The Hidden Queen (14 page)

“Mother!” gasped Ansen, caught unprepared by the thinly veiled contempt in his mother’s voice. Her face softened.

“We’ll talk of this again,” she murmured. “You’re tired. I will come and see you when you have rested. Feor, come. He still needs a lot of sleep if he is to heal. I’ll see the women bring you a draft.” She leaned over to brush Ansen’s forehead with her lips, just at the edge of the bandage.

Ansen’s eyes, much to his disgust, suddenly filled with tears. Or at least his one good eye did. They brimmed on the lower lid, and spilled; Chella reached to wipe them gently away.

“Am I loathsome?” he whispered, very softly.

“Of course not, darling,” his mother murmured.

Feor was already outside; Chella followed, closing the door behind her, leaving Ansen alone in the firelit chamber. He squeezed his eye tightly shut, trying to keep the tears back, but new ones came, hot ones, rage and self-pity.

Am I loathsome?…Of course not, darling…

She was lying. She was lying! How could he not be loathsome, fettered in his bed with an eye doomed never to see light again? A sound bubbled into his throat; he swallowed, but it filled his mouth with a taste of mold and ashes. His lips opened almost inadvertently, and it came out, first oozing gently in a soft moan, then building to a crescendo until it peaked in a howl of outrage, horror, thwarted passion. He seized his half-full wine goblet, heavy silver, and threw it with all his strength at the far wall. It struck and spilled, leaving a long smear to trickle down like blood and pool slowly on the wooden floor.

Eventually he found out where Brynna was, or Anghara, as he supposed he must now learn to think of her. He eased it out of his mother, playing her expertly. Once again she had not needed to tell him the whole story, only enough for him to surmise the rest—he knew about her own stay at Castle Bresse. In fact, he did it so well she was unaware she had spilled the secret. It was Feor who, with skill equal to Ansen’s own, made the young patient betray himself by an unwary word. When Chella heard of his plan to write a letter to Miranei in which he would detail Anghara’s whereabouts, she lost no time in extending the interdict, which, until then, had excluded him. It was with bitterness that Ansen received this new wound. He found himself helpless to utter Anghara’s name to anyone but Feor or his parents, and even there the cocoon of silence was tight around him if anyone else was near. His hand would not write the word, and if he tried to wrap it in euphemism or riddle even they were sufficient to confound him utterly. The name of Anghara, and anything that grew from it, were trapped inside his head like the ancient insects imprisoned in amber the children occasionally found in the woods. He raged against it, but he had no gift of his own to break Chella’s fiat.

And then he went quiet one day, very suddenly, very deliberately. It was the day he was allowed to leave his room for the first time, wearing an eye patch made from black silk. The long sojourn in his bed had made his legs weak; his knees trembled as he walked, but he would accept no friendly shoulder, no stick, leaning against a wall or a banister when he needed support. It was as though he wanted no further handicap to mar his emergence from convalescence. He insisted in dressing entirely in black for the occasion—saying, in the disturbing tone of voice he had adopted, that he had better learn to match that which would be his constant companion for the rest of his life. It suited him, setting off his pale hair, his white skin; he looked like a tragic prince from a harper’s tale, and people he met in the corridors hurried to him to smile and to say how marvellous it was to see him abroad again. Lyme had even allowed the twins to bring Ansen’s favorite hound into the house, and the dog nearly flattened him in the initial explosion of its joy—as did his brothers, even the taciturn Adamo finding words with which to welcome his brother back.

And Feor, watching, saw Ansen accepting it all, his head held high. He also saw the instant when Ansen’s good eye swept across the hall, pausing only infinitesimally at the closed door of the dining chamber. He also saw exactly when it occurred to Ansen that his confinement in this house and his mind was not permanent. This was his heritage—one day this would be his. And when it was, when his parents were gone, it would be easy to work his will. Until then…well, someone else could easily tell Sif where Anghara was, but it was hardly likely to happen in the nest of Sighted women they’d spirited her away to. And as long as she stayed there, Ansen would know where to find her. Would know where to tell Sif to find her. It wouldn’t bring back his eye, nothing would, but at least he would have the satisfaction of taking from her something equally precious in return. Certainly her freedom; perhaps her life. Sif was a king, in name and in deed; Anghara was already dead. It would cost Sif nothing to meet that condition in truth. All he needed were a few trusted men. Perhaps, one day, Ansen would be among them. Perhaps Sif would look past the missing eye.

Feor shivered where he stood. Oddly, it was not Anghara’s face that came to him as he stared at Ansen’s shadowy, triumphant smile; it was Kieran’s. Kieran, as Feor had once seen him, dark hair slicked with rain. He heard again his own voice.
It is well. She will need a friend.

Kieran. Not March who huddled faithfully in a village close to Radas Han and kept watch on his hidden princess, but Kieran. There was a cloud hiding Anghara’s future from Feor’s questing mind, a cloud oozing out of the blackness which draped Ansen’s thin frame; and Kieran’s name shone from within it. Feor suddenly knew that when the time came for Anghara’s friends to come for her, March would already be dead.

Ansen did not return to lessons with Feor. Instead, he spent weeks and months first trying to get the strength back into his wasted limbs and then, once he had accomplished that, trying to regain his mastery of the arts of war. He rode out to the hunt with his father, carrying his hawk on his gloved wrist, every inch the young lord. He worked up a lather in the tilting yard, occasionally partnered by one or the other of his younger brothers whom he soon taught to respect him since he gave no quarter, and expected none. He found he had lost his unerring aim in archery, and fought bitterly to regain it, adjusting his stance and grip to compensate for his disability; but had to come to terms eventually with the fact that he would never be as skillful a shot as before. He’d lost the depth of vision essential for accuracy. It was one more black mark against Anghara Kir Hama. Black was his color now, in more ways than one; since he had emerged from his sickroom, he had worn nothing else. Even his mind was obsidian, black, gleaming and utterly impenetrable. It was no longer possible for any Sighted person at Cascin to know what Ansen was thinking or planning behind this smooth facade. Feor had his fears, but they were insubstantial ghosts. The atmosphere in Cascin hummed with undercurrents where before there had been only clear waters; Ansen was the most direct cause for this, of course, but this, too, was a legacy of Anghara of Miranei.

Something irreplaceable had been taken from Chella—a vitality that had been hers, a quiet joy in her life had gone, vanished largely the instant she saw her eldest son with his hand held up to his bloodied face. What remained ebbed away slowly, and the change in her became increasingly obvious as her shoulders stooped a little more each day and she made no attempt to hide the gray hairs which now dimmed the familiar brightness of her hair.

“Are you ill, my lady?” became a mournful refrain for Feor as he watched the dark circles grow around her eyes and her hands tremble sometimes as she lifted a goblet or a spoon.

“There’s nothing you can do, my friend,” was the customary reply.

When she eventually took to her bed, Feor knew she would never leave it.

Distressed as Lyme and Feor were at the inevitability of a bright life ending, they failed to realize the repercussions of her steadily weakening condition until it was entirely too late. When Ansen mentioned Anghara by name in the presence of a servant, Feor did not realize the implications until much later. He was sitting with Chella in her chambers, reading aloud from a favorite book as she lay back alone and small in the great bed. When he did make the connection, Feor stumbled as the words ran into a sudden blur on the page before him. Chella’s eyelids, almost transparent now, fluttered open at the silence.

“Feor?” she whispered softly, her voice lifting in a query.

“Ansen. He spoke her name to me today. He said her name…and we were not alone.”

Chella’s white cheeks suddenly flamed as blood rushed to her face. “The interdict…”

“I should have bolstered it months ago!” groaned Feor, in an agony of self-reproach.

“Do not…blame yourself. It is I who should have realized…sooner.” She breathed for a while, very carefully, as though she had need of some deep well of power she had not tapped yet—and as though she was far from sure she had strength for the tapping. Her eyes stared at the tapestry adorning the wall, and the shadows flickering upon it from the fire in the hearth. It was warming up for spring, but a fire was laid every day in Chella’s bed chamber; she was so often cold. “Let me see…if I can’t make it…”

“Lady, no,” said Feor, coming to his feet and holding out his hand in a gesture that was almost supplication. “You haven’t the strength. Let me try.”

“Perhaps he hasn’t had time. Perhaps…it’s not too late. Feor, bring me…my son.”

This was a bad idea, Feor felt it in his bones, but could not ignore the pleading in the dying woman’s eyes. He hesitated for a moment, then bowed, turning away and striding out of the chamber in search of Ansen.

He did not have to seek far. Ansen was on the lawn, standing on the stone circle where the Cerdiad bonfires were lit each year. Dressed in his customary black, his feet planted arrogantly apart, his hands folded behind his back, Ansen stood looking up at the house with an odd, crooked smile playing upon his lips. It widened as he saw Feor emerge and hovered for a moment on the edge of a sneer.

“I wondered,” he said conversationally as the priest approached, “how long it was going to take you.”

“Your lady mother wishes to see you,” said Feor, refusing to rise to the bait.

“By all means,” said Ansen, with exaggerated courtesy.

Feor walked a step behind him as they climbed the stairs, watching the almost jaunty step of the younger man with deepening misgivings. There was something here…but the mind was still closed, still obsidian, if anything harder than ever. Ansen was now close to seventeen; he was fully grown, and his mind had not been that of a child for years. At Chella’s door Feor had a sudden urge to leap into Ansen’s path, forbid even at this late stage his audience with his mother—but even as he hesitated it was too late. Ansen crossed to the bed to lift one of his mother’s limp, pale hands and kiss it ostentatiously.

“And how are you today, Mother?” he said. “I am told you sent for me.”

“Sit down, Ansen.” The voice was stronger, firmer, than it had been only a short while ago. Feor didn’t know what she had done while he had been out of this room, but it had worked. “There is something,” said Chella, her fingers tightening on her son’s, “I have to ask you.”

But Ansen had already decided a game of cat and mouse was not what he had in mind; the crudest thing to do, the thing that would best retaliate for the years of silence imposed upon him, would be to tell the bald, unvarnished truth.

“Yes,” he said, “I know. But you won’t like your answer. You see, I sent the letter to Miranei almost two weeks ago.”

Chella’s fragile strength shattered. Her fingers fell away nervelessly from Ansen’s hand, and her face was once again a hectic scarlet blush. She tried to draw breath, and it came out as a dry, labored rattle. Feor sprang forward, pushing Ansen out of the way, hands that had once been a healer’s already reaching for the woman who lay rigid.

“Get out,” he said to Ansen, his voice cold. “Bring the healers, call your father. I will do what I can in the meantime.” A beat later he looked up to see Ansen still frozen at the bedroom door. “Call your father,” he repeated. “I hope you loved her at least that much.”

Ansen’s eye was very bright; it might have been tears, but Feor had no time for him. Ansen murmured something Feor only half heard—it might have been
I’m sorry.
But the time was past when a simple word of regret might have served to heal this kind of wound. In any event, he had vanished when Feor next spared a glance his way. But it was already too late. By the time he returned, with Lyme and the same plump healer who had kept the hard truth from Ansen almost three years ago, Chella was gone, beyond all Feor’s efforts to save her.

And so had a treacherous letter, meticulously planned and dispatched. What years of peace and education Anghara had enjoyed were unequivocally and finally over. The hunt was closing in.

T
here was a family vault in the foothills behind Cascin, in the fork where three of the wells joined into one stream and went rushing down to the River Tanassa. They took Lady Chella there the day after she had breathed her last. There were few mourners: Lyme, speechless with his grief; Feor, gaunt and pale, standing very still with his hands tucked out of sight into his sleeves; one or two of the oldest servants, who had known Chella since she was a child. Her daughter was considered too young to attend, but the twins were there, Charo looking merely bewildered at the unseemly haste in which his mother had left him, Adamo with a deeper sadness in his eyes, a deeper understanding.

Ansen was not there.

It was a gap none could ignore; by his very absence, he was more firmly present than anyone there. There were those who knew where he had gone but did not wish to speak of it; there were those who did not know, but felt with a fine instinct that it would be better not to ask. Lyme himself looked as though his tongue kept on returning to probe an abscessed tooth; the grimaces of pain that crossed his face every now and again had little to do with the loss of his beloved lady. He was finding it hard to come to terms with the treachery of his eldest son.

Ansen had fled Cascin for more than one reason. When he had entered his mother’s chambers to play his game, he had not dreamed it would kill her—he’d known she was ill, but not the extent of her weakness. Her death had hit him hard; the murder-guilt of what felt uncomfortably like matricide weighed on Ansen’s shoulders. But that in itself was not enough to make him regret the actions leading to it. If guilt burned his soul, so did resentment, his need for revenge, the darkness that claimed half his sight, his devotion to a king called Sif. In his letter to the court of Miranei he had introduced himself as Ansen of Cascin, nephew by marriage to King Dynan and cousin to Anghara Kir Hama…who had spent several years in hiding in Cascin and was now safely in Castle Bresse. But there was a possibility the letter might never reach Sif’s hands, some royal secretary might simply toss away a missive purporting to be a sighting of one known to have been buried in the family vault years ago. When Ansen saddled his bay and pointed him toward Miranei, his feelings may have been muddied and confused by his mother’s death, but there was, nonetheless, a single burning imperative easily discernible through the chaos of his thoughts.
I must go to him and tell him…I must go to him myself.

His horse cast a shoe in the middle of nowhere, when he was still more than two days’ ride from Miranei. Ansen lost valuable time hunting for a smith, then chanced upon one who looked as though he had spent the last week carousing and was only now hitting the full stride of his hangover. The man’s eyes were narrow and bloodshot, and he worked very slowly, as though he was infinitely fragile and an inadvertently hard tap of his hammer might shatter his broad, calloused fingers. Ansen could only stand and watch him, fretting uselessly over the hours slipping by.

With good reason, as it turned out. When he rode into Miranei, days later, sweaty and tired and his horse lathered with effort, he discovered Sif had already left the city to ride to an unspecified destination. It was a matter of considerable conjecture on the outskirts of Miranei that the direction he took had not been south, as might be expected, given the news of Tath and near-constant border skirmishes, but east.

The news greeted Ansen as he came wearily into the common room of a Miranei han. All he had wanted was to pass through on the way to his room, to try and find supper, a bath and a bed—whichever presented itself first—but he was brought up short by a stray tendril of conversation.

“Shaymir? What would the king want with Shaymir? It’s Tath that’s the troublemakers, anyone could tell you.” The voice was scathing in its contempt.

“Perhaps he’s gone to try and get them to help against Tath,” someone else hazarded.

The first voice returned, preceded with a snort. “Shaymir? As allies? That’s a nation of copper miners and pampered princelings, with nothing in between except a couple of crazies who live out in the desert and pretend to be Khelsie abominations. What would Roisinan want with the likes of them? What would the king want with them? One Sif is worth an army of Shaymir.”

Ansen agreed with the principle, where Sif was concerned. He had misgivings, however, about the other’s terse dismissal of Shaymir as a source of fighting men—he had sparred for years with Kieran, and there was nothing soft about him. An army of Kierans might well prove a formidable proposition. But Ansen knew Sif had not gone to Shaymir. There was more to the east of Miranei than the Brandar Pass. There was the river Rada; and beyond it, Castle Bresse.

For a moment he considered interjecting and telling the assembled company where Sif really was, and who had sent him there. But the knot of people on whom he’d been eavesdropping sat close together in a tight bunch and looked as if they would not welcome insolent intrusions from a stranger. Especially one claiming intimate knowledge of Sif Kir Hama’s itinerary less than an hour after he’d ridden in from the nether regions of Roisinan. Instead, Ansen turned away in pursuit of his original goals. These had now assumed urgency; he would stay in Miranei only as long as it took him to give his exhausted horse a few hours’ rest and to organize provisions for another journey. Then he would be out again, following Sif. It had been Ansen who had started this ball rolling; and Ansen meant to be at Sif’s side when they brought Anghara to him. Only that, in his mind, would wash the guilt from him—it was not Ansen who had killed Chella of Cascin, it was Anghara! Only that would pay for his ruined sight. He paused to glance once more at the crowded common room. The stories he could tell! He’d have them all hanging on his every word…but there was no time. The hankeeper was at his elbow, and Ansen turned to pin him with a smouldering gaze from his one good eye.

“Supper in my room,” he said crisply, “and a bath. Have someone tend my horse; I’ll be leaving at sunrise tomorrow.”

“But my lord said…” the hankeeper began, seeing his chance of profit slipping away.

“I changed my mind,” said Ansen, turning away.

This particular hankeeper had not had many occasions for entertaining visiting nobility, his particular establishment being too far from the gentry’s beaten path. That did not mean he could not recognize aristocratic arrogance when it was thrown in his face, and Ansen had more than his fair share. The hankeeper did not argue. He simply sketched the obeisance which seemed to be called for and departed to fulfill his orders.

Ansen was true to his word; the cook, who was the hankeeper’s wife, had to be woken to prepare his breakfast in the morning, as Ansen was astir even before the hardworking han proprietors. It was still dark when he rode out, although the sky was beginning to brighten in the east. Ansen caught himself grinning like an idiot at one point, watching the slow birth of the sun, pinning down a stray thought like a talisman:
It’s a good omen. I’m riding into the dawn.
The horse was fresh after a substantial feed and a night’s rest, and Ansen made good time; but Sif still had a considerable head start. But soon they would meet, the acolyte and his hero, the knight and his king. Not that Ansen was a full knight, not yet, but others had been knighted for valorous deeds while they were still a few months’ shy of their final coming of age. Ansen allowed himself to slip into a daydream, in which he knelt bareheaded before Sif and the king leaned forward, grasping Ansen’s arm and bidding him rise…
Rise, my ally and my friend…Sir Ansen of Cascin…
If Ansen still had two good eyes in this dream, he closed his mind to that. Anghara and Bresse were to be his price. After that…who knew but that miracles might still happen.

Sif and Ansen weren’t the only ones heading to Bresse. Feor, driven by a sudden premonition of disaster, had packed a few meagre belongings, accepted Lyme’s blessing and one of his horses, and was himself hurrying to the Sisters’ castle. Cascin was considerably closer to Bresse than was Miranei; Feor had the shorter way to go, and should have been at Bresse long before any of the hunters. But his journey seemed to have been conceived under an unlucky star, and he met with delay after delay. All the while he tried to reach the white tower with a mind call, a warning of danger; but either he was getting old and his gift was fading fast or there was a cocoon of silence around Bresse he didn’t know how to break. By the time he got to the village where March had made his home, he was drawn and exhausted—and March, from what he could gather when he inquired after him, was gone.

The village was far too small to rate a proper han, but Feor came to an agreement as to lodgings with the village miller. The miller provided his unexpected guest with a modest supper and a clean pallet before the fire. Feor wrapped himself in his blanket and tried to sleep, but a vision burned in his brain and would not leave him alone. There was a cloud before him, a black cloud, and many of his friends were either trapped inside or rushing toward it. Beyond that dark cloud Feor’s Sight could not go, except in flashes that seemed to presage death and disaster, and perhaps a proud young king, drunk on power or victory, stabbing a shining sword into the black billows which hid the sky. Anghara was in this. March had gone rushing in. Sif was coming.

By morning, as merely the last in a long series of troubles, misfortunes and plain bad luck, Feor had developed a high fever and lay shivering on his pallet, almost incoherent. His host summoned the village healer, who prescribed a regimen of hot herb tea and complete bed rest. Feor was far too ill to protest; by the time he had come sufficiently to his senses, it was already too late.

The arrival of Sif and his entourage had reduced the hankeeper of Radas Han first to incoherence and then to stark silence. Sif had in effect taken the han over almost completely. Guests who were staying in parts he had not occupied quickly found that urgent business called them elsewhere. Sif was not pleasant company. Some of his men, grim-faced and well armed, had parted from the main body and commandeered two flat-boats, upon which they had drifted downstream on the Rada River. It was worth a man’s life to ask where they were going, although there were rumors that one of the boatmen had overheard the name of Halas Han and, from thence, a place called Cascin. Sif selected patrols from those who remained; they came and went in shifts, departing mysteriously up the Rada toward the foothills and coming back when another had taken their place. There was nothing up there except Castle Bresse. That was hardly an object of siege to draw a king from a southern border beset with brewing war. People watched and wondered.

The rumor of Cascin had gone out, though, and it was this that greeted Ansen a day’s ride from the han where Sif waited. Given the choice, Ansen would have ridden the entire distance right then, but he had already driven his horse hard that day, and his only reward for such an effort might have been a cold camp midway between two hans. He was close enough now, he could afford to take a brief rest. His faithful bay had foam around its muzzle and stood with its head drooping with exhaustion. Ansen had tossed the reins to a willing stable boy and strode into the common room of the village han, only to look around sharply as a familiar name caught his attention.

“Cascin, is it? Are ye sure?” The voice sounded uneasy. “I’ve got kin there; my sister married a good man, he was a wizard with horses, Lord Lyme took him on at Cascin a few years hence.”

“Cascin they said, I’m positive,” said another voice, more gravelly. Ansen focused on the speaker—a big man, broad shouldered, his face all but smothered in an explosion of red beard. He had brawny arms where corded muscles rippled like ropes; a river-man, gnarled and pickled by his trade. Ansen sidled closer. “I’ve been doing that run for years. That’s where they were headed, and they didn’t look like they were goin’ for pleasure, either.”

“How many?”

The river-man glanced down at his hands, his short fingers jerking resignedly once or twice. He was no scholar; Ansen had grown up on the river and had been in and out of Halas Han often enough to know his type.

“Dunno, for sure,” the river-man said at length, after some deliberation. “More than ten.”

Ansen, quite pale, moved away and gestured for wine. It occurred to him for the first time that his actions may have brought ruin on his house and family. Sif may not have taken kindly the news that Anghara had been sheltered in secret at Cascin. It was warm in the room, but Ansen shivered violently beneath his cloak. He was suddenly torn: home to Cascin, to see if there was something evil happening, or on, to Sif, to the fulfillment of his dream? There was no chance that going to Sif might also stop any planned act of retaliation on his behalf—orders had already been given, the soldiers, if this river-man’s story was to be believed, already on the river. Riding cross-country at breakneck speed, Ansen might be able to forestall them…and then what? Would they stop if he stood before them and told them nay? The twins…his father…his little sister…the house that was his inheritance…had he gambled them all, and lost?

The night that Feor shook in his fever and Ansen agonized over his dwindling options also saw March take what was to be at once his first and final step into the black cloud Feor had foreseen for him. He had been to Bresse before—not so frequently as to cause comment, but often enough to satisfy himself of Anghara’s continued well-being. He’d been there far too often for either comfort or safety during the last few weeks, as word of Sif and his foray started to filter through the village grapevines. His passionate pleas to both Lady Morgan and to Anghara herself seemed to be ineffectual.

Anghara, at least, had the sensitivity to fear Sif’s anger, and suggested that the community relocate, at least temporarily, into the mountains. As far as Anghara knew, only Morgan and perhaps her second in command knew Brynna Kelen’s true identity; it was hardly fair to throw every Sister in Bresse to the wolf who was coming for the changeling in their midst, of whom they had known nothing. But Morgan, with a strange, almost supernatural calm, had insisted the project in hand had to be completed. The two were working on an important and entirely esoteric purpose March was incapable of understanding, which seemed to render them, or at the very least Lady Morgan, completely unable to comprehend the danger looming for them all. What neither March nor Anghara realized was that Morgan had told the community of the real reason behind Sif’s coming in good time, leaving the Sisters free to choose whether they wished to go or stay. Some of the younger novices, still ignorant of the truth, had been spirited away before Sif’s arrival, but most of the Sisters turned down the chance to leave, aware of danger but refusing to confront it by fleeing their tower. For the ones who were ambivalent, it soon became obvious they had waited too long. By the time some thought to try and play it safe, to flee or retreat into the mountains, it was too late. Sif’s patrols were already in position.