“How do you know it’s a stone wall? Face it, you haven’t tried all that hard. There’s got to be something here for you. All you have to do is find it.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Patrius was. He must have had a reason to bring you here.”
“Moira says Patrius made a mistake.”
“Moira may be beautiful, but she’s not always right.”
“Well . . .”
“Moira is a consideration, though. If you were someone here, it might change her attitude.”
“If you’re going to offer to play me a game, I refuse,” Wiz told the mirror.
“No offer,” the mirror told him. “Only the observation.”
“Okay, but what could make me special here?”
The mirror was silent.
“Well?” Wiz demanded.
“I don’t know the answer to that.”
“Great. Then why the hell bring it up?”
“Because you have two choices,” the mirror bored on inexorably. “You can believe you will never amount to anything here, never fit in, and dissolve in your own bile. Or you can believe you have a place here and try to find it. Which do you prefer?”
“All right. But how? What do I have to do?”
“You’ll think of something,” the mirror told him.
“You’ll think of something,” Wiz mimicked. “Thanks a lot!”
“Sparrow?” Wiz turned and there was Shiara standing in the open door.
“Who are you talking to?” she asked. Wiz flushed and opened his mouth to deny it. Then he changed his mind. After all, magic worked here.
“I was talking to the mirror, Lady.”
Shiara frowned. “The mirror?”
“Well, it talked to me first,” he said defensively.
Frowning, the mistress of Hart’s Ease swept into the room, her long black gown swishing on the uneven floor. “This mirror?” she asked, putting out a hand to brush her fingertips across its silvery surface.
“Yes, Lady. That mirror.”
Shiara smiled and shook her head.
“I’m sorry, Lady, I know you don’t allow magic in the castle, but . . .”
“Sparrow, I think you have been brooding overmuch,” Shiara told him gently.
“Lady?”
“There is no magic here. This is an ordinary mirror.”
“No magic?” Wiz repeated dumbly.
“No magic at all. Just a mirror.”
Wiz felt himself turning crimson to his hair roots. “But it talked to me! I heard it.”
“It talked to you or you talked to you?” she asked gently. “Sometimes it is easier to hear things about ourselves if they appear to come from outside us.”
Wiz looked back at the mirror, but the mirror remained mute.
Late one afternoon Wiz happened to pass Moira in the great hall.
“Moira,” he asked, as she went by with a nod, “what happened to Shiara?”
The hedge witch stopped. “Eh?”
“She was a wizardess, wasn’t she? But Ugo told me magic hurts her.”
“It does. To be in the presence of even tiny magics causes her pain. That is why she lives here in the quietest of the Quiet Zones in a keep built without the least magic.”
“How?”
“What happened?”
“By carpenters, masons and other workers who built without magic. Isn’t that the way you build things in your world?”
“No, I mean how did it happen to her?”
Moira hesitated. “She lost her sight, her magic and her love all in one day. It is a famous tale, but of course you would never have heard it.” She sighed. “Shiara the Silver they called her. With her warrior lover, Cormac the Gold, she ranged the World recovering dangerous magical objects that they might be held safely in the Council’s vaults.
“Not only was she of the Mighty, but she was a picklock of unusual skill. No matter what wards and traps protected a thing, she could penetrate them. No matter how fierce the guards set over a thing, Cormac could defeat them. With him to guard her back, she removed magic from the grasp of the League itself.”
“What happened?”
“We went to the well once too often,” Shiara said drily from the doorway.
They both whirled and blushed. “Your pardon, Lady,” Moira stammered. “I did not know . . .”
“Granted willingly.” Shiara swept into the hall, moving unerringly to them. “So you have not heard my story, Sparrow?”