The Boy in the Mirror
Zhafaris became a tyrant who did not observe the laws, and who cheated
his relatives of their due, my children, and they began to whisper against
him and his authority. Fiercest of all when it came to talking were the
three sons of Shusayem, but in truth they were all afraid of their father.
Then Argal Thunderer said to his brothers, "I hear that in far qff Xandos
there is a mountain, and on that mountain lives a shepherd named
Nushash, who is as strong as any man who ever lived. "And it was true,
because Nushash and his brother and sister were the true and first children
of Zhafaris, although they had lived long in hiding.
— from The Revelations of Nushash, Book One
THE WIND HAD BLOWN THE CLOUDS into tatters, and al¬though what remained was enough to keep the sun dodging in and out, for once the skies were dry. All over the castle people were emerging, eager to feel something other than rain on their faces.
A dozen young women came out into the garden of the royal residence. Matt Tinwright, who had been feeling sorry for himself and searching fruitlessly for something that rhymed with "misunderstood," stood and straightened his jerkin. His mood had suddenly improved, and not only be¬cause he could show his well-turned legs and new beard to some pretty girls: their arrival, bright and lively as a flock of migrating birds, felt like a harbinger of spring, although winter still had weeks to run. As he watched
them scatter across the formal garden, some wiping the benches dry so they could sit, others forming a circle on the central lawn to toss a ball of feather-stuffed cloth, Tinwright could almost believe that things in South-march might again become ordinary, despite all evidence to the contrary.
He took off his soft hat and ran his fingers through his hair, wondering whether it would be more enjoyable to insert himself into the proceedings directly or wait a while, watching the play and smiling in a friendly but slightly superior manner. A moment later all thought of the ball game fled his mind.
She walked slowly, like a much older woman, and with the young maid beside her she might have been someone's dowager aunt-especially since on this day, when everyone else had chosen to wear something with a lit¬tle color in it, she was still dressed head to foot in funeral black. But there was no mistaking that pale, resolute face, the fine, slightly sharp chin, the long fingers twined in prayer beads. At least she had left off her veil today.
What would have been quite sufficient for a casual game of ball and some seemingly accidental contact with the players was no longer enough to pass muster. Tinwright paused and pulled up his stockings, brushed a few crumbs from his chest-he had been eating bread and hard cheese while contemplating the unfairness of life-then made his way down the path looking only at plants, as if too taken by the harsh beauty of the winter gar¬den to notice the arrival of several nubile young women showing more skin around the neck and bosom than they had in months. He wound in and out among the box hedges by a path so circuitous he might have been a foraging ant, crunching along gravel paths unraked since late autumn, until at last he approached the bench where the object of his garden quest sat with her maid.
Elan M'Cory was sewing something stretched on a wooden hoop; her eyes did not lift even when he stopped and stood for long moments, wait¬ing. At last, his courage dying quickly, he coughed a little. "Lady Elan," he said. "I bid you good afternoon."
She finally looked up, but with such an unseeing, uncaring gaze that he found himself wondering against all sense whether he had approached the wrong woman, whether Elan M'Cory might have a blind or idiot sister. Then something like ordinary humanity came into her eyes. An expression that was not quite a smile, but almost, tugged at her lips.
"Ah, the poet. Master… Tinwright, was it?"
She remembered him! He could almost hear trumpets, as if the royal
heralds had been called out to celebrate his now unmistakable and con firmed existence, "that is right, lady. You honor me."
Her gaze dropped to her sewing. "And are you enjoying the afternoon, Master Tinwright?"
"Much more for your presence, my lady."
Now she looked at him again, amused but still distant."Ah. Because I am a vision of loveliness in my spring finery? Or perhaps because of the cloud of good cheer that surrounds me like a Xandian perfume?"
He laughed, but not confidently. She had wit. He wasn't certain how he felt about that. He didn't generally get on very well with women of that sort. On those occasions when he received compliments he wanted to be sure he understood them and that they were sincere. Still, there was some¬thing about her that pulled at him, just like the flame-loving moth he had so often cited in his poetry. So this was what it felt like! All poets should be forced to feel all the things they wrote about, Tinwright decided. It was a most novel way to understand the figures of poetry. It might change the craft entirely.
"Have I lost you, good sir? You were going to explain the subtle charm that draws you to me."
He started, ashamed at his own foolishness, standing slack-jawed when he had been asked a question, however sardonic. "Because you are beauti¬ful and sad, Lady Elan," he said, uncertain whether he might not be over¬stepping the boundaries of propriety. He shrugged: too late-it had been said. "I wish there were something I could do to make you less so."
"Less beautiful?" she said, lifting an eyebrow, but there was something underneath the gibing that hurt him to hear-something naked and mis¬erable.
"My lady points out rightly that I have made a fool of myself with my clumsy talk." He bowed. "I should go and leave you to your work."
"I hate my work. I sew like a farm laborer. I am more of an executioner than a chirurgeon when it comes to handcraft."
He didn't know what that meant, but she hadn't agreed he should go away. He felt a surge of joy but tried to hide it. "I am sure you underesti¬mate yourself, lady."
She stared at him for a long moment. "I only like you when you tell the truth, Tinwright. Can you do that? If not, you may continue on you way."
What was she asking? He swallowed-discreetly, he hoped-and said, "Only the truth then, my lady."
"Promise?"
"On Zosim, my patron."
"Ah, the drunkard godling-and patron of criminals, too, I believe*. A good enough choice, I suppose, and certainly appropriate for any conver¬sation with me." She turned to the young maid beside her, who had been listening to them and watching openmouthed. "Lida, you go," she said. "Play with the other girls."
"But, Mistress…!"
"I will be fine. I will sit right here. Master Tinwright will protect me from any danger. It is well known that poets fear nothing. Is that not right, Master Matthias?"
Tinwright smiled. "Known only to poets, perhaps, and not to this one. But I do not think your mistress will be in any danger, child."
Lida, who was all of eight or nine years old, frowned at being called a child, but gathered her skirts and rose from the bench, a miniature of dig¬nity. She spoiled the effect a little by sullenly scuffing her feet all the way down the path.
"She is a good girl," Elan said. "She came with me from home."
"Summerfield?"
"No. My own family lives miles from the city. Our estate is called Wil-lowburn."
"Ah. So you are a country girl?"
She looked at him, her expression suddenly flat once more. "Do not flirt with me, Master Tinwright. I was about to ask you to sit down. Am I to regret my decision?"
He hung his head. "I meant no offense, Lady Elan. I only wondered. I was raised in the city and I've often wondered what it would mean to smell country air every day."
"Really? Well, sometimes it smells wonderful, and sometimes it is just as bad as anything to be found in the worst stews of a city. If you have not spent much time around pigs, Master Tinwright, you haven't missed a great deal."
He laughed. She might have more wit than was fitting in a woman, but she also spoke more engagingly than most of the women he knew-or the men either, for that matter. "Point taken, my lady. I will try not to over-burnish the joys of country living."
"So you grew up in a city. Where?"
"Here. Well, across the bay, to be precise, in the outer city. A place called Wharfside. Not a very nice place."
"Ah. So your family was poor, then?"
He hesitated.He wanted to agree, to make himself seem as admirable as possible. Since he couldn't pass for nobility, he could at least be the oppo¬site, someone who had lifted himself up from dire misery by bravery and brilliance.
"Truth," she reminded, seeing him hesitate.
"Most in Wharfside are poor, yes, but we were better off than the largest part of them. My father was a tutor to the children of some of the mer¬chants. We could have lived better, but my father was… he wasn't good with money." But good with spending it on drink, and a little too forth¬coming in his opinions as far as some of his employers thought, Tinwright recalled, not without some bitterness even with the old man now years dead. "But we always had food on the table. My father studied at Eastmarch University. He taught me to love words."
Which was not exactly the strict truth, as promised-what Kearn Tin¬wright had actually taught him was to love words enough to be able to talk yourself out of bad situations and into good ones.
"Ah, yes, words," said Elan M'Cory, musingly. "I used to believe in them. Now I do not."
Tinwright wasn't sure he'd understood her. "What do you mean?"
"Nothing. I mean nothing." She shook her head; for a moment the brit¬tle look of ordinary social cheerfulness crumbled. She looked down at her needlepoint work for the span of several breaths. "I have kept you too long," she said at last. "You must get on with your day and I must get on with ruining my sewing."
He recognized a dismissal, and for once was too gratified to try to tug loose a little more of something he coveted. "I enjoyed speaking with you, my lady," he said, and meant it. "May I hope to have the pleasure of doing it again sometime?"
The shrieks of the girls playing ball rose up and filled the long silence. She looked at him carefully, and this time it was as though she had retreated behind a high wall and peered down at him from the battlements. "Per¬haps," she said at last. "If you do not hope too much. My company is nothing to hope for."
"Now it is you who does not tell the truth, my lady."
She frowned, but thinking, not disagreeing. "It is possible that some afternoons, when it does not rain, you may find me here, in this garden, at about this time of the day."
He stood, and bowed. "I will look forward to such days."
She smiled her sad smile. "Go on and join the living. Matt Tinwright
Perhaps we will meet, as you say. Perhaps we shall."
He bowed again and walked away. It took all his strength not to look
back, or at least not to do so immediately. When he did, the bench where
she had sat was empty.
Duchess Merolanna hesitated at the bottom of the tower steps as the door creaked shut behind them. "Oh, I'm a fool."
The creak ended in a low, shuddering thump as the door swung closed. The breeze set the torches fluttering in their brackets. "What do you mean, Your Grace?"
"I have brought us here without a single guard. What if these are murderers?"
"But you wished this kept a secret. Don't worry yourself too much, Duchess-I am reasonably fit, and I can use one of these torches to defend you, if necessary." Utta stretched up to lift one from its socket. "Even a mur¬derer will not relish being struck in the face with this."
Merolanna laughed. "I was worrying about you, good Sister Utta, rather than myself. You do not deserve to be harmed because of these strange games I find myself playing. I care not what happens to me. I am old, and all my chicks are dead or fled or lost…" For a moment her face became painfully sober and her lip trembled. "Ah, well. Ah, well." The duchess took a breath and straightened, swelling her sizable bosom so that she seemed suddenly a small but daunting ship of war. "It does us no good to stand here whispering like frightened girls. Come, Utta. You have the torch. Lead the way."
They made their way up the winding staircase. The first floor was un¬occupied. The single, undivided chamber contained several large tables bearing plaster models of the castle, some true to life and others showing possible improvements, the fruits of one of King Olin's enthusiasms now as forgotten as the dusty, mummified corpse of a mouse that lay in the mid¬dle of the doorway.
Merolanna eyed the tiny body with distaste. "Somebody should do something. What use is it having cats if they do not eat the mice instead of leaving them around to rot?"
"Cats don't always cat their prey, Your Grace," Utta said. "Sometimes thecy only play with them and then kill them for sport."
"Nasty creatures. I never did like cats. Give me a hound any day. Stupid but honest." Merolanna looked around for eavesdroppers-a reflex because they were quite alone. Still, when she spoke again it was in a low voice. "That's why I preferred Gailon Tolly, for all his faults, to his brothers. Hen-don is a cat if ever there was one. You can see the cruelty-he wears it like a fancy outfit, with pride."
Utta nodded as they returned to the stairs, leaving the cobwebbed mod¬els behind. Even Zoria herself, she felt sure, would have found it hard to feel charitable toward Hendon Tolly.
The doors on the second and third floors were smaller, and locked. She guessed that at least the upper one contained part of King Olin's famous li¬brary. This tower had always been his private sanctuary, and even with him gone so long she felt disrespectful poking around without royal permission.
But I am with Merolanna-the king's own aunt, she reminded herself. If that is not permission enough, what is?
The door to the chamber which took up the entire top floor was open, al¬though Utta felt oddly sure that in any ordinary circumstances it would be locked just like the floors below it. No light burned inside, and from where the two women stood on the landing at the top of the stairs, their torch barely threw light past the doorway. As Utta moved closer the shadows inside bent and stretched. Suddenly she felt short of breath. Zoria, preserve me from dangers known and unknown, she prayed from peril of the body and peril of the soul. "Your Grace?"
Merolanna frowned as if irritated at herself. She had not left the top of the stairs. "Very well. I'm coming." She hesitated a moment longer, then walked forward to stand at Utta's side. Together they stepped into the door¬way, both of them holding their breath. Utta lifted the torch.
If the room full of plaster models at the bottom of the tower had seemed cluttered, this was something else again. Books had been stacked every¬where across the floor in unsteady-looking towers, and across every surface, many of them open, covering the two long tables in heedless piles. More than a few of the volumes lay bent-backed, perched like clumsy nesting birds on tabletop or pile, in positions that likely had not changed since the king's disappearance. Many had lost pages: a mulch of creased parchments covered the floor like drifts of leaves. For Zoria, tutored in the thrifty ways of the Zorian sisterhood, where books were a precious, expensive resource and could be read only with the permission of the adelfa, the mistress of the
shrine's sisterhood, this careless plenitude was both exhilarating and shock-ing.
"What a dreadful clutter!" said Merolanna. "And it's frightfully cold in here, too. I'm shivering, Utta. Would you see if there's any wood, and light a fire?"
"'Light not any fires, great ladies!" a tiny voice piped. "I beg 'ee, or that will scorch my own sweet mistress most cracklingly!"
Utta jumped and dropped the torch, which with great good fortune landed in one of the few places on the floor not covered with sheets of book paper. She snatched it up again, breathing thanks she had not set the entire tower aflame. "What was…?"
Merolanna had given a little screech at the mysterious words, and now reached out and clutched Utta's shoulder so fiercely that the Zorian sister could barely restrain a cry of her own. "It was here! In this very room!" the duchess whispered. She made the sign of the Three. "Who speaks?" she de¬manded aloud, her voice cracked and quavering. "Are you a ghost? A demon spirit?"
"No, great ladies, no ghost. I will show myself presently." The faint, shrill voice might almost have come from the phantom of the dead mouse downstairs. A moment later, Utta saw something stirring on the tabletop. A minuscule, four-limbed shape crawled out from between two close-leaning piles of books. When it stood up, and was revealed to be a man no taller than Utta's finger, she nearly dropped the torch again.
"Oh, merciful daughter of Perin," Utta said. "It is a little man."
"No mere man," the stranger chirped, "but a Gutter-Scout of the Rooftoppers." He bowed. "Beetledown the Bowman, I hight. Beg pardon for affrighting thee."
"You see this too," Merolanna said, tightening her grip on Utta again until the other woman squirmed. "Sister Utta, you see it. I am not mad, am I?"
"I see it," was all she could say. At this moment Utta was not entirely cer¬tain of her own sanity. "Who are you?" she asked the tiny man. "I mean, what are you?"
"He said he was a Rooftopper," Merolanna said. "That's plain enough."
"A… Rooftopper?"
"Don't you know the stories? Ah, but you're from the Vuttish islands, aren't you?" Merolanna stared at Utta for a moment, then suddenly re¬membered what they were talking about and turned back to the astonishing little apparition on the table. "What do you want? Are you the one who… did you put that letter in my chamber?"
Beetledown bowed. It was hard to tell, he was so small, but he might have been a little shame-faced. "That were my folk, yes, and Beetledown played some part, 'tis also true. We took the letter and we brought it back. Any more, though, be not mine to tell. You must wait."
"Wait?" Merolanna's laugh was more than a little shaky. Utta half feared that the duchess would faint or run screaming, but Merolanna seemed de¬termined to prove she was made of bolder stuff. "Wait for what? The gob¬lins to come and play us a tune? The fairy-king to lead us to his hoard of gold? By the Holy Trigon, are all the stories coming to life?"
"Again, this one cannot say, great lady. But un comes who can." He cocked his head. "Ah. I hear her."
He pointed to the great, long-unused fireplace. A line of figures had begun to file out from behind a pile of books beside the hearth-tiny men like Beetledown, dressed in fantastical armor made of nut husks and rodent skeletons, carrying equally tiny swords and spears. The miniature troop marched silently across the floor (although not without a few nervous glances upward at Utta and Merolanna) and lined up before the fireplace. A platform descended slowly out of the flue and into the opening of the fireplace, winched down on threads with a feathery squeak like the cry of baby birds. When it was a half-foot above the ash-covered andiron, it stopped, swaying slightly. At the center of the platform, on a beautiful throne constructed in part from what appeared to be a gilded pinecone, sat a finger-sized woman with red hair and a little crown of gold wire. She re¬garded her two large guests with calm interest, then smiled.
"Her Sublime and Inextricable Majesty, Queen Upsteeplebat," an-. nounced Beetledown with considerable fervor.
"We owe you an explanation, Duchess Merolanna and Sister Utta," said the little queen. The stones of the fireplace, like the shape of a theater or temple, made her high voice easier to hear than the little man's had been. "We have information that we think you will find valuable, and in turn, we ask you to aid us in the great matters that are upon us all."
"Aid you?" Merolanna shook her head. The duchess was looking her age now, confused and even a little weary. "By the gods, I swear I understand none of this. Tiny people out of an old tale. What could we do to help you? And what information could you give us?"
"For one thing, Duchess," said the queen gently, as if to a restless child
instead of to a woman many, many times her size, "we believe we can tell you what happened to your son."
"Are you sure?" Opal asked. "Perhaps you're still too tired."
His wife, Chert noted, seemed to be having second thoughts.
"No, Mistress," Chaven protested, "I am much recovered. In fact, I am ashamed at having let myself go so far last night." He did indeed look rather embarrassed. "I count you even better friends for your kindness, indulging me at a bad time."
"But, are you truly…?" Opal looked at the physician, then at her hus¬band, as though she wanted him to intervene. Chert was quite happy to sit with a sour smile on his face. This messing about with mirrors had been her idea, after all. "Will you really do it here? In our home?"
Chaven smiled. "Mistress Opal, this is not some great, dangerous exper¬iment I will perform, only the mildest bit of captromancy. Nothing will damage your son or your house."
Son. Chert still wasn't sure how he felt about that, but kept his thoughts to himself. Just in the months since Flint had come to them, the boy had grown another handspan, and now he towered over Chert. How could you consider someone your son who first of all didn't belong to you, whose mother and father might be alive and living nearby, and who in a few years would be twice your own size?
Ah, I suppose it isn't the height but the heart, he thought. He looked at the boy, sitting sleepy-eyed and faintly distrustful, curled in his blanket in the corner he had made his own. At least he's out of his bed. These days Flint was like some ancient relative-asleep most of the day, barely speaking. The boy had never been talkative, of course, but until the moment he had woken up from his weird adventure in the Mysteries the vigor had prac¬tically sprayed off him like a dog shaking a wet coat.
"What do you need, Doctor?" Chert couldn't help being a little curious. "Special herbs? Opal could go to the market."
"You could go to the market, you old hedgehog," she said, but her heart wasn't in it.
"No, no." The physician waved his hand. He looked a bit better for a night's sleep, but Chert knew him well enough to see the hollowness be¬hind the facade of the ordinary. Chaven Makaros was not a happy man, not
remotely, which made Chert even more anxious."No, 1 need only Mistress ()pal's mirror and a candle, and…" Chaven frowned. "Can you make this place dark?"
Chert laughed. "Can we? You forget, you are a guest in Funderling Town now. Even what we usually walk about in would seem like deep dark to you, and what you think is ordinary light makes my head ache."
Chaven looked stricken. "Is that true? Have you been suffering because of me?"
He shook his head. "I exaggerate. But yes, of course, we can make it dark."
As Chert stood on a stool to douse the lantern burning high in the al¬cove above the fire, Opal left the room and returned with a single candle in a dish which she set on the table next to Chaven. Already the exchange of the lantern for this single small light had turned the morning into some¬thing else, into eerie, timeless twilight, and Chert could not help remem¬bering the murk of Southmarch city across the bay, the ceaseless dripping of water, those armored… things stepping out of the shadows. He had dis¬missed Opal's worries about doing this in the house, thinking that she was concerned only about a mess on her immaculate floors, but realized now that something deeper troubled her: by this one act, the lighting of a candle, and the knowledge that more was to come, the day and their house itself had been transformed into something quite different, almost frightening.
"Now," said Chaven, "I will need something to prop this mirror-ah, the cup should do nicely. And I want to put the candle here, where it will re¬flect without being directly in front of him. Flint, that is the boy's name, yes? Flint, come and sit here at the table. On this bench, yes."
The straw-haired boy rose and came forward, looking not so much ap¬prehensive now as confused-and why not, Chert thought: it was an odd thing for parents of any kind to do, foster-folk or not, handing their child over to a strange, bespectacled fellow like this one, a man who might be small among his own kind but here was too big for any of the furniture, then letting him do the Elders knew what to the boy.
"It's all right, son," Chert said abruptly. Flint looked at him, then seated himself.
"Now, child, I want you to move a little so you can see nothing but the candle." The boy tilted a bit to the side, then moved the rest of his body at the physician's gentle direction. Chaven stood behind him.
"Perhaps you two should move to — where he cannot see you," the physi¬cian said to Chert and Opal. "Just stand behind me."
"Will this hurt him?" Opal asked suddenly. The boy flinched.
"No, no, and again, no. No pain, nothing dangerous, only a lew ques-tions, a little… conversation."
When Opal had taken her place, gripping Chert's hand tighter than he could remember her doing for some time, Chaven began quietly to speak, "Now, look in the mirror, lady' It was strange to think this same fellow, so soothing now, had been shrieking like a man caught under a rockslide only a few hours earlier. "Do you see the candle flame? You do. It is there be¬fore you, the only bright thing. Look at it. Do not watch anything else, only the flame. See how it moves? See how it glows? The darkness on either side of it is spreading, but the light only grows brighter…"
Chert couldn't see Flint's face, of course-the angle of the mirror didn't permit it-but he could see the boy's posture beginning to ease. The bony shoulders, which had been hunched as though against a cold wind, now drooped, and the head tilted forward toward the mirror-candle that Flint could see but Chert could not.
Chaven continued to talk in this soft, serious way, speaking of the can¬dle and the darkness around it until Chert felt that he was falling into some kind of spell himself, until the pool of light on the tabletop, the candle and Flint and the mirror, all seemed to float in a shadowy void. The physician let his voice trail off into silence.
"Now," Chaven said after a pause, "we are going to take a journey together, you and I. Fear nothing that you see because I will be with you. Nothing that you see can see you, or harm you in any way. Do not be afraid."
Opal squeezed Chert's hand so hard he had to wriggle his fingers free. He put his own hand on her arm to let her know he was still there, and also to try to stave off any sudden urges on her part to crush his fingers again.
"You are a boy again, just a very small boy-a baby, perhaps still in swaddling, and you can barely walk," Chaven said. "Where are you? What do you see?"
A long pause was followed by a strange sound-Flint's voice, but a new one Chert hadn't yet heard, not the preternatural maturity of the nearly wild boy they had brought home, or the anxious sullenness that had come on him since his journey through the mysteries. This Flint sounded almost exactly like what Chaven had described-a very small child, only just up on his legs.
"See trees. See my mam."
Opal got hold of his hand despite Chert's best efforts and this time he didn't have the heart to pull away, despite her desperate grip.
"And your father? Is he there?"
"Han't got un."
"Ah. And what is your name?"
He waited another long moment before answering. "Boy. Mam calls me boy."
"And do you know her name?"
"Mam. Ma-ma."
There was another spell of silence while Chaven considered. "Very well. You are a little older now. Where do you live?"
"In my house. Near the wood."
"Do you know its name, this wood?"
"No. Only know I mustn't go there."
"And when other people speak to your mother, what do they call her?"
"Don't. Don't none come. Except the city-man. He comes with the money. Four silver seashells each time. She likes it when he comes."
Chaven turned and gave Chert and Opal a look that Chert could not identify. "And what does he call her?"
"Mistress, or goodwife. Once he called her Dame Nursewife."
Chaven sighed. "Enough, then. You are now…"
"She's not well," Flint said abruptly, his voice tremulous. "She said, don't go out, and I don't. But she's sleeping and the clouds are coming along the ground."
"He's frightened!" said Opal. Chert had to hold her back, wondering even as he did so whether it was the right thing to do. "Let go of me, old man-can't you hear him? Flint! Flint, I'm here!"
"I assure you, good Mistress Opal, he cannot hear you." Something odd and hard had entered Chaven's voice-a tone Chert hadn't heard from him before. "My master Kaspar Dyelos taught this working to me and I learned it well. I assure you, he hears no voice but mine."
"But he's frightened!"
"Then you must be quiet and let me speak to him," Chaven said. "Boy, listen to me."
"The trees!" Flint said, his voice rising. "The trees are… moving. They have fingers. They're all around the house, and the clouds are all around too!"
"You are safe," the physician said."You are safe, boy. Nothing youcan see can hurt you."
"I don't want to go out. Ma said not to! But the door's open and the clouds are in the house…!"
"Boy…" /
Flint's desperate words came out in little bursts, as though he were run ning hard. "Not… the… don't want…" He was swaying on the bench now, boneless as a doll, his head rolling on his neck as though someone were shaking him by the shoulders. "The eyes are all staring! Where's my ma? Where's the sky?" He was weeping now. "Where's my house?"
"Stop this!" Opal shrieked. "You're hurting him with your horrible spell!"
"I assure you," Chaven said, a little breathless himself, "that while he may be remembering things that frightened him, he's in no danger…"
Flint suddenly went rigid on the bench. "He's not in the stone any¬more," he said in a harsh whisper, throat as tight as if someone squeezed it in strong hands. "He's not just in the stone-he's… in… me!" The child fell silent, still stiff as a post.
"We are done now, boy," Chaven said after a long moment of stunned silence. "Come back to your home. Come back here, to the candle, and the mirror, come back to Opal and Chert…"
Flint stood up so suddenly that he tipped the heavy bench over. It crashed onto Chaven's foot and the physician hopped back on one leg, cursing unintelligibly, then fell over.
"No!" Flint shouted, and his voice filled the small room, rattled from the stone walls. "The queen's heart! The queen's heart! It's a hole, and he's crawling through it…!"
And then he went limp and fell to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.
"He only sleeps." Chaven spoke gently, an unspoken apology behind the words, but Opal was having nothing of it; the look on her face could have crumbled limestone. She angrily waved Chaven and her husband from the sleeping room so she could continue dabbing the boy's forehead with a wet cloth, as if the mere fact of their presence would compromise her healing abilities-or, as Chert thought more likely, as though the very sight of two such useless men made her feel ill.
"I do not know what happened," Chaven said to Chert as they turned the bench right-side-up and sat on it. Chert poured them both a mug of
mossbrew out of a jug. "Never before…" He frowned. "Something has been done to that boy. Behind the Shadowline, perhaps."
Chert laughed, but it was not one of the pleasant kind. "We did not need any mirror-magic to know that!
"Yes, yes, but there is more here than I ever thought. You heard him. He did not merely wander across the Shadowline-he was taken. Something strange was done to him there, I have no doubt."
Chert thought of the boy as he had found him just days before, lying at the foot of the Shining Man at the very center of the Funderling Myster¬ies, with the little mirror clutched in his fingers. And then that terrifying fairy-woman had taken the mirror from Chert in turn. What was it all about? Was she the queen the boy was shouting about? He had said some¬thing about a hole, and Chert could see how a heart with a hole in it might describe her.
"I don't understand," Chaven said. "Not any of it. But I cannot help feel¬ing that I need to."
"Well enough." Chert stood, wincing at the ache in his knees. "Me, I have more pressing things to worry about, like where we are going to go and how we are going to find something to eat without anyone noticing you."
"What are you talking about?" Chaven asked.
"Because not only isn't Opal going to feed us today," Chert told him, "I think it's pretty plain that you and I will be a lot healthier if we're not sit¬ting here when she comes out."
"Ah," said the physician, and hastily drained his mug. "Yes, I see what you mean. Let us be going."