The Hidden Queen (7 page)

They started out for home in a sort of unspoken common consent—it went without saying the morning was ruined for Ansen. Kieran’s interest in Brynna seemed to have been exhausted by his defense of her in the face of Ansen’s rage and spite, and he walked ahead with Ansen, the two of them muttering something between themselves, too low for the other three to hear. Brynna was left to the mercies of the twins, or, rather, of Charo, since Adamo still maintained a grave silence. Charo, however, seemed to want to make up for his brother’s sins of omission, for he didn’t shut up for a minute during the short walk back to the house. Brynna learned all about the wells, Cascin, Lyme, Chella, and every beast in Cascin’s mews, stables and kennels. This last appeared to be the topic of the moment, since one of the bitches in Lyme’s prize hunting pack was about to whelp and the twins had been promised a puppy each from the expected litter.

When Charo stopped to draw breath, Adamo startled her by speaking for the first time.

“Father said Kieran might have a puppy too, if he wanted,” Adamo said. He had a lower voice than his twin, and spoke in slower, more measured tones; Brynna suddenly knew she would have no trouble at all telling them apart, once they opened their mouths to speak. “I guess you’re also our foster sister now, same as Kieran is our brother. Maybe Father will let you have a puppy as well.”

It was an attempt to accept her, to make her feel as though she belonged to this family; Brynna suddenly warmed to Adamo. Charo immediately took up the notion and took over the conversation again, but Brynna saw Adamo was the brother who originated ideas in this twosome and Charo was the chatty, bright, social face the twins presented to the world—a kind of a mask.

Ansen, too, had a mask—several of them. It was hard for Brynna to read him. When they reached the house and met Lyme in the hall, it was Ansen who told, in light, self-deprecating tones, of the incident with the arrow. Anyone would have thought he had dismissed the episode without a second thought—anyone who hadn’t witnessed his reaction, or who didn’t see, lulled by his light banter, the curiously intense look he gave Brynna as he related the story. He lingered only long enough to explain the whole thing to Lyme, as though afraid someone else might beat him to it with a different account, then he was gone, vanishing somewhere with the agility of a mountain cat. Kieran, who greeted Lyme with real affection almost surpassing that shown by his true sons, added nothing to Ansen’s tale, and followed him into whatever refuge Ansen sought. The two were of an age, and obviously pursued their own interests when not lumbered by the younger brothers.

The twins, though, seemed to have adopted Brynna, something that seemed to amuse their father. Nothing would do but she had to go with them to inspect the canine mother-to-be in the kennels, and get caught up, which she found herself doing with surprising ease, in speculation about what the impending puppies would look like and which of these phantom puppies each would choose.

The children ate lunch with all the adults in the dining hall, but Brynna had the distinct impression, from the twins’ table manners, that this was not an everyday occasion. Indeed, it wasn’t long before she was confirmed in her assessment by a whispered aside from Charo.

“Maybe it’s because you’ve arrived, and they wanted everyone to have a good look at you at once, and you at them,” Charo had hissed as a footman, bearing a decanter of wine, made an ostentatious detour around the end of the table where the children had been seated. “But when Kieran came they didn’t…”

“We’ve probably got a new tutor,” said Kieran with a comically doleful face, eyeing an unknown guest a few chairs down from Lord Lyme, in what might have been an indirect attempt to explain Charo’s words.

Seeing the man was March, Brynna couldn’t help grinning; the smile brought her Ansen’s immediate beady attention, distracted from the wine-steward’s retreating back. He had been allowed wine for the first time that year, and had developed a taste for it; he had been caught up in wishing the steward had not detoured quite so comprehensively.

“Do you know him?” Ansen asked, after a last disgusted look at the water in his goblet.

“He brought me from Miranei,” Brynna answered, truthfully if not completely.

Ansen gave her a measured look. Brynna was instantly on her guard; she backtracked, thinking on what she’d said. Would an ordinary girl from Miranei rate an escort? Did she just plant a seed in Ansen’s mind that she might be more than she looked? Thoughtfully, Brynna added a snippet of extra information. “He comes from here,” she said. “He was coming home, and I came along.”

Ansen still looked as if he wouldn’t believe the time of day from her. Once again, unexpectedly, it was Kieran who stepped into the breach. “I don’t suppose he looks like a tutor,” he said, assessing March with a long, cool look. “Not unless he came to be our Arms Master, Ansen.”

Distracted as always when it came to arms and fighting, Ansen’s attention wandered from Brynna, and she breathed a surreptitious sigh of relief. All the same, she couldn’t seem to uncoil a tense knot somewhere within her.
Avanna!
she thought desperately.
It’s not fair! I can’t watch him all the time!
It was the thought of a child, but that, after all, was what she still was.

The question of tutors cropped up the very next morning. Brynna had retired to her chamber after breakfast, but it wasn’t long before someone came for her and delivered her into a bright, spacious room with several bookshelves along the walls. Any remaining wall space was hung with an eclectic collection of items—mounted sets of twelve-point stag antlers, a large and brightly painted shield bearing Lyme’s heraldic arms and several artistic displays of polished swords. A large window looked out onto the open lawn. The weather had turned foul again, the tail-sting of winter, and the window was lashed by sudden slaps of cold gray rain; there was a fire lit in the grate, and four chairs were set around it. One was empty. From another, the tallest, a long, lanky figure dressed in the blue robe of a priest of Nual rose as Brynna was deposited inside the library and the door closed behind her escort.

“I am told,” said the priest, “that you are a new student. Come in, sit.”

His voice was kind, but Brynna’s heart was beating like a drum. In Miranei she had several tutors—but there it had been expected of her, as Dynan’s heir, to be familiar with the history and the geography of the land she would rule. This was entirely unexpected, a cold surprise, especially the sight of her co-students in the other chairs—Kieran and Ansen peered at her, not the twins, whose age she was nearer and with whom she would more plausibly have been placed if education had been an issue. After all the talk of concealment, what were Lyme and Chella trying to do here?

The priest studied her as she approached, settling back into his chair, as she took the one he indicated. “We are none of us here what we seem,” he said cryptically, and Brynna stiffened in alarm before she’d had a chance to control her reaction. She forced herself to relax, but her hands stayed clasped in her lap, her fingers twisted almost painfully into one another. “For myself, my name is Feor, and I was not always a priest of Nual. I was trained in Kerun’s schools, given Kerun’s knowledge, but I left the temple when I was of age and sought sanctuary. I have been Nual’s, ever since. Hence this.” He fingered a fold of his blue robe thoughtfully. “When Lord Lyme sought a teacher for his sons, I heard of it, and he took me,” Feor continued. “That’s what I’m doing here. As for the others, Ansen is twelve, and has been my pupil for two years; but a scholar’s robe is just a disguise for his other inclinations, I very much suspect, and this room is, alas, rather too potent a reminder of what they might be. Even now he would rather be swinging a blade, or training a hawk in the mews, or chasing after some stag to put another set of antlers on the wall.” Ansen looked both thunderous and abashed at this, but he held his peace; he obviously had great respect for the priest. “Kieran is thirteen and, like yourself, is not of this house,” Feor continued. “He probably has other secrets I have yet to discover. And now there is you. Why would Lord Lyme require you to join us at our lessons, young Brynna? As far as I can gather, you have barely turned nine, and…forgive me…educating daughters does not seem to be a priority for most fathers in Roisinan.”

Brynna had had a chance to recollect herself, and think. When she spoke, it was with a cool logic, offering unvarnished truth. “I’m not just a daughter, I’m an only daughter. An only child,” she said, and Feor nodded, interpreting smoothly.

“Ah, not just an heiress, an heir. Your father is grooming you to take over…something, after his passing. That does explain the education, of which you have probably had a bit already. But enough to hold your own in this schoolroom with boys three or four years your senior?”

Anghara’s response would have been a snap, rooted in the royal arrogance inherited from Dynan and never really discouraged by those who surrounded her. But Brynna simply looked down into her lap, concealing eyes that danced with the challenge Feor had thrown her. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Well, we shall see,” said the priest, settling back into his chair. “Throw another log on the fire, Kieran, and you, Ansen, tell me where we stopped in our history lesson the last time.”

“The Interregnum,” said Ansen. His inspiration seemed to dry up after naming his subject, and he glanced toward Kieran for support.

“Continue,” said Feor, giving him no chance to malinger. Once again, however, Ansen was being forced into a position where Brynna would witness a humiliation, for he sat mute and mutinous, his back straight, his face flushed with more than simply his close proximity to the flames Kieran had fed a smidgen too zealously.

Feor, who had been sitting back and watching Ansen through hooded eyes, sat up again with a sigh, lacing his fingers. “Very well, we will get back to you. Kieran?”

Throwing an apologetic glance Ansen’s way, Kieran launched into an edited version of the first Rashin grab for the throne of Miranei. To Brynna, once again almost wholly Anghara at hearing these lessons of her childhood, this was exquisitely painful. It had not been concealed from her where her father had died, how, and why. Sooner or later they would come to the battle he had fought. That he had died in. It was too close, too close to home…

“Brynna? What happened next?” said Feor with impeccable timing, stopping Kieran with a gesture of his hand in mid-sentence and turning to face her.

Brynna would have hesitated a little, wondering, waiting to see what was expected of her. But Anghara sat without looking up from her folded hands, not seeing the sudden interest in Ansen’s and Kieran’s faces, and in Feor’s own. She hesitated not at all. She launched into a very soft but errorless accounting of what followed the point in time where Kieran had halted.

“Stop,” said Feor after a minute or two of this. He thought for a moment, and his three pupils sat in silence, Ansen and Kieran staring at Brynna with a sort of fascination with which they might have watched a winged horse, Brynna her self watching her teacher, too late, with a wary uneasiness from beneath lowered eyelashes.

The priest’s face was inscrutable, his thoughts veiled. But the pause lasted less than a few heartbeats, and then Feor merely smiled.

“Very good,” he said. “I can see that Lord Lyme has sent me no undeserving student. We should have a session, young Brynna, where I can determine just exactly how much you do know of what we have done here. In the meantime…we’ll get back to the Interregnum. For now, let us skip forward a little to the battle where Garen Kir Hama, King Dynan’s grandfather, regained his throne. We’ll take a closer look at the Kir Hama kings.”

There was knowledge in his voice, so solid Brynna could almost feel it settle on her shoulder like a heavy hand. But when she looked up, mortally afraid at the blunder she had just committed, Feor was looking away into the fire over his steepled hands as he began a reckoning of King Garen Kir Hama’s return to Miranei after the temporary exile contrived by the Rashin. The two boys, knowing they would be interrogated later until Feor was satisfied they had this latest lesson down pat, had their attention firmly held by their teacher, whose own mind seemed to be focused tightly on his subject matter. All the same, Brynna felt his vivid interest in her, not lessened in the least by the fact that he was very efficiently doing something else entirely. She had met that before, at home, several times, this subtle ability to communicate feeling masked by some quite unrelated activity, except that there it had only emanated from some of the women in her circle, and from Rima. Never yet had she seen it manifested in a man. But in Miranei it had a name. They called it Sight.

B
rynna had the feeling that Kieran, at least, was curious and intrigued by his new classmate, and would have liked to linger and talk to her after the lesson was over. Ansen was, perhaps predictably, in a deep sulk—once again, unhappily, one precipitated by his new foster sister. But Brynna made her escape from both tutor and fellow students as soon as she possibly could, staying only long enough for Feor to demand her presence half an hour earlier the next day in order to assess her knowledge.

The first person she ran into in the corridor, perhaps fortuitously, was March. He was safe, a link with home who knew all her secrets, and she rushed up to throw her arms around him, heedless of who might be watching or what conclusions might be drawn.

“Well, hello,” he said, disentangling her small form from his midriff, “how are things going? I saw you whispering with the others at lunch yesterday, you looked as though you might have been talking about me.”

Brynna cast a glance back over her shoulder, a look of such panic that March’s smile slipped a little and his hands tightened on her shoulders.

“What is it?” he demanded, speaking very softly.

“The tutor,” Brynna gasped, glad to have found someone to whom she could blurt out the whole thing and remove the burden from herself, “the priest of Nual…he is Sighted, March, I know it, and I think he knows who I really am!”

March looked at her gravely for a long moment, and then reached out to smooth away a wayward curl of red-gold hair. “Let us find Lady Chella,” he said at length. “Lord Lyme said you must have a proper education, but this was her idea. And the Lady of Cascin does nothing without a good reason. She knew what she was about.” He was a little uneasy, but he was not worried. Yet. Rima’s sister had made this decision. And yet, it was to Rima March had sworn to keep her daughter safe—and now, here, already…

The time they took for this exchange in the corridor was enough, however, for Feor to forestall them. When March and Brynna were ushered into the lady’s chambers, they found him there already. The priest’s strange, luminous eyes met Brynna’s briefly, and she went white as she returned his look, again unable to control her reaction. Even if Feor had known nothing before, her chalky face would have condemned her, believing herself to have wrecked what had been a carefully laid illusion by betraying her secret at almost the very first test. Chella and Feor seemed to be exchanging cryptic messages with their eyes, in total silence, and then Chella smiled. “It’s all right,” she said softly.

At the same time Feor, somewhat unexpectedly, suddenly lowered his long, angular frame onto one knee, bending his head before Brynna as a sign of respect before looking up at her. “Yes, it’s all right,” he said to her. “You see, Lady Chella was sure of me, and I think she was almost sure of you. Sure of me, because she knew I would guess almost everything within the first few moments I spent with you, and never tell; and sure of you, because she thinks you also have this gift that she and I and your mother share. And if I am your tutor in things like history and geography, I will have occasion to teach you…other things you must know. Am I right, Lady Chella?”

“I am truly sorry to have given you such a scare,” said Chella, coming over to give Brynna a hug. Then she put her away, her hands still on Brynna’s shoulders, her eyes steadily holding the child’s. “I wanted Feor to read you unaware—if I had gone to him and told him of a Sighted child at Cascin, we would have had to plot desperately for him to have access to you. This way, you have been placed in his charge by Lyme himself, the lord of Cascin. And there’s another advantage to all this, another layer of concealment for you.”

“If Sif comes looking for the female fosterling he may hear about at Cascin, he might think she is perhaps twelve or thirteen, not nine, if he hears of her being tutored by the same man who teaches Cascin’s older boys,” said March slowly.

“Exactly,” said Feor. “And already I see she knows quite enough to stay with us. She certainly knows more than Ansen.” Chella grimaced at that and Feor, getting up creakily from his obeisance, could not help smiling. “So we’ll have a few private lessons, young…Brynna, but not all of them will have to do with history, even though Kieran and Ansen will have to think so.” He came up to her and cupped her chin in a gentle hand, tilting her small face up and searching her eyes. Brynna suddenly felt quite dizzy from the hypnotic depth of his look. “But not just yet, I think. In time. You are still so very young,” he murmured. “It’s astonishing to me that already we have been able to tell. In most children Sight does not show until they are into their teens. But you…” He shook his head. “I think you may well be a melding of two very strong Sight lines, my child. It runs in your mother’s family, although it seems to have passed by all her sister’s children. And by all I can gather from the history I teach, Red Dynan’s line had it as well, although they always shrouded it carefully away. I wonder if some of the old kings ever really knew the potential they were leaving untapped…but most Kir Hama kings wedded Sighted women. That alone should tell us something. Like calls to like, and you may be more than just a strong melding—you may be a culmination of many generations.” Feor let her go, and his smile was warm, full of comfort and support. Freed from the terror of having betrayed herself so easily to a stranger, Brynna found herself smiling back. It was hard to like Feor—he had a distant, other-worldly air that precluded closeness—but he could be a tower of strength to his friends, and Brynna suddenly realized he wanted to be her friend. That by itself was worth a great deal; another layer of safety added to her precarious existence, another ally in the devastating and swiftly emptied world in which the exiled child-queen had been set adrift.

But ally or not, Feor was an odd and rather troublesome companion. He wandered Cascin like a restless spirit, popping up unlooked-for at unexpected moments, liable to come out with barbed double-edged remarks which could pass at face value with anyone who wasn’t listening for hidden messages but which would reveal a great deal to those who were. He seemed to take pleasure in this baiting, and while Feor was capable of judging his audience very finely, never actually saying more than was prudent, two days of this was quite enough to completely unnerve Brynna in his presence. It did not help that there was always the menace, all the more frightening because it was shrouded in silence, of impending instruction in arcane matters concerned with Sight. But having told her she had it and that he would help her learn to deal with it, Feor seemed to have forgotten about the whole thing. But Sight does not allow itself to be easily forgotten or thrust aside. It was only a matter of days before it rose to haunt them all.

Less than a week after her first lesson with Feor, sitting once again in her by now accustomed seat by the fire, a shaft of indescribable agony lanced through Brynna’s skull and she doubled over with a moan of pain, clutching her head. Ansen glanced up, and Kieran surged out of his chair, but both were forestalled by Feor who, languid though he looked, could nevertheless move with remarkable swiftness and agility. He was already crouching by Brynna’s chair, his long, bony hands gentle on her hair.

“It hurts! It hurts!” she moaned.

“Don’t fight it,” admonished Feor in a low voice. “It will pass. Ride it.”

“Are you a healer, too?” asked Kieran, his attention diverted briefly. Feor spared him a swift glance.

“I was a lot of things in my time,” he said. His eyes were flooded with a strange sort of compassion, but Kieran could tell that, although Feor had looked directly at him, he’d been very far from seeing him. His compassion was all for Brynna.

His attention was back on the girl, who sat small, fragile and somehow lost in the great chair, with tears streaming down her face. Feor seemed to be observing her with a furious concentration, his hands never leaving her temples. At length Brynna drew a ragged breath and he nodded, straightening up. “Good. You’re through it.”

“Is she feeling ill? Shouldn’t she lie down or something?” asked Kieran, prompted, perhaps, by his memories of his own first days in a strange house as a new foster child—and other, deeper memories whose roots lay in his own childhood.

“I’m fine,” said Brynna, wiping the tears with the back of her hand, sitting up straighter. She would not look at him, however. Kieran’s acquaintance with his newest foster sister was still very short, but already he had seen how her eyes mirrored everything she was feeling, her emotions revealed for anyone to read. Kieran knew what would have been written in Brynna’s eyes if she had looked at him—a residue of her pain; resentment she had succumbed so abjectly and a strange, still sort of fear, whose cause he could not pin down but which was always about her like a faint scent. Ansen, looking at him, suddenly snorted in what sounded like derision; Kieran looked away into the flames in the fireplace, aware that his own face must have been mirroring Feor’s compassion.

Kieran would have liked the chance to have lingered, more curious than ever about this strange new classmate. But between them, Ansen and Feor gave him no chance—the former dragging him out of the room at the conclusion of the lesson, and the latter claiming Brynna’s attention, excluding the two boys almost before they’d left the circle before the fire. Kieran glanced back from the doorway, but the teacher and the young girl were deep into a softly spoken conversation he could not hear—and then he was out, with Ansen closing the door almost pugnaciously behind him. He turned away, following his foster brother with ill grace.

Back in the schoolroom, Feor was once again by Brynna’s chair. “You did very well,” he said encouragingly, “very well indeed for one so young. Perhaps I was wrong to wait. Perhaps you are ready to begin to learn.”

“But what happened?” murmured Brynna, sounding a little lost, her eyes filling with tears even at the memory of the pain.

Feor, who had stretched his angular features into a rare smile, looked sober once more. “As to that, I cannot say,” he said. “Something grave, though, else it would not have caused so much pain. Something very deeply connected to you. I do not know what might be happening in Miranei right now, but something of great importance for you has probably occurred there. If you were a little older, and maybe a little more trained, it would have come to you as an image, a sign. But you still do not know how to interpret these signs, even though you are obviously capable of receiving them. Let me speak to Lady Chella. Perhaps she could give us some answers.” He rose. “You look better. But you are likely to nurse a headache for a while longer; go to the kitchens and ask Mariela to give you an infusion of wirrow. It’s as well to try and prevent a major…”

The door opened behind them, very softly and gently, but they both looked up with a sudden feeling of doom. Lady Chella stood there, her normally serene face drawn and white and her gray eyes dark with tears. Feor stiffened, glancing from aunt to niece, for the first time putting together this shared vision of pain into a picture that made all too much sense. The hand that suddenly dropped back onto Brynna’s hair was no longer that of a healer with Sight, instead it was the hand of a friend helpless to shield a child from a mortal hurt. He did not speak, merely giving Chella an awkward little bow before lifting the edge of his blue robe and gliding out of the room. Watching him leave, Brynna had an abrupt, unaccountable vision of Feor guarding the door from outside, as implacable and perhaps far more dangerous than any soldier. Chella came inside and knelt by the chair, taking Brynna’s small, cold hands in her own, lifting her face to the child’s. There was something subtly different about it today, and Brynna suddenly knew what it was—Chella’s eyes, the eyes that had reminded her so of her mother. They were unfamiliar now, eyes which might have had a passing resemblance to those of someone she loved, but nevertheless the eyes of a stranger. Something had vanished for good, a link, a nexus that was there before, binding the two of them into family. The disorientation lasted only for a moment, and then the world changed again, returning to something Brynna knew and recognized. She found herself looking down into painfully familiar eyes once again—and realized it was now Chella’s eyes that were familiar and reminded her of Rima, not the other way round. It was as though she had never seen Rima’s eyes, except in a distant dream…And then, just like that, she knew. “Mama…She’s dead, isn’t she?”

Chella reached out to gather her in a wordless embrace and Brynna stared over her aunt’s shoulder into the leaping flames. She felt curiously empty, as though there were no more tears, as though she had cried them all, shed over nothing more than the pain which had wracked her so a moment before. The memory of Miranei, the perfect memory she still cherished and her last thought before she fell asleep every night, was intact. But in this instant it seemed to Brynna that the city and the keep were starkly empty of people and a woman named Rima had never walked its corridors or shared the Throne Under the Mountain with a king they called Red Dynan. There was nothing there, no memory of a face, of a form—nothing except a pair of beautiful and intense eyes which now existed only as remembrances, pale copies in the face of Rima’s sister, and that of her daughter.

Chella drew away to look at her. “When it came to me I knew you must have felt it too,” she said, “and you had no means of knowing…it was a good thing Feor was with you. Come, Catlin is waiting for you upstairs. I thought…”

But the thought of seeing Catlin was suddenly unbearable. Catlin was a potent reminder of Rima and the world that had been torn from Brynna, the latest in a series of deep wounds and gashes oozing not life-blood but an even more agonizing and incessant trickle of loneliness, heart-sickness, and a hopeless longing for what was irretrievably lost. Brynna dropped her eyes. “I don’t want to go to my room,” she said, and there was an echo in her voice of the girl who had known the power of command. “May I go for a walk out in the garden?”

Chella glanced at the window. “But it’s raining,” she said.