Free The Universal Mirror by Gwen Perkins Page A

his look and her face turned, peeking over her shoulder, her cheek turning rose.
    “What are you waiting for?”  She whispered, her brow wrinkling in confusion as her eyes dropped to the wadded fabric in one of his hands, the clean shirt in the other.  He stepped forward, sliding his hand across her waist.  He pulled her back into him, his hips meeting her waist.  The heat of Catharine’s slender body radiated into his own as Quentin pressed his lips against the back of her hair.
    “You,” he said and he felt Catharine still.  Her entire body seemed to sigh.  He felt her fingers rest on his, the touch so light he could barely feel it.  It sent a shiver up his spine.
    “You’ll be waiting a long time then,” she lifted his fingers up one by one until he was no longer touching her, then stepped away.  Catharine’s braid had come undone, her brown hair wild around her cheeks as she looked at him, her expression frank.  “I’m not interested in trading spots with a whore.”  Her eyes were bright as she spoke and he saw that they were glistening as the morning’s light shone against her face, slipping in through a slight movement of the curtain.
    “Catharine, I swear to you, that I haven’t been—that I would never—”
    “Then where have you been?”  He could hear the hurt in her voice and it surprised him.  It matters so fiercely to her, Quentin thought, then—I matter.  “No.  Don’t tell me.  I don’t want to hear it.”  The woman strode through the door, not looking back.
    “Catharine—” He tried one last time.
    The door slammed.
     
    They called it Judgment but as far as Quentin could tell, there was no justice being done at the Gallows.  The event had the aura of a late-summer carnival despite the chill of the season.  He could smell the galingale in the air, lightly sprinkled on the bread that peddlers were hawking.  It was a strangely sweet-sour smell, compounded by the sweat of the packed citizens that he and Catharine were moving past.  The energy of the people unnerved him.  Heresy was rarely committed and there was a blood-thrill in the swarm of men and woman who had come to witness the punishment.  Many of the men were people Quentin recognized from university, others from dances, but many more were strangers.  All of Cercia came out for a Judgment and it was all Quentin could do to keep sight of his wife as she slipped past him, walking further away from the Gallows.
    “You can barely see the platform from here,” he muttered as he caught up with Catharine.  It was an elevated stage to which he referred, crudely built with a block at one end of it.  Hands or heads—it was one or the other that the Council would take.
    “I know.  Why do you think I came back here?”  She glanced with disgust at the place in which they were standing.  The stone was covered in wet straw and flies, the scent of urine rising in fumes from the gutters.  Catharine tugged at her skirts to jerk them out of the mud as she glanced around the two of them.
    “The company?”  He gestured to a couple of young boys taking turns spitting at the wall, then to an old woman who was winking at him with her one remaining eye.  She stopped the leer when Catharine looked over at her, replacing it instead with a smile made of rotted, black teeth.
    In spite of herself, Catharine laughed.  “Well, I do have you, Quent.  Perhaps I can arrange a trade with that one-eyed woman.  I’ve always wanted a chicken.”  The redhead looked back over at the woman to see that she did appear to have a mass of feathers poking out from a bag she’d slung over her back.  He shuddered.
    “A chicken?”  He danced lightly around her, finding a barrel and wiping rainwater off the top of it.  He gestured to Catharine, bidding her silently to sit down.  “I’m worth two goats at least.”
    “You’re as much trouble as four, for cert.”  The woman replied as she sat, smoothing her skirts out as if