Glenda Larke - The Heart of the mirage

The moment my gaze found him, he looked up to see me, and I wondered if he had deliberately stopped where he had just for that purpose.

I brought my cabochon up to my face, close to my eyes, and concentrated. The stone, which I now kept uncovered by skin, began to glow faintly and I used the light bathing my eyes to enhance my vision. Temellin sprang into clarity as though he were close enough to touch. He looked thin and tired; nothing of his laughter was visible on his face any more. The brown eyes regarded me thoughtfully, the mouth was tight.

My body hungered, my heart grieved, the sight of him lacerated me. Temellin. My cousin. I could have bedded him without guilt, if he would have had me. Well, perhaps not quite without guilt. What my blood-father had done to save me had left me with a burden that would last forever.

Tears came to my eyes and Temellin blurred back into a distant figure mounted on his shleth. I opened up my palm and flattened it against the glass of the window in a gesture of greeting and farewell. I thought I saw him begin to raise a hand in acknowledgement, but the gesture died half made and he turned away, urging his mount along with the others.

I sat by the window looking down the road for a long while after it was empty of people. The Mirage Makers created a flock of pink flamingos for me to look at, and then – perhaps because the birds looked a little lost standing on the cobblestone road – added a marshy pond with waterlilies. None of it eased my torment.

I had finally thought it all through: a story of betrayal and tragedy that started when I w§s a chiV1

and wasn't finished yet because I was the one who held the endings, and I didn't know which one to write into Kardiastan's history. I may have thought it all through, but I still didn't know what to do.

It had all started because a woman took her daughter away from the child's father. Magoria-wendia removed Sarana from the palace because she thought the Mirager-solad was ruining the child with his lavish spoiling. I could even remember some of the arguments now, the incomprehensible shouting matches between two much-loved parents, arguments so shattering to a child not quite three. Far distant memories: running, barefoot, across polished agate floors into my father's arms. Adoring him, feeling safe and loved in his strong clasp…

And somewhere on the journey to another city, Magoria-wendia's party had been ambushed and wiped out – with the exception of that same child, Sarana, heir to her father's Mirager sword. She fell into the hands of General Gayed and Rathrox Ligatan, who knew exactly what they had, and were prepared to use her in ways Solad could never have envisioned. My mother, jumping out of the howdah, sword in hand, leaving me in the care of my Theura nurse, while she battled to save us – and died…

Sarana, the beloved daughter of an obsessed father, a man so crazed by the thought of what they would do to her if he didn't obey them, he was prepared to betray the rest of his family, his fellow Magor, his country: prepared to raise wards around the annual Shimmer Feast so no one sensed the trap closing in on them, prepared to lower those same wards at the crucial moment to turn the trap into an extermination.

Solad's supposed discovery and identification of his daughter's body, his return with her already shroud-

wrapped in his howdah, her burial griefs – all playacting to conceal the kidnapping, to hide the existence of a hostage he would do anything to save. The scale of his treachery was breathtaking. I even wondered if he'd killed another child in order to have a body to wrap.

Of course Solad knew what was going to happen at the Shimmer Feast: he had arranged it. And some shred of remaining good sense or conscience made him send away ten Magoroth children to build the core of a new leadership. Just ten of them, with a few teachers; not enough to be missed by the Tyranians. The calculated cruelty of his decisions – take Temellin, but leave his sister Shirin; abandon the babies to their fate. Did his conscience bother him, my father? Did he think I was worth all those slaughtered that day? A whole nation enslaved? Did he really think the vestiges of future hope he seeded by sending the Ten away was enough to atone for his crime?

My Mirager father had sold his honour for his daughter. Temellin's parents and his sister Shirin, and Goddess knows how many Magoroth had died – to keep me alive. Kardiastan was enslaved because of me. Temellin and the others of the Ten were brought up in exile because of me.

Because of me. Sarana. Solad's heir. The rightful Miragerin. Miragerin-sarana. Me.

It was the only explanation that made any sense.

My memories all fitted; I'd seen Wendia jumping out of a howdah into battle. If I'd been Shirin, I would never have been sitting in a tiny curtained room that swayed just before my mother was killed. I would never have seen her rip off her skirting to fight. Shirin's mother had been attending the Shimmer Feast and would have been shot down with the others, far from the nursery.

There was more evidence, too, once I started to think things over. The Mirage Makers had said, You are the Miragerin, not, You are the Miragerin-shirin. And now I had the book to tell me they would never have given Shirin the cabochon-making conjurations. Sarana was another matter. When Sarana had disappeared from Kardiastan, they must have thought her dead, so they bestowed the Mirager's sword on her heir: her cousin Temellin. Once they had seen Ligea Gayed, they had realised Sarana was far from dead and they had tried to make up for their past mistake.

I'd been so blind. I was the one with the memories of what had happened in the ambush; I should have known those memories didn't fit with what Zerise told me of Shirin. I should have realised much earlier about the significance of the Mirager's sword. Temellin and the Magor had been so upset by its loss, so relieved at its return. Why, even the ordinary Kardis had cheered to see it again. I had seen the reverent way the Magoroth had touched it back in Madrinya; I'd heard Temellin say to Korden, 'At least you can stop worrying about that baby of yours.' I'd been told the first thing Temellin did when he returned to the Mirage City with the sword was to bestow cabochons – which would not have been necessary if other Magor or other swords could have performed that task in the year the Mirager's sword had been missing – yet I'd still blithely gone on thinking there was nothing special about my knowledge, about my sword.

And then that casually uttered but infinitely tragic, 'Ah. You don't know it, beautiful one, but you've just saved my life.' Temellin had thought there wasn't going to be another Mirager's sword until he died, and without one there would never be a new generation of

Magor. So some time before he'd met me, he'd decided to die.

The cold-blooded courage of that decision pierced me. I remembered his reluctance to ask if I really did have his sword; he'd been so concerned about what my answer would be that he hadn't been able to frame the question.

I remembered the strange reaction of Korden when he'd seen with his own eyes Temellin's sword safely returned: the odd mixture of relief and guilt. Part of Korden desperately wanted to be Mirager, but not over Temellin's body. In his heart he believed he'd be a better Mirager, but he'd been terrified Temellin was going to suicide, and he had feared the guilt that would have consumed him as a consequence.

I understood Korden better now that I was burdened with the guilt of my own past.

I wondered at my own blindness… The compeer in me had been granted enough evidence to unravel the tale long ago, but this hadn't been a crime I could solve objectively, distancing myself from the players; this had been my life.