Emily sucked in her breath. Her hair framed her pale face, a face too long and too sharp to be conventionally attractive. Or so she’d always thought. It had never crossed her mind that someone might find her attractive, not in any way she’d want to be found attractive. She’d been surprised when Jade and Caleb expressed interest ...
They said my face had character, she thought. Alassa had said it too, insisting that Emily would be beautiful if she put more effort into her appearance. And they didn’t think it was a bad thing.
She studied her own appearance, unsure what she was meant to be looking for. Her eyes seemed shadowed, somehow; her pale face seemed to blur, her lips thinning ... she seemed older, all of a sudden. Her head felt ... she wasn’t sure how it felt. It was translucent, as if she could see her thoughts throbbing through her head and ....
A stab of pain tore through her head. She screamed, throwing the mirror aside. Her head spun, as if she’d suddenly fallen backwards or ... she wasn’t sure what she was feeling. It was suddenly very hard to focus. Her thoughts were a tattered mess.
“That’s not uncommon,” Samra said.
Emily opened her eyes, unsure when she’d closed them. Her eyes felt as if someone was stabbing knives into her eyeballs.
“Very few people master it on the first try,” Samra continued.
Emily felt sick. Her head throbbed with pain. She had to swallow, hard, before she was sure she wasn’t going to throw up. Her entire body felt limp, as if she’d run for miles before collapsing in a heap. She wasn’t even sure she could muster the energy to sit up and find the mirror. A vague part of her mind prattled on and on about seven years of bad luck. In the Nameless World, it was quite possible that wasn’t a superstition.
“Oh,” she managed. “What happened?”
“In order to use soul magic properly, you have to know yourself.” Samra stood—Emily breathed a sigh of relief when she saw the mirror in Samra’s hand—and walked over to the sideboard. When she returned, she was carrying a glass of water. “Drink this, then ready yourself to try again.”
Emily sipped the water, eying the mirror as if it were a deadly weapon. Perhaps it was. The pain had been agonising, even though it only lasted for seconds ... perhaps longer. Her head no longer felt as though a hundred elephants were trying to stampede through her thoughts, but she still felt fragile. She wasn’t sure she wanted to try again.
It was hard to speak. But she had no choice.
“What ... what is that?” She waved a weak hand at the mirror. “What are we doing?”
Samra eyed her as if she were a particularly interesting specimen on the dissection table. “I told you,” she said. “Know yourself.”
“I don’t understand.” Emily forced herself to sit upright. “What is this?”
“When you look into a regular mirror, you see your face,” Samra said. “When you look into this mirror, you eventually see your soul. You look at yourself from the outside, as it were, and learn things about yourself that you never really knew. Once you know yourself, you can proceed to the next step, which is peering into someone else’s soul.”
“Gordian used ...”
“Grandmaster Gordian,” Samra corrected.
“Grandmaster Gordian used soul magic on me last year,” Emily said. She wondered, absently, if Samra had advised him. “He helped Frieda look into my mind.”
“A step born of desperation,” Samra said, sounding coldly disapproving. “It was not a wise thing for him to do. Even with your consent, the risks were high. I would not have authorized it in his place.”
“I volunteered,” Emily said.
“That doesn’t make it right,” Samra said. “Soul magic is dangerous. If you take it lightly, you can destroy your mind—or someone else’s mind.”
She held out the mirror. “Again,” she said. “And again, until you know yourself.”
Emily hesitated. “Why do I need to know myself?”
“When you are physically naked in front of another person, and he is naked too, there is still a clear line between you and him,” Samra said. “Even in the throes of sexual congress, when he is deep inside you and pumping hard, you are still two separate people. He will pull out of you, eventually, without difficulty. You and your lover are not the same person.”
She paused. “Using soul magic, on the very lightest level, is like being naked in front of someone else. But as you go deeper, you run the risk of blurring into their magic and soul. The most intensive sexual experience has nothing on it. They are totally vulnerable to you, but you can also be influenced by them. And if you don’t know yourself, you will never be able to tell what’s you and what’s them.”
“So I might come out thinking I’m a boy,” Emily said.
“Yes,” Samra said, flatly. “Or worse.
“You will be able to tell, once you know what you’re doing, if someone has been ... influenced ... or not. I believe that is what Gordian wanted to check. If I’d been there ... I would have insisted on doing it myself. Frieda didn’t have direct contact with your mind, but the risks were still considerable.”
“I trust Frieda,” Emily said.
“Frieda would not have wanted to hurt you, I am sure,” Samra said. “Many of the men who hurt women and vice versa don’t want to hurt them either. But saying or doing the wrong thing at the wrong time can cause hurt that cannot be mended, even with the best of intentions. And that’s just in the regular world. In soul magic, the slightest misstep can be disastrous. You cannot hide from the truth in your own head.”
Emily kept her face blank. She’d met a number of people who did just that, as far as she could tell.
“Now.” Samra indicated the mirror. “Let us try again, shall we?”
Chapter Fourteen
“YOU DIDN’T DO TOO BADLY, FOR your first time,” Samra said, an hour later. “You’ll need practice, of course, but you’re getting there.”
Emily barely heard. Her head was throbbing with intense pain. Sheets of fire seemed to be crashing through her mind, as though her very thoughts were burning. If it was this painful just to look at herself, she couldn’t help wondering how anyone lasted long enough to gain a soul magic mastery. It was hard to imagine someone as frail as Samra surviving such brutal treatment. But then, she wouldn’t have been an old woman when she was in school.
“It does get better,” Samra said. “Right now, you’re trying to twist your head to look down your back.”
“I can’t twist my neck to look down my back,” Emily pointed out, crossly. The headache was slowly fading, but her entire body was now aching. “It’s physically impossible.”
“It’s a very limited metaphor,” Samra acknowledged. “Your magic—your insight—doesn’t want to look at yourself. Naturally, it is resisting.”
“As if I was trying to perform surgery on myself,” Emily said. Sergeant Miles had taught them a great deal of battlefield medicine, but he’d made it clear that they weren’t to try to heal themselves unless there was no choice. “My body rebels against it.”
“Your mind, yes.” Samra shrugged and reached into her pocket, producing a small vial of potion. “Go back to your room and get into bed, then drink this. It’ll help you sleep.”