The Spriggan Mirror

“Just a mirror-polished metal, or glass and silver, I suppose.”

“Then I can’t think of anything that would find the mirror itself.” She hauled her pack up onto her lap as she spoke and began unbuckling the straps. “But I do have something that might be useful.”

“Oh?”

She rummaged in the bag as she said, “I have something you can use to find and follow spriggans. Maybe when you get close you can use it to backtrack to the mirror.”

Gresh nodded thoughtfully. “That might help,” he agreed.

She pulled a talisman from the pack, a dully gleaming metal disk that looked rather like a hand-mirror itself, and held it out. “It isn’t specific to spriggans,” she said. “But it can tell you when anything is moving within a hundred feet of you and follow the motion, even if you can’t see anything yourself. You can tell it to watch one movement and ignore another, or tell it to watch for a particular size or speed.”

Gresh accepted the disk warily and looked at its round surface; his reflected gaze looked back at him, far more faintly than from an actual mirror, but still clear enough.

“How does it work?” he said.

The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar

Chapter Five

Operating the sorcerous talisman was not as simple as Gresh would have liked. He was sitting in his front room, once again going over the various gestures and commands it obeyed, making sure he wouldn’t forget them, when the front bell jingled. He looked up from the device as Twilfa hurried from the kitchen to answer the door.

He had been practicing with it since Chira left, which had been long enough for Twilfa to clean up the broken jar, wipe up the spilled blood as best she could, and arrange a carpet and a few boxes to hide the bloodstains, which Gresh had promised to have magically removed at the first opportunity. She had scarcely finished that when Tira had arrived at the back door, and Twilfa had barely settled her in the kitchen with a sausage roll and a mug of small beer when the bell rang. Twilfa still reached the front door before Gresh could even slip the talisman into the pouch on his belt. Twilfa was in full bustle this afternoon, rushing around and getting things done with remarkable efficiency. By the time he was upright and had straightened his tunic, she was showing the customers in.

The young man Twilfa ushered into the shop appeared to be in his mid-twenties, but since this was presumably Tobas of Telven, a wizard powerful enough to own a flying carpet, appearances might not mean much in this case. He had dull brown hair and rather pale skin and stood just slightly taller than average. He wore a black tunic trimmed with red and gold, and good leather breeches.

Behind him were two women-the tall, black-haired witch, and a shorter, plumper woman with hair equally black, but curly rather than straight. She had milky-pale skin, whereas Karanissa’s was brown, and the other woman held a bundle in her arms-a bundle with tiny fingers and a face.

The baby was wrapped in fine white linen embroidered in blue and green; its mother wore green velvet and yellow silk. The family could obviously afford to dress well, though Gresh did not think much of their taste-no two of them went together well, not even the mother and child.

“Come in, come in,” he called, tucking the talisman out of sight as Twilfa ushered the foursome through the door. He rose to greet them-and not incidentally, to impress them with his own height and physique. That little bit of psychological advantage might be useful.

Karanissa stepped forward to make introductions. The man was indeed her husband Tobas, the other woman her co-wife Alorria of Dwomor, and the infant was their daughter Alris, who was still at an age where she did little more than stare, wave her hands aimlessly, and occasionally drool.

“She’s named for her grandmother,” Alorria said, as Gresh smiled down at the baby and held out a finger for her to grab. “The queen of Dwomor.”

Gresh managed to hide his surprise at that. When he had first heard the baby’s name, he had immediately wondered whether it deliberately combined elements of both wives’ names, which would have been a remarkable bit of diplomacy. In his admittedly limited experience with polygamists, co-wives tended to treat each other like sisters, which is to say, with a great deal of barely concealed rivalry and an intense interest in maintaining their own place within the family. For a mother to give a baby a name that reflected both women hardly fit that model, so it wasn’t surprising that Alris was not, in fact, named in part for Karanissa, nor that Alorria made sure he knew that-but it was surprising that Alorria’s mother was a queen.

Alorria herself had not been introduced as a princess-but then, she was married to a wizard, and the Wizards’ Guild would not allow someone to be both wizard and royal. Alorria had presumably had to give up her title and her place in the succession when she married Tobas.

Gresh wondered what that place had been. If she had been next in line for the throne then her attachment to Tobas must have been quite intense, but if she had half a dozen older brothers then she hadn’t really given up much of anything. The Small Kingdoms were awash in surplus princesses, due to the tradition that princesses must marry princes or heroes, but princes could marry anyone they chose-emphasis on any one, as multiple marriages complicated the bloodlines and inheritances too much and were therefore not normally permitted for royalty. Which was another reason Alorria’s shared marriage seemed odd.

How in the World had this Tobas wound up married to a witch and a princess? It wasn’t as if it was common for a man to have more than one wife; most women wouldn’t stand for it. Gresh had only very rarely managed to keep company with more than one woman at a time, let alone marry them. Not that he had married anyone, or particularly wanted to.

“Would you like to sit down?” he asked, gesturing toward the velvet chairs.

“There aren’t enough chairs,” Alorria said.

“I’ll be happy to stand,” Gresh said. “Let the ladies be seated.”

“I’m not a lady,” Karanissa murmured.

“I am,” Alorria said, settling onto one of the chairs and cooing at Alris.

Karanissa started to say something else, then bit it off and took the other chair.

“Your mother was queen of Dwomor?” Gresh asked Alorria as he leaned comfortably against the wall by the hearth.

“She still is,” Alorria said. “And my father is King Derneth the Second.” The pride in her voice was unmistakable.

That eliminated any possibility that Alorria had been exiled from her homeland and had made the best of her situation by marrying a wizard. Tobas could not be a prince himself-the Guild would never have allowed that.

But in that case, if Alorria had obeyed the rules at all, Tobas must have been a hero.

That was interesting.

Gresh remembered that Karanissa had said that the three of them had helped the Guild deal with Empress Tabaea. The details of exactly what had become of Tabaea had not been made public. Apparently the Wizards’ Guild had employed some extremely dangerous magic, and rumor had it that all that had remained of the self-proclaimed empress was her left foot. The overlord’s palace in Ethshar of the Sands had reportedly been gutted in the process, as well. Had it been Tobas who did that?

Gresh glanced at the wizard, who gave every appearance of being a rather ordinary young man. It was hard to imagine him flinging around that sort of high-powered spell.

Even if it had, though, that couldn’t have been what qualified him as a hero in Dwomor. The timing was wrong, as little Alris had certainly been conceived well before Tabaea’s downfall.