because your chastity belt chafes?”

She gawped.

“No, I thought not,” he agreed. “So tell me, Bruna of Farbrook, who has bedded a good portion of the court and promised to bed several more, tell me exactly why you object to that charming Northern creature kissing a squire?”

Her mouth drew tight, a grim slash across her face. He had cut past the clever mask now – some intense emotion cringed behind her anger, something he could not yet fathom. He intended to dig it out though; after all, he owed Andrea Kirisra a debt, even if she didn’t realise it, and this seemed a fair way to repay it. One swift, sharp lesson would stick in the mind of others who’d torment her, and he would no longer be weighed down by obligation.

“Do you think we should let the peasants in through the gates to whore with nobility?” she demanded and there was a touch of outrage in her voice.

Davir leaned back on the wall. So it was this old argument, was it? “Whoring? I saw no payment, only a kiss given freely and taken freely.”

Her laugh was irreverent. “Until later. Until she needs money, or a word in the right ear.”

“I doubt she will want for either. After all, that street thief is quite capable of keeping them both in money if matters become so desperate, and a girl taught by Numair Salmalin is unlikely to lack for friends in later life...”

She flinched at the mage’s name. How odd.

“No,” he continued, segueing smoothly into this new and intriguing line of attack, “I don’t think you care who she kisses. But she will be a lovely girl one day, won’t she? They whisper about her in the court already – so quiet, so unusual, and so very, very Gifted-”

There. The baffling flinch again.

Of course. She too was Gifted, brimful with magic that had been largely untrained, and the discovery of her potential had been swept aside by Andrea Kirisra and Ryan Talver, who were so very Gifted that their capacity for destruction would one day be matchless – one day, the mages said, sounding very glad that the day in question would not come for years yet.

Ryan Talver wouldn’t stand for such insults, hurled in jealousy. But Andrea Kirisra, shy and timid, yet all those things that Bruna was: lovely, powerful, with the enchanting addition of a gentle heart...

Yes, she would see only easy prey in this rival.

“How sad to be forgotten,” he whispered, the words designed to cut. “How heartbreaking.”

But to his bemusement, she only raised eyes that were oddly tranquil but lost – childlike, almost. “It depends who has forgotten you,” she said, and he felt as if he had been privy to a confession. “And how much heart you have left to break.”

And the silence hung there as he puzzled her words. All her anger was gone and he didn’t know this solemn young woman. He’d never seen a hint of her in the courtesan who breezed through crowds casting quips and merciless observations as she went, never glimpsed her through the gauze and gossamer.

Curiosity got the better of him. “Who would forget you?”

She blinked, as if startled. He supposed it had been a compliment, though he hadn’t meant it thus.

“A great man,” she answered. “A dead man now.”

Her hands had risen to rub at her arms though the room was warm with summer sunlight.

“All great men die eventually, just as all men do,” he said dryly. In truth though, he was not sure how the conversation had swung so far off track. Better to bring it back, to escape this uneasy moment. “The only difference is that they get a better epitaph. Which brings us back to words. Your words.”

She lifted her head, haughty. The player had reappeared, well-rehearsed in lines and motion. “Sticks and stones, Carthaki. If that Northern peasant can’t take a few words now, she’ll be ripped apart before she turns twenty.” Her face contorted with sudden intensity. “It was only blind luck that saved her from the gallows.”

He put extra menace into his smile and strolled closer to her. Pride would not let her move away – instead she held her ground until he was so close he could feel her breath tingling on his lips, until he had leaned in as if for a kiss.

“And it will only be blind luck that saves you from me, Bruna of Farbrook. If you ever speak to Andrea Kirisra that way again, you may rest assured that I will do my utmost to break what remains of your heart and your reputation and you may be very, very sure that the gallows will seem like the soft option when I am done.”

“What hold does she have over you?” she hissed. She didn’t seem afraid; more fascinated, as if no one had ever spoken to her so. Perhaps they hadn’t.

“She is a good person,” he answered. “There are so very few of them left in the world, and they are needed more than ever.”

And when I was a stranger dying in a dark alleyway, one among many, she got down in the dirt and healed me for no better reason than that she could not walk by. She could not turn a blind eye.

I fear such clear sight may be needed in the days ahead.

“You really believe that,” she breathed. “You still believe in good and evil as if there’s any difference between the two.” Her laughter bubbled up, soft and almost seductive but for the hard edge. “What a fool you are.”

“But not a fool for you, my lady,” he said, stepping back and offering her a mocking little bow. “I, after all, can see the difference.”

He left her there, lips parted as if to say something, her beauty tumbled, more honest for the emotion there.

But when he glanced back from the door, she was holding a piece of broken mirror in her hand, and her eyes were intent on her looking glass world and whatever she found there – perhaps a world where a great man had not forgotten her, or a world where she had a heart.

Yet from the way her hand shook, he was confident she would not forget his words. There would be no need to carry out his threat.

Or so he thought.