Sriduangkaew - Mirrorstrike

In the house of the Winter Queen, even time itself slows.

Above Nuawa, the prisoner swings in shallow parabolas, a human pendulum suspended by iron and harness. She has never thought a body could be reduced so small. Ytoba is little more than a torso, ice clinging to the stumps where eir limbs used to be. By right ey should have long succumbed. She was the one to hack those limbs off and she was not delicate about the taskthe hemorrhage alone should have been fatal. Somehow ey persists.

At the moment, Ytoba is wearing the face of Nuawa's mother, Indrahi.

As Nuawa understands it, the act of shifting shapes costs em: like any other physical exertion it places demands on the flesh. Ey hasn't been fed much recently, only water and the thinnest gruel, the occasional rice boiled to soft mush. She is sureshe has personally been forcing every watery spoonful down eir throat. It should have left em too malnourished to think, let alone alter eir shape, to her mother's or anyone else's.

"Are you," ey whispers with her mother's voice, "going to kill me again?"

"I'm aware of who and what you are, and my mother's ghost you are not." She gazes at the frieze behind em, gray ice and blue glass on the wall, water crystals arranged into the shape of hyacinths, Her Majesty's flower. Here even the prison cells are beautiful, the same way moraines are. "There's no real point in keeping you, save for the general's sentiment. She may show you mercy. I have no interest."

Ey smiles. Her mother's mouth. "Afraid I might betray you by revealing what you were up to? Exposing you to the prince. Though I'm sure you'll never let me have audience with her."

Nuawa shows em her wrist, where the hyacinth glints like a small faceted knife. "I've been sworn in, and General Lussadh has even less interest in speaking to you than I do." The general being half a continent away.

"There are laws and forces you're dealing with that you fail to understand. One to wake. Two to bind. By and by you shall lose your will, become the queen's creature in truth as well as pretense. Your mother's plot and her legacy wearing thin, then wearing out, then simply wiped away. I am sure your mother will be proud." Ey gazes at her unblinking. "And you're dying too, aren't you?"

"Am I? Every minute we're dying. Some faster than others."

"I'm an expert. I can smell poisonsome parasite. Very creative. It's not contagious though, not until it spawns, and by that point you'd be in no state to spread it anywhere. If you mean to assassinate Prince Lussadh during intimacy, this is an exceptionally poor method."

Impotent taunts, until the end. "This is all you have to say?"

"What did you reckon? That I would give you the queen's secrets? After you've done so much for me." The smile widens and, at last, it no longer resembles her mother's: toothed, grotesquely wide. Further than any human mouth should be able to stretch. "Anything I know will have to go with me to the next earth."

"Well," she says, drawing her gun, "that is that, then."

The ice shudders to gunfire acoustics, a few icicles falling off, tinkling a pretty, abortive melody. The assassin sags in the harness. In death ey does not revert to eir true face, true shape. In death, ey looks almost like Indrahi when Nuawa shot her.

But she is no child, and can separate fact from fantasy. She loosens the harness, turns the torso around, checking for a pulse one last time. There is none. For good measure, she slits the shapeshifter's throat. Even in this chill, the arterial system still has power; the blood leaves em in a burst, drenching her sleeves. The rest puddles under em, soaking the harness and the frost tiles. More black than red, under this light.

"This is for you, Mother," she says, but there is no answer. Only the cold, the dark, and the weight of history like a noose around her throat.

Lussadh hunts. The night is deep and the frosted roofs gleaming with ice, but she is used to both. She moves with precision, a foot in a crack between slates, another on a ledge that would bear her weight but only just. It is quiet. Cities under siege always are: she knows from experience, having been on both the defending and invading ends. For those defending, familiar streets and intersections distort; all laws and rules shift to accommodate the factors of combat always impending.

She glances briefly behind her shoulder, in the direction where her army camps, awaiting her next command. From this distance they are not visible, obscured by the high, high walls. Citizens of Kemiraj may even pretend they are at peace and that their magistrate has not revolted against the Winter Queen. She turns her gaze back to her destination, inhaling the clean, crystalline air. When was it that she's become at home wherever snow is, has taken the queen's element as her own? It must have been gradual, but it has happened so seamlessly that she no longer remembers a time when she felt otherwise and called herself a child of the desert.

Not that there's much desert left, now.

A step, then another. She climbs until there is no further handhold and no further roof. A gap yawns between the platform she occupies and the top of the wall that protects the magistrate's mansion. She judges the distance, draws back, and leaps.

She lands easily, with minimal noise. A matter of trainingfrom her youth she was tutored by court assassinsand a matter of agility granted by the queen's mirror. The slight, subtle strengths that together come to something more. Lussadh will be fifty soon and hardly feels the fact. Her body may not be the tireless engine it was at sixteen or twenty-five, but it remains formidable, lightly touched by age. Joints and muscles well-oiled as ever. A day will come when all these fail, but through her queen's blessing, that is yet held at bay.

Through the garden she moves, concealed by shadow and a veil of aversion made by one of her officers. Not the most potent thaumaturgy, but it deflects attention, makes her peripheral to the naked sight. Major Guryin is practiced at such things, the minor alterations, the tricks of perception. It would not hold against direct scrutiny. Still she has little enough to worry about. The city's military falls into two categories: loyal to winter and therefore deadMagistrate Sareha executed them with the suddenness of garrotes in the darkor loyal to Sareha and therefore vanishingly few. Of that handful, most have been decimated by Lussadh's army. Sareha would not be able to muster more than ten soldiers to defend her estate.

The grass is nearly as tall as she is, the trees black and dense.

She feels more than hears the velocity of it, the metal cutting through the air. Time enough to turn so the shard buries itself in her right shoulder instead of her throat. She drops to her knees, half-hidden in the shrubs, her back against the base of a marble plinth. Smaller target this way. Her breathing judders.