Another Range of Mountains

The kidnappers had smashed the mirror. Lacra knelt over the mercurial remains, the slivers so minuscule they failed to give back even the tiniest glimpse of her tired face. Whoever had taken the girl had been aware of Lacra’s talents. The mirror was tipped onto its face, then crushed to fine glitter beneath a hard boot heel. Some of the larger pieces, still no bigger than her smallest nail, bore the streak of water-softened leather. It hadn’t rained last night.

“Can you see anything?” Boyar asked.

“Patience, please.”

Behind her the oil lamp wavered in Count Boyar’s hand, betraying his anxiety. She couldn’t blame the man. His child had been stolen from her own bed; a bed tucked away behind his walls and his guards. Useless ornamentation to the determined thief, and Boyar was paying that price now.

Lacra reached out, allowing her leather-gloved fingers to sift through the rubble. Ah, there. She felt a lump beneath the rug and pulled the edge aside. It was a small shard, no bigger across than the palm of her hand and no wider than two fingers, but it would be enough. She ignored the hopeful sigh behind her.

Reaching into her supply case, a battered thing with wooden handles and wooden fasteners, she pulled out her notepad and charcoal pencil. She found a clear space on the ground and set the pad in her lap, pencil poised over its naked face. She laid the shard down before her with care and let her eyes unfocus, falling backward through the memories imprinted in the mirror.

Her hand covered it, sudden light as it was found and the rug pulled back. She saw its crazy descent from the shattered whole, flickering light and dark. Then there—in the moment before the breaking. A hooded face, but the profile was strong. She held onto it, and sketched.

When she was finished she blinked back into the world and looked down at what she’d drawn. It wasn’t much to go on. A hawk-nosed man with heavy brows. The hood covering him was thick, and she’d cross-hatched in its rough texture. Cheap, then. Either it was disposable or he was poor. Hard to tell.

“Is that the monster?” Boyar hovered over her shoulder, angling the lamplight so that they could both see better.

“Maybe. It’s a beginning.”

She tucked her supplies into her case and stood, brushing off the little bits of mirror that clung to her leggings. A night breeze chilled her. The wooden shutters the kidnapper had come through had been left open upon his egress, and the night was only half done. The bedposts were old wood, good and sturdy, but the thing was made with tongue-in-groove construction. A testament to its craftsman, but without brass fittings it gave her little to work with. The silly girl had placed her hand mirror facedown on the nightstand.

Seeing nothing else reflective in the room, she crossed to the window and looked out over the city below. The count’s estate backed against the tallest hill at the northern end of the city, giving him a comprehensive view of the land he governed and the Katharnian Mountains to the south.

It wasn’t a very big city, and that was just fine by her. The close quarters of Alrayani constricted her senses, while these wide streets shadowed by desolate mountains were much more to her liking. But then, her mother was of these mountains. Lacra had been born here herself, though she had been a babe and remembered none of it. It was a pity she couldn’t stay much longer. The king’s men would catch up with her eventually.

A path caught her eye, a way down the ornamental carvings from the window into the little sitting garden below, then over the outer wall into the street beyond. It would not be an easy path to take; one would have to be an experienced climber to attempt it. She did not yet know enough about her quarry to discount the possibility.

“The lamp.”

When he gave it to her she shuttered three of its sides, so that only a slim beam sliced through the night. Slowly, so very slowly, she angled the beam toward the suspected place of ingress and swept the light across it. There was a tiny glint by the wall. A puddle, probably left by overwatering the flowers. Bad for the garden; good for her.

“I’m going out now,” she said, knowing that her words sounded stilted to him. The Kathari language was not an easy one for her tongue, and the words got tangled when she attempted longer sentences. She was used to round vowels and lilting consonants, not a language as craggy as the landscape which birthed it.

“I’m going with you.” He looked firm about it, but it was hard to take a man seriously when he was dressed in his bedclothes and house slippers.

“No. You distract. I go alone. You should have called for me sooner.”

“The constable was confident he could find her.” Boyar twisted his sleeve between his fingers. “He doesn’t know I called you.”

She shrugged, “Good. I go now, before the light changes.”

“Take Costel then. You’re vulnerable when you sketch, and he doesn’t fear you like the others.”

“Fine.”

Boyar took her hand in both of his and squeezed.

“Please, bring my Tatya back. She’s all I have.”

Lacra thought of her pursuers, spreading north from Alrayani, drawing the noose tighter. She also thought of the portrait of the late countess hung above the fireplace, of how the count cleaned the gilded frame every day with his own soft hands, teasing out the tiniest particles of dust with a mink brush.

“I will do my best.”

It felt good to have Costel with her. He was an anxious man, but his incessant worry made him a more stringent follower of her protocols. He stood in silence while she hunched over the puddle, notepad supported on one knee, and he steadied her with his hand on her shoulder. Pulling out the imprinted memories was more difficult on a malleable surface, and they had to stay very still while she waited for the minuscule ripples their footsteps had caused to settle.

Winding backward. The clouds slipping the wrong way across the sky, too fast as she sped it up, dug deeper. An anxious face, the hawk-man’s, posture hunched and burdened, a bulging sack strapped to his back—dead weight. She hesitated, stopping the flow of images. If she drew this, Boyar would have proof of his daughter being taken by the man, but no more detail. If she let the moment slip by, it could not be recovered. Reflections which were pulled from the mirror were lost unless there was an anchorpoint, a linchpin connecting all the imprints together. She decided to risk a closer look.

A shattering splash—turbulence. Boot in the water? Nothing but clouds again, and then the hawk-man’s first arrival. Too quick, the splash came before his face resolved. Not enough detail.

She let the imprints fade, her fingers still over the pad.

“Anything?”

“He came this way and left with Tatya. I cannot get a hold on what he really looks like.”

Costel frowned. He was better at understanding her accent than Boyar, but it still took awhile. “An Easterner?”

“Perhaps; it is too early to be certain.”

He nodded, and she knew what he was thinking—that it was definitely an Easterner. Lacra made a habit of remaining impartial during her investigations, but she forced herself to admit the possibility was strong. Boyar had been increasing his border skirmishes with his Eastern neighbors of late. She snorted. Grown men arguing over who owned a piece of useless rock face just because their stories said a god died there. Ridiculous.

The other side of the wall offered no new vantage. Gas-fueled streetlamps pushed back the night around the city’s central carriageways, making them an unlikely route for an escaping criminal. She saw Boyar’s messenger run out of the front gates in the direction of the constable’s office, feet slapping to wake the dead. She turned away to skirt the estate wall toward the darker hollows of the city.

“You don’t like him, do you?”

She blinked, startled from her concentration. “Who?”

“The constable.”

“He thinks I’m a witch.”

“Are you?”

She shook her head. “I just see differently than you.”

Silence pervaded as she explored the side street. Well, a kind of silence, anyway. She could practically hear Costel thinking, turning over what she’d said. Trying to fit it into what he knew of the world. She pressed down a sigh and tried to focus on the task at hand. Ever since word of her ability as a mirrorpainter had gotten around, some of the more superstitious shopkeepers had taken to putting up butcher’s paper inside their windows in an attempt to mute any reflections. Lacra suspected that it was really to hide illicit dealings, but Boyar had brushed her off as being too cynical. To him, it was just an extension of the old ways.

In truth, it only hampered her ability to see what happened inside those rooms. If anything, the solid backdrop enhanced the detail she could tease out of the window glass from the street side. She had failed to mention as much to Boyar. His loose lips seemed to be where most of the rumors about her sprouted, and she dared not volunteer more fuel to that mounting fire.

Their progress down the lane was slow as she hesitated at every papered window to dip momentarily into its imprints. He had come this way; she could see that much. Hood down, face obscured, running. She didn’t bother with the notepad. This man had been aware of her and made a habit of keeping his face covered. Now it was just a matter of following the trail. She hesitated. If he had been aware of her, why come this way? There were other paths to take, ones with bricked-up windows and little light. He either wanted her to follow, or had no other choice.

“My uncle can’t tell green from red. Is it like that?”

She bit her lip to keep from yelling at him for breaking her concentration. “Yes. Similar. We may be close now. Be ready.”

Costel sucked air through his teeth, the front gap making him whistle, and fumbled to get his hand down on his saber’s handle. She was beginning to wish she’d requested a different guard.

They reached the first turning in the lane, and found a gas lamp throwing off shadows from its perch high on a hollow metal pole. Here her culprit would have been surrounded by subtle glimmers, unable to shield his face and direction from the dew gathered in the ruts left by wagon wheels or the shining brass hinges on thick wooden doors. All she had to do was find his prime fail point, the place where he’d been unable to shield his face.

She stood in the center of the lane and let her eyes roam the glass-faced window to her right, drawing up the image of the fleeing man, and held it still, adjusting her footing until she stood in the exact spot he had. The kidnapper was a half hand taller than she, so she pushed to her toes and hunched her shoulders, attempting to mimic his burdened posture. She let her eyes wander, seeking the telltale spark of a reflective surface. There—the door on the other side of the intersection, a thick thing with wide brass plating around its handles.

Crouched down so that she was eye level with the plating, she perched the notepad on her knee and lifted her pencil.

Her own approach, running backward. Clouds shift across the sky, bringing patches of shadow and light. Stillness. A figure moving backward, he was turning right down the lane, away from the city’s heart. His face lifted—finally. Her fingers moved.

“Looks like an Easterner.” Costel said when she finished.

The face she had drawn could have been an Easterner. It could have been anyone, really. The bones were sharp, an already firm profile made craggy with sunken age. His brows were pushed together with effort and his lips twisted to the left with a scar. The bundle was visible over his shoulder, but the rest of the scene fizzled away into meandering squiggles. There was something familiar about that hard, twisted face, and something wrong with the incoherent mess of the background. Her visions were always clear. Always. Her fingers trembled as she turned the page in her notepad, hiding away the stern face and laying bare the next page.

“We must be very careful now. He went right.”

Costel frowned down that shadowed stretch of road. “But there’s nothing down there.”

She raised her brows high at him. “I presume that’s the idea.”

The rest of the way was in relative darkness. She felt blind, and not only because the stars were dimmed under a mantle of cloud. They left the papered windows and ornate brass fittings behind for a narrow lane crowded with tenement homes, their windows shuttered wood.

“Nothing but poor folk out here; they wouldn’t risk hiding a stranger.” Costel said as his eyes flicked from one side of the street to the other. His fingers stayed wrapped around the grip of his blade, baring the steel a finger’s width or two every time they heard a cat skitter or a night soil bucket dumped from a window.

“They’re working folk,” she explained. “And there are storage halls closer to the city’s edges which aren’t visited at night. I suspect that’s where we will find him.”

Costel appeared dubious, but she ignored him. He was a good lad, but he didn’t know a thing about the underbelly of his own city, let alone the habits of criminals. Something Lacra herself was all too familiar with.

Lacra choked back a sigh and shook her head to focus her thoughts. The man’s naïveté aside, he was loyal to the count and handy with that blade. Considering she hadn’t seen a speck of evidence that the constable was anywhere near the trail, she would be relying upon Costel’s expertise to handle any fighting. Back home her reputation as a mirrorpainter would have been enough to cow most, but not here. No, here they were more likely to skewer her for it.

The tenement quarter backed up to a lazy river which turned the milling wheels and dragged the city’s waste away. By daylight the water was a disconcerting shade of brown. With her sleeve pressed over her nose, she sidled up to the edge of the bank and leaned over to get a look at the flat surface. The river was so sluggish that she managed to dredge up a few imprinted images from it. Though they were wildly unsteady due to the river’s stubborn trudge toward the sea, she pieced together that the man had taken the low footbridge out into the fields beyond.

Not wanting to remove her sleeve from her nose to sketch the wavering image, she dropped the connection and hurried across. Once she was upwind, she propped her fists on her hips and surveyed the land. Paths of packed dirt and bits of gravel wound out into the cultivated countryside, crisscrossing amongst fields of grain and lower-growing vegetables she didn’t recognize. By day the fields filled with locals working, weeding, replanting, tending. By night nothing save the woodland fauna stirred, stealing bits for their burrows and bellies.

Storehouses stood at the head of each field, massive stone structures with thatched roofs and entrances wide enough to ride two laden carts through. One had a lantern in the window.

“There.” She pointed.

This time Costel pulled his steel out all the way, and Lacra was surprised to see its shine had been matted with charcoal and wax. Even Boyar didn’t want her seeing some things.

They circled the storeroom from a wide radius, Costel moving with grace that made her cheeks flare with warm jealousy. She had always been a flatfooted type of woman, her attempts at moving with any kind of elegance mocked behind manicured hands at every fête she’d ever attended. Too bad, really. She could use the gift of stealth now. Too late for regrets.

All of the storehouse’s windows were shuttered, save the one that had let out a sliver of light. It seemed sloppy to her. Or worse, intentional. The muddled background she’d sketched rose in her mind, taunting her senses. She was missing something here.

A single-horse carriage came clattering around the back of the storehouse, the hawk-nosed man bent over the reins. He leapt from the high seat and gave the horse a pat before opening a narrow door into the storehouse. The kidnapper disappeared within, leaving the door ajar.

“Let’s go,” Costel said.

“Wait—”

He wasn’t listening. Costel crept toward the open door, blade low and ready, while Lacra slunk after him with nothing more than her wooden case clutched before her like a shield. What in the White Beyond was she thinking? She’d found the place; what happened next was no business of hers. And yet … The unquiet background, the noise in the charcoal. Her knuckles whitened on the case.

She needed to witness.

Costel crossed the threshold of the door, and for a moment his shadow was cast in sharp relief against the warm lamplight seeping from the room. Lacra froze, her painter’s eye admiring the stern contrast, before a vibrant clash of metal snapped her back into reality. Costel’s shadow disappeared into the maw of light and she followed it, not knowing what else to do.

She ducked into a world of chaos, light glinting off blackened blades in patchworked sparks as every strike exposed naked metal. Having no blade of her own, Lacra rushed deeper into the storehouse to find Boyar’s daughter. The brown-cloth bundle lay prone beside a pyramid of white root vegetables. Lacra dropped to her knees before the girl to roll her over. Lacra’s hands sank down, collapsing the bundle to scatter crumpled cloth and white root across the floor.

Tatya had never been that bundle.

Lacra leapt to her feet and clasped her case tight against her chest, struggling to quell the panic which threatened to override rational thought. Deep breaths; look around.

The harvest season had not yet begun, so only a few meager stacks of white root obscured her view. A table sat before the window that had been left unshuttered, a warm lamp near the opening. She tried to ignore the squealing metal and grunts and curses coming from near the door and hurried over to have a closer look.

On the table was a notepad, slightly wider than the one she preferred. A charcoal pencil lay beside it, the remnants of torn-out pages sticking from the top like crooked teeth. There was also a small wooden box, the lid tipped up, revealing a set of pastel chalks. Color! She went cold all over. Hawk-nose was a mirrorpainter. She tucked the pad under her arm and shoved the pencil through her hair, then tipped the box of chalks out on the floor and ground them to dust under her heel. One last glance around told her what she’d suspected. There was no food here, no sign of a sleeping place. This room was a decoy or trap, and she didn’t fancy sticking around to find out the truth the hard way.

Costel’s abilities were strained to their limit, but it was the hawk-man who drew her attention. Seeing him now, in the full flush of color and without the shadow of his hood, she knew him for what he was. He may have some Katharnian blood in his veins but he was from much farther away than Costel had feared. An Alrayani then, and she did not give herself the luxury of dreaming his presence here a coincidence.

But then where was Tatya?

Using the white root stacks for cover she slipped up behind the Alrayani and cracked him over the back of the head as hard as she could with her wooden case. Her teeth chattered and her joints ached but the man went down without so much as a whimper. Costel stared at her, wide-eyed.

“Tatya?”

“Not here.”

The hawk-man groaned and twitched an arm, eyelids fluttering.

“Hurry,” she urged as she kicked the downed man’s blade away. “This man is a mirrorpainter; he tricked us. Tatya is elsewhere.”

Costel opened his mouth to protest, but she dug her nails into his arm and dragged him out into the cover of night. Together they ran, Lacra trying to explain what she could with broken words and gasping breath. They ducked off the gravel path to cut through the tall stalks of wheat, hoping to obscure their path. A crash sounded in the night; the sound of wood cracking on stone, and Costel grabbed at her, pulling her down to the hard earth. She grunted, all the air whooshing out, and he pressed a hand over her lips. She went very, very still.

In the distance she heard the squeal of leather harnesses tightening. Then hoofbeats, tramping away down the road that ringed the city. Costel took his hand away, and eased into a crouch to peek through the grain-grasses. He waved for her to stand.

“We could take him now, make him tell us where Tatya is.”

“No. He would never talk, and you cannot best him.”

“How could you know, witch?”

She narrowed her eyes and took a step closer to him. He stepped back. “I know,” she said.

“Then we follow.”

“Another trap.” She shook her head, “I know where to find what we need. But we must hurry.”

He frowned. “How could he trick you?”

She tried to look nonplussed, but terror made her throat scratchy. She’d gotten too complacent here in the Katharnians, where mirrorpainters were rarer than lapis blue. “He drew the real images out, and put new ones in using colored chalk.”

His mouth was open, white teeth shining in the moonlight, “Can you do that?”

“If I must.”

Whether he was silent to hide his horror or conserve his breath, she couldn’t say, but it didn’t matter. The hawk-man would soon realize she wasn’t following him and then return to wherever the girl was kept to hatch a new plan. She needed to figure out his hiding place before he could move again.

Back across the footbridge, up past the tenement housing. She was only a little winded by the time they reached the lamplit intersection, and she wasn’t sure if it was fear masking her fatigue or the general haleness she’d felt ever since she’d crossed the mountains into this land. There were health benefits to being a fugitive, it seemed.

She strode straight to the center of the intersection and let her eyes unfocus. Turning, bit by bit, she scanned the area directly across from the brass plate from which she’d taken the last drawing. Back and forth, up and down, eyes seeing little more than muddled smudges of color while Costel hovered just out of her periphery. Ah! She grinned up at the lamp itself, seeing the bottom edge of its copper casing glinting in the right direction.

“Bring me something to stand on.”

Costel dragged over a barrel tall enough to reach her ribcage and helped her step onto it. He asked no questions, but incessantly drummed his fingers over the wide leather of his weapons belt. Lacra knelt a bit so that the angle was just right, and held the notepad she’d pilfered in the crook of one arm. With the stolen pencil poised above it, she let her vision blur and drifted.

Distorted light, brilliance from behind filling all directions. Nothing. Nothing. The man walking forward, a bundle on his back, he crouches before the door across the intersection and pulls a pad out. His box of colored chalks is out, his fingers dusty with their mingled hues. He draws. Lacra grabbed the image and held on tight. Her fingers moved.

When she was finished Costel helped her down from the barrel and they pored over what she’d drawn. She’d honed in on the pad in the hawk-man’s hands the best she could, and it took up the center of the page. Her shoulders slumped with relief when she saw the pilfered details. She’d never sketched another mirrorpainter’s work through an imprint before, and hadn’t been sure the conceit would work.

But there it was. The detail was fuzzy, but she could make out a man shorter than hawk-nose walking down the center road. He was cloaked, a bundle strapped across his back. He would have looked just the same as the hawk-man as he ran down the lane, but below the height of the windows he was hand in hand with a girl about Tatya’s age and height. They were just passing through the intersection, and appeared to be going straight on.

The hawk-man had removed this image from the obvious spot, and replaced it with the one of him veering off toward the tenements. She would have been impressed, if she weren’t so pissed off that she had fallen for it.

“You should send for the constable while I run them down,” she said, hating herself for asking for help.

“No time for that. If we see ’em on the way we’ll enlist ’em, but we have to get to Tatya before that man realizes we didn’t chase after him.”

The heat of the chase burned in Costel’s eyes, and she knew there would be no coercing him to go for help. It would just be a waste of time, and who knew what the kidnappers would do with the girl once they realized they were exposed? They won’t hurt her. They don’t want her, now, do they? She’s just bait, effective bait. Her fingers itched with the desire to scope the area further, to dig up any imprints that might give her a better idea of just what was waiting for her at the end of the lane.

No time for it.

“This way.” She strode off down the lane somewhere between a walk and a jog, allowing her eyes to dip in and out of reflective surfaces as they passed. The hawk-nosed man had been rushed, or just plain sloppy, because he hadn’t bothered drawing out and replacing the imprints of reflections along this route. He probably assumed they’d never discover this to be the true trail.

The lane emptied into a little courtyard ringed with inns. She froze, surveying the terrain, and let her mirror-sight drift in and out of blank panes of glass and still puddles. These were inns meant for travelers, and the images she filtered through were a dizzying array of merchants and vagabonds, touring nobles and cutthroats looking to spend their ill-got coin on a warm bed. Even in the heart of night half the windows of each inn were aglow with lamplight, and the occasional laugh burbled up through the murmur of idle chatter.

With every fruitless probe into a reflection her irritation grew until she clenched her fists so tightly her nails carved half-moons in her flesh. It was an ideal place to hide out from a mirrorpainter. The bustle of day-to-day life in places like these crippled her ability to come to any conclusion in a hurry. She lamented this as she flicked her gaze from memory to memory, and never did see the bag come down over her head.

Lacra opened her mouth to cry out, but a cloying aroma filled her nostrils and gagged her. The world around her feathered, fractured. Though she could not see, her mirrorpainter’s eye conjured up mingling colors of panic until darkness encroached, and her panic faded into bliss.

When consciousness returned, she opened her eyes to darkness. For a moment, she wondered if she had died. Then she felt harsh rope chafing her wrists and ankles, and a sharp chill settling into her bones. Light denied her, she shifted and felt a wooden cot creak beneath her. Someone had drawn a blanket up to her chin, and the wool scratched her exposed flesh. She supposed it was the only thing keeping her from death by exposure. Katharnian winters showed no one kindness.

She eased her bound ankles over the edge of the cot and wriggled her way into a sitting position. Her head spun, unused to being upright, and she squeezed her eyes shut even though it was already too dark to see. Someone had pulled thick woolen socks over her feet, and that was a relief. It meant she was probably wanted alive and in one piece, at least for now.

There was a knock at the door and she jumped, then let out a ragged laugh. What jailer knocked? The man must have taken her laugh for permission, because the door swung inward. For a moment, she was blinder in the light than she had been in the dark. Lacra flinched back from the radiance of the lamp and brought her bound wrists up to shield her eyes. She blinked and squinted, tears falling, but forced her lids open.

The hawk-man set the lamp on a small table and shuttered all but one side.

“Where’s Tatya?”

“The girl?” He spoke in the smooth language of the Alrayani, “She has been safely returned. She was not harmed.”

Lacra swallowed. It was good that Tatya was safe, but his blithe dismissal of the girl painted a clearer picture of Lacra’s future. “And Costel?”

He stepped over and cut her bindings with a thin blade, “He was glad to trade you for the girl, when we told him you were a murderer.”

She bit her lip. He was testing her resolve, trying to see if being accused would conjure up the memories of that day. A good mirrorpainter could steal the imprints from your eyes if you shuffled them up for them to steal. A good mirrorpainter could also keep his memories to himself. She kept her mind centered, focused only on the current moment.

“Boyar will send people for me.”

“No, he won’t. We told him you killed a king and stole a prince’s memories of it.”

She flinched, and felt the hawk-man’s eyes attempt to dip into hers. Lacra stared hard at him as she imagined bits of the room they were in, parading them through her foremost thoughts. He grunted, and she felt his attention slip away.

“You’re going to have to give it up eventually, you know.”

“Do you think I would have come all this way if I had any intention of giving it up? I am the stronger of the two of us. You feel that. I will die before I let the memories go.”

“Funny thing to die for, staving off an execution.”

“I have my reasons.”

He left her there with the lamp and a pot of hot somal tea. Her fingers trembled as she poured a cup and gathered the warm porcelain into her hands. She felt the heat of it leech into her flesh and bones, warming joints stiff with cold and disuse. A mirrorpainter’s hands and eyes were her most valuable assets; she feared frostbite more than she did death. When her hands warmed, she gave it a careful sniff. The brew was weak enough, the honeyed sweetness of the somal leaf muted by dilution. Better to risk the mind-lulling effects of the somal leaf than dehydration. She sipped and looked around.

The little table had only the lamp and the tea, but her cot had a trunk at the foot. She opened it and discovered more blankets, in which she wrapped herself. A chamber pot hid beneath the cot, and a washrag rested next to a half-filled basin. They expected her to be here awhile. There were no windows.

There was no food.

They’re going to starve me out. Mirrorpainters could be coaxed into giving up their memory imprints if they were severely weakened, and the fastest way to do this, save a beating, was starvation. She put her cup back in its saucer, unable to calm the tremble that had returned to her fingers.

On the second day of her captivity, the hawk-man brought her a pad and a pencil with her tea. When he had finished his morning interrogations and left, she brushed her finger pads over the smooth, blank surface. It was good paper, made from waxbark mash if memory served her, which it always did. She tugged a sheet out of the pad and looked at the little scraps left behind in the stitched binding. A whole sheet gone he would notice, but those scraps, those he would not miss.

She eased out those scraps left behind, and began to soak them in her tea.

When he returned on the third morning, she had been dozing. She lifted her head, and for once since her captivity began did not feel the slosh of liquid in an empty stomach. He sat the teapot down and surveyed what she had drawn on the pages he’d given her. Lacra knew that he would hope for her to slip up, to edge in some tiny detail that might give away the prince’s linchpin imprint. She had been meticulous in avoiding such a mistake.

Each scene was a representation of a moment in her life before that terrible day. It was safe for her to sketch with the charcoal, only scenes drawn in color could take away or replace a person’s memories. And they weren’t true memories anyway, just drawings. They were scenes which included her, not taken directly from her point of view.

All her time at court she laid out in whorls and cross-hatching. Most of it spent with the prince. With Alfon. She drew him as she had seen him; as she had known him. Always smiling, laughing. Larger than life and yet sweet and humble. The hawk-man picked up one sheet, and she saw him touch the surface in the place where a fallen tear had marred the image. It was still clear enough.

Alfon, ring in hand.

Lacra lay back down on her cot and pulled the blanket to her chin. The hawk-man left without asking her the questions. She let her tea grow cold.

The next morning, he brought her gruel. She sat cross-legged on the floor of her cell, blankets wrapped high around her shoulders, the images of her life scattered around her like downed leaves. He cleared a small spot before her and sat the bowl between them. He rested his forearms on his knees and leaned back.

“Eat.”

“Why?”

“Just eat.”

She reached for the bowl, unable to help herself. More than anything she dreaded that he would take it back, that he would laugh at her for being so foolish as to think he would offer her sustenance. Lacra cradled the bowl in one hand and shoveled the food into her mouth with two fingers. It was the most marvelous thing she had ever tasted.

“Slowly,” he warned, “or you will throw it up.”

It pained her to do so, but she rested the bowl in her lap and began to dip out smaller portions. So very, very small.

“You loved him?”

She coughed, choking, and he handed her tea without the too-sweet aroma of the somal leaf. She drank, taking the time to smooth her mind as well as her throat. “Yes.”

“Then why withhold the truth from him?”

“That I cannot say.”

She saw him dig his fingers into his knees, but his face stayed placid. “Not knowing is killing him.”

“It would kill him to know.”

“Can you be so sure?”

“Yes.”

She saw his hesitation, his fear. She had painted a thousand faces; she knew the configurations of them all. Just as he did, she felt sure of that. He could read her just as easily, and know that she was telling him the truth, insofar as she believed it herself.

“We are two mirrorpainters. A great deal could be accomplished between us.”

Her flesh prickled and her stomach protested its food. She let her gruel-coated fingers rest on the inner edge of the bowl and licked her lips. “He’s here, isn’t he? That is why you haven’t moved me back to the coast. He will not let you leave until he knows.… He was the man. With Tatya. I had wondered.”

The hawk-man hesitated before nodding, no doubt trying to work out how he could fool her into thinking Prince Alfon—no, King Alfon—was safely back in his coastal palace. Apparently, he decided he couldn’t slip it past her. It was a good choice, because it was correct. She could see the shape of Alfon in the man with Tatya clearly now. How had she not noticed before?

Well, it had been so long. How could she be sure?

“He should not be here. It is dangerous for him to be without his Honor Guard.”

The hawk-man waved a dismissive hand, “The chancellor oversees Alrayani in his absence. Alfon is said to be on a hunting expedition on the south coast. His cousins there know the truth. He could not be waylaid from chasing down the rumor of a mirrorpainter in the north. Believe me, I tried. Which is why I want to get this over with quickly. You will show him?”

“If I am correct that knowing will be worse than not, will you help me reconstruct matters?”

“Yes.”

“Then you had better bring me very, very good paint.”

“You did not save the linchpin?”

She shook her head. “I burned it that very night.”

He flinched. To burn a painted linchpin of the human eye was sacrilege, but she no longer cared whom she offended. At the time, she had felt it was the only way to secure Alfon’s blanket of ignorance. She was just as sure of that now.

“I will return with what you need.”

He left her there, huddled over her cup and her gruel, struggling to push aside her misgivings. This man, the hawk-man, cared for Alfon. She could see it in his eyes, in the way he set his lips and shoulders as he talked about his king. She had not known the hawk-man during her time at the palace, but she felt certain he was loyal unto death. That level of devotion could not be faked, which was why he had seen the same sentiment within her.

It was not the hawk-man who entered her cell next.

She did not recognize him at first, though on an instinctual level she knew who he must be. The king had grown gaunt, his cheeks hollow and his shoulders stiff with bone. His eyes were dull and bloodshot, his beard left wild. His movements were halting as he came to sit beside her on the cot. They did not look at each other, but stared at the floor between their feet. He pretended not to notice the sketches of him scattered around.

He smelled the same: cedar and lamp smoke. He always did stay up late, huddled too close to the light to better see his books. “I just need to know.”

“You will. I will paint it.”

“Can’t you just tell me?”

“No, it’s better for you to remember.”

“I cannot understand how, how you could … He was my father, Lacra. My father.”

“I know. You will understand.”

“His last words … Promise me I’ll remember those.”

“I promise.”

He squeezed her knee when he got up, an old habit, and placed a sack of supplies by the door as he left. She crawled to them and spilled the tiny pots and brushes out upon the floor. The hawk-man had done as promised. These were richly pigmented, a hard thing to find in the shadow of the Katharnians.

Lacra laid the bit of stretched canvas on the floor and dipped some of her wash water into an empty teacup. Closing her eyes, she drew up the moment she had stolen from Alfon, the linchpin memory that would spark his recalling all that had happened between that moment, and the moment she took it from him.

It had been a warm day on the southern coast. The sky had been blue and clear, a hard thing to remember in the north. She recalled the feel of sun on her exposed arms, the warmth of the horse beneath her, the animal smell. She dipped her brush in the water, and opened the first paint pot.

The hawk-man returned in the morning and found her dozing on the floor, sketches tangled in her hair. She pushed herself upright and rubbed at her eyes, feeling dry grit behind them. He handed her tea and gruel, and she ate while he examined her work. “This is it?”

She understood his confusion. It was an innocuous scene, just before disaster had struck. From Alfon’s point of view, the painting showed only Lacra and his father mounted side-by-side, setting out on the trail north to the oak forest.

“It is. I was in a hurry, and I wound back too far. Do you still hold to our agreement?”

She kept the lamp near to hand just in case. It would be messy, but if she timed it just right, she could set the painting ablaze, and then, just maybe, make her escape. As silence expanded between them, her fingers crept toward the light.

“If he gets worse, I will help you correct it.” He passed his hand before his eyes, the mirrorpainter sign of trust, and she let her hand go slack.

“Bring him here.”

He handed the painting to her and left again. While he was gone, she cleared a place for Alfon to sit and covered the painting with a corner of her blanket. He would have to reveal it to himself. Asking her to force that day upon him was just too much.

Alfon sat in the spot prepared for him and leaned over the covered painting. He licked his lips, pale hands clasped tightly. The hawk-man came and sat beside her, both directly across from the king so that they could view the return of his memories. The hawk-man to make sure it was done, Lacra to witness what her decisions wrought.

“Do I just …” He held up the corner of the blanket and mimed pulling it back. She nodded. He uncovered her work, and his pupils dilated. She unfocused her eyes and witnessed the return of his memories.

They’d ridden up to the oak forest on a high jetty of earth overlooking the bay. It was a wide strip of land, and as the summer air warmed, the great stags of the Alrayani forests congregated there to claim the land for the rearing of their herds.

Alfon had been bored—this she had not known at the time, but felt through his recalling—and circled back on the hunting trail, hoping to flush out a stag or doe and bring it down quickly so that they could return to the palace for his evening dram of port.

He spotted Lacra to the north, and assumed the king was with her. They had been together when he left them, after all. Movement in the brush, quick and furtive. He fired.

The king hadn’t seen it coming—he turned his head away.

Lacra cried out a warning. Too late.

The arrow thunked into the side of the king’s neck and tore out again. Crimson spray arced through the clear summer air and the king looked up, wonder and confusion in his eyes. He put his hand to his neck and took it away, red all over. Numb shock fled before reality and he fell forward, landing hard on his knees. Lacra and Alfon rushed to his side, and the king put his hand back to hold the wound together. Blood spilled. Pooled. Spurted.

Alfon grabbed up his father, weeping. The old king patted him on the back with his unencumbered hand.

“It’s not your fault,” he said before pink foam filled his mouth.

Lacra pushed Alfon aside, spilling cloth bandages from her pack, and tried to staunch the bleeding. It was no use. Each of the king’s fearful heartbeats hastened his death.

Alfon had been delirious, inconsolable. The next memories to flow through were a torrent of rage, guilt, pain. Reality shifted into smears of color and then he was standing, so clearly, on the edge of the cliffside, staring at the rocky beach below. Lacra grabbed him, forced him to the ground. She was smaller, but he was incapable of any real resistance. She spilled her pouch of colored chalks upon the ground and forced the prince to look at her. He saw his memories unwind as she ran them backward.

On a clean bandage laid flat in the grass, she drew.

Alfon wept. He sat in their little room, huddled over himself, face buried in his hands, and rocked back and forth with each sob. With all the weight of a bird’s wing, she touched her fingers to his shoulder. He let out a low moan and uncoiled, only to wrap himself around her.

“I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry I ever thought you could …”

“Hush, now.”

She stroked his hair and held him as he trembled. Over the head of the sobbing king, she locked eyes with the hawk-man. He nodded, once, and passed his hand before his eyes. Then he took the painting, and burnt it.

Lacra had freedom after that. Her room was still her own, but the whole of what she now knew was a hunting cabin was open to her. In the dead of night she stood on a wide balcony overlooking the valley below. They had chosen a good place for secrecy; this stretch of land was rarely visited save during the prime hunting days of springtime. Below her not a single campfire burned, and above her the sky was hung with diamond-bright stars.

The hawk-man came to stand beside her and rested his forearms against the railing. They stood in silence a long while, looking out over nothing at all.

“You were right. He can’t go on like this. He’s determined to turn himself in to clear your name.”

“They’ll hang him for it. His uncles will be happy to. It will mean an opening on the throne.”

“We have to correct this, but we cannot just take it out again or this will start all over. He would run himself into the ground, searching for you, hoping to discover the truth.”

“Then we will give him a different truth,” Lacra said. “Come with me.”

She led him back into her room. Alfon was deep in the sleep of grief, and she felt sure he could not be stirred. They had returned her wooden case to her, and from it she produced her favorite notepad.

“What do you know about reprinting?”

“Only what I’ve demonstrated to you. I can remove a mundane imprint with charcoal or an eye imprint with color, and stage a new one with color to be brought out later. It’s a crude thing, when rushed.

“I have been thinking, what if we were to deconstruct an event? Take it moment by moment and change things just slightly.”

He swallowed. “Insert another person, a new killer? Then how would we explain your running, your memory theft?”

“No, no.” She shook her head. “I was thinking we could make the accident mine, in his truth. Put the bow in my hand.”

“He would still hunt for you. He would want to prove it was an accident to the council, and such a thing would not hold up under a mirrorpainter-led investigation. It would all fall apart, and he would hang anyway.”

She gave him a small, tight smile. “It is difficult to chase a dead woman.”

“I see.”

“Shall we begin?”

They removed the lids from the pots, and two sets of brushes began to move. When they reached the last set of images, Lacra reached out to stay the hawk-man’s hand. “These stay the same. I will paint them.”

“Are you sure?”

“These are his father’s last words. He needs this. I promised.”

The next morning she woke beside the king, her fingers stiff and curled from having drawn and painted all night. It was impossible to capture every minuscule moment, but she had managed to sketch all of the key events of that fateful day. Together, she and the hawk-man painted them, shifted them. Twisted tiny little details until the narrative fit just right.

Beside her, Alfon stirred into wakefulness. She held her breath, waiting, crossing her fingers beneath the thick blankets. She dared to turn her head just enough to make out his movements, and saw him rub his eyes, then stare straight ahead. The first of the painted images was tacked to the wall directly across from where he lay. Lacra had gambled he would not shift position in his sleep.

He shook his head and stood, stretching. Lacra closed her eyes in relief. He had seen the painting, she was sure of it, but mirrorpaintings were moments in time, not artwork. He had seen the painting as a random memory bubbling to the surface of his thoughts, nothing more. This just might work.

When he had gone from the room, she burnt it.

The next few days progressed much the same. Each morning the king laid his eyes on a new sequence, and sometimes she and the hawk-man managed to place more paintings about the cabin for him to find, always in order. The sequence was key to keeping him ignorant of their conceit. After awhile, he began to seem less gloomy, and his glances toward her became more and more worrisome.

On the fifth day, he slipped up behind her and rested his chin on her shoulder. “It’s okay, Lacra. It was an accident.”

She closed her eyes and leaned against his chest, trying to keep the tension in her body from relaying what she felt to him. But what did she feel? She was the murderer now, in his eyes at least, but she carried no guilt, only a slight tinge of pride that came with manipulating her skill to the best of her abilities. Pride and sadness. Her time in the cabin with Alfon was over.

“I know,” she said, “I know.”

That night the hawk-man found her on the balcony after the king had gone to rest.

“Well?”

“He believes.”

The hawk-man rubbed at his face with both hands and then shook his head. His eyes were a little wild, his lips turned up. “I can’t believe it worked. I don’t think anyone has done anything like this before.”

“And no one will ever know. If someone even begins to suspect such a thing is possible …”

“You’re right, I know. It’s just—” he shrugged. “I wish you could take the credit you deserve.”

“You’ll know. That’s enough. I’m counting on you to look after him. I’ve compiled sketches of what really happened, so that you can reference them if you need to fill in any blanks. Keep them secret, and burn them if exposure is imminent.”

“I will. Will it be tonight?”

“In the morning. There are some preparations I need your help with.”

“Name them.”

When next the sun rose, Lacra watched from her hiding place in the craggy valley as a deer carcass wrapped in her cloak plummeted from the balcony to the jagged terrain below. She was too far away to hear or see any of the details, but she knew the hawk-man would have cried out, gotten Alfon’s attention right before the bundle gave way to gravity and tipped forward toward certain death. They would then find the suicide note on the balcony floor, penned in her own hand, spelling out her grief and her guilt. Alfon would never go searching for her again.

She stayed in the valley through the day, unwilling to leave that place until she felt certain that Alfon was back on the road to the south. The hawk-man had provided her a good horse, saddlebags laden with supplies. She could afford to linger.

In the night she saw them burn her, or what scraps the hawk-man had found of “her,” on a pyre near the river. When she heard Alfon’s weeping, she knew it was past time for her to go.

He will heal from this, she told herself. He must.

Lacra turned her horse toward the north, and prepared to cross another range of mountains.