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The headmaster’s office had the odd quality of seeming larger than it was because mirrors hung on the backs of the doors. I saw everything twice: the wall of windows, the ranks of bookshelves reaching from floor to the crown moldings, the wide table with paper and books covering its entire surface, and the severed head of the poet and legal scholar Bran Cof atop a pedestal. The headmaster was watching me in one of the mirrors. I could see things in mirrors that others could not, threads of magic like the fine lines of spiders’ webs. In the mirror, he looked like a perfectly ordinary old man. No threads of cold magic wove around his form as they did around Andevai. No vast winged shape billowed from his slender frame. He looked as solid as the furniture.

“Natural historians speculate that mirrors reflect the binding threads of energy that run between this world and the unseen spirit world,” he remarked, as if he had divined my thoughts. “Do you suppose that is true, Maestressa Barahal?”Advertisement

I glanced down at my scuffed and muddy boots. The ends of the laces had been chewed up as by hungry mice. The longcase clock ticked like the pacing of ethereal feet.

“My apologies, but we don’t have time for speculation,” said Bee. She walked to the corner where the head of the poet Bran Cof rested like a stone bust. I broke into a prickling sweat. I could not bear the thought of those eyelids snapping open, yet I could not look away no matter how much I wanted to. “When did the head speak? What did he say?”

The headmaster smiled enigmatically. “The very questions I meant to ask you. It was at dawn. I was seated here at my desk reading aloud, as is my habit. This day it happened to be a monograph on the salt plague which I recently received from one of my correspondents at the University of Expedition. Perhaps the same words will waken him again.” He glanced at a printed pamphlet lying open on his desk. “‘According to report, if a human is bitten by a ghoul, the onset of the disease is so swift and implacable that the victim will become morbid in less than seven days. However, if a human is bitten by a plague-ridden human, there are three distinct and slower stages through which the disease progresses, although the disease remains invariably fatal.’”

The head remained fixed. Bloodless lips kept their disapproving pinch. The lime-whitened spikes of his hair and the luxuriant droop of his mustache made his features look younger than what the heavy crow’s-feet radiating out from his deep-set eyes told of years and trials. Three scars like ritual marks formed a column beneath his right ear. Maybe the head was just stone after all.

Maybe it was all a mistake.

“If you have something to say, Bran Cof, speak now.” Bee’s voice rang above the whispering crackle of the fire burning in the circulating stove. “My cousin and I cannot wait forever.”

“Bee!” I cautioned.

“And furthermore,” she continued in the tone of an Immortal Fury who has just remembered an ancient slight and means to pursue vengeance to the ends of the Earth, “if you are really bound between this world and the spirit world as it is said poets and sorcerers and djeliw and bards can be—which I admit seems quite unpleasant, for wouldn’t it be rather like being forced to stand in a doorway all the time, neither going nor coming? Anyway, if you are so bound, then I wish you would not be so coy about it. I know you are a very famous legal scholar, one of the Three Even-Handed Jurists of the old Brigantes Confederation, so I would hope you would show us consideration now we are come before you, at your request. Yes, I am aware we are required to defer to poets, whose words reveal the world in ways we who are not poets could not otherwise see. And your fame as one of the Three Silver Tongues of the western Celts is naturally enough to awe and impress humble students like ourselves. But I must say, the constant references to women as roses with thorns seems a bit much. Men torment women far more than women torment men.”

Did the sun escape a cloudy veil outside? A gleam shuddered within the reflecting angles of the mirrors like the spark of fireflies. A cowl of silvery light writhed around the head of the poet Bran Cof. Color washed the pallor of his face. There crawled beneath his skin a straining like insects swarming or a trapped prisoner trying to claw its way out.

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She rolled blithely on. “I can’t endure these constant protestations about the chains women bind on men. In truth, the chains all bind women at the feet of men.”

His eyes opened, corpse-still one moment and full of ire the next.

“Bold Taranis spare me from the complaints of virgins!” His voice was resonant, as lovely as a caress, even in anger. “Especially ones whose black hair is a snare to entwine the helpless and whose dark eyes provoke the tenderhearted to grief. How I despise the beauty of women!” pqdm.com