Mirror Witch [complete]

Part 1

The orb in my hand pulsed when I spoke, cascading spirals of green, yellow, blue and pink across the astonished faces of those gathered around me.

Etine actually cooed.

"Do it again!" she urged, even as Gion was asking, "What's the trick?"

"No trick!" I laughed, setting the thing to glimmering once again. "You just talk to it and it glows. Here, you try it."

I pushed the orb into his hands. It was a dull thing to look at, normally. Just a sphere of cloudy glass with what looked like a crack deep in its heart. I had almost missed it, tucked away in a corner of the trinket shop. But when the shopkeeper showed me what it could do, I had to have it, even though it cost me a month's allowance. There'd be no new gown for the Promenade next month, but that hardly bothered me. Swaths of silk and velvet couldn't fascinate the Court so much as novelty did.

"What do I do?" The orb pulsed with color even as the words came out of his mouth. For his fluting tenor voice it seemed to favor flashes of gold threaded with a shimmer of bright, fresh violet.

After that, everyone had to try it, passing it from hand to hand and babbling mostly nonsense just to see it light up. Well, nearly everyone.

"You always pick the most useless toys, Sancha," Verina said from her seat at the card table. "No wonder you've never accomplished anything of note."

"It's not useless!" Etine retorted. "It's pretty!"

I said nothing, though I felt the prick of Verina's icy barb. She was my cousin, more by marriage than by blood, though we looked enough alike we might be sisters. We had come to Court in the same season, and our paths had twined together from the first. But any jests of sisterhood quickly faded as our differences became more pronounced. Verina oozed elegance and grace, and she was admired for her talents as a musician and poet, for her clever, witty tongue, and for her ever impeccable sense of fashion. Her rise to the Queen's ministry had seemed effortless and inevitable. I, on the other hand, was all knotty elbows and funny faces, and no real merits except the tenacity that had eventually earned me an appointment as a minor functionary in a sub-council. She was a jewel made for the splendor of the Court of Colors, and I was but her clumsy shadow.

Verina never hesitated to let me know about my failings — all in the spirit of being helpful, of course. I had stopped reacting long ago. If I let it show how her comments bothered me, it only encouraged her to continue.

Instead, I turned to Sir Cassion, the only other one of the dozen of us gathered in the salon that night who had not tried the orb. I liked Sir Cassion — more than liked, if I must be truthful. He was handsome, and also brave. He had won renown on the battlefield and even saved the Queen's own son once in combat, a deed that had won him an attractive pension. But what mattered more to me was his kind heart, and the way he usually had a gentle joke to share in company. Tonight, however, he stood alone beside the hearth with a strange, pinched expression on his face that I could not read.

"Why don't you try it?" I held the orb out to him, smiling as it sprinkled pink stars across his face.

Cassion hesitated an instant, but put forth his cupped hands. I rolled the orb gently into his palms.

He licked his lips, as if trying to decide what to say, and there was an in-drawn breath of expectation from the salon as everyone waited to see what colors the orb would spin for him.

"I'm not sure what to say," he said at last.

The orb sat colorless in his hands.

I stared at it for a moment, perplexed, then looked up to see dismay stretched across his face.

"By all the sorrowfull gods, what is wrong with me?" he said, so low I wasn't sure I heard what he said. The orb reacted not at all.

"He broke it!" Gion's raucous exclamation broke the silence of the onlookers. In that instant Cassion jerked his hands back and sent the orb tumbling for the ground. I just managed to snatch it out of the air before it smashed into the hearthstones.

"Are you all right?" I asked him as I straightened, and the orb made ribbons of lavender and green. But Cassion was gone. I turned just in time to catch sight of his back as he fled our company.

The courtiers murmured in excitement once again, this time puzzling over the mystery of Sir Cassion and the orb. I stayed silent, the dull orb folded against my breast as I remembered the distraught expression on Cassion's face. His words echoed in my mind. 

What's wrong with me?

Verina was silent, too, sipping her strong, spiced wine, a thin smile curling the edges of her mouth.