The Hidden Queen (10 page)

He looked up at Kieran, who stood pale and rooted with shock, as someone tried the door, banging on it when it wouldn’t give. “Kieran! Snap out of it! Tell them at the door to admit only Lord Lyme and Lady Chella. And bid them ask for the healer. Nobody else. Understand?”

“Yes…Will he be all right? What happened? In the name of all that’s holy, I didn’t mean…”

“You did nothing,” said Feor. “The door!”

Chella was in first, and could not suppress a gasp of horror when she saw her son, who had mercifully passed out from the pain and no longer writhed against the wall clutching at what was left of his face.

“Feor! What in the Gods’ name happened in here? I heard a scream…I heard you call out…” She hesitated suddenly, aware of Keda and of Kieran himself.

“Who else heard?”

“Most of the gathering…all the doors were open…”

Feor sat back, closing his eyes. “It’s over, then. This won’t be kept quiet easily. They heard me call out the name of one the land thinks dead. They will soon see the evidence of an inexplicable accident. They will talk. Sif must hear.”

Chella glanced at where Keda had gone over to tend to Anghara. “She…”

“Yes. Ansen threatened Kieran, and she…There is too much power there, too untrained. I am no longer enough, my lady. You must send her to those better qualified than I to teach her what she must learn. Otherwise she will sooner or later destroy herself, perhaps through sheer mischance—without training she is a danger to others. You can see what happened here today. She could have killed him.”

There was a commotion at the door as the healer arrived, and was admitted. He paused by Anghara, who was already starting to come round, then came to where Feor knelt at Ansen’s side. “The girl will be all right. But this…”

Feor and Chella withdrew, giving him space to work, and looked toward the other patient. Both Kieran and Keda were now kneeling at Anghara’s side, and she was stirring into consciousness, pressing her palms against her temples with a moan of agony.

“We must get her out of here,” said Chella firmly.

“That might prove difficult,” Feor said, arching an expressive eyebrow at the muted hubbub seeping through the closed door. “Your entire household is out there, waiting to see what transpires in this room. Nothing can be done without it being in full sight of every man, woman and child in Cascin. Have her carried out of here, and then carry out Ansen straight after, and you will have everyone concocting their own version of events and broadcasting it in the han’s beer rooms tomorrow.”

“What, then?”

“Wait until she can walk out. It’s one thing less to explain. As for Ansen…”

The Cascin healer approached them, clearing his throat deferentially. Chella whirled to face him, silent, her whole soul in her eyes.

“There is little I can do, my lady,” the healer said in a soft, hopeless voice. “The damage is very great. I have dressed the eye, but it is possible he will lose its sight. We must wait and see.”

Chella groaned and buried her face in her hands. “Oh, Ansen, my son!” she moaned softly into her palms, her fingernails pressing into her white forehead. He would be maimed, never whole again, he would never enjoy the life which should have been his. He would still inherit—he was the oldest, and Lyme himself was crippled to a degree—but it would be a bitter inheritance. Ansen would probably end up hating the two younger brothers who could tread roads this night had closed for him forever, brothers who could still gauge distances with two sound eyes and shoot a straight arrow. And Chella knew well Ansen’s youthful pride, his…arrogance. This wound had not finished inflicting its harm. Ansen’s pride would bleed and scar where the shard had taken his eye.

Feor touched her elbow gently. “She is up,” he said quietly, avoiding the use of any name at all now that Brynna was sloughed off and Anghara not yet owned. “Go with those three, take them upstairs. Leave me to deal with the rest.”

Chella roused, cast a last glance at Ansen’s motionless form, and nodded. “Feor,” she said, and her voice was cool and solid with decision, “the celebration must go on; I will be down again directly. The Harvest Blessing has not yet been pronounced. But as soon as it can be contrived, come to my lord’s chambers. We need to make some decisions, fast. Lord Lyme and I would value your opinion. And…if you see Rima’s man, March, bid him come with you.”

Feor bowed his head in a gesture of assent. “My lady, I will be there.”

In the end they thought that it would be less conspicuous if Anghara and the two young Shaymiri left the chamber by themselves. As they supposed, the crowd waiting outside dismissed the two Cascin foster children and the visiting singer as unimportant and waited to learn the substance of the mystery the room concealed. Those who had heard Feor’s appeal to Anghara had yet to connect the name with the girl they had known as Brynna for almost two years.

Bringing Ansen out was far more difficult, but they an nounced the interrupted Harvest Blessing was imminent, and this persuaded many to move out onto the lawn. Ansen, his face roughly cleaned and bandaged as a prelude to more substantial care, was whisked away into his quarters. When Ansen came out of his swoon and began to moan in pain, the healer administered a powerful sleeping cordial; they left him there, with one of Chella’s women in attendance. Lyme and Chella attended the Harvest Blessing, but it was a muted affair, with even the children losing their appetite to scramble for the customary handful of gold coins Lyme flung into the crowd. The bonfire was allowed to burn down early, with nobody feeding it more wood as though by some prearranged agreement, and the Cerdiad festival, usually so boisterous and joyous, faded quietly into the night.

Upstairs in Lyme’s chambers the conclave to decide Anghara’s future had come together. Chella was white, with dark circles under eyes puffy with unshed tears. Lyme’s lips were drawn together in a thin line. March was still and tense, only a restless hand playing with the hilt of his dagger as though he itched to use it, but his face was curiously blank. Feor alone seemed calm, but this veneer of outward serenity was something they were all used to—it hid many deep secrets. No one in the room was willing to hazard a guess as to his true feelings.

“She was sent to us,” said Lyme. “For us to guard. And yet…I cannot see her and Ansen continuing to share the same roof, not after this night. One of them must go. And if we are not to fail in our trust, it cannot be Ansen; we must send from sanctuary, instead, the very person we have sworn to protect. I know my son. He would never hold his peace. Do you think he heard the name?”

“I cannot tell, my lord,” said Feor.

Lyme turned toward him. “Ansen attacked Kieran? You saw this?”

“Yes. I have spoken to Kieran since, and I also know why. It would seem Ansen was trying to trifle with Keda, and she was not willing.”

“Holy Avanna!” muttered March. “Of course she was not willing! She is a young woman, and Ansen turned fourteen in her presence not two weeks ago! To her, he is a child—he offered her nothing less than a mortal insult. Is that how it began? Did Kieran try to defend his sister?”

“Yes. Ansen was armed. Kieran was not.”

Lyme turned his head a fraction. “There is no chance that Kieran might have reached the pitcher, that it was he who…”

Feor was already shaking his head. “I tell you, my lord, I felt the power.”

Lyme sat down rather suddenly, straightening his game leg as though it pained him. “So. What are we to do with the young queen? This house is no longer a shelter for her—nor a safe foster home for Kieran, whom I have loved no less than my own sons. It seems I must lose two who have been given into my care, and all because of my son’s precocious passions.” He sighed deeply, casting his eyes down. “And yet,” he murmured, “how to blame him—my own son. My blood. Was it I who taught him that everything he desired must be his?”

“It will be an empty house,” said Feor, with an unusual touch of sadness in his voice, “but you are right, my lord. They must both go. Kieran is old enough to be given into a knight’s entourage, and his training sufficient for him to acquit himself with competency, if not distinction. We must leave that in your hands, my lord. As for Anghara…”

“She must go to Bresse,” said Chella unexpectedly.

March’s head whipped around. “Castle Bresse? Would that not be the first place Sif would keep under observation?”

“He does not know she is Sighted,” Chella pointed out.

“He might well surmise. Rima’s daughter…there is often a bloodline. And if a young girl of Anghara’s age and description suddenly appears on Bresse’s doorstep…”

“She needs training and Bresse is the only place I know that can give it to her. It is the place where I was trained, and Rima also…” The memory of Rima was a sharp, sudden pain; Chella fell silent. Chella was no young girl tasting Sight for the first time. What Rima’s daughter had still been too young to know, Rima’s sister had tasted in full measure. Chella knew how Rima had died. “Yes,” she said at length. “It could be dangerous.”

“There may be a way,” said Feor slowly.

Three heads swivelled as one. Feor steepled his fingers in front of his face, formulating his thought. “Yes,” he said at last, “Sif might well be looking for Anghara. But he is not looking for Keda.”

“What are you talking about?” snapped March, goaded into impatience.

“The focus,” said Feor slowly, “of anyone spying on a young woman travelling with a maidservant is on the young lady, not the servant. If Keda were to enter Bresse, with Anghara wrapped in homespun and carrying her harp, I daresay Sif’s spies would consider the girl who trailed after the Shaymir singer beneath their notice. Another girl could leave with Keda when she goes, carrying the same harp—someone who could later return with impunity because her description matches nobody in whom Sif is remotely interested.”

Chella never hesitated. “I will speak to Keda tomorrow. Anghara will have letters to my own teacher. And she will be safe…”

“Who will she have to protect her in that nest of women?” demanded March, his eyes dancing with what was almost fear. “If Sif should suddenly decide to…”

Feor was betrayed into a laugh. “Your loyalty does you credit, March, but I am afraid that smuggling you into the sisterhood of Bresse would cause no small consternation and bring upon the place precisely the kind of unwelcome attention you wish to avoid.”

“You,” said March, stabbing the air in Feor’s direction with a peremptory finger, “you are also Sighted, and schooled enough to have trained the princess in the early disciplines of the art.” It was all too easy for him to slip back; Anghara was the princess again without a second thought on his part. “Where were you trained? If a man would cause such consternation at Bresse, who taught you?”

“An old woman, long dead,” said Feor softly. “She died before she taught me all too many things. Perhaps my deficiencies were what caused tonight’s catastrophe in the first place. No, March, Bresse is all there is. Bresse alone remains, after the Castle at Algira was put beyond our reach.” His voice dropped. “Trust me, I would rather die than see the girl come to harm. I am proud to have had the teaching of her, such as my contribution has been. She will be great some day; she will be queen, and Sif will be a memory. I do not send that destiny to its death.”

March searched his eyes, and then nodded once, sharply, turning away. “All right. I will accept it. But I will be somewhere close, where she can find me if she needs me.”

“Not too close,” cautioned Feor. “Sif may not know her, but you are another matter. And where you are, he might well expect to find Anghara.”

“I cannot abandon her!”

“You will not,” said Feor softly. “None of us can. None of us will. But we can be more useful to her now if we let her go. She tried to fly tonight, and almost broke her wings beyond repair; we must let her go, to learn what she might of survival. She is strong, March; strong enough to doom herself, if we let her.”

Unexpectedly, March’s warrior’s eyes prickled with tears. “She’s a little girl,” he whispered.

Feor shook his head, rising. “She is a queen,” he said, very softly.

I
t was hard, being adrift again. It had been difficult enough before—leaving everything but coming to what was, after all, still family. Now, going from even this haven into the unknown, a part of Brynna wanted nothing more than to curl up into a tight little ball and cry herself to sleep. But there was another part of her, a part that kept her back straight as she sat on her dappled pony, riding behind Keda on the road to Castle Bresse. Both halves of her shared one thing—the burden of guilt and misery she carried with her from the place she had, for however short a time, called home. She knew she would never forget her last days at Cascin.

She had crept in to see Ansen the morning after the Harvest Blessing, but he was still under sedation, his breathing shallow and uneven in a restless, unnatural, drugged sleep. All she’d wanted to do was say she was sorry, but she stopped and simply stared at the great white bandage wrapped around his head. Only a few wisps of blond hair and the mouth, curled into its habitual, almost supercilious sneer, told her the prone form on the bed was Ansen. Cascin’s healer, coming to visit his charge, found her standing mute in the doorway, her hands crossed at her breast in a gesture that spoke eloquently of her shock.

“What are you doing here?” the healer asked, half-annoyed, half-sympathetic. “He should be left to sleep. Are you all right? As I recall, you too appeared to suffer some effects last night. Here, come inside, quietly now. Let me look at you properly.”

Brynna was limp, allowing him to drag her into Ansen’s room without protest. The healer peered into her eyes, lifting the lids as if to seek some arcane knowledge, and asked her if her head hurt when she made any sharp or sudden movement. Her reply, a quiet no, seemed to satisfy him.

“You’ll be fine. It was no more than a swoon,” he pronounced eventually, dismissing her. “You must go now, I need to change Ansen’s dressing.”

The name restored her power of speech. “Will he…will he be all right?”

The healer spared her a kind glance. “Perhaps. Perhaps all will still be well. We have to wait and see if…” But there was something in the wide gray eyes that gazed at him, into him. The platitudes died. Almost without thinking he spoke the truth, bluntly, not veiling it as he would normally have done, if he were to have uttered it to a child at all. “He will probably remain blind in that eye. Permanently.”

The hypnotic gaze was broken as the child’s eyes filled with sudden tears and long, dark lashes swept down rapidly as she tried to blink them away. The healer regained his composure, and his facility for prevarication. “But there is always hope. Now go, child, and let me work.”

But the gifts that smoldered within the mind of Miranei’s lost princess let her winnow truth from lie, without trying, without even knowing she did. The one truth Brynna heard from the healer was that Ansen would remain blind. And it was her fault. Her fault.

She fled with tears streaming down her cheeks, flying out of the main doors and into the woods. Straight to the willows, the place where her Standing Stone spread its small peace in the shade, where she had found solace before against dozens of small household catastrophes.

This time peace was gone, even from here. Instead, she found more guilt. Kieran stood on the banks of the well, leaning against a tree trunk, staring morosely at the bubbling brook. He looked up as her feet found a twig and cracked it, as though he had been waiting for her, and she recoiled from the expression on his face.

“What is it?” she gasped, seeing the hurt smoldering in his eyes. “What have I done?”

She had forgotten that Feor had called her by her true name, forgotten that Kieran had heard. All she could think of was Ansen, something to do with Ansen; Kieran had, after all, been his friend and foster brother for some time before Brynna had recast the equation. But she was not thinking of that other self, the Princess of Miranei, when she searched her soul frantically for the sin she had committed against one she loved with a child’s unwavering devotion, for whose sake she had blinded another human being. She was completely unprepared for Kieran’s reply, a pain far deeper than any surface wrong she might have done him.

“You could have told me,” he said, very quietly.

She closed her mouth on the words that were about to burst forth, and simply looked at him. His eyes slid away, falling again on the water, following a piece of bark that pirouetted along whirlpools in the water and was carried away downstream. He kicked at the trunk of the tree against which he leaned, with barely leashed savagery.

“Kieran…”

“What do I call you now? Brynna? Anghara?” He paused, looking up briefly. His mouth was tight. “Your Highness?”

She flinched. “I couldn’t…”

“Did you think I would run and tell the first spy I found?” he said. “All those lessons…all those campaigns we dissected…Sif is your brother!”

“He is not!” she flared at last.

“But he is king. And you…”

“And I. Yes. I couldn’t tell you, I couldn’t tell anybody! They made me promise!” It was a child’s reaction, instinctively defensive. “Nobody knew except Lyme and Chella and Feor! Even I tried to forget. When Feor found out…it was…and I knew he wouldn’t tell anyone…”

“They’re sending me away,” he said, bitterly.

Her heart stopped for a moment, and then lurched into a wild, jolting beat. “I’ll be alone again…”

“You were always alone,” he said, looking around at last with something other than anger and pain in his face. Now there was sorrow, a trace of compassion—reluctant understanding. “Even while I thought I was with you.”

“You were,” she almost wailed, “you’re my friend…”

“Yes, but whose? Brynna’s? Anghara’s?”

“I am both of them…”

“And I don’t really know either, do I?” he said. A breeze brought a strand of his hair to snap across his eyes and he reached out to pin it. “And what is really ironic is that only now do I go, now that I know it all. Now that I am, according to some, the most dangerous.”

“You will never tell,” she said, all the unshakeable faith of her love for him in her voice.

Kieran looked at her, and, unexpectedly, smiled. “No,” he said. “Still, you should have known that a long time ago. You could not trust me when it mattered…Anghara.” He experimented with the name, rolling it around his mouth as though it were a ripe plum. “That hurts. There is very little you don’t know about me.” He shrugged. “Granted, my life is devoid of secrets. Yours, it seems, is a labyrinth, full of them.”

She was a child, but she was a princess, and royal pride finally rose to the surface. She met his eyes with a look that smoldered. “I did not ask for it.”

“No,” he said, looking at her as though he had never seen her before. “I still cannot fathom,” he said after a pause, “that I sat and discussed Red Dynan’s last campaign with his daughter, all unknowing. That must have hurt,” he added, even as it occurred to him, an afterthought. “What must have gone through your mind at Ansen’s mad adoration of Sif, at my own dissection of your father’s death with not a thought for anything beyond the bare facts? I could not have sat there, wrapped in silence, while someone blundered mindlessly over the death of someone I loved.” He reached out, hesitantly, to touch her hair. “You should have told me,” he murmured. “I would have…I wouldn’t have been so…”

You should have told me…

The memory suddenly exploded, vividly, of the autumn day her mother had died far away in Miranei, of sharing something that, had Brynna been able to cast her thoughts into adult philosophy, she would have called their souls. Or, rather, Kieran’s soul; she remembered how she had given him everything in return—everything except the deepest secret that made her what she was. Yet he had given all. And she had taken it, giving back only that part of her life which had been a lie. Always, always, the wall…Others had raised it for her, in her, but she had shored it, buttressed it, strengthened it and fed it with her fears…for her life’s sake. And while she nursed the spark of her life, so deep within her air never touched it and sun never saw it, she had forgotten what it was like to live in the light. Kieran would have helped her, perhaps, but while he was blundering about trying to find a door, she had walled herself within and cowered alone in the dark. And now, when she wanted to open the door and let him in, he was on the verge of vanishing from her life, for what might well be for good.

You should have told me…

Kieran hesitated, helpless once again before the sight of her tears but constrained as he had never been before at the revelation of her identity. He could not give the same comforting hug to a Kir Hama princess as he would have given without a second thought to Brynna, his little foster sister. There was a barrier between them now that had never been there before, and he found himself missing the child he had known as Brynna with a passion which surprised him. He had—almost—sworn once that he would always be her friend, but his oath shimmered before him now, the words taunting. He understood why she had never said anything to him, and part of him admired her for it, yet another part was more deeply hurt than she could ever know. It was not a matter of forgiving—he’d forgiven her, both of her, unconditionally and almost immediately—but a matter of healing. And yet—this was not the end of it. There were still secrets. Ansen, lying half-blind in his room, could attest to that. Kieran still didn’t understand what had happened after Ansen raised his knife. And that web, too, had Anghara Kir Hama at its center…

He reached out to touch her shoulder. “I have to go,” he said, his voice coiled, tight.

“When are you leaving?” she managed to stammer out, wiping her eyes childishly with the back of her hand. Kieran’s heart turned over at the gesture. How could he be angry with this child…

“Tomorrow,” he said, instead of all the other words crowding his tongue.

She said nothing. The silence lengthened between them as their eyes held for a brief moment, full of all those things they could no longer say out loud. Kieran broke it; raised his hand in a gesture of farewell, at once too little and too much. Then he dropped his eyes, turned, and walked away. Brynna reached blindly for the tree he’d been leaning on and touched her cheek against the harsh bark, welcoming the small pricks of pain as something telling her she was still alive, still a part of this world.

He was true to his word. The next day he was gone, vanished sometime in the night, even as she stumbled out of the house in the early morning to wish him good luck and goodbye. But his saddle was no longer in the tack room, and his horse was gone from its stall. There was something, though—he had left his cloak, the one he had sheltered her with the day her mother died, on a nail in the stables. It was a message, of sorts, or at least that was the way Brynna chose to take it:
A part of me will always be with you.
She took it almost clandestinely, as though she was doing something wrong, and folded it at the back of her closet, still smelling faintly of the stable, of Kieran’s horse, of Kieran himself. A keepsake. Perhaps a promise.

The cloak and its message were soon driven from her thoughts when she was summoned before Chella and Feor and informed she would also be leaving Cascin. Her guilt returned with the force of a blow.

“You’re sending me away?” she asked, a little wildly. “I didn’t mean to do it, I didn’t…I’m sorry…”

It was Feor who forsook dignity so far as to allow her to weep on his shoulder. When the storm subsided, he wiped the tear tracks from her cheeks with long, gentle fingers.

“If anyone is to blame, it is I,” he said, trying to put balm on her wounds. “Perhaps I taught you too much without also teaching you control. But you must be taught that control, otherwise, what happened here will happen again. And again. You have a gift. It is time you learned to ride it to whip and curb.”

“I’m sending you to my own teacher…and your mother’s,” said Chella. “Feor spoke your name out loud…the other night. We must try and hide you again, before someone comes to look for you here.”

“You will still be Brynna,” said Feor. “At Bresse, only your teacher will know. It’s safe for you there, it’s a nexus of our power; and even if they do not know about you the Sisters will protect you as they protect everyone there against harm.”

“Keda will take you,” said Chella. “You’ll go disguised as her maidservant; nobody will take you for anything more.”

“And then?”

“They will teach you what you must—”

“No, I mean…I’ll be alone…”

“Not alone,” said Feor, “but in a Sighted Sisterhood. You will never be quite alone in Bresse. But, yes,” he continued as she veiled her eyes against him, too honest to fob her off with a nebulous promise, “alone, until you make another friend. There is nobody we can send with you there. Catlin cannot go into a place of the Sighted when she is patently not gifted that way; questions are bound to be asked. And March…well, he might be just a little conspicuous. He asked,” Feor added, and was rewarded with a quirk of Brynna’s lip so small as to be almost invisible. It was, nevertheless, the beginning of a smile. Feor sat back; she would be all right. “March will be somewhere close, he promised us that. He’ll find a way to get a message to you.”

“And Keda?”

“Keda will go her own way. She’s a musician; she’s going to fledge out in the world. She would not stay even if she was Sighted, and she is not.”

Travelling with Keda would be bittersweet, because of her link with Kieran and, indirectly, to Cascin. Brynna had not wanted to ask, but the sense of his loss was greater than her resolve. Her mouth formed the words even as she fought against them in her heart. “And…Kieran?”

“He’s gone to one of Lord Lyme’s friends, a knight with a keep near Tanass Han,” said Feor. “He’s to be a squire in the household.”

That was all they told her. That was all she could ask. Perhaps one day…but, for now, it was safer for everyone if nobody knew exactly where anyone who had been in that fateful room had gone. Ansen, Brynna suddenly knew, would probably be told very little, if anything at all, about the sudden disappearance of two of his foster siblings in what almost amounted to a midnight flit. Brynna was told to pack immediately; Keda would be leaving within the next two days.