Gannon could hear them. The King’s Champion lounged on the floor, his right arm leaned across the end of a low divan.
There were twenty or more people watching Aria’s performance, young men and women—all the women beautifully gowned and none of them as beautiful as the princess.
Gannon, with his black garb and dark good looks, was in the center of the group. His eyes were on Aria, and it seemed to Dennis that she looked back at the champion more than chance would require.
Gannon smiled.
“No!” Dennis cried, turning his head.
He’d come to the mirror for reassurance. The mirror instead gave him truth; two truths, and neither of them reassuring in the least.
“No,” Dennis repeated as he looked again, his voice now a whisper. His tortured expression gazed back at him, looking for help that the youth didn’t know the words to ask for.
His face hardened, and he shrugged loose the sword at his side. “Show me—” he ordered. “Show me any other huts that are, are beside this pasture.”
Dennis was wondering how he could rephrase his question and make it clear to the mirror—to the demon or device which controlled the mirror—that he wanted to find another creature like Malbawn or Malduanan.
“Before they find me,” Dennis muttered aloud.
Chester made a metallic snorting sound.
“All right!” the youth snapped as he looked down at his companion. “But it’s something I can do something about. Not like Emath.”
And not like the Princess Aria, who could look at anyone and sing to anyone she pleased. Whether Dennis, a vagabond and visitor to Rakastava, liked it or not.
Dennis was blushing as he turned back to the mirror. Chester knew him too well.
Chester had saved his life against Malduanan.
The mirror had understood his instructions. On it gloomed the image of Malduanan’s hut, hunching in the woods where Dennis had left it less than an hour before. The vision had remarkable depth and detail: when a scarlet lizard scooted up the doorframe, its tail seemed to flick beyond the surface of the glass.
“That’s good,” Dennis said encouragingly, as though he were speaking to another person instead of a thing of glass and bronze. “But show me a different one. Is there a—”
The picture was shifting before Dennis could finish his question. As he blinked at the new scene, he thought the mirror had made a mistake after all: this was a real house, not a hovel of twigs and moldy leaves.
It was small, but no smaller than the old houses in Emath village which had been built before space in the bustling community became too valuable to waste on one-story dwellings. The house sat at—in—the margin of the jungle, the way Malbawn and Malduanan’s huts did, but it had a proper, human-sized door with a window to either side. The walls seemed to be shingled, and the roof was probably covered with thatch.
It couldn’t be hair, though that was what it looked like no matter how carefully Dennis squinted.
“Show me the inside,” he ordered.
He was getting very used to the mirror. It didn’t make him uncomfortable, the way he’d felt when using the Wizard Serdic’s device.
That had put him into an unreal scene—unreal because it was part of the past and therefore dead. Malbawn’s mirror was no more than a window through which Dennis could look. He could understand the mirror.
So long as he didn’t think too closely about it.
The image in the mirror flip-flopped as though a painting were being spun—front-side, back-side, and both images executed in meticulous detail.
Inside the house, a plump old woman in bonnet and apron was sweeping the floor with a twig broom.
“Oh!” Dennis gasped.
He’d expected some horrific monster, though why…? This was a human dwelling. A man as tall as Dennis would have to duck to step through the doorway. A creature like Malbawn or Malbawn’s brother—
Well, either of those monsters were nearly as big as this whole house.
The house had only one room. The woman stood her broom in the corner and checked a pot of something on the brick stove. Apparently satisfied, she opened the door and finished her sweeping with firm, quick strokes. Her face was old—lined and gray.