A Winter's Promise (The Mirror Visitor, #1)

by Christelle Dabos

“What is it that you reckon I won’t survive?” she asked. “The Pole. The court. Our engagement. You should go back to your mother’s apron strings while you still can.”

“Renouncing?” he rasped. “You have a very saccharine vision of our customs.” “I’m not following you,” whispered Ophelia. “This marriage is as loathsome to me as it is to you, be in no doubt, but I have committed to your family in the name of my own family. I’m not in a position to go back on my pledge without paying the price, and it’s a high one.” Ophelia took the time to take these words in. “I’m not in a position to either, sir, if that’s what you’re hoping from me. For me to reject this marriage for no admissible reason would be to dishonor my family. I would be summarily banished.”

“The more I see of you, the more my first impression is reinforced,” he grumbled. “Too sickly, too slow, too pampered . . . You’re not cut out for the place I’m taking you to. If you follow me there, you won’t last through winter. Just you wait and see.” Ophelia held the look he was boring into her. A look of iron. A look of defiance. Her great-uncle’s words resounded in her memory and she heard herself replying to him: “You don’t know me, sir.”

Ophelia thought, from his stubborn silence, that Thorn wouldn’t respond to her, but he finally unclenched his jaws: “In the presence of others, and as long as it pleases me, you will be two lady’s companions that I’ve brought over from abroad to entertain my aunt. If you want to make it easier for me, watch your language, in particular that of your chaperone. And don’t stand alongside me,” he added with an exasperated sigh. “It will arouse suspicion.”

“Don’t take your coat off, aunt,” Ophelia said quietly. “I think this park is fake.” “Fake?” repeated Rosaline, baffled. Thorn half-turned. Ophelia caught but a brief glimpse of his scarred and unshaven profile, but the look he’d thrown at her had betrayed a flicker of surprise.

wink. “Yes, my dear child, it’s the name of our family. Three clans, including ours, currently hold sway at court. As you now know, we all don’t like each other very much. The clan of the Dragons is powerful and feared, but small in number. Not too many of them for you to meet, my dear!”

“That Thorn couldn’t get married. I must admit, I can’t quite understand what could stop a man from taking a wife, if that’s his wish.” A ray of sunlight decided to enter the room and planted a golden kiss on Berenilde’s delicate neck. The little curls clustered at her nape gleamed. “Because he’s a bastard.” Ophelia blinked several times, dazzled by the light emerging beyond the windowpanes. Thorn had been born to an adulteress? “His late father, my brother, had the weakness of character to frequent a woman from another clan,”

“You keep examining the tattoos that my mother and I bear on our hands. Be warned, my little Ophelia, that they are the mark of the Dragons. That is a recognition to which Thorn can never lay claim. There isn’t a female in our clan who would accept to marry a bastard whose parent was disgraced.”

“One can love at first sight. Indeed, one never loves someone more than when one knows the least about them.” Bitter words, indeed, but Ophelia wasn’t sentimental enough to feel concerned. “I’m no more enamored of your nephew than he is of me.”

“A member of the Web is present at every marriage,” he explained in his voice of eternal gloom. “By a placing of hands, they forge a link between the couple that enables them to be ‘twinned.’” “What are you trying to tell me?” stammered Ophelia, who had stopped wiping the desk. Thorn again seemed irritated. “That soon, you will have taken part of me and I part of you.”

She stood still in the cold darkness, lost inside her coat, her stomach so knotted she felt nauseous. From Thorn she’d been ready for anything. Brutality. Disdain. Indifference. He didn’t have the right to fall in love with her.

Thorn got up and held open the mirrored door of the wardrobe for her as though it were an ordinary door. Ophelia didn’t have the heart to leave like this, without a friendly word for him. “I . . . I thank you,” she stammered. Thorn raised his eyebrows. He suddenly looked all stiff and starchy in his uniform with its epaulettes, too confined by his big, thin body. “It’s a good thing that you opened up to me,” he said, gruffly. There was a brief, awkward silence, and then he added, between his teeth: “I may have seemed a bit cold, earlier—” “It’s my fault,” Ophelia cut in. “Last time I behaved unpleasantly.”

“Put your trust in only my aunt,” he reminded her. Ophelia was sad to see how much credit he gave Berenilde. She was manipulating them like puppets and he was playing her game without even realizing it. “In her, I don’t know. But in you, no longer any doubt about that.”

“I’m really sorry, miss,” the Knight sighed, “but you will retain no memory of this conversation. I am, however, convinced that it will leave an impression on you. A very bad and very tenacious impression.” With these words, he took his leave with a bow of the head, and closed the door behind him.

Thorn had just accepted her conditions, as humiliating as they were, to save her life. She felt so guilty about not returning his feelings that she had a lump in her throat. “I’m so sorry . . . ” she repeated, pathetically. Thorn then lowered a metallic look at her that made her feel as if nails were being hammered into her face. “Don’t apologize too quickly,” he said, his accent even harsher than usual. “You’ll be regretting having me for a husband soon enough.”

Thorn’s memory was a family power? “If you say so,” she stammered, “but I don’t understand what his memory and our marriage have got to do with this reading.” Berenilde burst into laughter. “They’ve got absolutely everything to do with it! Have you been told about the ceremony of the Gift? It enables family powers to be combined. This ceremony takes place at marriages, and only at marriages. It’s Thorn who will be Farouk’s reader, not you.” It took a considerable time for Ophelia to take in what Berenilde was telling her. “You want to transplant my skills as a reader onto his memory?” “The alchemy promises to be effective. I’m convinced that the dear child will work wonders!”

But the look in her eyes, that would never return to how it once was. From having seen so many illusions, it had lost its own, and that was just fine. When illusions disappear, only the truth remains. Those eyes would look less within, and more out to the world. They still had much to see, much to learn.

“Traveling through mirrors,” her great-uncle had said before their separation, “that requires facing up to oneself.” As long as Ophelia had scruples, as long as she acted according to her conscience, as long as she could face up to her reflection every morning, she would belong to no one else but herself.