The Soul Mirror Read Free

dullness. Until I felt dead, too.
    “Damoselle de Vernase!” The balding apprentice called out from behind a wicket gate in the gatehouse wall. “Chancellor Kajetan agrees to the marker. The stone must be cut small and designed to lie flat on the ground. When it is ready, the stonemason should apply to the grounds-keeper, and he’ll be taken to the site. Now, will there be anything else?”
    Anything else? Everything else! My skin flushed hot, then cold, then hot again. Choked by events I could not allow myself to feel, I could spit out only the mundane. “My sister’s things,” I said. “I should take them with me.”
    The jittery apprentice glanced over his shoulder. Well behind him, in the rectangle of sunlight at the far end of the dark gate tunnel, a broad-shouldered man leaned on a white stick and stared back at me. His features were indistinct, save for dark brows and thick black hair that threatened escape from a bound or braided queue. A silver band glinted from his neck—a mage collar.
    “If anything of a personal nature is discovered, it will be forwarded to you along with the girl’s death warrant,” said the apprentice. “This concludes our business. Divine grace, damoselle.” The wiry man slammed the wicket and retreated into the shady tunnel. Once he exited the tunnel, the arched rectangle of light was empty.
    So, that was that. The sorcerers of Collegia Seravain had not allowed me even to step inside their door. Suffering such disrepute as they were already, they likely feared my unsavory family connections would taint them irreparably.
    Five years previous my father had enlisted three sorcerers of the Camarilla Magica in his scheme to overthrow his oldest friend, the King of Sabria. The three had been caught using grotesque, murderous means to “enhance their power for magic” and paid the price on the headsman’s block. My father yet eluded capture. The penalties for his infamy had been paid only by his victims and his family.
    I hiked the long, dusty road down the hill to the whitewashed village of Seravain. As constant practice taught me, a rapid walk helped loose the knots in one’s belly.
    In the village I endured another two-hour wait, this time for the stonemason to return from mending a customer’s springhouse. A contract with the stonemason to engrave a small plain marker with Lianelle’s name and embed it in the ravine took two silver kentae and no time at all.
    The stonemason gave me the name of the village baker’s half-wit son, who might be spared long enough to drive me down to Tigano. From there I could take the evening coach back to Vernase. I’d be lucky to get home before middle-night.
    “Damoselle Anne! Anne de Vernase!” I’d not yet rounded the village well to the baker’s house when the shout halted me. A fair-haired man came pelting down the road from the collegia, the long sleeves of his gray gown flapping behind him like pennons in a Feste Vietre parade.
    I waited for him in the middle of the deserted road.
    “You’re Lianelle’s sister?” He skidded to a stop not a handsbreadth from my nose. Sweat dribbled through the fine layer of dust coating his boyish face and plastered tendrils of pale hair to his high forehead.
    I stepped back to leave a more comfortable space between us. “Sonjeur?”
    “I’m Guerin—Adept Guerin—Lianelle’s instructor in semantics: lexicography, cryptonymics, and all that. And her friend, I think.”
    My sister had written about her semantics instructor a number of times. Wizardly talented , she had called him, and wickedly handsome. Lianelle had never been temperate in either speech or living.
    “She mentioned you.”
    “We were just beginning—” The adept’s voice faltered. Puffing out his cheeks, he released a long, shaking exhale, then held out a small roll of red leather tied with string. “The day before she died, she asked me to post this to you. But I’d not gotten around to it, and, in the upset, forgot I