The Mirror of Fate Read Free

have to appear right now? Just when I’ve botched everything?”
    She stroked her long chin. “If I didn’t know better, I might think you had been hoping to impress me.”
    “Not at all.” I clenched my fists, then shook them at my shadow. Seeing it wave its own fists back at me only made me angrier. “Fool shadow! I just want to make it do what it should.”
    Hallia bent to study a sprig of lupine, as deep purple as her robe. “And I just want to keep you a little humble.” She sniffed the tower of petals. “That’s usually Rhia’s responsibility, but since she’s off learning the speech of the canyon eagles—”
    “With my horse to carry her,” I grumbled, trying to stretch my stiff shoulders.
    “True enough.” She glanced up and smiled, more with her eyes than with her lips. “She can’t, after all, run like a deer.”
    Something about her words, her tone, her smile, made my anger vanish like mist in the morning sun. Even my shoulders seemed to relax. How, I couldn’t begin to explain. Yet all at once, I recalled the secrets she had shown me of transforming myself into a deer, as well as the joys of running beside her—with hooves instead of feet, four legs instead of two; with keen sight, and keener smell; with the ability to hear not just through my ears, but through my very bones.
    “It’s . . . well, it’s—ahhh . . .,” I stammered. “Nice, I suppose. To be here. With you, I mean. Just—well, just you.”
    Her doelike eyes, suddenly shy, turned aside.
    Emboldened, I climbed down from the rock. “Even in these days, these weeks, we’ve been traveling together, we haven’t had much time alone.” Tentatively, I reached for her hand. “If it hasn’t been one of your deer people, or some old friend, it’s been—”
    She jerked her hand away. “So you haven’t liked what I’ve shown you?”
    “No. I mean yes. That’s . . . oh, that’s not what I’m saying! You know how much I’ve loved being here—seeing your people’s Summer Lands: those high meadows, the birthing hollow, all the hidden trails through the trees. It’s just that, well, the best part has been . . .”
    As my voice faltered, she cocked her head. “Yes?”
    I glanced her way, meeting her gaze for barely an instant. But it was enough to make me forget what I had wanted to say.
    “Yes?” she coaxed. “Tell me, young hawk.”
    “It’s, well, been . . . Fumblefeathers, I don’t know!” My brow furrowed. “Sometimes I envy old Cairpré, tossing off poems whenever he likes.”
    She half grinned. “These days, it’s mostly love poems to your mother.”
    More flustered than ever, I exclaimed, “That’s not what I meant!” Then, seeing her face fall, I realized my gaffe. “I mean . . . when I said that, what I meant was—not, well, not what I meant to say.”
    She merely shook her head.
    Again, I stretched my hand toward her. “Please, Hallia. Don’t judge me by my words.”
    “ Hmfff, ” she grunted. “Then how should I judge you?”
    “By something else.”
    “Like what?”
    A sudden inspiration seized me. I grasped her hand, pulling her across the grass. Together we ran, our feet pounding in unison. As we neared the edge of the stream, our backs lowered, our necks lengthened, our arms stretched down to the ground. The bright green reeds by the water’s edge, glistening with dew, bent before us. In one motion, one body it seemed, we sprang into the air, flowing as smoothly as the stream below us.
    We landed on the opposite bank, fully transformed into deer. Swinging about, I reared back on my haunches and drew a deep breath, filling my nostrils with the rich aromas of the meadow—and the full-hearted freedom of a stag. Hallia’s foreleg brushed against my own; I replied with a stroke of an antler along her graceful neck. An instant later we were bounding together through the grass, prancing with hooves high, listening to the whispering reeds and the many secret murmurs of the meadow. For a time