Fic: She Looked Into the Crystal Mirror Title: She Looked Into the Crystal Mirror When: During the Ascension Wars. Who: Marguel, Cai, Anna, Athyr Rating: PG-13 Warnings: None.
The trip to Bredigan is so long that Mama gives Marguel the money for a hotel -- “Just stay overnight,” she says, as she’s handing Marguel the keys to the skimmer. “But come home quickly the next day.”
It’s the first time Marguel has been anywhere on her own. She stops the skimmer just outside of Til Tomeil and climbs the short hill, hiking her skirts up around her knees to keep them out of the dew. Til Tomeil shares the cemetery there with the shantytown where she and Mama and Anna used to live. The gate is locked, but everybody in both towns knows the passcode; it takes her hardly two minutes to key it open and slip inside.
Lelaine’s grave is twice as short as most of the others, but then she only lived for two days. Mama had her the day after Vtere killed Papa Lunta. Marguel looks at the headstone, her eyes stinging behind her glasses. Nothing ever makes her cry, but Lelaine’s death was so unfair. Lelaine didn’t do anything. Not like Vtere, who deserved to die the way he did -- and even Papa Lunta at least got a chance to live and be a good father first.
Marguel remembers holding Lelaine in her arms after Mama gave birth, feeling Lelaine wriggle weakly and try to cry, while Anna sopped up the blood and tended to Mama. The year after that, of course, Mama had Athyr, who was a good strong healthy baby, and Marguel almost forgave him. But if Lelaine, who was innocent, had to die after just two days, and break Mama’s heart with it, it wasn’t fair that Athyr, who was Vtere’s baby, should get to live.
Besides, both times Mama was sick after she gave birth; she lay in bed for weeks just crying, or staring sadly at the walls, and left Marguel and Anna to tend the shop.
When the old man came and stole Athyr away when he was just two, it was the final thing. Marguel had been thinking again of forgiving him, starting to think of him as her brother. Then Vtere died -- the way he deserved -- stomped to death by a lot of his men who finally got fed up with how evil he was -- just as he deserved. And the old man came, but not to protect them, even though they needed to be protected; Marguel had heard people calling Mama Vtere’s kept woman, his whore, even though they had been married properly and all. The old man just took Athyr away and disappeared.
That was when they moved to the house on the hill on the outskirts of Til Tomeil. People there were kinder. They needed a seamstress, and Mama wasn’t just a seamstress, she had an import license from the Alliance to bring in clothes and textiles from Manassah. So Mama was allowed to put in a shop, and Marguel and Anna minded it, because after Vtere dying and Athyr disappearing Mama was worse than ever before.
They both kept up with their studies, anyway. And now Anna’s gone off to the Central Planets, to some fancy Alliance medacad, which Anna has earned for sure, but it leaves Marguel alone with Mama to manage everything by herself.
Some days Marguel thinks she is going to go insane if she has to stay in Til Tomeil another minute, managing Mama’s sick spells and doing the sewing and keeping the shop and barely getting time to do her own med studies before she has to go to bed at night early to save electricity.
She gets up from beside Lelaine’s grave and goes back to the skimmer.
At least Bredigan will be a change of pace. Mama won’t be there to mind her and hang over her like an unlucky cloud that looks like rain and turns out to be a dust storm. Marguel’s hands tremble on the steerer of the skimmer. She can buy whatever she wants to eat. Stay at whatever hotel she wants. She can do anything, no one can make any choices for her. She could get drunk and roll around on the floor in her room and no one could do anything about it.
As it turns out, Breidgan only has one hotel. But it’s a nice one, with a full bed and a hot and cold unit and even a shower stall inside. The woman who owns the hotel says to take a hot shower all she has to do is heat water on the hot unit and then take it to the stall and wash with it like she would do a cold bucket shower at home (except those are outside). Marguel does that first. And it’s wonderful.
Then she does her hair in front of the mirror with the silver backing wearing off, and fastens it up with pins. She puts on her denim work dress and leggings, which are from Mama’s shop to show off the merchandise.
The shipment has to go to a man called Antor, who does resale. He’s old and fat and rich -- Marguel has seen him before, he came to Til Tomeil once to pick things up -- but he’s also nice enough. He had a pocket of hard crystal sugar when he came to Til Tomeil, real sugar, and he gave pieces of it to Marguel and Anna when Mama wasn’t looking. They were twelve and thirteen then, but excited as the skinny ponies the Torres the smith keeps -- real sugar is an offworld treat, there’s hardly anybody on New Britain who can afford anything but synthetic.
Once she’s dressed up she takes the shipment over to his house. Mama didn’t say anything about making a good impression, but Mama forgets a lot between all her sicknesses; Marguel knows about looking good when you’ve got a sale to make from the periodicals that run on the family console.
Antor opens the door and smiles at her. “Marguel Lunta, you’re lookin’ all grown up.”
Normally she’d bristle at anybody who said something so inane, but she grins at Antor. “Yes, sir. Brought your goods in myself.”
“Glad you did. Tell you the truth, I’m lookin’ forward to when you’re runnin’ that shop in your own name. Ain’t many folks I like doin’ business with more.”
“Oh, Mama still does most of the work,” Marguel says blandly. She’s starting to feel less kindly towards Antor.
“Well, let me come look at what you brought.”
“Yes, sir.”
As he moves out of the doorway, there’s a crash, and a skinny ten-year-old comes falling out around her ankles.
“Boy!” Antor roars, but it’s a fond, fathery kind of roar, and Marguel’s stomach feels like it’s tipping over inside her. She barely even remembers the way Papa Lunta talked to her and Anna, just that he would grab her and sit her on his shoulders and let her lock her legs around his neck and cling to his head. Antor picks up the skinny kid and sets him on his feet. “Cai, you’re supposed to be minding your brother!”
“I was,” says the other boy -- the one Marguel didn’t notice until just now, and her stomach falls over again. The other boy looks like he’s Anna’s age. He’s tall, and oh, lord, he’s handsome, gruff and a bit awkward and dark-eyed. He has big broad shoulders and his arms look thick and hard -- he must work around the place, maybe with Antor’s horses -- and her insides feel like they’ve gone all water and slithery.
Marguel’s never even looked twice at a boy in her life. She doesn’t have the time and she doesn’t have the inclination. She tries to glance back to Antor, but she ends up staring at the ground, her cheeks turning red.
“Then what’s he doing running around and trying to break his neck?”
“That’s his new hobby, breaking his neck.” She peeks up in time to see Cai holding his brother by the collar, his expression chagrined. “I’ve got him, he’s fine.”
“I’m fine, Dad!” the kid squeaks.
Cai glances at her, cursory.
“Hello,” Marguel says, in the tiniest voice that’s ever come out of her in her life. Cao! She’s always sure of herself. She’s smart-alecky and confident and she has a perfectly good head on her shoulders, so why can’t she just act like it now? She’s never going to be out to Bredigan again for years. She’s never going to get another chance.
“Hello.” Cai offers his free hand to shake.
Marguel grabs it and then drops it, uselessly, and watches as he turns away, dragging his brother gently back into the house.
“Come on, you ruttin’ loon, let’s keep you alive until the next payment, how about?”
“Watch your language,” Antor calls over his shoulder. “Gorram kids, they hit that age, they start sayin’ whatever they want Let me have a look at that cargo, then.”
That night back at the hotel Marguel buries herself in the huge soft blankets of the bed. She is an idiot. She is sure enough bai chi, and she can’t wait to get home and get back to regular work and never think about Cai Antor ever again.
You see a boy one time, she mutters to herself, one damn time and you’re lyin’ here wishin’ you were dead. You’re as bad as Mama. You want to grow up and go so crazy for one fellow that if something happens you can’t even get out of bed? Or have it so if you ain’t married you think you’re a failure? Don’t ever think about him again. That’s so stupid. But it doesn’t stop smarting.
She’s going with Anna to the Medacad next year. She’s going to get her degree and be powerful, and then if she still wants a boy she can have any boy -- forget Antor’s son. She’ll be important.
She pulls the covers over her head and imagines herself at a -- at a party or something, and the most handsome man in the whole Medacad is there. She just beckons, and he comes across the room to her and starts to dance with her. He brings her a drink. He ignores everyone except her, and she can feel how jealous everybody is, just rolling off her like a flash flood after a dry spell, when the ground is so hard that nothing sinks in.
The next morning she gets up early and takes the skimmer back to Til Tomeil.
---
Marguel always planned to kill Vtere Liung’s baby. Maybe if the old man had left him, and she had taken care of him when Mama couldn’t, and helped him grow up, that would have made things different. But as it is, Marguel’s been planning to kill him for years, as soon as she gets her med degree, as soon as she finds him again.
Which she doesn’t realise she has when she tells Arthur LeGuin she’ll work for him.
She’s been back from the Central Planets for two years, taking here and there jobs wherever New Britain has jobs to offer -- which is most everywhere, with the ascension wars that have been going on since she was a child. Everybody has a makeshift hospital, everybody needs a surgeon, everybody needs someone who has the Alliance authority to get drug shipments through the freighters. Her little plastic scancard with the picture ID is better than gold or cred.
Then she gets that message on her console. Dr. Lunta, on behalf of Arthur LeGuin, king-elect of New Britain, I would like to extend an invitation. The position of head of medical staff is open…
So of course she says yes. Who has more power than the person who does the king’s medicine?
She doesn’t get to meet him at first. He’s still king-elect, so he’s nothing official yet, and she’s needed in the field hospitals, not the capitol city. Then, on the day he takes the throne, they bring her into the city to give him his physical and a handful of vaccinations against poisons and other possible avenues of assassination.
She waits in the little office in the Menw, the half-built hospital they’ve been trying to construct since his people took over the old one as the base of operations. But he doesn’t just open the door and come in. He throws it open and grabs her in a hug, strong arms around her shoulders. Marguel nearly loses her glasses.
“Marguel! I’m gorram happy to see you, bet you don’t even remember me, it’s been so ruttin’ long --”
She shoves him away so she can look at him, but she doesn’t recognise him, except to know he’s good-looking, lanky, medium height, probably about twenty, colour good -- the doctor checklist, except for the part where he’s handsome. “Who are you?
“You don’t! Damn, I knew you wouldn’t.” He claps her shoulder cheerfully. “It’s me, it’s Athyr. Your brother, dummy.”
Marguel just stares at him.
And then she poisons him.
What else is she supposed to do? She owes it to Mama -- she owes it to Anna, who hasn’t even contacted her since she left Medacad, and to baby Lelaine, back in the cemetery in Til Tomeil. She gives Athyr his physical, and the shots, and then for the last one, instead of the inoculation for anthrax, she gives him a hypo of stereoisometric CORAL-virus, and sends him on.
He collapses right after the coronation.
“He smiled all the way through,” her assistant tells her later. “I mean, there was no way you’d’ve guessed he was illin’. Just did as the Merdhin told him, lookin’ shiny as anything, and as soon as they finished takin’ photographs he was pukin’ his brains out on the floor.”
Marguel stands next to his hospital bed, fixing the feeding tubes that go down his nose and the sedative drip in his arm, half-listening to her assistant. When he jumped on her in her office, it was like getting met by two or three people, he was so bright and noisy and warm. And he was so happy to see her.
But he’s still Vtere Liung’s baby. Even grown up and king of New Britain. And now he’s vulnerable to her, and she’s the only person -- she knows she’s the only person -- who can save him or finish killing him.
She looks down at him. Nobody’s guessed what’s wrong with him yet. She’s the only one who knows he’s CORAL-positive, and probably the only person trained enough to treat him for it even if someone did guess. If she lets him die now -- she said she was going to kill him. She remembers telling Anna, years ago, that she was going to kill him. Of course, New Britain is finally looking at something like peace for the first time in eleven years. With Athyr gone, they’d start again.
Her assistant goes silent suddenly as the door to Athyr’s hospital room bangs open. Marguel turns quickly and feels her insides slowly turning cold liquid.
“What the hell’s wrong with him?”
It’s Cai Antor.
She doesn’t say anything; he pushes past her and half-falls into the chair beside Athyr’s bed, touching his cheek with worn, cut hands. In the silence he rounds on her.
“I asked you what the hell’s wrong with my brother.”
“It’s easy to treat,” she whispers.
“Are you treating it?”
“Not yet, but I --”
His face works, jaw clenching subtly -- Marguel watches the muscles and bones moving beneath his skin. “Treat it. Now.”
Her assistant moves towards the door, but Marguel gets there first, down the hall to her office where she keeps her things. Protocol is that all antidotes, antivirals, and really anything that requires careful dosage is supposed to be kept in the main cold unit, but she locks up everything she likes to keep at hand in her own space. In her spare time she plays with the pharmaceuticals and biologicals, mixing and administering them to the prohibitively expensive white rats her ID card gets her.
When she gets back to the room Cai is still sitting in the chair, but he backs off to give her working space, leaning up against the wall and watching her closely. She preps a hypo, trying not to look at him.
“I thought you gave him his physical before the ceremony.”
“I did.”
“How’d you miss this?”
“It’s very fast-acting.”
“You didn’t vacc him for it?”
“It’s also very uncommon.”
“How do you think he picked it up?”
She closes her eyes, cleaning the injection site with V-saline. “Somebody administered it to him.”
“Don’t want to start a witch-hunt in the new staff. You got any tips? Anybody more likely than another to get his hands on this stuff?”
Marguel finally looks at him, pushing her glasses up on her nose with her wrist. “Hospital access is restricted to none -- we don’t have any use for this kind of virus. It had to’ve been smuggled in, possibly on one of the medical supply carriers.”
“I’ve got work that hasn’t been done yet, but as soon as I’m finished I’m comin’ back up here, and I’m stayin’ with him the night. Every night, till he’s better.”
“Of course we’ll make that exception for you, since he’s your brother --”
His dark eyes flicker for a moment, still watching her. Marguel stifles the urge to cry. She hasn’t cried in years.
“Message my communicator if there’s any change to him.” He moves for the door, then stops. “He’d better get well.”
“He will.” He knows. Her liquidy insides feel like they’re going to slosh out of her mouth.
Cai nods and leaves, and Marguel sits back in the chair, clenching her hand in her lap. He knows he knows he knows. Oh, God. She feels the way she did in Bredigan, in the hotel, and she wishes she had blankets to pull up over her head here.
She’s not Mama. She’s worse than Mama. Mama was useless and weepy and sick, but at least she got to have the men she was in love with, at least she wasn’t the one who made them leave her. Marguel has earned all of this, and Anna was right, when she said going to Medacad to learn to hurt people was all right -- and Marguel’s not the prettiest girl in the room, or the most powerful, or important. She’s just cheap med staff on a backwater planet in a grimy kingdom, and Cai will never look at her with anything remotely like love, or want, or anything like that. He’ll never touch her. He won’t even be indifferent. He’ll distrust her, and it’s her own fault.
She sorts through the medicine she brought from her office, the tears falling in her lap.
Two days later Athyr opens his eyes while she’s taking his vitals, and catches her hand in his limply, then presses the palm to his lips. When she looks down, he smiles at her, stupid with the drugs.
“Knew you’d take good care of me.”
Across the room she can feel Cai’s eyes on her, and she decides right then that she isn’t going to kill Athyr.
She’ll never kill Athyr.
But she’ll poison him just as often as she likes, and let Cai be scared out of his head, he won’t be able to let her go because he’ll need her, because no one else will know how to save Athyr when she gets him. It won’t be often. Most of the time she’ll just do her job as well as she can. She’ll keep them guessing. She’ll keep Cai afraid.
And then she’ll have the most power after all.
And it won’t matter what Cai Antor thinks. He won’t matter.