Her vision blurred.
Cleared.
“Lorela?”
Her sister turned, dress half on, and staggered toward her side of the mirror. “Miri! You’re alive! Lord and Lady, you’re alive! Where are you?”
Leaning so close her breath fogged the glass, Mirian swallowed and said, “I’m in Karis.”
“What? What are you doing…? Mama said you died! That you were killed trying to rescue the Mage-pack, but there was no body. The elder Lady Hagen actually visited her. Mama was in her glory. But you’re not dead. Cedryc said you weren’t. He said he Saw you, but I couldn’t tell…” Lorela swiped her palm across her cheek and took a deep breath. “Were you captured with the Mage-pack? Have you escaped? Are you coming home?”
“No, I wasn’t captured. Well, I was, but I escaped.” She almost giggled as Lorela frowned, clearly about to accuse her of not taking things seriously. “I’m here, with Tomas Hagen, to rescue the Mage-pack.”
“Tomas Hagen is alive and you’re with him?”
“Yes.” Mirian braced herself. Her mother was, after all, Lorela’s mother.
Lorela ran both hands up through her hair. “Lady Hagen needs to be told her younger son is alive.”
“Yes.” She blinked away tears and remembered she had information to give her sister in return. “Lor, if you touch Cedryc when he starts to See, it might bring him back. Touch him as much as you can, skin to skin.”
“You’re not supposed to touch a…” She couldn’t say it.
“Because then what they See will be lost. Maybe they go so deep and fall so far because as soon as they start to See, people stop touching them. Maybe that’s why they find what focus they have when they get to touch people. It’s a stupid, selfish rule.”
“Cedryc…” Lorela stopped, took another deep breath, and wiped her eyes. “All right. Thank you, Miri. Now then…” She squared her shoulders and frowned again. “…what do you mean you’re in Karis to rescue the Mage-pack? And who set up this link? This isn’t even a crafted mirror!”
“Just what I said. I did. Love you.” She lifted her hands from the mirror, closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, she saw only the blurry image of her own reflection.
“Who were you talking to?”
Mirian turned to see Tomas sitting up in bed. “My sister.”
“Through a mirror-link?” He sounded impressed, but she couldn’t make out his expression. “Danika has one set up with her mother—Ryder kept hanging his jackets over it, said the last thing he need was the abiding presence of his mother-in-law. I didn’t know you could link with an uncrafted mirror, though.”
“Neither did I.” Teeth clenched, she lifted the first layer of the stupidly restrictive Imperial undergarments off the hook and pulled it over her head. By the time she tugged it down into place and brushed her hair back off her face, Tomas stood less than an arm’s length away.
“Are you all right?” He sounded worried.
She shrugged. “Busy day.”
“Is it the captain?”
“Is what the captain?”
“I know you’re willing to work with him because he let you—let us—go on the road, but what if this is a trick? A trap? I mean, he’s already told us we’re expected. If we get grabbed, he’s still in the clear and he can play the sympathy angle with you.”
“Why would he do that?”
Tomas shrugged in turn. “I don’t know. He likes you.”
“Funny way of showing it. Pass me the thing with the laces.” She wrapped it around her waist and began hooking the busk in the front. “If he plans to stop us, why didn’t he do it yesterday in the square.”
“He didn’t have a net and he knows what you can do.”
After the sound left her mouth, Mirian thought it might have been better had she not tried to laugh. “I don’t know what I can do.”
“Anything.”
“What?”
Hands on her shoulders, he moved close enough she could finally see his face. Close enough one leg bumped against hers and she could smell the warm, musky, morning scent of him. “You can do anything,” he said.
And he believed it.
“Thank you.” Mirian let her head fall forward and rest on his shoulder for a moment. Then, as a cart rolled by outside on the street, she straightened and took a deep breath. “We have to trust him.”
“But you don’t want to.”
“What I want doesn’t matter, at least not until after we rescue the Mage-pack. And the others.”
“Okay, then.”
“Okay, then?”
He grinned as she leaned back to look up at him. “Whatever you decide, you know I’m right beside you.”
Beside. Not behind. “You’d better get dressed, then. They’re not going to let you into the palace in fur.”
There was no way he could do this and hide his involvement. This time, having Mirian knock him out as the emperor’s captives fled the palace would only make it easier for him to be caught. He could get the necessary artifact only because he’d been sent to get it before. Because he was known to the Lord Warder. “The emperor requests that I be given…”
“It’s a festival day. I could tell from the bunting.” The Lord Warder sighed as he unlocked the cabinet. “The palace will be swarming with people.” The old man snorted, carefully opened the cabinet’s front, then slid a smaller key into the lock of one of the exposed drawers. “People. They’ll touch things with their dirty fingers. They always do. I plan on hiding down here until it’s over.”
He always did, according to the pages Reiter’d overheard complaining. He went to the Archive early and stayed late, sometimes sleeping on a cot in the corner if he felt the palace wasn’t yet empty enough. The pages hated traveling all the way down to the Archive. The service halls didn’t extend that far and they had to run to get the food there still warm.
Jiggling the key, the Lord Warder finally got the drawer open. He pulled out the fork and stared down at it for a moment before handing it to Reiter. “His Imperial Majesty will have no time for hobbies today.”
Reiter slipped the small artifact into the inside pocket of his tunic. “I don’t know about that, Lord Warder,” he said, closing the frogging and trying to get the ridiculous amount of braid to lay flat. “I’m just following orders.”
The old man snorted again. “Aren’t we all, Captain? Aren’t we all?”
Back in his room, Reiter changed out of his court dress and into his regular dress uniform. With half the garrison pulled in on extra duty and the other half wandering through the halls gawking, it granted him even more invisibility than usual. He had no reason to sign his sidearm out of the armory and being mistaken for an officer on duty could cause problems without it, but he missed its weight by his side. Not as much as he missed the weight of his musket over his shoulder, but that was a whole other level of not going to happen.
Ten past nine.
Reiter snapped his watch closed and slid it into his pocket. Walking over to the window, he buttoned his tunic and stared at the golden arc of the emperor’s balloon, a hobby the emperor’d had no time for for a while. At least the aeronauts wouldn’t be bored today.
Just before nine, they joined the crowd already gathered in the square, staying well back from those who clearly intended to be first in. Mirian didn’t know if there were prizes or merely bragging rights, but the people nearest the gate were weirdly intent. She didn’t need to be able to see their expressions; the need to be first in rose off them like smoke.