The Memory in the Mirror

By morning, the palace had found a use for every minute Senamé had intended to spend in the records room.

First came breakfast, then fresh bandages, then a message that the queen would receive her. She followed its bearer through two courtyards before he handed her over to a guard who apparently knew nothing about it.

Her wooden token admitted her this far. Beyond the next doorway, it became a piece of wood.

“The queen sent for me.”

“Then someone will come for you.”

Senamé looked past his shoulder. The passage was clear, the doorway close. She had measured the distance before Afiwa caught her elbow.

“I’ve only just unpacked.”

Sètondji found them there with Kékéli leaning against the wall, reproducing the guard’s expression. One glance at Senamé’s feet seemed to tell him enough.

He showed his seal and led them into a shaded walkway.

“The audience records are ready,” he told her. “They can wait until Her Majesty has finished.”

“Everything here seems to wait for permission from something else.”

“Usually someone else.”

Ahead, a woman stood holding a pile of curtains while a clerk explained why he could not give her the key to the room she had been ordered to prepare. The keeper had left without signing for it. The audience would begin before he returned.

Senamé slowed.

“So she can carry his curtains, but she can’t open his door?”

The woman lowered her eyes. The clerk’s face closed, and Senamé recognized the result of her intervention a moment too late.

Sètondji put his seal beside the register.

“Enter my name. I’ll answer for the room.”

The key appeared.

Once they had moved on, Senamé glanced back at the woman disappearing beneath her burden.

“Why couldn’t he do that for her?”

“If anything goes missing, she’ll be searched. He’ll be questioned. The keeper will explain that he wasn’t there,” Sètondji said.

“And you?”

“Will have to make sure the key comes back.”

She had expected him to explain why she was wrong. Instead he had made himself responsible for something he could easily have walked past.

It gave her more to think about than his clean sandals.

A messenger caught them at the next courtyard with a folded note.

“The queen mother requests your presence regarding the marriage proposals.”

Senamé examined a carved flower in the doorframe. Its petals were suddenly fascinating.

“After my duties,” Sètondji answered.

The messenger hesitated.

“I’ll explain to her myself.”

He put the note away. Senamé kept her questions with considerable effort; she could feel Afiwa storing them for later.

At the entrance to the inner household, a steward checked their names against a list. His finger stopped beneath Kékéli’s.

“No guardian recorded,” the steward said.

“He’s with me,” Senamé replied.

“Are you his mother?”

“No.”

“His sister?”

The woman waiting beside the gate had already stepped forward. Kékéli slipped behind Senamé’s hip.

The steward explained that children whose place had not been established waited in a supervised courtyard. He sounded reasonable. Senamé imagined strange hands taking hold of Kékéli, the panic, the sudden burst of wings. She drew him closer.

“He stays with me.”

Afiwa moved to her other side.

Sètondji read the entry, then turned the register towards Senamé.

“Will you answer for him while he’s here?”

“Yes.”

“Then sign.”

She read the line twice. It named the person responsible for his conduct, his movements and any damage he caused. Kékéli peered around her arm, interested in the pen.

She signed before he could borrow it.

The steward added the necessary mark. The waiting woman returned to her place, and the doorway cleared.

Inside, Senamé loosened her grip on Kékéli’s hand. He remained pressed against her for several steps before noticing a girl carrying lamp bowls and becoming interested in their clinking.

The girl paused. Her gaze travelled from his bright hair to his eyes, and she tipped her head in answer to his. An older attendant called her away before Senamé could decide what she had noticed.

“Thank you,” she told Sètondji.

“If he causes trouble, they’ll come to you.”

“They usually do.”

“This time, keep the token ready.”

He gave her the marked piece of wood. She turned it over in her palm. Behind them, another visitor was being stopped; somewhere along the walkway, the woman with the curtains had finally been allowed to put down her load.

The palace was beginning to make sense in a way she did not entirely like. Someone’s name had to bear the weight before anything could move.

A royal attendant emerged from the divination room and called for her.

Senamé’s hand went to the bead beneath her collar. The promised examination, so often delayed, had arrived while she was thinking about somebody else.

Afiwa caught her wrist.

“I’ll wait here.”

Senamé nodded. She had counted the scales again while washing. There were more than yesterday.

Beyond the door, Tassi asked them to let her in.

Tassi was struggling with a clasp caught in her hair.

Senamé released it before remembering that she might need permission. The queen thanked her and handed the ornament to the waiting attendant, who gathered the bracelets from the table and withdrew.

Without them, Tassi looked ready to work.

The room opened onto a square pool beneath the sky. Against the opposite wall stood a round mirror in a dark metal frame, small enough to carry beneath one arm. Senamé had expected something larger. An object capable of explaining her ought, at least, to require two people to move it.

“That’s it?”

Tassi brought it to a low stand.

“The Mirror of Truth.”

Senamé crouched beside the water. Her hip ached where the scales pressed against her wrap; she resisted the urge to loosen it.

“Will it show you why they’re spreading?”

“I hope so.”

The answer disappointed her more than a refusal would have. She had been carrying the queen’s certainty all the way from Azara, making it stronger whenever her own failed.

Tassi noticed.

“I won’t pretend to understand what I haven’t examined.”

She tilted the mirror towards the pool.

The reflected roof dissolved.

Beneath the water lay a muddy shore. Senamé smelled wet earth, though the stone around her knees remained warm and dry. Two men struggled at the edge of the image, their feet slipping as one tried to wrench free of the other.

She saw the opening before he did. Turn towards the thumb, step inside the arm—

He turned the wrong way.

A stone came down against his head.

Senamé recoiled. When she looked again, the surviving man was kneeling beside him. He shook the fallen shoulder, cautiously at first, then harder, leaving bloody handprints on the cloth.

“The first murder,” Tassi said.

Senamé watched him trying to wake the body. She remembered the pressure beneath her foot at the inn, the certainty that she could make the struggling stop. Here was someone discovering what came after.

A shadow crossed the shore.

High above the men, an immense serpent uncoiled through the sky. Colour travelled beneath its scales, green deepening into blue, gold breaking along a curve too vast for the pool to contain. Senamé leaned back to follow it and found the room’s open roof above her instead.

“Aido-Hwedo.”

The name seemed to vibrate somewhere beneath her ribs.

The serpent lowered its head towards the dead man. A shining drop fell beside him, then another farther away. Where the first entered the mud, light remained beneath the surface, buried like a seed.

The shore gave way to other lives.

A woman held a child against her breast. A man searched the ruins of a house. Two sisters stood on either side of a closed door. Pearls brightened within them, each answering differently: water climbed, stone parted, a voice reached someone impossibly far away.

“Pain makes them?”

“Pain can wake what a person carries,” Tassi replied. “It does not decide what they will do with it.”

In the water, one sister opened the door.

The other had gone.

Senamé drew out her grey bead. It lay against her fingers with its familiar, unhelpful weight.

“I’ve hurt enough for several.”

Tassi turned the mirror towards her.

For a moment, the pool showed Senamé as she was: knees tucked beneath her, hair still damp at the roots, the bandage around her hand. Then the reflection deepened. Fine threads of light ran from the bead towards her wrist and beneath her clothes, vanishing where the scales began.

She leaned closer.

“Are those supposed to be there?”

“I don’t know.”

The queen adjusted the angle. Light crowded the reflected bead until its outline disappeared; the rest of the image clouded around it.

Senamé’s grip tightened.

“Should I try?”

“Without borrowing a pattern.”

She reached towards the water. Familiar workings offered themselves immediately, waiting to be fitted into place. Beyond them lay the blankness of every examination she had ever failed.

She pushed into it.

The ache behind her eyes returned. In the pool, the threads drew taut.

Tassi covered the rim of the mirror.

“Stop.”

Senamé opened her hand slowly. She had not realized she was holding her breath.

“So now you’ve seen it.”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“The necklace answers when you repeat a working. When you force it without one, the strain passes into your body,” Tassi said.

“I could have told you that.”

“Then we won’t ask you to prove it again.”

The words deprived her of the argument she had prepared. She looked down at the damp marks her knees had left on the stone while Tassi set the mirror farther from her.

Beside its stand lay a board bearing three drawings.

One was unmistakably the mirror. Another showed a sword.

Senamé reached for the board.

She knew those shallow marks along the blade. Kpénahi cleaned them with a corner of oiled cloth, patiently, even when everyone else had finished tending their weapons.

“What is this?”

Tassi watched her face.

“The treasures entrusted to Oraniyan.”

The third drawing showed a jewel. Two smaller sketches beside it contradicted the first: a faceted stone, a rounded pearl, something almost shapeless.

Senamé turned the board towards the light.

“Your artists disagree.”

“So do the accounts.”

“Convenient for anyone hoping to sell you one.”

Tassi’s mouth softened, but her attention remained on Senamé’s hand beside the sword.

With another turn of the mirror, the pool filled with painted figures. A man knelt before the three treasures. When he lifted the blade, a cord parted around a captive’s wrists, followed by a pale line stretching from the freed hands towards someone beyond the image.

“The sword cuts bonds imposed by force,” Tassi explained.

The mirror rose next. A painted wall became transparent, revealing the people confined behind it. Then the jewel brightened, and roads reached towards each other across the water.

“The mirror reveals what has been concealed. The jewel brings into accord what has been separated.”

Senamé glanced at the object on the stand. It had just shown her enough of herself to frighten her and too little to explain why. She wondered how often truth arrived like that.

Beneath the drawings, a passage had been copied in a careful hand.

Tassi read it aloud.

“Let the crowned head gather the three. Let the serpent’s breath pass through them. What was divided shall answer as one.”

Senamé read it again.

“No instructions about the serpent?”

“None that have survived.”

“I’d specify which end. With a creature that size, you don’t want a misunderstanding.”

Tassi laughed, and Senamé found herself grinning despite the ache behind her eyes. Then light moved between the painted treasures, catching her attention.

“Again.”

The queen repeated the image.

This time Senamé followed the brightness from the sword to the mirror, then towards the jewel. It returned along another path before the roads joined.

“They don’t answer together.”

Tassi leaned closer.

Senamé placed three drops of water on the pool’s stone rim. Holding the bead in her injured hand, she borrowed a small trembling motion from the water and passed it between the drops. The last spilled before she could complete the return.

She let the working go.

“Putting them beside each other won’t be enough. Look—the mirror sends something back. It has to pass through all three.”

“The serpent’s breath.”

“Perhaps. But it’s doing something. The verse tells you what to collect and leaves out how to use it.”

Tassi replayed the image more slowly.

Heat gathered inside Senamé’s fist.

She released the bead. It swung on its cord, and the queen’s attention followed it.

“You recognize the sword,” Tassi said.

Senamé drew the necklace back against her chest.

There it was.

She remembered Kpénahi’s register already open to her name, the house offered in the same conversation as the reports. Here she had been given a room, a mirror, the queen’s undivided attention. How much of it had belonged to the question she had not yet answered?

“Is that why you showed me this?” Senamé asked.

“I need to find it,” Tassi replied.

“I came because you said you could help me.”

“And I intend to.”

“You can do both, then. Help me and find out what you want.”

Tassi accepted the accusation without looking away.

“Yes.”

Footsteps approached outside. An attendant called her title, but the queen asked for more time.

Senamé studied her. The admission was almost a relief. She could work with a desire spoken aloud; it was the kindness concealing one that left her searching for the price.

“And if I don’t tell you?”

“You still come back.”

“For this?” Senamé touched the scales beneath her wrap.

“For you.”

She wanted to believe the distinction. Wanting it made her cautious.

“Tomorrow, we start with mine.”

“Tomorrow, we start with yours.”

Tassi turned the mirror away. Oraniyan and the treasures vanished beneath the returning reflection of the roof.

Senamé bent to gather the necklace cord from her knee.

In the water, colour moved along an enormous curve behind her shoulder.

She froze.

The pool was scarcely deep enough to cover her hand. Yet for one breath she could see no bottom, only scales receding through a darkness the room did not possess.

Then a ripple crossed her reflection.

Tassi was still holding the mirror.

“Did you see that?”

The queen looked towards the water.

“What?”

Senamé waited, watching the place where the curve had disappeared. A cloud passed over the open roof, and its pale reflection travelled harmlessly across the pool.

She tucked the bead beneath her clothes.

“Next time,” she said, “I look first.”