Law

She did not look at him, she moved a finger in a particular way across the stone and the mirror shifted, failing to reflect, blurring and unblurring into some other scene, another reflection, where horses breathed warm air and the air shifted in a thousand small draughts from the irate fanning of leathery wings. A dark, lanky boy in overalls, whose pointed ears stuck out from under a short mat of white hair at unbelievable angles to his head, looked up as the command slipped from his elder's colourless mind, into the stone, through the mirror, into his thoughts. He clicked his tongue in a soft staccato rhythm, brief and quick, and jumped up to the saddle room.

"The horse will be ready in five minutes," she said, still looking at the mirror and the rows of black and chestnut flanks lining the stalls. "I have told him to saddle the one you are used to. He says it will be good today. You will enjoy the ride."

"The last ride I will enjoy," he said, smiling at her. It was very rarely that he smiled, and even more rarely still when she smiled back. It had become like that only in the past few months, he realised. She did not smile back now. "No, I did not mean to say it like that. Vyshun. I am sorry."

"It is what you want, isn't it?"

"It is what I have always wanted."

"Then why apologise? I have never apologised to you."

"I am sorry. Vyshun. I do not know what exactly I mean to you, not now, but you have come to mean a lot to me. I know what I will be when I come back - because I know I will come back, Vyshun, I was born to pass the Bar, born to be the Scirrims' Lawyer - I know that I will not be able to speak like this, to feel like this. I will not be able to feel at all. And I do not care. But it is the things I do not know, that make me feel I should not go."

"You have been working for this all your life," she said. "It is only right that you should go."

"Is that what you say, then?"

"Yes. Go."

He looked at her. The colourless eyes had nothing to say to him. He had thought they would. And finding out the truth, he was almost giddy with relief.

"Then I will go," he said, rising, the bag in his hand. "I am sorry that you did not love me - I loved you, honestly, I still do - but if you do not, then, I am glad. You will not feel any pain..."

She had turned her head back to the mirror. Now he could only see her reflection, the outlines and the whiteness, and the emptiness in her eyes.

"Vyshun?"

"You know what your horse is like when he is kept waiting," she said, "he starts biting the others. I want my stableboy to keep all ten fingers intact. Go!"

The light boots clicked as he walked out. On the threshold he paused, because the light had just then shuddered tremendously, like a candle being blown out by the wind. She had been looking at the image of him that the mirror had caught, and, watching the light go out as it washed across his face, it seemed that all of him that mattered was being blown out, too. He would not go away entirely; like a candle going out, the light would be replaced by darkness. It only mattered how you felt about darkness. Because the light from a candle flame could burn something warm into your heart, but the darkness would only be there...

"I really must fix that light when I come back," he said. "Remind me, Vyshun."

He shut the door. The mirror reflected a face so white and eyes so full of nothing that you could not see the tears.