The Hidden Queen (12 page)

Some of the things it showed her, she recognized. Kieran holding her as she wept in her pain when Rima had died; herself drowsing against the warm trunk of the willow on a summer afternoon; hunting for Charo’s puppy, after it had run after a baby hare and lost itself in the woods. She saw Keda throwing an apple peel in slow motion over her shoulder on a moonless summer night; Cerdiad…the Cerdiad bonfire…
ah, but I don’t want to see this…
shattering glass…men with scowling faces, smoking torches, eyes full of tears…
This isn’t Cerdiad…this hasn’t happened…they’ve come to burn the house…no…No…No!

She’d cry out loud, coming to herself bent double with pain on the mat in her chamber, with tears streaming down her face. When she calmed down and took a few moments to catch her breath, she’d doggedly try again—and come up against the same vision, or different ones, no less potent. Touch the stone and be swirled into madness, that seemed to be the impasse she shipwrecked against time and time again. And yet…she couldn’t understand it. The willows had never given her anything but peace beneath the green bower. Now, far away, the place seemed to hold nothing but chaos and confusion.

She struggled with it alone for almost two weeks. Perhaps she would have gone to Morgan sooner if she hadn’t been so aware of having given the impression of choosing her talisman so blithely in the first place—but stubborn pride kept her at it until the thing simply defeated her by its sheer persistence. Beaten, exhausted, she sought Morgan’s wisdom.

“It’s as though it has a mind of its own,” Brynna complained. “I can catch it, I can hold it, but then it fills my mind with other things even as I am thinking of it, and it’s gone.”

“Perhaps you had better tell me,” said Morgan, frowning, “what the talisman is.”

Brynna hesitantly described the willows, wishing she didn’t feel as though she was laying bare a hallowed place to infidel eyes. “I had a stone from the well when I first came under the willows,” she said, gazing down into her lap. “I planted it there, in the ground, like a small Standing Stone. That was what I took as…”

“A
Standing Stone?
” echoed Morgan blankly.

“Not a real one, just a pebble…it was only I who ever thought of it that way,” Brynna said.

“But…a Standing Stone…” Morgan shook her head; realizing only now just how different her charge was from the rest of the girls in her care. “What made you pick that, of all things? Don’t you realize you’re crossing power with power…I don’t even know myself what you’ve done here. It’s quite possible you’re lucky you aren’t dead!”

“Should I choose something else?” asked Brynna queasily.

“You can’t,” said Morgan, in real perplexity. “The connection has been made already; it’s often said that novices don’t choose talismans so often as they are chosen by them. For some reason this stone of yours has picked you. But, my dear child, I’m not at all sure just where we go from here. It is unlikely that a Standing Stone will ever allow you the freedom you need for it to be the talisman you require.”

“But it’s only…” began Brynna again.

Morgan shook her head. “It’s no longer only anything. Whether or not it is a Standing Stone raised for obscure purposes by those long dead or a pebble planted all unknowing by a girl unaware of the power of naming which lies in the gift of her Sight, it’s all the same in the eyes of the Gods.”

“You mean I made it a Standing Stone just by willing it so?” said Brynna, a little breathless at the magnitude of this.

“It would seem so—even if it is just for yourself. It may serve a useful purpose for you—from what you said, it appears that many of your stone’s visions are concerned with things which are yet to come to pass. But taming this wild beast to be ridden as your talisman…I don’t know, Brynna. Try again, here, with me. I will try and follow you, perhaps then I will be able to see what to do.”

Brynna obediently focused on Cascin again—the house, the path, the trees…the stone…Her mind brushed it, and dissolved almost instantly in a tower of flames wreathing a column of white stone, an unearthly wail of terror and distress rending the air. Her eyes flew wide, her mouth opened and gasped for air. She was dimly aware that one of the voices in the fugue of fear and dismay was her own, her cry loud in the silence which remained behind after the vision faded. It was the only cry she heard as a sound…the rest…the rest had cried out in her mind, had been felt there, and had been silenced…For a few moments dark ness took her, held her, then her eyes cleared. She realized with a start that the grip on her shoulders was Morgan’s hands. They were both kneeling on the floor before the fireplace—Morgan’s face almost as white as her robe.

“Kerun and Avanna!” Morgan gasped, invoking the protection of almost every God she knew. “You had to cope with this every time?”

Brynna reached up to wipe salty trails of tears off her cheeks, tears she could not remember having shed. “It’s not usually…this bad,” she finally managed to say, her voice oddly hoarse. “What was…that place?”

“I’m not sure,” said Morgan, very slowly.

She lies,
said Brynna’s mind with cold clarity.

But Morgan was too wise in ways of Sight to be drawn out by the long, hypnotic stare of Brynna’s truth-gaze. Brynna was not going to hear from her that she could put an interpretation to the vision the Stone of Cascin had seen fit to give them. It was obvious that Brynna had not recognized the tower writhing in the fire. But Morgan had, having lived in it for almost half her life: the white tower of Bresse. There was no denying the truth in the revelation—with powers of her own Morgan could tell that much. Castle Bresse, which had stood for almost two centuries, was going to fall; and it was beginning to be painfully obvious to Morgan that the oracle predicting its downfall was also the trigger that would spark it. It was something Brynna herself could not but become aware of in the fullness of time, but Morgan did not see why it should be necessary for her to be burdened with the knowledge before it became inevitable.

She steered her thoughts, instead, into more productive channels. The disciplines of Bresse demanded a talisman; it was obvious Brynna’s stone would not do at all. And yet…there had been the choosing…

“Are you all right now?” asked Morgan carefully, reaching out to cup Brynna’s chin in her long fingers. When the girl nodded, Morgan let her go and sat back, arranging her robe around her. “I think I may have your answer,” she said. “It’s only the Stone that is your bane, not the clearing itself. So let the clearing take its place—or something else within it, something close to but not of the Stone. The moss around it perhaps, or the willow tree. It is much more difficult to hold a pure image of an entire physical space than that of a single object, but I think you’re well able to do it.” She did not offer to explain the reasoning behind this declaration of faith; in truth she was still reeling from the purity of the images she had seen in Brynna’s mind. A part of her found it difficult to believe the white tower was not already in flames around her.

“But the Stone…”

“Yes, there is a risk that your new talisman holds within itself this seed of danger; you have to make sure you are warded in your mind against the Stone’s touch, unless you are in need and actively seek it.”

“Seek it?” echoed Brynna, her eyes haunted with stonesent dreams.

“You may well have an oracle within you,” said Morgan gently. “We might never have known if you hadn’t…the Gods preserve you…decided to pick a Standing Stone as your talisman. The choice is made, the damage is already done; but we can still hope to turn this to advantage. But we must go slowly, and very carefully. The least of my problems right now is that this has never been done before, and I shall be making up the rules as we go along. Ignorance always means danger; and you, of all people, we cannot lose.” She reached out to touch Brynna’s cheek in an almost maternal caress. “It’s you who will be blazing this trail,” she said, “I’ll just follow, learn, and keep you out of trouble if I can.”

But trouble seemed to follow the girl who had once been Anghara Kir Hama, of Miranei under the Mountains, like a shadow. Castle Bresse, protected and secluded, was shelter for a while—but the storms that beset Anghara’s young life were far from blown out.

The first touch of the cold wind came early, when young Brynna Kelen of Castle Bresse was only just beginning to find her feet in the dangerous streams and eddies of Sight. Brynna, with Morgan’s help, had succeeded in centering on her substitute talisman—the spongy, yielding moss which surrounded the little Standing Stone at Cascin. Morgan had objected, again, arguing that the stone itself was standing in the midst of the moss and it would be all too easy to touch it by mistake—with consequences which, by now, both teacher and pupil knew well. But it seemed to work, and proved adequate as a basis on which to build. However, the first stirring of coherent power from Brynna whipped up an unexpected wasp’s nest.

Brynna, who had turned twelve only the week before, was sitting at Morgan’s feet in her teacher’s chambers, attempting one of the more difficult exercises Morgan had set for her. In her mind’s eye she sat in, was surrounded by, what was almost a nest of the soft moss she remembered from beneath the willows. With a tendril of her mind she perceived the deep green of its presence all around her, feeling its texture with the tips of her fingers. With preternaturally sharpened senses she was following a thread of thought, of Power, retrieving a target set by Morgan. When the alien contact came it was sudden, jolting, and very fast; she was shocked from her cocoon, the moss turning hard and gritty beneath her hand, as though it had transmuted itself into coarse sand. She blinked, shivered, and sat rigid with shock, rubbing the last of the trance’s cobwebs from her eyes.

Morgan had felt nothing. “What is it?” she asked, herself startled by the sudden change in her young pupil.

“It felt…as though they were looking for me,” said Brynna slowly, groping for meaning in what she had just experienced.

A swift vision of a white tower in flames was visited on Morgan’s mind, quickly suppressed; she rose, her face grave. Once Brynna had spoken, she had no doubt as to exactly what had happened.

“And they may well have found you,” she said. “We still have time for a plan. I think,” and she allowed a wintry smile to touch the corners of her lips, “it’s time for some of our Sisters to go into retreat.”

They gauged it to a nicety. Morgan arranged things in such a way that the patrol came to Bresse in time to see the tail end of a small cavalcade of Sisters and a couple of pack animals vanishing along the narrow track which led up into the mountains. Morgan herself was in the courtyard to greet Sif’s soldiers. They were ten, and with them a pair of frightened women, one young, one old enough to wish never to have to sit a horse again, looking anxious and uncomfortable on her placid gelding.

“We have reason to believe you are harboring one whom our lord the king wants taken,” grated the leader of the patrol, after observing a sketchy obeisance due to one of Morgan’s rank. Behind him, thinking themselves unobserved, four of his men were making the sign against the evil eye.

“Bresse harbors no fugitives,” said Morgan levelly.

“We have orders to search,” said the patrol leader.

Morgan stepped aside, making a welcoming gesture with her hand. “Search. But disturb nothing.”

More men were making the sign; so many Sighted women together in one place was a rare circumstance. Every child in Roisinan grew up with the idea of Sight, sometimes within reach of a Sighted mother or grandmother, and this kind of domestic power was known and accepted. But gathered all together, the little puddles and trickles of familiar Sight pooled into a vast, unknown and dangerous sea. Bresse was not often frequented by common folk. Morgan’s injunction was almost unnecessary; not one soldier would willingly touch anything in this place.

But physical searching was not what the patrol leader had in mind. He turned, caught some in the act of making the sign and swore, then beckoned the two women forward. “Well?” he barked.

The older one was sweating, half in fear of her horse, half in terror of the captain of the guard. She offered nothing. But the younger woman was mettlesome enough; she met Morgan’s eyes squarely, then allowed her gaze to play on the cottages in the courtyard, the byres, coming to rest finally on the white tower. They lingered there for a long moment, and then she turned her head toward the scowling man who waited for her answer.

“No,” she said. “Not here.”

The scowl deepened. “By the Gods,” he snarled, “if you’ve led us here on a wild goose chase…”

“We heard what we heard,” she said, unmoved.

One of the men had been more observant or perhaps less overawed than the rest. “The group that just went into the mountains,” he said to his captain, “who were they?”

“Yes, who were they?” the captain asked, leaning forward on his pommel to stare at Morgan. “Where were they going?”

“Four of our Sisters,” said Morgan calmly. “They are going on retreat into the mountains.”

“On retreat? What does that mean? Where have they gone?”

“Even if I could tell you,” Morgan returned, “I would not. Retreat is a calling to solitude, not to be savaged by a mob of angry men. But the truth is I do not know where they have gone. Bresse maintains several small bothies in the mountains; those who go on retreat are not called upon to provide advance notice of which one they will make for.”

“This is true,” said the younger of the captain’s women.

His head swivelled in her direction. “What do you mean?”

“I was trained here,” the girl said, keeping her voice carefully neutral and her eyes on the space between her mount’s pricked ears. Morgan felt a sudden warmth spreading through her. This was one of their own; Morgan didn’t recognize her, but there had been so many novices through the years. This girl was Bresse-trained; she would not…

But the captain was speaking again. “Would you know where these mountain huts are, then?”

The girl glanced up at Morgan quickly, almost too fast for anyone to see, and dropped her eyes again. She shook her head. “I never went on retreat.”