Shadowheart by Laura Kinsale

arrayed in robes of sable black and silver, resplendent against a sky of infinite stars. Elayne felt her breath fail her.
    It was her own dark angel. Beautiful and powerful, radiant with mystery, a perfect rendering upon the artist’s card. And as she lifted her eyes, she saw the same face alive before her, watching her, in the person of a nameless pirate.
    She sprang up, sweeping the card away and knocking over her chair as she escaped from his circle of Truth. “It is a trick! It is some artifice with the cards!” She stood breathing quickly, angrily. “He can’t be you.”
    The Raven never took his eyes from her face. He tilted his head a little, as if he too were doubtful. “Do you remember me, Lady Elena?”
    “Nay—remember you? Have we met?” She shook her head helplessly. “I don’t understand this! It’s not—I don’t mean—not in life! Remember you from where?”
    He smiled. “It is merely a card, as you say. I only wonder why it disturbs you so.”
    “It is not merely a card, as you well know!” she cried. “It is you! And he can’t be you. I don’t know how you have discovered this, or made it come about, but he is not you.”
    He lifted his eyebrows. “You confuse me greatly, Lady Elena, I do concede. The card is me, and I am not him? Who is ‘he’?”
    She set her jaw and reached to pick up the card, slapping it face-up on the table. “I am quite sure this is some prank you play with your victims, as it must be known to you that this card is a perfect rendering of your person.”
    His mouth worked, as if he were subduing a smile. “I confess, you are correct in that point.”
    She hesitated, taken aback by this easy admission.
    “It is a little game. I delight in games. It is a pursuit of mine to observe the human character. Your response has been the most interesting of all so far. Tell me, who is this ‘he’ that I cannot be?”
    “No one,” she said, truthfully enough. “ Tis naught but a resemblance to a… a statue I used to gaze on during mass.”
    “Of a saint?”
    “Um, an angel,” she said.
    “Ah, that would account for it,” he said placidly. “I’ve oft been told I resemble an angel.”
    Elayne blinked at him. He did not appear like any angel she had ever seen, except her own.
    “I expect it is my cherubic expression,” he said, and gave her a smile so wicked that her throat shrank.
    “You are very frightening,” Elayne breathed.
    “I mean to be,” he said. He riffled through the cards and spread them in a fan upon the table. “And yet… you do know me.”
    “No.” She shook her head, twice. “I don’t know you.”
    “I’m in no mood to harm your lovely face, Elena,” he said. “None at all.” His lip curled slightly. “ ‘Tis your good fortune that you remind me more of Melanthe than of your sister.”
    Elayne felt herself frozen. She answered nothing.
    “Ah, the house of Monteverde. Do they either of them suppose that I would forget those night-flower eyes? Your half sister’s are only brown, but you have that infernal Monteverde tint of blue and purple in yours. Foolish of Melanthe, to be so careless. But better for you in the end, as I don’t hold the timid Madame Cara’s visage very dear.”
    If he had only spoken names, or even of faces, she might not have believed he could be speaking true. But when he called her sister timid, Elayne knew that he must have some close and vivid knowledge of her. “You have met my sister?” she asked faintly.
    He made a short nod. “Aye,” he said, “and hated her as she despised me.”
    Elayne stared at him. She could not even imagine her fainthearted sister in the same room with this man, far less that they knew one another enough to have hatred between them.
    He turned his full gaze on her again. “Either you dissemble well, or your education in your family heritage has been sadly neglected, Princess Elena Rosafina di Monteverde. I am of Navona, and you have no greater enemies on earth.”
    She stiffened in her chair. “Nay,” she whispered. “That is all gone now. Lady