The Spriggan Mirror. Lawrence Watt-Evans
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piece by bedtime.”
Just then Twilfa emerged, carrying a tray bearing a pot and two cups of tea.
“Just two?” Chira asked, as she accepted hers.
“Mine’s in the kitchen,” Twilfa said.
“You’re welcome to listen,” Gresh said. “It’s all in the family.”
“No, that’s all right,” Twilfa replied. She set the teapot on a nearby shelf, then turned, tray in hand, and retreated toward the kitchen.
Gresh frowned at her departing figure.
“I make her nervous,” Chira said quietly, cradling her teacup.
“You’re her sister,” Gresh protested.
“I’m twice her age,” Chira pointed out. “I was halfway through my apprenticeship by the time she could crawl.”
“Well, I was about thirteen, and an apprentice myself,” Gresh said. “It’s not as if we were playmates, either.”
“But she works for you. She sees you every day. And you don’t carry around a bag of mysterious ancient talismans.”
“No, I sit in a shop full of magic! Blood and body parts on every shelf and a vault with explosive seals only I can open!” Then he waved it away. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”
“We’ve always been a competitive family,” Chira said. “You were special, being the only boy, so maybe you didn’t…”
“I noticed,” Gresh interrupted. “I definitely noticed. But that doesn’t mean I like it when Twilfa treats you like a stranger.”
“Not a stranger,” Chira said.
“Not a sister, either!”
Chira raised her empty hands. “Never mind that. I’m not here to see Twilfa, or to talk about her.”
“Fine. At any rate, I want to find the mirror. Can you help? And rest assured, I won’t just hand it over to my employer with no questions asked.”
“I can’t see how I can find the mirror directly,” she replied. “It doesn’t give off light or sound or odor, so far as you know?”
“No.”
“And it was an ordinary mirror before it was enchanted, not made of anything unusual?”
“Just a mirror—polished metal, or glass and silver, I suppose.”
“Then I can’t think of anything that would find the mirror itself.” She hauled her pack up onto her lap as she spoke and began unbuckling the straps. “But I do have something that might be useful.”
“Oh?”
She rummaged in the bag as she said, “I have something you can use to find and follow spriggans. Maybe when you get close you can use it to backtrack to the mirror.”
Gresh nodded thoughtfully. “That might help,” he agreed.
She pulled a talisman from the pack, a dully gleaming metal disk that looked rather like a hand-mirror itself, and held it out. “It isn’t specific to spriggans,” she said. “But it can tell you when anything is moving within a hundred feet of you and follow the motion, even if you can’t see anything yourself. You can tell it to watch one movement and ignore another, or tell it to watch for a particular size or speed.”
Gresh accepted the disk warily and looked at its round surface; his reflected gaze looked back at him, far more faintly than from an actual mirror, but still clear enough.
“How does it work?” he said.
CHAPTER FIVE
Operating the sorcerous talisman was not as simple as Gresh would have liked. He was sitting in his front room, once again going over the various gestures and commands it obeyed, making sure he wouldn’t forget them, when the front bell jingled. He looked up from the device as Twilfa hurried from the kitchen to answer the door.
He had been practicing with it since Chira left, which had been long enough for Twilfa to clean up the broken jar, wipe up the spilled blood as best she could, and arrange a carpet and a few boxes to hide the bloodstains, which Gresh had promised to have magically removed at the first opportunity. She had scarcely finished that when Tira had arrived at the back door, and Twilfa had barely settled her in the kitchen with a sausage roll and a mug of small beer when the bell rang. Twilfa still reached the front door before Gresh could even slip the talisman into the pouch on his belt. Twilfa was in full bustle this afternoon, rushing around and getting things done with remarkable efficiency. By the time he was upright and had straightened his tunic, she was showing the customers in.
The young man Twilfa ushered into the shop appeared to be in his mid-twenties, but since this was presumably Tobas of Telven, a wizard powerful enough to own a flying carpet, appearances might not mean much in this case. He had dull brown hair and rather pale skin and stood just slightly taller than average. He wore a black tunic trimmed with red and gold, and good leather breeches.
Behind him were two women—the tall, black-haired witch, and a shorter, plumper woman with hair equally black, but curly rather than straight. She had milky-pale skin, whereas Karanissa’s was brown, and the other woman held a bundle in her arms—a bundle with tiny fingers and a face.
The baby was wrapped in fine white linen embroidered in blue and green; its mother wore green velvet and yellow silk. The family could obviously afford to dress well, though Gresh did not think much of their taste—no two of them went together well, not even the mother and child.
“Come in, come in,” he called, tucking the talisman out of sight as Twilfa ushered the foursome through the door. He rose to greet them—and not incidentally, to impress them with his own height and physique. That little bit of psychological advantage might be useful.
Karanissa stepped forward to make introductions. The man was indeed her husband Tobas, the other woman her co-wife Alorria of Dwomor, and the infant was their daughter Alris, who was still at an age where she did little more than stare, wave her hands aimlessly, and occasionally drool.
“She’s named for her grandmother,” Alorria said, as Gresh smiled down at the baby and held out a finger for her to grab. “The queen of Dwomor.”
Gresh managed to hide his surprise at that. When he had first heard the baby’s name, he had immediately wondered whether it deliberately combined elements of both wives’ names, which would have been a remarkable bit of diplomacy. In his admittedly limited experience with polygamists, co-wives tended to treat each other like sisters, which is to say, with a great deal of barely concealed rivalry and an intense interest in maintaining their own place within the family. For a mother to give a baby a name that reflected both women hardly fit that model, so it wasn’t surprising that Alris was not, in fact, named in part for Karanissa, nor that Alorria made sure he knew that—but it was surprising that Alorria’s mother was a queen.
Alorria herself had not been introduced as a princess—but then, she was married to a wizard, and the Wizards’ Guild would not allow someone to be both wizard and royal. Alorria had presumably had to give up her title and her place in the succession when she married Tobas.
Gresh wondered what that place had been. If she had been next in line for the throne then her attachment to Tobas must have been quite intense, but if she had half a dozen older brothers then she hadn’t really given up much of anything. The Small Kingdoms were awash in surplus princesses, due to the tradition that princesses must marry princes or heroes, but princes could marry anyone they chose—emphasis on any one, as multiple marriages complicated the bloodlines and inheritances too much and were therefore not normally permitted for royalty. Which was another reason Alorria’s shared marriage seemed odd.
How in the World had this Tobas wound up married to a witch and a princess? It wasn’t as if it was common for a man to have more than one wife; most women wouldn’t stand for it. Gresh had only very rarely managed to keep company