The Hidden Queen (11 page)

She managed to say goodbye to the twins, who were mystified and fretful at the upheavals shaking their world; she left her dog—given when she had first arrived—in Adamo’s care. Ansen was under a strict regimen of sleeping drafts and still asleep, wrapped in his stark bandage, which made him look as though he had no face at all. She whispered next to his ear, never to know if he heard or understood her heartfelt apologies. She did not ask if he would forgive her; she was leaving him much to forgive. When she left him, finally, he looked as though whatever dreams might come in his drugged sleep would be anything but pleasant.

Keda and Brynna left early in the morning, two days after Kieran’s departure. Catlin stood crying in the doorway; Feor, beside her, looked like a statue cast in stone. Lyme and Chella had already said their farewells inside, out of sight of prying eyes. March was gone, trying to find a place to watch over his charge; the twins were asleep, Ansen adrift in his drugged dreams and his pain. Nobody else had roused to see them go. The sun had risen, but Cascin’s woods were still in deep shadow, and Feor suddenly shivered as Brynna’s pony vanished within. He looked up into the promise of a blue summer sky, filling his mind with the soothing image of a pool of clear water as he sent a prayer winging to his God.
Nual of the Waters, protect her, keep her safe…

Keda had bargained for a ride on a flat-bottomed river barge from Halas Han’s docks a few hours later, and the boat took them and their horses up the Rada River. Keda was silent and preoccupied; Brynna, afraid of the future, burdened by the past, might have opened up had Keda made an overture, but the older girl seemed sunk into her own thoughts. The camaraderie of Cerdiad, only days past, seemed as though it belonged to another life.

The journey was uneventful, almost tedious, leavened only with rumors of border skirmishes, which were endlessly chewed over by the crew. But even those palled after a while, and the next place for reliable news was at Radas Han, at the far end of their journey. They greeted it with something like relief, the boatmen hurried to the han tavern to wet their throats and re-stock on gossip and Keda quietly took Brynna to their room. The next day they were off again, taking the ferry across the Rada and riding north into the foothills. They both found their eyes drawn to the west, for different reasons, and thought themselves alone in this until they both looked away in the same instant and happened to meet each other’s eyes. Keda’s face acquired the ghost of a smile.

“What do you see?” she asked, and she did not mean the empty, rolling moors stretching across the Rada toward the distant western mountains, no more than a smudge on the horizon.

“Home,” said Brynna almost inaudibly. The perfect memory of Miranei, so cherished, so carefully husbanded, rose almost solid before her eyes. She offered a halting word of description, then; a glimpse of pennant, a swift glance at a battlement, the hewed stone corridors of the citadel, the mountain-buttressed sky that vaulted across the ancient walls. It started as a trickle and ended as an emotional tor rent, leaving the girl who had been Anghara trembling in its wake. Keda looked at her with surprise and wonder.

“And I thought I was a poet,” was all she said. But that was praise enough; and later, when they rested, she took out her harp and drew out strange, haunting passages evoking the things of which Brynna had spoken.

“It’s beautiful,” said Brynna, listening with rapt attention.

Keda looked up with a slow smile. “It’s the first music I have played which is truly my own,” she said. “When I get to Miranei, I’ll play it there, tell them it was a gift from one of their own whom I met on the road.”

Anghara jumped, her face flushed. “But not…”

“No, of course not.” Keda put the harp away with a sigh, reaching for one of the younger girl’s hands. “I haven’t been the best of companions,” she said, “not what you needed. I’m sorry; you’re hardly to blame. It’s just that I’m finding it difficult to come to terms with the last few days. Too much has happened; I came to spend some time with my brother, and I wound up driving him from a place where he was happy, which he was far from ready or willing to leave.”

“But it was I who did that,” said Brynna plaintively. Her eyes filled with tears again, at the thought of Kieran. “He was the only real friend I had, and now I don’t even know where he is…”

“I just hope Sif doesn’t send his master to the borders,” said Keda, thinking aloud, coming to herself with a start at Brynna’s sudden gasp. “It’s all right,” she said quickly. “Kieran is a man already, and knows how to protect himself. I’m not worried he’ll die. It’s just…I would have wished that he came to war a little older. Not at all, if I could help it, but if needs must, not when he is still not properly sixteen. I always thought taking young boys to war is barbaric. Who needs a page on a battlefield?”

But the topic of conversation seemed to agitate Brynna, who had not thought of this horrifying possibility; Keda tried to change the subject, but Brynna worried at it like a puppy at a bone. As she rode, she had waking nightmares of Sif ordering Kieran into the mountains, the woods bristling with hidden spears of ambush as he entered the forest shadows. So wrapped up was she in this bloody fantasy, appalled but unable to shake herself free, she almost screamed aloud when Keda gently touched her shoulder.

“We’re here,” said Keda. “Look.”

Castle Bresse was not a conventional castle, not a citadel like Miranei or the parapets of walled Calabra. Instead it was a tall white tower surrounded by an inner ring of smaller, thatch-roofed dwellings and an outer skirt of stone sheds and outbuildings that faced them across a circular paved yard. There was a gate in the outer ring, closed, with a huge iron ring fastened on the outside. A white pennant flew from the steeply sloping roof of the tower.

“It looks like a Tower of Avanna,” said Brynna, who had expected…she did not quite know what, but certainly something quite different.

“I think it probably used to be one, before the Sisters took it over,” said Keda. “Come on, I think they’ve seen us.”

Sure enough, the gate was opening as they approached, revealing a knot of three Sisters dressed in plain white. They waited in silence.

“Greetings,” called Keda as they drew closer. “I am a harper from Shaymir, and I ask for your hospitality for the night.”

“You have it,” said one of the Sisters with a solemn smile. “Will you honor us with a tune at evenmeal, harper?” Keda inclined her head graciously, slipping off her horse before the gate. The Sisters moved aside to let her pass as Brynna joined her, one of them waiting until the visitors dismounted to gather up the reins of their horses and lead them away in the direction of the stables.

“They will be cared for,” said the Sister who had spoken earlier. She walked a little ahead, with Keda at her elbow, her smile slightly quizzical. “Forgive me, but it can’t be just the desire to let a few cloistered women hear the heavenly sounds of the Aymer harp that brings you all the way to Castle Bresse,” she said. “We are hardly on paths frequented by your kind.”

Keda smiled, relaxed and at ease. “I bring a message,” she said, “to Lady Morgan.”

“And a recruit, perhaps?” said the Sister, glancing back to where Brynna walked behind the other two Sisters, on her own.

“Perhaps,” said Keda.

The Sister tucked her hands inside her wide sleeves. “Lady Morgan will see you after evenmeal,” she said. They had reached one of the thatched buildings at the foot of the tower, and one of the other Sisters stepped up and pushed the door open. “Our guesthouse,” she said. “We hope you will be comfortable. Evenmeal is almost ready; the bell will summon you when it is time. Any Sister will show you where to go.”

Keda thanked them, and they withdrew. Brynna’s eyes were round with wonder. “Am I going to have to stay here forever, then?” she asked, almost frightened. The Sisters had a disturbing air of permanence.

“I don’t think so,” laughed Keda. “Not everyone who comes here does, and you of all people are a special case.”

“My aunt and my…my mother were both here,” said Brynna carefully.

“Yes,” said Keda, seeing through the logic, “and they both came to leave. All you have to do is stay here until you learn what they have to teach you.” She looked at Brynna with eyes that were suddenly shadowed, and her long fingers could not help clenching into a fist for a moment. “Avanna,” she murmured, “yours is a gift I am glad I was never born with. Not after…what happened at Cascin.”

A vision of Ansen’s bandaged face flashed across Brynna’s mind, and she cried out, burying her face in her hands. “I didn’t mean it…”

Keda crossed the room in one long stride and took the other girl into an almost maternal embrace. “I’m sorry. You’re hardly to blame. He was mad that night, mad! And who’s to say that, if it hadn’t been for you, it wouldn’t have been Kieran lying wounded in his bed? I can pity him, but I cannot bring myself to grieve for what happened to Ansen.”

It was absolution, of a sort. In any event, they were not given time for more, as a melodious peal from a high, pure bell echoed through the settlement. It was all they could do to drag a comb through their hair and splash some water on their faces and hands before they joined the company of white-clad Sisters streaming toward the open door of the white tower.

The meal was simple, and relatively short. For Brynna it lasted a lifetime, knowing that all too soon, after Keda had sung for their supper, the harper would vanish up the stairs to the private sanctum of Lady Morgan, head of this community, and Lady Morgan would open Chella’s letter. Brynna dreaded the aftermath. They might question her, demand to know what it was she had done to Ansen—the truth was, she did not know, and was in fact almost sure she could not do it again if she tried. It had been instinct, pure and simple, when she had seen the knife raised against Kieran; the rest came…from somewhere beyond her. But Feor seemed to think the likelihood of it happening again was not as negligible as Brynna believed. That was why they had sent her here—to blunt the killing edge, to teach her to wield her blade with more circumspection.

But when Bresse came to claim her, it was gently. Lady Morgan came back to the guest lodgings with Keda and bowed her head to Brynna in a gesture as unexpected as it was, in its own way, proud. It was an obeisance to a queen from one who was herself a queen of sorts in this, her small realm. But the queen gave way almost instantly to what might have been a loving grandmother, with Morgan bending down to smile and take Brynna’s small hands into both her own brown, aged ones.

“I grieved for your mother,” she said, her voice low, husky, rich with her years. “I bless the day I learned I have to grieve for you no longer, my princess. Sleep well, child; tomorrow we will begin the work that is before us. Tonight, Castle Bresse will keep you safe.”

I
f there was something out of the ordinary in the fact that the Lady Morgan of Bresse herself undertook the teaching of the youngest novice in her Sisterhood, the girl still known as Brynna never suspected. Brynna was allowed her freedom and Keda’s company for as long as the harper was at Bresse. The morning after Keda left, Brynna was deposited, garbed in the ubiquitous white robe of Bresse, in Morgan’s chambers and left to cool her heels in the empty room until the lady was ready for her. At first she waited patiently, sitting on the edge of a wicker chair by the hearth, but when the minutes stretched into a respectable part of an hour she began to fidget, kicking the leg of the chair with her heel. Eventually she rose to wander round the room, examining the few objects left lying about for her to see. Morgan was giving nothing away; her room was remarkably free of anything personal by which her nature could be read. The pickings were poor; Brynna ended up standing by the window, one of her hands clutching childishly at her thin wrist behind her back. The window faced west. Unbidden, Keda’s question of only a few days ago returned to whisper in her mind.

What do you see?

This time, it was different. Perhaps it was just the change of perspective, but it was not Miranei which rose to haunt her so much as its dead queen, herself once a novice here in Castle Bresse.

Her mother’s voice, the flushed cheeks of excitement.
They will not forget this.
The crown of Miranei, trembling above Anghara’s head.
They saw the crown upon your head. It looked as though it belonged there. They will not forget this, Anghara. When you can come back to Miranei, I will call you.

But she couldn’t call. She was gone. And her daughter was Anghara no longer; she was plain Brynna Kelen, coming to Bresse from the hand of Chella of Cascin…

“She does not have to beckon from the battlements to call you home,” said a voice at Brynna’s elbow, answering the flow of the girl’s thoughts. Brynna’s eyes snapped up to meet Lady Morgan’s serene smile.

“How did you…” she blurted, shock wiping all the proprieties she had ever known from her mind. This easy mind-reading was not something even Feor had done.

“That,” said Morgan, “is just one of the things we will teach you at Bresse. But first of all, we must see what you already know. Come, sit. Let’s talk.”

At first they avoided any mention of the Cerdiad festival at Cascin. Morgan explored the little things, the triggers Feor had taught Brynna to use in order to touch her gift, the manifestations he had tried to teach her to control. Morgan muttered once or twice, with a twinge of impatience, that there would be not a few things that Brynna would have to unlearn; but on the whole she seemed satisfied with her new pupil. In the end, inevitably, they came to it as Brynna had known they must—the night when the carefully cultivated control had shattered and power had flooded from her like spilled wine.

It took one mention of Ansen’s name, and Brynna closed up like a bruised flower. Morgan, perhaps surprisingly, had not expected a wound this deep; it would have to be healed before it could be explored. The most dangerous of Brynna’s gifts would have to be left until last, until the girl had learned enough of the art to forgive herself for what she thought she had done. With a sigh, Morgan left it there.

“We will start from the beginning,” she announced instead.

Brynna looked up in something like dismay. “Then is nothing that Feor taught me right?”

“I did not say that,” Morgan said. “But if Bresse is to have a hand in you, then it is our disciplines you must learn. And you may as well start afresh. What you already know might make it easier for you—or harder, I don’t know. We’ll have to see.” She paused, looking down onto her hands, folded gracefully in her lap. “What is Sight?”

Outflanked, Brynna blinked in consternation. “Lady?”

“You have seen it, you have experienced it. Now tell me, what is Sight?”

Brynna tried; but there were no words. Sight was the banked glow that told her what Feor was, that told Feor what
she
was, within moments of setting eyes on one another. Sight was her mother’s healing touch when Anghara had grizzled over some childhood megrim. Sight was Rima’s true dreams; it hid in the way Brynna could tell truth from lie, could force truth by no more than a glance from one determined to slide by on a falsehood. Sight was within a thousand small things, all around her. Familiar; completely unknown. She stammered, mumbled, finally swallowed hard and came to a grinding halt, certain she had failed an important test.

To her surprise, Morgan only smiled.

“No worse than some of the Sisters could offer,” she said unexpectedly, her expression almost wicked. “Sight,” she carried on in a voice quite changed, sliding almost imperceptibly from the glimpse into the girl she must once have been into the dignified teacher and mistress of her own small domain, “is all around us. They called it that because it was first recognized as something they called Second Sight, when village spaewives predicted next week’s weather or the way a marriage would turn out. But we have grown far beyond that. There were things done with you, which were done with Sight no village spaewife would recognize.”

“What things?” said Brynna, latching onto the specifics where they had to do with herself. “Like magic?”

“Not magic,” said Morgan. “Power. Power ordinary women have learned to reach out and take from the well where it abides. Or, rather, power for which they have learned to allow themselves to become vessels. Those of us born with Sight are no different from any other human being—except there is a knowledge and ability within us to sense and control something to which ordinary people are blind. Your first task at Bresse, therefore, is to learn to empty yourself before you can reach for the power.”

Brynna greeted this with a blank stare.

“Every Sister at Bresse has what we call a talisman,” Morgan continued, by way of explanation. “I do not know what yours is; you will have to find that out by yourself. Mine is a white rosebud; I watch it opening in my mind, and when it blooms, I am ready to let the Sight in. You are welcome to try that, but the same talisman seldom works twice. Others have chosen a candle flame, a seashell, a butterfly. Anything that you love, that you think beautiful, that brings you a sense of serenity and peace. Anything you can hold in your mind until there is nothing there except your vision, strong enough for you to see it almost solid before you.” Morgan’s hands moved underneath her gaze until she might almost have been holding the ghost of her rosebud; Brynna swallowed.

“And when I have done it?”

Morgan had to smile again, at the unconscious arrogance of this. “It isn’t as easy as it sounds. Other thoughts are loath to leave your head. But this is something you will have to master before we can go any further, and it is something you will have to do alone. Cheating is easy, but pointless, and if you come back to me and tell me you’ve achieved this task, I will know if you are telling me the truth or not. You are welcome to seek my advice, or any other Sister’s, if you need help; but until you have chosen your talisman, and learned to enter it, the rest of the disciplines of Bresse are impossible to master.”

“Do I have to tell you what I have chosen?”

It could have been a rhetorical question, but her tone left no room for doubt. “You have chosen already?” said Morgan, lifting her eyebrow. “No, you don’t have to tell me. It is a secret useless to anyone but yourself. It is entirely up to you.”

She asked no further, but simply pointed the way to a staircase leading up into the Novice Chambers, high in the White Tower. Brynna was to go and claim one of these and wrestle with her talisman, reporting her progress to her teacher the next day.

But she was given only an hour to bend her mind to this task. There were no servants in Bresse; every Sister took her turn at the chores of the Castle, from weeding the garden and feeding the cows to doing laundry, cooking meals and washing the dishes afterward. Brynna was just another novice and the newest one at that, ripe for the plucking. The community at Bresse did not know she had been a princess, was indeed a crowned queen, but even if they had known it would probably not have made any difference. In Bresse, she was nothing until she earned her rank by her skills and talent. When one of the older Sisters came to the Novice Chambers to round up a clutch of girls for kitchen duty, Brynna was one of the haul. Her sleeves rolled up above her elbows, she was set with another novice to peeling potatoes by the kitchen hearth.

In truth, she was far from annoyed at the interruption of her meditations. She had thought Morgan’s task would be easy enough, but the talisman she had set her heart on kept slipping from her grasp. Every time she thought triumphantly
I have it!
she was reluctantly forced to admit she did not, else she would not have been able to think about having it. She struggled with it until she was flushed and breathless, with a thundercloud of an incipient headache rousing on the horizon of her mind like the purple storm hammerheads of Miranei. In the end she had to concede that, for the moment at least, her talisman had defeated her. She had almost welcomed the potatoes.

Which is not to say she was making an unqualified success of them, either. She had peeled very few potatoes in her life, and it showed, painfully. In the time her peeling partner had taken to peel three, Brynna was still struggling with her first, gouging out respectable quantities of the flesh together with the peel.

“With those white hands,” said the other, breaking the silence that lay between them and pausing to survey Brynna’s work with a mixture of amusement and disdain, “I’m not surprised you peel a potato as though with a broadsword. Do you think there’s going to be any of yours left to cook by the time you’re done with it?”

Brynna looked up, biting back a retort.

“High-born?” enquired the older novice conversationally, as she took up another potato. “Here, for the sake of all our suppers, watch me. This is how you do it.” Her hands were deft, fast; the potato gleamed creamily, pale and bare of skin, in her palm in seconds. Then she relented, having shown Brynna up in no uncertain terms. “You don’t have to do it that fast, not in the beginning. I have a year of potato peeling behind me in this place. I’m Bly, my father is Sir Machin of Nevan. Aren’t you a bit young to be here?”

There was the faintest trace of envy in Ely’s words; if young, the new novice must have been all the stronger in Sight for her gift to have been discovered already. And that meant the younger girl would be better than the common flock, destined for higher things.

Brynna bent industriously over her potato. “I’m Brynna,” she said, “from…Cascin.” She could not say Miranei—not here, when Miranei seemed so close. It was too painful to lay claim to a place which had not been home for so long—and perhaps, although this was no more than an afterthought, even risky. Brynna knew of Nevan Manor, close enough to Miranei for its family to have been a part of court life—she did not remember Bly, but that was not to say that Bly, prodded in the right direction, would not come to realize Brynna might be more than she seemed.

But what she said had triggered something almost as dangerous. “Cascin?” said Bly, tossing the second potato she had finished since Brynna had laboriously begun her own into the bowl set out to receive them. “Cascin of the Wells? I seem to remember there were only three sons in that manor.”

“There is a daughter, too.”

“Oh yes, I do recall. We haven’t had much contact with Cascin lately, but one summer, it was a year or two ago now, my lady mother spent quite a lot of time with Lady Chella of Cascin. Still, the daughter would be much too young to be you.” Her interest piqued, Bly left off the potatoes, measuring Brynna with a steady gaze.

“I fostered there,” said Brynna blandly. She lifted a pitted potato for Ely’s inspection. “Will this do?”

“A somewhat lighter hand would still be advised,” said Bly, peering at it.

Brynna made a deliberate mess of her third potato; anything to divert Bly from her line of enquiry. It worked, after a fashion, especially after the Sister who was in charge of the kitchen came to cuff them into greater industry, if they wanted to eat that day. Wary of betraying herself with an inadvertent word, Brynna decided her best chance of safety lay in solitude. She fended off Bly for the moment and, after her, one or two other novices who tried to make some kind of contact. Before her first week was out she had acquired a reputation for being withdrawn and aloof; some even said haughty. There were those who resented being rebuffed by someone who was their junior, both in years and in status. The Sisters were kind to her, and gentle, as they were with everyone, but very soon her peers left her to herself. It was safety, in a way.

Morgan, keeping an eye on her newest charge, saw a danger Brynna had entirely overlooked. Isolation made for conspicuousness; if anyone came asking who was the most mysterious, most intriguing and most tantalizing novice in Bresse, the one most likely to hold dangerous secrets, Brynna Kelen would have had no competition. For someone who wanted to stay unobtrusive and unremarked, it was poor strategy. Still, there were no enquiries after her, and it would have made her stand out even more if she suddenly changed tack and began cultivating friendships. Even people who had remained indifferent might have started to harbor suspicions. Morgan decided to leave the matter alone.

Brynna learned quickly how to peel potatoes, milk the cows, feed the chickens and make vegetable broth for fifty people. Her studies took a little longer, though. It was true she had chosen her talisman without thinking twice that first morning in Morgan’s chambers, almost in the same instant she had first heard of the existence of such a thing. Taming it, though, proved to be a beast of quite a different color.

She would start well enough, focusing first on Cascin, then the path she knew so well, leading from the house to the woods and the well on whose banks the willows dreamed lazy summer dreams. Using the same facility that had kept Miranei alive for her in her years at Cascin, Brynna found she could charm up an image of the willow grotto in such perfect detail that she could see every individual leaf on the two old trees in her mind’s eye. She could almost feel the softness of the springy moss beneath her feet, and there, on the highest point of the little mound, virtually touch the greenish pebble her own hand had planted there. In Brynna’s vision, the little Standing Stone stood in the midst of an aura of…something, a pale green light, a shroud of its own small sphere of power. This alone in the picture was strange and unfamiliar, the sole thing Brynna could not remember having seen at Cascin. And it was precisely this aura which proved to be her problem. She focused flawlessly on the idea of her talisman until she came to the vision of the stone; but as soon as her mind reached out to touch the light around it, her concentration would vanish in a shimmer of scattered thoughts, dreams and memories. The stone would disintegrate into motes and slivers, sparkling like sunlight on water, and in the welter of visions that were its gifts, Brynna found it difficult to remember the stone at all.