The Hidden Queen (21 page)

I
f that first sight of Arad Khajir’i’id had been wine which had gone to Anghara’s head, her first day in the desert sobered her up very quickly. It was still beautiful, and had lost none of its power to touch her soul—but the surface beauty was delicate skin stretched over fine bones, and if the bones themselves were beautiful it was the razor-sharp beauty of the purity of death.

It was not yet mid morning when they set out across the sands, but the heat was already overwhelming, the sun a living fire overhead. They had travelled for only a few hours before the caravan leader signalled a stop; a semicircle of black tents was up almost before Anghara could scramble down from her ki’thar. One had been raised for herself and for ai’Jihaar, the first sign Anghara could see that anyone in the caravan acknowledged their presence. She noticed the ki’thar’en had been tethered in the meager shadow of the tents, and she led her own behind her tent, hammering in a clumsy peg to hold his hobble. The
sen’thar’s
was already there, and ai’Jihaar was standing by the entrance to the tent; when Anghara rose and looked in her direction, ai’Jihaar simply nodded her approval in that uncanny way she had of knowing when she was being watched and ducked inside. Anghara followed. The tent was small, the air inside it close, but somehow less torrid than out in the merciless sun.

“Try to get some sleep,” advised ai’Jihaar. “We leave again late this afternoon, and we travel during the cool hours of evening. It will be midnight before we stop for rest again.”

It was indeed a pleasure to close eyes which hurt from the brightness of sun reflected from yellow-white sand, but sleep eluded Anghara—it was too hot, and there was a thin film of sweat on her skin which seemed to make her clothes slide and chafe uncomfortably. All the same, it seemed all too soon when a quiet voice called from the tent’s entrance:
“Sa’hari? Sa’hari, an’sen’thar?”

When ai’Jihaar murmured a response the summoner departed, his chamois riding boots rasping softly over sand as he walked away.

Anghara remembered the serai keeper outside the curtained doorway of their room had used the same soft word to rouse them on the morning they had left Sa’alah. Only now, here in the desert, was she beginning to understand the lack of doors in Kheldrin.

“
Sa’hari
…. what does that mean?” she asked ai’Jihaaras they made ready to emerge from the tent.

“You would knock on a door in your land,” said ai’Jihaar. “There are no doors in the desert. The sense of
sa’hari
could be translated as
are you there?
It is your answer to this which either invites the one who asked into the place where he seeks admittance, or bids him wait outside while you come to him. Come, they will wish to strike the tent.”

Theirs was one of the last, the rest having vanished as though they had never been. For a moment Anghara gazed back the way they had come, to where the mountains shimmered like an illusion behind a wall of heat. It was already difficult to believe anything existed beyond them. When she finally turned away to claim her ki’thar, it was with a start that she found herself face to face with a Kheldrini man, his eyes gleaming from his desert-veiled face, who stood holding the reins of her ki’thar in his left hand. He hissed a word of command at the ki’thar, waited until it had knelt on the sand, and then offered the reins to Anghara in silence. Another word came back to her, one she had heard ai’Jihaar use in the serai.

“Saliha,”
she said. Thank you.

He bowed—heart, lips, brow—and after a slight hesitation she did the same. Leaving her in possession of her mount, he withdrew. Anghara stood looking after him for a moment, not sure what just happened but aware it had been deeply significant in some obscure way. She climbed into her saddle in silence and made her mount get to its feet, which the ki’thar did with the same rebellious commentary he’d already expounded once in the yard of the Sa’alah serai. Another ki’thar approached her, and the smile on ai’Jihaar’s unveiled face was unmistakable.

“That was well done,” she said. “Your instincts serve you well.”

Beneath the burnoose Anghara flushed with the pleasure of a just praised child who had solved a difficult problem, and the pride of a queen who proved that royalty lay in her more than just skin-deep or conferred by the touch of a jewelled circlet on her brow. She even caught herself wondering, with what was almost venom, whether Sif would have done as well, for all he claimed he was Kir Hama, and royal-born. And then she veered away from that road. Sif’s name, and what he had done with his crown, was still too raw a wound.

They rode for the rest of the afternoon and, it seemed to Anghara, most of the night. She was bone-weary when the leader finally called a halt, and it was almost more than she could manage to do her duty by her ki’thar, settling it with ai’Jihaar’s for the night with a portion of coarse grain. Then she returned to the center of the tent semicircle, where a blaze had been kindled and several of her co-travelers were busy over a steaming kettle.

The air was cool, even chilly, on Anghara’s first night in the desert. Too tired to even attempt to sleep, every muscle shrieking in agony, she came and sat close by the campfire, wrapped in the woollen djellaba ai’Jihaar had given her, holding out her hands to the cheerful blaze. She had removed her burnoose, after a momentary hesitation, and the thick braid in which she had confined her hair fell over her shoulder to pool in her lap, with the usual wayward curls framing her pale face. Others who moved in the circle of the firelight had also removed their burnooses in the quiet, windless night. Bronze skin and bright copper hair caught glints from the fire and gleamed in the desert darkness beneath a translucent sky wreathed with bright, cold stars. Anghara could not see ai’Jihaar anywhere.

It was only now, without the concealing burnooses, that Anghara was able to discern there were women in the group with which they travelled. One of the women kept glancing toward her with an expression that was difficult to read. It might have been curious fascination and, perhaps not entirely unexpectedly, much the same instinctive wariness and mistrust with which Roisinani stared at “Khelsies” when they crossed the sea in the other direction. But at length curiosity seemed to win, the woman left her task by the fireside and disappeared briefly into one of the tents. When she came out carrying something in her hand, she made directly for Anghara. She squatted down beside her, reaching out hesitantly to touch the bright rope of hair, and then smiled, taking Anghara’s hand in her own small warm one and pressing something into her palm with a murmur. Anghara looked down, far from sure what to expect, and saw a small, carved bone comb.

She was momentarily nonplussed, but then she smiled with real pleasure and nodded her thanks. But the woman seemed to want something else, and kept on darting a timid hand toward the bright braid. Anghara glanced around for ai’Jihaar, but she was still missing; the woman who had made her the gift of the comb murmured something, and Anghara grimaced her frustration.

“I don’t understand,” she said helplessly. She picked up the end of her braid in one hand and stared at it for inspiration. It seemed to have been an enlightened move, for the woman nodded eagerly, her lips curling into one of those odd, narrow-lipped Kheldrini smiles. Understanding suddenly dawned. Anghara lifted her hair in one hand and the comb in the other. “Now? You want me to comb it now?”

The golden eyes were bright. Anghara felt a little self-conscious; it was one thing to quietly remove her burnoose, quite another to perform an act which was so intimate in the focus of several interested pairs of eyes. By this time others had been drawn to the strange encounter by the fire. But it was such a little thing, after all. She hesitated for another brief moment, and then slid off the knotted thong holding the braid, and began unweaving the strands of hair. When it was done, she shook her hair loose and it spilled over her back and shoulders like a cloak; she ran her fingers through it, tugging gently at one or two tangles.

“Hai haddari!”
breathed the woman who began it all, sounding impressed. Anghara smiled at her—vanity was not one of her faults, but it was hard not to preen a little in the light of the open admiration in the other’s eyes. She reached for the comb, but the woman, suddenly shy, said something else, making a motion toward the comb herself.

Either Anghara was learning the language fast, or it was just a question of being able to extrapolate the meaning of this new question from what had gone before. The request was more than humble—it was clear, from the set of the narrow shoulders and the downcast eyes, that the woman almost expected the reply to be a blistering reprimand, and not necessarily from Anghara but from her own people. She had evidently not been able to help herself, but this was a breach of both etiquette and privacy; and Anghara was a stranger of whom none of them knew what to expect. Anghara hesitated, this time because up until that moment only a select few had been allowed the privilege and duty of caring for her hair. When she had been very young, it had been her mother; later, it had been her nursemaid, then Catlin. Since that first morning at Cascin, she had dressed her hair herself. And the last time it had known the touch of anyone else’s hand had been in Cascin, a few days before the terrible events of Cerdiad which would cast her out. And that had been Kieran…He had come upon her in the garden, combing her wet hair in the sun. He had taken the comb from her, untangling with a gentle hand the damp knots which she had been furiously yanking at, spinning for her a tale of his own childhood, of the times he had done just that for Keda, back in Shaymir.

It was an oddly potent memory, Kieran’s voice echoing in her head as though he was close to her, speaking to her in this strange place from which he was so desperately far away. Anghara sat very still, but part of her wanted to run alone into the desert, leaving the camp and its bustle behind and going into the silence of empty desolation under the stars. There she would be better able to hear the remembered words of one whom she had loved. Instead, and the move was so rooted in pure instinct that it took even Anghara herself by surprise, she held out the bone comb to the one who had given it. The woman took it almost reverently, hesitating now that her request had been granted. Then she sank its bone teeth gently into Anghara’s curls and drew it downward, very slowly, along the length of her bright hair.

But Anghara was already far from that place. She was sitting very straight, legs crossed beneath the demure folds of her robe and the woollen djellaba, hands folded in her lap; her gray eyes, wide and unblinking, pupils dilated and fixed with vision, were staring into the campfire which blazed before her. And the voice in her ears was still Kieran’s…

He was white and troubled, blue eyes bleary with fatigue, dismay and apprehension. Anghara did not recognize the room he was in, nor the old man upon the edge of whose bed he was sitting…but no, she knew him, it was Feor, Feor broken by his own grim burdens into a premature old age…Feor, whose transparent white hand trembled as he reached out toward the young man at his side…

“It’s been almost two months since Bresse was razed,” Kieran was saying, voice a little unsteady with sheer desperation. “And she’s vanished, Feor. Vanished. I found a boat captain or two who think they may remember taking her down the Tanassa, and one who is equally convinced he took her
up
the river; and then there is one who says a young girl travelling on his ship simply disappeared in one of the villages they stopped at for repairs—swallowed by the night. They even organized a search party—but there was no trace…Feor…I don’t know where to look any more.”

“But she is alive,” Feor said.

Kieran’s head came up fiercely. “Yes, I believe that. I have to believe that. But she is out in that chaos, and Sif could already have killed her without even realizing he had done so. Or worse…” he shuddered convulsively, looking away. “I saw one woman after Sif’s inquisitors had finished with her,
purged
her…she had been lovely once. And when I think that could happen to Anghara…I…I almost rather wish…”

He glanced at Feor, met the other’s eyes, and quickly looked away again, clenching his teeth. “No. No, never that.” He paused. “Adamo is back,” he said, his tone quite changed. “We may not have found Anghara, but he’s found Ansen. Or, at the least, his grave.”

Feor’s eyes closed briefly, and a grimace of pain and what might have been regret crossed his face. “That, I expected,” he said quietly. “He went hurtling headlong to his own destruction, ignorant to the last of what he was getting into. I wonder if he ever truly realized what he was precipitating?”

“He was hanged, so the people say,” said Kieran, leaping to his feet to prowl the room restlessly like a young wolf caged for too long in a confined space. Ansen, whatever his sins, had once been closer than a true-born brother.

“Sif?”

“Yes. It was at the han, and Sif was still there.”

“Do they know why?”

“They guess,” Kieran said. “There is nothing else left for them to do. But they took him down, and buried him, although the stone they put on his grave bears no name.”

“Perhaps,” said Feor, and the words were wrung from him, “it is best so.”

Kieran gave him a bitter, strange look, half rebellious, half compassionate. He bit back whatever he had been wanting to say and simply nodded. “Perhaps.”

Feor raised himself in bed on both elbows and turned toward Kieran, catching the younger man’s eyes with an intense gaze. Kieran crossed back to the bed in two long strides and laid him back down onto the pillows with an extraordinary gentleness.

“Do not exhaust yourself,” he said.

But Feor was still looking at him with eyes far too bright, a world of pride, sorrow, trust and anguish in his gaze. “What now?”

Kieran straightened. “I go back,” he said. The words were plain, shorn of every embellishment or frill; this was the iron from which a sword is yet to be forged, all latent strength and power. But within, already, it was possible to glimpse the flames in which that sword would be made. He was young, but already, perhaps, he had seen too much of a tragedy which should never have been; at the beginning of this conversation his spirits had been flagging—but he was through the valley now, and out on the other side, and he was the stronger for it. “As long as Sif searches, so do I. And there are many back in Roisinan now who know that she lives. I will find her, Feor. However long it takes.”