Mirror Sight

“I don’t need help,” she said, but she was sliding to the floor.

“Don’t worry. I won’t carry you.” And he proceeded to do just that, placing her on the closest bunk. She seemed too tired to argue.

“Why did the professor do this to me?” she asked plaintively.

Cade poured water into a cup from a pitcher that sat on a nightstand next to the bunk. He sat beside her and tried to get her to drink. When she pushed it away, he said, “The professor drugged you because you are trouble. Now try some water before you get more sick from the lack of it. It’ll help dilute the morphia.” He did not know if it was true, but his reasoning persuaded her. When she finished that cup, she asked for another.

He could see in her eyes how much she disliked being in a state that required the help of others. He remembered having overheard Mirriam tell the professor what a difficult patient “Miss Goodgrave” was after Karigan had first arrived. He also remembered his first meeting with Karigan on the dark streets of Mill City when he’d helped her fight off the assailants in the alley and then brought her to the professor’s house. He’d been astonished by the amount of fight in her then, and even more so after he’d learned the extent of her injuries.

Even so, it had still taken him a long time to accept what she, a mere female, was capable of. If he’d known at their first meeting, he would have been far more careful. As it was, he’d only gotten the better of her because of the chloroform he’d used to knock her out. Likewise the professor must have realized that the only way to control her was to dose her with morphia. Unfortunately, he’d used a rather large dose.

“More water?” Cade asked when she drained her second cup.

“A little.”

This time he handed her the pitcher. If it was difficult for her to accept help, he’d let her try to help herself. He grimaced at how her hands shook, the water slopping over the cup. When she thrust the pitcher back at him, he was almost splashed, too. When he looked at her, though, there was some of that old fire in her eyes and less despair.

The cup clunked on the nightstand as she set it aside. Then she flung herself at him, throwing her arms around him.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for helping.”

With her embrace clamping his arms to his sides, and her cheek pressed against his chest, he didn’t quite know what to do or what to say. Here he had just decided that she was averse to help, and now she was thanking him for it? Maybe it was the morphia confusing her.

“For helping?” he asked.

She pushed away back into her pillow. “For—for not being like the professor. For helping me go after Lhean.”

Then Cade understood, and he nodded to himself. That was the sort of problem for which she could accept help, because it was coming to the aid of someone else. The rest, he thought, was the same. She would not thank him for helping her. He wondered if the people who knew her in her own time had to often grapple with her stubborn nature.

He smiled at the thought that he might be able to ask them himself.

SILK

Ezra Stirling Silk turned up the light of the lamp beside his armchair and enlarged the image he was gazing at with a magnifying glass. Was it his imagination, or were Miss Goodgrave’s features beginning to define themselves? With his poor sight, it was difficult to say, but her head looked less transparent, and he could almost make out her features. Had something happened with the image trapping process that her face was only now quickening?

The rest of the picture remained as before, her body well defined in its dress, the backdrop, too. He gazed hard at her shoulder, but the ghostly hand resting on it seemed to have faded into almost nothing.

He turned the lamp down to lowest glow which left his sitting room dark. He removed his specs and rubbed his eyes. Night time was so much easier on them. Day time and intense light left them aching.

It was relatively quiet in the cabin of this, his private packet boat, on the Imperial Canal. He heard the chug up ahead with its pulsing steam engines and the rhythmic plash of its paddle wheels. Attached directly behind the chug was a packet boat for servants and personnel. Next in line was his packet, which housed a couple of his body servants, with a cabin set aside for the child and her governess in the forward section. In the middle, between his quarters and those of the servants, lay the kitchen and dining room.

It was an extraordinary luxury having his own private packet boat. Public boats squeezed up to a hundred ordinary citizens per load, and they were nowhere as graciously outfitted with mahogany and teak and gleaming brass embellishments. Velvet drapes crumpled from ceiling to floor over portholes, rich carpeting underfoot. The furnishings, art, and details were as fine as any room in his house in Gossham, just on a smaller scale.

The chug did not pull just two packets, however, but a third, as well, a freight barge coupled to the stern of his own boat. The barge carried his horses and carriage, luggage, the exhibits he’d displayed at his dinner party, various pieces of equipment, and most importantly, a circus wagon garishly painted with lions. It contained the Eletian.

Canal travel was very easy going, and Silk did not even feel the motion of his boat gliding through the mirror-still water. Much more soothing than by carriage, even on the empire’s well-maintained roads. That was not to say he felt nothing, did not sense the water beneath the boat’s hull, not so very far from his feet. Only some layers of wood and carpet separated them. The closer they drew to Gossham, the stronger the sensation would grow, like a tingling beneath his feet. A feather touch on his flesh. Before the accident that had injured his eyes, he had never sensed the etherea, even in the heart of Gossham, but ever since, he could. Even this far out. Most of the etherea remained locked up in Gossham, less so in the outer regions of the Capital. A small amount leaked out so he felt it even here. He wondered if the Eletian could, too.