The Hidden Icon (2 page)

“I’ll go,” I said, whisper-stiff. Their looks were as knife-edged as their parting bodies as I passed between them, hips and elbows thin from many hungry months in the desert. My sisters’ expressions were curious and Jurnus’ nostrils flared in indignation when I ignored the short, sharp shake of his head. They were all wondering the same thing and I was, too: Why did he want me when he could’ve had one of them?

I crossed the stone serpent’s belly, following the design with my eyes to keep from looking at the guard. The serpent was fat with swallowed prey, a warning to intruders that crossing the royal family would cost them their lives. But not anymore. Our resistance might cost us ours, and it appeared I would be the first to go.

Before they bolted the door again behind me I caught my mother’s eyes, saw in their depths a prescient gloom. She raised a hand as though to shield tears, but I knew better. I knew her thoughts, that she believed she would never see me again. She didn’t want to remember me this way, the defeated sink of my shoulders, the shallow, surrendering scrape of my sandal.

But it was too late. For all of us.

Chapter 2

The guard didn’t look at me as we passed through the corridor from the reliquary, didn’t speak. The soldiers barred and locked the door again behind us, but I heard instead the sounds of shattering wood and the terrible scream of steel against stone. In the caves where we had been captured we had waited hours in the dark, tasked to hear the death of each man and woman who had sworn to preserve our lives at the cost of their own. I saw again the first soldier I had seen up close, her grim lips and bared teeth in the torchlight, bloodied spear brandished as one of my servants twitched his last on the cave floor between us. I’d been so afraid I could have trembled out of the ropes she’d used to bind me. I felt the ghosts of those ropes tighten around my wrist and ankles now, fighting to follow the man who stalked before me.

I feared him, too, giving him no reason to touch me, no reason to raise his voice in anger. We took a winding stair that opened onto a wide, brushed stone landing: a bright place where we had played as children. I didn’t recognize the broad leafed, flowering plants growing there now or the imported heavy wooden furniture. The somber faces carved into the arms of chairs told me all that I needed to know: you are not welcome to sit here, you do not belong.

The guard took a position at the top of the stair, like a block of stone or wood himself barring the exit. Two figures stood opposite me behind a narrow table, a woman and a man standing nearly the same height. They regarded me with a grave curiosity that chilled me more than the guard’s callus attentions. I couldn’t help but stare, my lips parting in the witless expression one of my sisters was like to take with a handsome man. These two were not soldiers. The man wore a half-mask roughed of some metal fitted to his features, riding the bridge of his nose and curving back to his ears. It was the mask I saw and little else, registering but barely the sandy hair, the thin, blank line of his lips. His eyes were fixed on me, and I fought the urge to squirm under the cool, measured notice I received.

The woman’s expression was intelligent, stirring uncommon beauty in an otherwise common face. She drew her dark curls severely back from her face, and a sliver of glinting metal marked her brow above soft, too-kind eyes. I didn’t want them to be kind. It had taken all my nerve to follow the guard this far, and now I felt even more alone, more vulnerable. I opened and closed my mouth once, twice, dumb as a grazing animal when there is nothing left to eat. Their unwavering attention could have galvanized even the slowest of beasts, however, and I found words where there had been none.

“I don’t know what you hope to gain from me.”

The woman’s expression was shrewd, but not cruel. She looked away from me for a moment, catching the man’s eyes. I sensed the stir of something between them, the unspoken understanding that can pass between two people who know each other well. After a moment, he turned and walked out onto the high walled balcony that circled much of the room. His dark clothing seemed to gather and repel light in the same instant, and I didn’t like not having them both in the room where I could see them. But when he was gone she spoke, her voice husky like that of a much older woman, pleasant and deep, and I had to look at her.

“Don’t be alarmed. We wanted to meet with you alone. I am
Dresha
Morainn, daughter of-”

“I know whose daughter you are.”

She didn’t need to wear the circlet for me to know. Morainn was their princess, soon to succeed her father, no doubt. Of course we were meeting alone. If she hoped to negotiate, she was wise to keep her distance from my brother and sisters.

“Eiren,” I answered, though I knew she didn’t need my name. I was stalling, unsure of what to say to her, to this kind-eyed princess of monsters. “Are you going to interrogate my brother and sisters, too?”

“No.”

She moved around the table, hands skirting papers, implements for writing and measuring distance, inks in tinted glass bottles. This was a familiar place for her but not for me, not anymore. I bristled, and as she drew nearer her full frame and considerable height made me feel weak as a foundling child. Morainn had eaten well and stretched her legs in the flower of her youth, and I’d spent the last five years living like a rodent in a cave.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” she continued, casting her eyes out to the veranda where the man stood, his head tilted slightly, listening. Morainn’s voice was calm, cool, as though she were attempting to subdue me. “So you needn’t act like I’m going to.”

Had she spoken with my sisters in this fashion, they would have been at her throat already, if not with a knife then with words. One of them would at least have insulted her height.

“That is difficult for me to accept,” I countered, baring blistered wrists, ragged nails, bruises yellowing with age from where I had been dragged across the cavern floor.

Morainn looked away, exposing a profile that was as commanding as her height. For a moment I thought she might shout, the jut of her lip petulant, like a child. I chewed my own in a moment’s hesitation. A lifetime of war had taught me little about our enemy, but I’d seen more than murders. My hands hooked against my bare arms, feeling again the bite of other hands, the soldier that had taken hold of me and bound me to a pack animal to be driven back to the capitol. A flood of hatred had accompanied his touch, for I needed even less than his sneer to know the depth of his feelings. He could not have known that in his face, when he had touched me, I had seen the face of every one of my people he had killed to reach me.

Just as Morainn could not know what I saw in her, next.

“I know,” she said, her voice soft and hard at the same time, features as still as the horizon bleached white in the morning. “If we’d known, you would have been spared.”

Something slipped between us and it was like a colored lens passed over my eyes, some thought of hers that I could no more snatch from the air than I could a mote of dust. I resisted the moon-pull of her thoughts as I always did the thoughts of strangers, not because I was afraid of her, as I had been with the soldiers, but because I was afraid of what I might see. I held my breath. The man outside turned toward us, no more bothering with even the pretense of our privacy, his face without distinction in the strong sunlight.

There was no stopping it. I was flooded with her impression of me, a figure of myth who didn’t resemble me in the least. I wasn’t a person to her, but a means to something I did not understand. I was a tool.

And she feared me.

I was spared scrambling for a response by the man, who abandoned the terrace to rejoin Morainn.

“What she means is that you are not what we expected,
Han’dra
Eiren,” he said, his tone empty and the formal address putting distance between us. Where Morainn had felt curious and sorrowful and
alive
, this man didn’t seem to feel anything. “You’ve changed things.”

I stood motionless, ferreting out the heart sounds of my family elsewhere in the palace to ground me. Their thoughts were clouded, anxious, distant. A storm of confusion and fear tumbled thunder in my gut, and I thought I might be sick, empty what meager breakfast they’d given us in one of the foolish potted plants they’d imported. He addressed me as though he had all of the answers and I none, like I was an ignorant child. What I had seen in Morainn retreated, and what I was left with, just myself, didn’t seem like enough. I could do things no one else could, knew things I had no business knowing. But I had still been surprised to be singled out, as my brother and sisters had been, my mother and father, too. Perhaps they had been even more surprised.

“What do you want? Tell me.” I managed, quiet but firm. Morainn softened, features falling as easily as the drape of her skirt, though the man seemed as unaffected as before.

“No,” he said simply. There was a subtle change in his temper, like an offering of water after a hot day’s fasting. I read a promise in his shaded eyes and tight mouth: he wouldn’t tell me
yet
.

He was less formidable in proximity than he had been at a distance. I could not keep from studying his face as the moment lengthened to discomfort, the rough lip of the mask below his cheekbones, splitting his brow above. His hair strayed from where it had been smoothed back, softening his unnaturally muted expression. Morainn interrupted what might have become a battle of wills between the man and I, each of us silent and stubborn as stones.

“You’re afraid for your family. I can offer you their protection.”

Morainn had the power to promise me what she offered. I didn’t need to look into her mind to know it but I did anyway, because I could. She was far easier to read than her brother, for the man was her brother, the blood bond between them as fierce as the sun’s blaze on the terrace. Only my nerves had kept me from seeing it before. Whatever her motives, she meant what she said.

“Why would you do that?”

“Because I want you to return with us. Without a fight.”

I gaped. I couldn’t help it. Morainn didn’t understand the full scope of what she asked of me, but her brother did, and it was his attention to my response I was more shaken by than the request itself. I looked at him, but couldn’t hold his eyes for more than a moment. He wanted me to answer, and I didn’t want to.

“I don’t have a choice, do I?” I asked at last, my stomach hardening as though I had swallowed stones enough to fill it.

“No.” Even as her brother spoke Morainn laid a hand upon his arm, softening his blunt answer with another question.

“Would you really choose not to go?” She was trying to tempt me with what she had promised in return, my family’s freedom in exchange for mine, but in that moment I was only painfully aware of the tenderness between Morainn and her brother. It was nothing like the little rivalries and competitions between my siblings and I. If they’d been here, their opinions and actions would all have been wildly different, though they would all have felt their choices worthier than mine. Wasn’t I the youngest, the quietest, the coward? I wasn’t a leader. Blood or grain spilled, a man’s head cut from his neck or a flower torn from its stem, I could and had only ever sat idle. Because only I could see what acting rashly might bring. I could see into the hearts and minds of others and it stilled my hands, and my sisters and brother, my mother and father, they couldn’t understand. Nobody else could.

But Morainn and her brother wanted me. I didn’t know why, but did it matter? She was right. I wouldn’t say no.

“If I go with you, they’ll live? A proper life. Not one in chains.” The Eiren that had been content to wait out the war in exile would never have made such a demand without the support of her family, but she’d never been asked, either, how she might’ve changed things. She had never been alone.

I watched Morainn until I was satisfied that her nod of consent was truthful. My parents would never rule again, but they would be safe. That was enough. Though I felt again the strange impression Morainn had of me, that I was not a person but a tool, I had made my choice. Morainn raised her hand and the guard that had been my escort made room for me to pass back down the stair.

But her brother wasn’t ready for me to leave. His eyes caught mine as I made to turn, arresting.

“You are more than a tool,
Han’dra
Eiren.”

Chapter 3

I followed the guard without a thought for where he might be taking me, my heart and all of my senses hanging still in the air before Morainn and her brother. I had barely recovered my senses when I shuffled into the reliquary, eyes sweeping empty as cold lanterns over the anxious faces of my mother and father, my sisters, my brother. I couldn’t rouse my voice. There wasn’t room in me for answering questions when I suddenly had so many of my own.

How had he known what I was thinking? I had never met anyone who could do as I did, and my shock at Morainn’s offer was eclipsed by the revelation of what he and I alone shared. Was this why they wanted me? A shudder and a thrill jangled up my spine, stopped from spreading by Jurnus’ hand on my shoulder.

“Eiren, what happened?”

“What did they want?”

“Have they cut out your tongue? Tell us, Eiren!”