Dervish—
Brilliant colors and flashes of white stars, swooning and exploding at once, flooding with warmth and pain and tortuous pleasure. Miranda shook, vibrating head to toe, the explosion rocking her to the core, no air and none needed, God, oh God, shaking violently as it reverberated through her until the shake was just a quiver at the base of her spine, and she felt herself as outside her own body, falling to the floor, crashing to earth.
You're not him! You're not him!
Alone, Miranda dug her fingernails into the floorboards and gasped, her eyeballs relaxing into her skull, lungs exploding with new air. Alone. Alone. Alone.
Oh, god, oh, god.
On Lammas we give the bread, the bread is the flesh.
The flesh is the life.
Jemuel was still in his nightcap when he came to the door, thrusting a candle before him. He looked out and sighed, as if in exasperation. "I heard you calling as you rode," he said.
"Please, can we talk?"
"Of course." Jemuel rubbed his eyes and turned, and she followed him into his study, where he set a fire burning and she took a seat. "Chocolate?"
"No. Thank you. Did you know Stephen?"
Jemuel was stoking the fire with a poker and raised an eyebrow. "A little before my time, but he was alive when I came to this village."
"Was he in trouble?"
Jemuel replaced the poker in its stand and wiped his hands on his gown, and took a seat in his chair. "Aren't we all, at some time or another?"
"I want to show you an image, and I want you to tell me if it is Stephen."
Jemuel nodded, slowly. "All right."
Miranda lay back and whispered something, and brought the image forward, of the wizard whose spirit she had been talking to so much, and of late had shown such ardor in the library. The wizard she saw fighting with another man at the well on Stephen's land. She saw the images and drew from them, one after the other, here a profile, there a badly lit front view. An image from a mirror. She extracted the details and set them in the image of a man, and cast it at Jemuel.
Jemuel sat, receiving the image, and studied it. After a while he turned the image away. "Hmm."
"Is it Stephen?"
"This is the spirit in Stephen's house?"
"Is it Stephen?"
"Of course not," Jemuel snapped. "You knew that, too, or you wouldn't have come all the way out here to ask me. Wrong question. Try again, Miranda."
"Who is it?"
Jemuel smiled and wagged his finger as he got up from his chair and went to his shelves. "You know, I spent some time on special assignment with the Circle as well, before I received placement. If you pay attention you can find out interesting things. Secrets are hard to keep among wizards." He pulled out a book and held it at an angle, and Miranda could read the title, in gold: Roster, under Fredren. "Fredren was the head of the Circle when I was young, this is a roster of the Inner Circle. I think we'll find what we're looking for here."