PROLOGUE
THEY had set free the fire of her house.
That was noth ing. Her house had been burned by the master of fire,
and she had restored it. She had burned in such fire as made this a
dance of sunlight on water, bright but harmless. But if they had
intended not her destruction but their own escape, they had
succeeded. And there were others in her house less inured to fire.
She called the water-beasts without the proper forms of their
names. They would match this discourtesy by coming without further
preliminaries, and thus escape the fire. As she thought so, they
surrounded her, bubbling and spouting. The faint smoke in the room
was overlaid with damp purple mist, and the fire’s crackling
drowned in the rush and murmur of innumerable waters. She wished it
were better than an illusion.
“Flee the fire,” she said. “After the time it
takes to boil six kettles, I will requite this barbarous
rudeness.”
They hissed like a gallon of water spilled on a
giant’s griddle, and were gone. The smoke grew thicker. She could
not remember how many cats were in the house, and cursed the humor
that made them all black cats. She called each cat’s six names, and
in a little time had all nine of them climbing her skirts. No cat
that had lived with her feared fire. But they were indignant, and
disposed to be intransigent. She crouched and gathered them in,
grinning. So those children had broken the mirrors in her house.
Who would break the mirrors in her mind?
She spared a moment to look into one that offered
no escape: not for her, and not for those she looked at. She saw
Fence and Randolph, in High Castle, in its Mirror Room. They did
not know what its mirrors could accomplish, and in any case were
occupied with other matters. It pleased her to see them standing
there as the outline of their doom took shape, surrounded by
salvation and thinking it ornament.
Randolph was thinner than when she had danced
with him at Midsummer Eve, his face sharper, his green eyes darker,
his wild black hair limp and his bewitching voice hardly better
than a croak. He looked as if he had been ill a fortnight.
“Truly I felt such nudgings and nibblings as thou
ex-plainest thus,” he said, “but I tell thee, Fence, not once did I
feel them regarding King William. That foul crime I did of my own
will.”
She had never seen Fence look like this. Nothing
she did could make him suffer so. Randolph could make him suffer
worse, and, before the end, no doubt he would.
“Will you, then,” said Fence, “tell me why?” His
round green eyes and innocent face beneath the untidy brown hair
were not amusing, and his shortness was no cause for contempt. He
was formidable.
“That you might be here to reproach me,” said
Randolph. He suffered Fence’s look and countered with mere
steadiness. He seemed to be bearing some pain so great that he
dared not attend to it. She had never seen Randolph look so,
either.
She reached out a hand, and frowned. Her
mind-mirrors were but doors or windows; they were not, as the
mirrors of her house had been, instruments of her will. She could
work no nudgings and nibblings from here.
“Better far that I were dead, having had no doubt
of thee while I lived,” said Fence, still looking up at
Randolph.
“What? Dead, the truth undiscovered?” said
Randolph. The mockery in his voice was mild, but she felt it in her
bones like a curse. So, it seemed, did Fence.
“You made this truth!” shouted Fence. “Spare me
your convolvings.”
“I had thought to,” said Randolph, and the
mockery now was leveled at himself. “Edward, I thought, had killed
me long since.”
“Edward,” said Fence, as though he still did not
believe it, “is dead. You are the Regent.”
“I am a regicide.”
“A perfect jest, then,” said Fence. “Having
killed King William, his heir dead already, you must take William’s
place.”
“That is madness.”
“No,” said Fence, “it is justice.”
She laughed. She would not have thought of this.
Had those children done it? Both men started at the laugh; Randolph
drew his dagger. She chuckled, in her mind only, as they snatched
back the tapestries covering the mirror. Their arts could not
discover her, unless she continued so careless.
“An the very air laugh at us, is that not justice
also?” said Randolph.
Fence’s mouth quirked, but he said nothing.
“Fence, it is not justice to make me king. What
of the country? I am a poison as potent as that wherewith I struck
down William, the only antidote thereto being my death.”
“If that were all, all would be easy,” said
Fence. “You are not the poison. Your act is that. Though you die
and enter the shadows and forget what you have done, yet you have
done it, and all our history to come is poisoned thereby. At least
stay and see your handiwork.”
“Stars in heaven,” said Randolph. As he had in
the event, he looked far more poisoned than had the dying
King.
“The lesson of Melanie was ever bitter to your
mind,” said Fence. “Learn it now with your heart. Life gained by
treachery is a pain sharper than death.”
In her fury at this statement, though it was an
old axiom in the teachings of the Blue Sorcerers, she almost spoke
aloud to them. But a brisk blow on her cheek brought her back to
the burning house, where an unhappy cat resented her neglect.
“Quite right, small one,” she said to it. “All
attend.”
She found in her mind a mirror that was a door,
and sent three cats where they would be most useful. She found the
second door, and pulled herself and the other six cats through it,
to her House in the Hidden Land, four leagues from where Fence and
Randolph turned and turned in the maze she had made for them. She
must consider now whether it was still possible to bring them to
the trap at its heart.