The Mirror Said Don't Go to the Royal Academy novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: What the Lamp Knew
Caspar lies in her kitchen, Calista confesses half the truth, and Linnea refuses him in front of the whole market before taking the northern coach, where the Rune Master at Thornfell's gate asks who put a Warden's ring on her.
For a moment nobody spoke on the dark doorstep.
I could hear Caspar breathing.
Then the runes on my grandmother's shelves caught again behind me.
A soft gold glow spilled down the hall and over the three of us.
Caspar looked at it, and then at me.
"Linnea," he said, in the voice he used on examiners. "You've got your hand bare."
"I took it off."
"Why would you do that?"
He tried to laugh.
He lifted his palm and said the word for light, and nothing happened.
He said it again, harder.
Nothing came but a thread of smoke.
"It's the damp," he said.
Calista hadn't taken her eyes off my left hand.
"Come in," I said. "It's cold, and you're both in my doorway."
I made tea because my hands needed work.
Caspar sat at my grandmother's kitchen table.
Calista stood by the stove, still wrapped in his coat.
I noticed the silver chain at her throat then.
A signet hung from it, a lot like the ring on my table, only without a stone.
"You're upset," Caspar said. "It's the move. Grief takes people strangely. Mother said so."
"Your mother said I'd be grieving?"
"She said you'd be nervous."
"Caspar." Calista's voice came out very small. "Tell her."
His jaw tightened.
"Tell me what?" I said.
I set the cups down.
"That you've promised each other?" I said. "That you'll marry when you graduate, and I'm the one who still wears your ring?"
Calista put her hand over her mouth.
It wasn't a denial, and all three of us knew it.
"Who told you?" Caspar said.
It was so quick that he hadn't had time to build a face for it.
I almost admired it.
"Nobody you'd believe," I said.
He leaned forward and put his hand over mine, warm and familiar, and for eighteen months I'd have melted.
"Whatever you think you know," he said, "give me the ring and we'll sort it out in Lauremont.
"It's a family piece. Mother would be so upset if it were lost."
Twice now he had asked about the ring, and not once if I was all right.
I took my hand back.
"Sleep in my grandmother's room," I told Calista. "There are clean sheets. In the morning you're both going back to Lauremont without me."
She nodded without looking at him.
He didn't sleep, I think.
I heard him walking the hall until the birds started.
By eight the whole of Marren Cross was in the market square.
Only one coach went north each week, and everybody liked to see who was on it.
I came out of the house with a trunk, a canvas satchel and my grandmother's mirror wrapped in a quilt.
Caspar's ring rode in the satchel, wrapped in one of Grandmother's silk gloves, where I wouldn't have to look at it.
Caspar was waiting by the pump with Calista beside him, and he'd put on his best smile.
"She's overtired," he told the baker, loud enough to carry.
"The old lady's death hit her hard. She's got some idea she'll run off north."
Faces turned.
The baker's wife shook her head in sympathy.
"I'm not overtired," I said. "I'm going to Grey Thorn on the rune scholarship."
"You're engaged to a Royal Academy man," said the baker's wife. "You can't."
"I'm not," I said, and I held up my bare left hand where everyone could see.
A hush went over the square.
Caspar's smile never moved, but his eyes did.
"Linnea. Please. Not here."
"Then do one thing for me, here," I said. "You light every lamp at the Academy with a snap of your fingers. Light that one."
I pointed at the iron lantern hung over the pump.
He couldn't refuse in front of the whole town.
He raised his hand and said the word.
Nothing happened.
He said it again, and a girl at the back snorted.
On the third try his face went red from the collar up.
A boy asked his mother, loud and clear, why the Royal Academy man couldn't do a trick.
Calista stared at her shoes.
I climbed up into the northern coach with my trunk and didn't look back.
The road to Thornfell took three days, and snow met us on the second.
On the third evening the coach let me down at a black iron gate in a wall of black stone.
It drove off before I'd finished thanking the driver.
Wind pulled at my coat.
Behind the bars stood a keep with a hundred narrow windows, each lit low and gold against the dark.
A man stood at the gate with a ledger in one hand and a lantern in the other.
He was tall, dark-haired, with a white streak at his left temple, and his left hand was bare in the cold.
"Linnea Aldwin," he said, as if he'd read it off the snow. "You're late. Your grandmother was never late."
My throat tightened.
"You knew her?"
"I knew her."
He set the lantern down and took my left hand without asking.
His palm was hot and rough, and across it ran a pale scar in the shape of a burned seal.
He turned my hand until the lantern light fell on my ring finger.
There was a white band of skin there, and a groove in the flesh where the silver had sat.
His whole face changed.
"Who," Ansgar Dahl said quietly, "put a Warden's ring on you?"
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