The Universal Mirror by Gwen Perkins Read Free Book Online Page A

Meg.  The memory of the night was beginning to come back to him now.  He hadn’t taken a good look at her in the Thana and his eye focused on her now to correct that fault.  Her hand lifted up, shielding her face from the look.  Both of Quentin’s eyes snapped open, blinking in surprise.
    “Don’t stare.  It’s not proper.”  Her fingers tugged at her dress, faded brown fabric yanking up higher with her grip.  There was little else about Meg to distinguish her—she was nothing more to Quentin than brown hair and brown eyes set into a humble face.  Were she not one of his captors, Quent would have simply blurred her in with the women he saw begging coin in the street.
    “Excuse me,” he said, although to apologize felt unnatural.
    “You’re dazed,” Meg said, distracted.  “Embr knocked your head hard, he did.”
    “Is that what that was?  I don’t remember much beyond the blackness.”  The redhead flashed her a grin.  “I’ve got an incredible headache, at least.  Do you mind if I sit up?”  He was used to his smile making the argument for him that he took her consent for granted.  It seemed, as she leaned over him, that he’d been right.
    Her warm fingers brushed the inside of his wrist, then she stopped, pulling away.  “No.  I’d best not.”
    “You don’t have to untie me.”  His smile was plastered on now, tight on his skin.  “Just… let me sit up straight, get my feet back on the ground.”
    She shook her head.
    “No.  Pig said not to.  You’ve a trick or two about you.  I’ll not do it.”  She moved further away from him, returning to the other side of the small room.  He noticed a basket of laundry at her feet.
    “I’ll fold those clothes for you,” he said teasingly, gambling again on a smile.
    “You?  Fold clothes?”  Meg snorted.  “What would one like yourself do with them?   No.”  She leaned down, skirts swishing against her ankles as she tugged another shirt free of the basket and hung it up on the line.  He noticed a small pool of mud forming beneath it as water dripped down from the sleeve and into the peat floor.
    “That’s a lot of laundry you have there,” he tried again, trying to find some sort of ground for a conversation.  He needed to find a way to convince her that he was harmless.  Quentin swallowed, feeling the dry rattle in his throat as he saw her lips fight a smile.  Meg leaned down, picking up another shirt, and he saw that, beneath the dirt and exhaustion that wrinkled her face, she was actually much younger than he.
    “Well.”  He expected her to follow it with a flirtatious remark and tilted his face a little with a smile.  She glanced over at him, her expression now firm and said, “There are a lot of dead men in this city.”
    What do you mean by that?  He stopped, not quite daring to ask.
    The smile returned to her mouth, this time knowing.  Meg continued with her work, as steady and silent as any of his servants.  He knew little of domestic duties—her casual movements took on new meaning with her comment about the dead.  He watched as she lifted and sorted through the pile of clothing, noticing now that it was of finer quality than most of the apparel that he’d seen worn by the poor.
    She resumed singing, this time under her breath so that he couldn’t quite make out the words.  He turned his head, staring at the wall on his right side.  The bed was shoved up against the peeling paint—he could feel a draft through the cracks in the wood.
    “Whose clothes are those?”  Quentin asked, no teasing now in his voice.
    “They’re not mine,” she said.  She’d finished hanging them now, wiping her palms against the coarse linen of her skirt.  “Nor Pig’s, nor Embr’s.”
    Quentin wondered why she was so free with the men’s names.  Then he understood.
    “Those are dead men’s clothes.”  And you intend mine to join them.
    “Sure, and they’ve got no need of them.”  Meg spat the