The Mirror Prince (34 page)

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Authors: Violette Malan

BOOK: The Mirror Prince
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Once more, Max felt the lure of the water’s stillness, but he shook away the distraction. He knew what he wanted. The same thing he’d always wanted.
I want to go home,
he thought.
I want for none of this ever to have happened.
The longing for
Max Ravenhill,
his own apartment, his own life, his books, his crowded office, his students, even his committee meetings, closed his throat and stung his eyes. In that moment he knew that if he gave her this answer, truthfully as Cassandra had advised, the Lady of Souls could somehow make it so.
 
A movement, a noise, made him aware of the people behind him, and he drew in a harsh breath. He saw that the Lady’s question was like the wish a genie offers you. There were always strings attached, consequences you couldn’t foresee. Except he knew what the Lady’s price would be, for that as for any other gift. He would see it in Cassandra’s face every time she looked at him. And he would see it in his own face. Souls.
 
And that he couldn’t live with. Take what you want, and pay for it. That’s what the old proverb said. So if you found you couldn’t pay the price, would that mean that you didn’t really want it?
 
It took a conscious act of will to loosen the muscles of his throat enough to speak. “I will play the Game,” he said.
 
The Lady closed her eyes and leaned back in her watery chair, her long fingers dancing on the arms.
 
“Hear the first question,” she said, and her voice took on the cadences of recitation.
 
“What sees the edge of the blade?” she asked, and paused until Max nodded.
 
“What are the final words spoken?
 
“What seals all bargains?”
 
Okay, Max squeezed his eyes shut. One at a time, think about this. What sees the edge of the blade? Knife blade, sword blade, blade of grass? What? “You don’t look at the blade,” Cassandra had said, “you look at the opponent.” But it isn’t the blade, Max thought, it’s the
edge
of the blade. What sees the
edge?
The guy sharpening the knife. The butcher. The animal being killed. The wound? There were too many answers, and all of them felt right. “Trust your instincts,” Cassandra had said. Their lives unnumbered Cycles long, no Natural would trouble to deliberately trick you as Solitaries would; no Natural cared enough, not even this one. But they would let you trick yourself. Of the answers he’d thought of, the one that
felt
the most likely was the last, the wound. Except the wound couldn’t see, in the usual sense, so what if he looked at the question metaphorically? What had edges? The landscape around here, for one thing. It had nothing
but
edges. It was easy to tell where one thing ended and the next thing began. He pushed his hair back out of his face. He wished he had one of Cassandra’s hair clips. His hair seemed to be growing more quickly than usual, it was brushing his shoulders already. He dragged his thoughts back to the questions. It wasn’t always so easy to tell where the edges of things were. To tell the difference between things not apparently different. The two sides of the coin of discerning, one of his old professors used to say, are wit and judgment. Wit sees the similarities in things not apparently similar, while judgment—
 
“Judgment,” he said. “The first answer is judgment.”
 
“Yes,” the Lady of Souls said. “What are your explanations?”
 
Sweat broke out all over his body and Max shivered in the sudden chill. Explanations? Plural? “Judgment” answered all three questions? So it really
was
the Game of Three Questions, even though nine questions were asked. Why hadn’t Moon or one of the others told him this? What if he couldn’t explain how “judgment” was the answer to each question? What else didn’t he know? He drew in a deep steadying breath and flexed his hands. For a second his mind went blank. What were the other questions? Now that he had the answer, would he be able to think of the explanations?
 
Start talking,
he thought,
moving the mouth oils the brain.
 
“Judgment sees the edge of the blade, because it sees the fine distinctions between things that seem not to have any differences, so it can see the exact point where one thing ends and another begins.” The Lady said nothing and Max swallowed. “Judgment is the words spoken if something is being contested, like in a court.” The last one was bargains, what about bargains? Bargaining is like a contest. “A bargain is concluded when both parties feel they’ve gotten the best they can out of it, when it is their judgment that further bargaining won’t change anything.”
 
The Lady sat, eyes closed, for long enough that Max felt the sweat trickle down his back. What would happen if she didn’t agree with his explanations? How much warning would he have? At least he was ready for the other questions now. She was looking for abstractions, so all he had to do was find the right one for each set of questions.
 
“Hear the second question.”
 
Max’s lungs stopped hurting as he released the breath he was holding.
 
“Who is the last man standing and the first to be seated?
 
“Who is the first man to eat and the last man fed?
 
“Who is not lost until found?”
 
Honor
,
courage
—Max cursed under his breath and stopped mentally ticking off abstractions; there was no point in hoping to hit on the right one. He should have known it wouldn’t be this easy. These questions sounded more like regular riddles, the kind he’d never been any good at. He ran over the questions again in his mind, but got nothing—they were just words.
 
He took another deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to steady his spinning thoughts. Too many possibilities, that was always his problem with this kind of question. Without some hint, some nudge from instinct, how would he know which of the many possible pathways would lead him to the answer? All he needed was to answer one question, then he could compare his answer to the other questions and see if it fit.
 
Okay, who sits down first? Ladies, not men. The president? But why would he be the last man standing? Okay, so who was the last man standing? Bruce Willis in a mediocre movie—stop that and
think!
Last man to eat and the first one fed. That sounded familiar. Except the way he remembered it, it was the first man in battle and the last in retreat.
Who
was? Would it help if he could remember the battles he’d fought in when he was the Prince?
 
No, not the Prince. The King.
 
Would it fit? The King sits on his throne while everyone else stands, so he’s the first to sit down. But he’s the last to be standing on the battlefield, because when he goes down the battle’s over. The first to eat when there’s plenty, the last to be fed when there isn’t? Well, yes, if he was a really good king. But what about the last bit? Not lost until he’s found? Like the battle again? That wouldn’t be it, Max felt certain that he couldn’t use the same explanation for two different sections.
 
This just wasn’t his kind of game. He frowned. That was it, something . . . Max unclenched his fists and forced his shoulders to relax. He couldn’t go mentally haring off after the thought that just wouldn’t jell. In fox hunting, the fox didn’t lose until he was found, that would be true for anything that involved prey. But when was the King prey?
 
Oh.
 
“In my world, in the Shadowlands,” Max corrected, “the answer would be the land’s ruler. We call that a king, I think here you call it the High Prince.” He gave his explanations before she could ask, before she could tell him he was wrong.
 
Again he watched as the Lady closed her eyes, otherwise immobile on her water throne. When her eyes opened again, Max found that he was smiling, and he tried to stop. But he couldn’t help it. He’d answered two thirds of the questions successfully. There was only one set of questions left.
 
“Hear the third question,” the Lady said, still with her eyes closed. “Will you wear the smile or the veil?
 
“Will you hear the eyes or the tongue?
 
“Will you choose the Head or the Heart?”
 
Max felt suddenly cold and fragile as glass. All the confidence, all the hope emptied out of him. She had tricked them after all, the Lady of Souls. She had always meant the game to end this way, with an unanswerable question. He knew this kind of death-riddle; this was one of those “feathers or lead” questions. The kind the gods asked when there was no right answer, no answer that reason or logic could give you. The right answer was the one the god had decided it would be, and your only hope was that the god would play straight.
 
Who would ask such a question if they meant to play straight?
 
Well,
he
was going to play straight, goddamn it. At least he’d have that much, he thought, as the heat of his anger warmed him. Answer with the truth, just as Cassandra had said. He wished more than anything else that he could turn around and look at her right now. One last time. That’s what he would choose, if he had the chance. That’s what he’d been choosing all along, he realized. What he’d chosen when he walked across that crowded cocktail party to speak to her. What he’d always wanted. Cassandra. Truthsheart.
 
And just that easily, he knew what he would answer. All the choices the Lady of Souls had given him asked him to choose between reality and artifice. And he knew which he would choose, every time. And his choice would be a kind of pun, too, and so he might as well go out with his sense of humor intact. Max took a deep breath. He wished he wasn’t letting them down. He wished he could have become the Prince for them.
 
“Truth,” he said. “The answer to your question is Truth.”
 
The Lady put out her hand. Max felt a tingling in his hands and feet. Involuntarily, he took a step forward into the water and extended his own hand. As if from great distance he heard what might have been Cassandra’s voice. Heat spread from his skin inward, as if eating into his body. This was not the healing warmth of Cassandra’s breath, but a destructive flame, burning through his body, searing the air from his lungs. Max felt cold wetness and realized that he had fallen forward into the Tarn. His last thought was to wonder if he had at least disturbed the mirrorlike perfection of the water’s surface.
 
Chapter Fourteen
 
“FIND WALKS UNDER THE MOON. I need to know what this means.” The Basilisk Prince spoke through stiff lips. “And bring the Hound who waits.”
 
Only a very few moments passed before the guard escorted a Hound into the Basilisk’s presence and bowed his way out into the passage again. The Basilisk concentrated on the beast before him. He was no longer made uneasy by the way the creature flickered constantly from shape to shape, sometimes this, sometimes that, but always taking on the form of a Rider to speak. One day, the Basilisk thought, he would like to know why that was. One day, he would be at leisure to pursue that kind of interest again.
 
In front of the Hound he could relax, let his hands tremble if they would, let himself sink with shaking knees to the chaise where the Exile had lain. The strain of hiding his uneasiness from his servants was wearing on him. He had expected to be informed before this as to Dawntreader’s whereabouts. If one of his spies did not come quickly with the information he needed, he would have to loose the Hunt again.
 
Except now they said there was no scent.
 
The Hound flickered into the shape of a Rider casually leaning against the Basilisk’s map table. “We have not the scent,” it said in a voice like ground glass. “Among the ashes of the fortress of the one you call Honor of Souls there was his smell. The smell of one of the Shadowfolk. That smell we could find, did it exist in this Land, but it does not.”
 
“Is he dead?” The Basilisk’s hands formed into fists. If the Banishment did not end . . . He must have the Talismans, he
must.
The Chant of Binding pushed at him to be used. He had thought there was time in abundance, but now that there was nothing to distract him, no building, no planting, the Chant of Binding burned like a bonfire in his head. He had to have the Talismans and soon.
 
The thing lifted its shoulders and spread its hands in a grotesque parody of uncertainty.
 
“Give us a scent,” it said.
 
The Basilisk resisted the urge to smash the Hound across the mouth. It would only amuse the creature. He could not have Dawntreader dead. He it was who had been Banished, and the Banishment would not end without him. But if he was not . . . if they had reached the Tarn of Souls, if the Lady had helped them, and the Guardian was returned . . .
 
Then the Talismans were found. They would soon be his.

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