The Hidden Queen (13 page)

Foiled, the captain rounded on Morgan again. “How long are these…retreats?” he demanded.

“As long,” said Morgan beatifically, tucking her hands into her sleeves, “as the Sisters think it is necessary. Sometimes it’s only a few days. Often it’s weeks, sometimes months. Once, a Sister stayed away for almost a year.”

The captain considered this. Perhaps he would have taken a chance and chased after the fugitive Sisters himself, but he knew he would find it utterly impossible to make any of his men do so, even at the point of a sword. Sif could have made them do it, but Sif was far away. “We’ll stay until they come back,” he decided abruptly, his fingers going to his temples as though he was nursing a particularly violent headache.

“I am afraid,” said Morgan, every word oozing with polite regret, “that Bresse cannot offer hospitality for longer than a night.”

“What do you mean? We are here on the king’s business, and…”

“You are men,” his captive Bresse graduate informed him.

They stayed in Bresse that night, and it was doubtful if any of them save the women enjoyed a wink of sleep. The captain knew when he was defeated and took up lodgings in Radas Han for almost another month, riding up to Bresse every day to look for the return of the Sisters who had gone on the fictional retreat. He became increasingly bad-tempered. Eventually, losing patience, he returned to Miranei with the two Sighted women and his troop of guards. Even the thought of Sif’s wrath at his failure was infinitely more palatable than guarding a castle full of women who set his men’s teeth on edge and who, in the captain’s own private and considered opinion, had been driven more than a little crazy by their isolation.

The captain would have been in a white-hot, blazing rage if he had realized the Sisters “on retreat” had only gone as far as the first bend in the mountain trail and waited there for his troop to leave. They had returned to Bresse, with him none the wiser, the very next day—via the small postern door, even as the captain was in the process of demanding lodgings from the innkeeper at Radas Han. The object of his search had watched him ride up from Radas Han and back again every day for a month. As it was, he rode away merely furious at the wasted time; he took it out on the two women, whom he made ride at a pace which soon reduced the elder to a quivering jelly of jolted and shaken bones and raw muscles. The younger woman took the punishment, and merely smiled.

Bresse had ways of guarding against accidents. But that gathering of women who ought to have been able to hear a feather fall from an eagle’s wing in the mountains on the other side of the world was oddly blind when it came to some things. When the true betrayal came, Castle Bresse lay wide open, unable to turn the blow that came unlooked for, out of the darkness.

A
nsen recovered slowly from his brush with power. At first he did not question the fact that his only visitors were his parents, the healer, occasionally Feor, and a pair of silent women whose function seemed to be that of sickroom attendants and who came and went in shifts, one of them always in the room with him. By the time he thought to query the continuing absence of Kieran and Brynna, as well as both his younger brothers, his two former schoolroom companions had been gone for almost two months. When he did ask, unfortunately, it was of one of the women, and she did not know any better than to be blunt.

“They were sent away, young lord,” she’d said. “Right after your accident.”

Ansen, who preferred not to think about his “accident” at all but whose sightless eye never ceased to remind him of that Cerdiad night, sat up in bed, propping himself up on both elbows. “Sent away? Where? By whom?”

“Lord Lyme and Lady Chella,” the woman said. “And Feor, your tutor.”

The three names rang in Ansen’s head, buzzing around his skull like furious bees. He smelled a conspiracy. The woman was obviously ignorant of the real facts, and Ansen pressed her no further, but he waited with angry impatience for one of the three who had been named to come to him, frustrated as he was by his continuing confinement to bed. It was Feor who was the first to arrive, gliding in one morning in his blue robe, trying to arrange his lugubrious features into one of his unaccustomed smiles.

“The healer tells me you’re getting restless,” said Feor. “That’s good. It means you’re healing.”

“When will I be allowed out of this bed?” demanded Ansen, distracted for a moment by the glittering prospect of a renewal of normal life.

“That isn’t up to me,” said Feor with his usual adroit verbal sleight of hand.

Ansen’s hand rose to touch the bandage which still wrapped his head. It was lighter now than the one Brynna had stared at, aghast, when she’d first come into this room after the accident. The patient was looking a little bit more like himself, his pale hair sticking out at odd angles from beneath the strap holding the bandage in place. “I can hardly wait for this to come off,” said Ansen with a sigh. “I feel like half a man with one eye closed like this.”

The expression that passed through Feor’s eyes was gone almost before Ansen could be sure it was there, but it was such a rare occurrence to catch Feor off guard he was instantly alert. His one good eye narrowed.

“Feor…”

Feor spared a moment to frame a choice curse in the privacy of his mind for the healer who had—perhaps out of misguided pity—neglected to acquaint his patient with the diagnosis everyone else in the keep already knew. When he met Ansen’s eye, sparking with something that was half anger and half abject terror, Feor had managed to restore a semblance of his usual tight control. When his eyes met Ansen’s they were blank, revealing nothing—no pity, no fear.

“There is a possibility,” Feor said in the flat, inflectionless tones of a messenger bringing news of defeat in battle to a new widow, “that you might never…”

Ansen’s cry was that of a wounded beast, inarticulate, inchoate, bleeding. He clawed at the bandage with the sudden and violent motion of a trapped animal gnawing at its own foot to reach freedom. It was as though having heard the bandage was not what was keeping the light from his injured eye, Ansen had decided to tear it away and take his chances without it.

He had decided nothing, of course, not consciously; blind anguish moved his hands, and his strength was such that Feor, who sprang to stop him from reopening his wound, could hardly hold him down. He shouted for someone to fetch the healer, anyone, an extra pair of hands. The healer arrived first, with a potion they tried to force down Ansen’s throat. It took three men to do it at last, and even then they were forced to tie his hands together until the potion took effect. He lay there moaning for a long time, and even when he slipped off into a drug-induced sleep he tossed uneasily on his pillow. There was a telltale streak of tears on his cheek, where his pale eyelashes touched flesh pallid from months of illness and incarceration.

Feor did not often give way to rage, but Ansen’s pain had distressed him greatly and the sight of futile and childish tears on the face of one so nearly a man drove him over the edge. When he turned on the panting healer, whose forehead shone with the sweat of his exertions, the man shrank from the white fury in Feor’s face. The priest’s voice, however, was silky, quiet and dangerous when at length he spoke.

“Did you not think he deserved to know the truth?” he enquired, almost conversationally.

The healer, whose eyes had dropped from the other’s set face, glanced up hopefully, thinking the storm had passed him by. What he saw made him quickly look down again.

“I did not think,” he began portentously, taking refuge in pomposity, “he was well enough to cope with the news. I was waiting until he…”

“Until he heard it spilled out without warning?” enquired Feor, still ominously quiet. “Do you consider him well enough now?”

The healer, a rotund, red-faced man with a premature paunch, was far from incompetent or cruel; he had genuinely meant well. He bleated some excuse and stood trembling before Feor, in the silence of a child caught out in some sin by his elders. If Feor had been in a softer mood, he might have pitied him, standing there in abject abasement. But there was no pity. There was only the glint of the hearth-fire on Ansen’s tear-stained cheek.

Feor’s voice broke at last, in thunder.

“Out!”
he bellowed, flinging his arm out to point at the door. “You have done here! If I ever find you in this room again without the express permission of Lord Lyme or Lady Chella, I shall throw you out of yonder window myself!”

There was something faintly ridiculous in the idea of tall, thin, angular Feor lifting the stocky physician and throwing him anywhere, but as Ansen’s window was located on the second floor of the Cascin manor the healer saw nothing humorous in the situation. He scurried out of Ansen’s door, wincing and ducking a blow which never came, and vanished down the corridor.

Only now did Feor’s face soften and his hands drop to his sides. He sat lightly on the side of Ansen’s bed and smoothed the pale hair from his face in an unconsciously tender gesture. Ansen turned away, murmuring something incoherent. Feor summoned his attendant, leaving strict instructions that he or one of Ansen’s parents was to be called immediately the boy woke, and went in search of Lyme and Chella to tell them of the ugly turn of events.

They were all ready to pamper Ansen when he woke, with Feor aloof as usual but with an odd stoop to his shoulders, which made him look like a wizened old eagle hovering protectively over an injured chick. But Ansen, when he woke, was brittle and hard as obsidian. He wanted no pampering—he wanted the truth. He went back to the accident he had tried so hard to forget, and demanded that somebody help him remember it. All of it.

It was Feor, the only eyewitness still in Cascin, who gave him back the events of that night. The priest tried to blur the outline, pulling ragged edges of concealment where none remained, but Ansen cut through the pretense with a shrewdness that was almost Sight.

“Yes, but who threw the decanter?” he asked again, returning to the one point Feor had skated over. “Keda was right next to me, Kieran had his hands full of me, you were at the door and Brynna was halfway there, close neither to the table nor to me. I would have noticed if she had gone for the bottle, surely, even under the…circumstances. I admit I was drunk, perhaps perverse…” That was the one concession he made to his role in the whole affair, still arrogant, still haughty. “But…”

“Ansen, do you remember taking out a knife?”

Ansen shot him a smoldering look. “Does it really matter? Now?”

“It matters. If you did, you were the reason why two of your foster siblings were made to leave this house.”

“Is that all?” Ansen enquired, with sudden nastiness in his voice. His hand rose to touch his bandage. “And what of me?” The hand dropped. There was a goblet of mulled wine on a tray beside the bed; Ansen reached for it, frowned when he misjudged the distance and nearly overbalanced the vessel. “Gods,” he muttered, “am I to be condemned to this for the rest of my life?” He looked up again, and there was a flash of rage in his good eye. “They crippled me, damn it, Feor!”

Ansen had experienced episodes of self-pity before, but they were different by far from the fit he was now in the grip of—more innocent, more innocuous, the last vestiges of childish whining from someone who was no longer a child. Now self-pity had congealed into something more brittle, more bitter. It was hard to feel compassion for Ansen when he resorted to mockery and sarcasm; he nursed his misery fiercely, and it colored the way he saw the events of that night. To his mind, he had still done nothing wrong by trying to seduce Keda using the traditional appurtenances of Cerdiad. The knife…the knife he could only vaguely remember, a blur in his mind. And there was something else, something he could not put into context, something terribly, terribly important…

“Where did they go?” he asked, taking a weary sip of his wine.

“Kieran was placed as a squire,” Feor said, abrupt and businesslike. He did not wish to discuss Kieran with Ansen, not while he was in this mood. Kieran was a living reminder of what Ansen might never be now, a youth on the path to knighthood, to glory. A youth with two good eyes.

“And Brynna?” Ansen frowned into his goblet. It was to do with Brynna, the thought he couldn’t pin down. She must have thrown the decanter at him—she must have—there had been nobody else in the room. But that was not it. Although there was something strange…

“She has gone to family,” said Feor smoothly. Which was true, up to a point; she had gone to a Sisterhood. But Ansen was devilishly sharp that day. Feor made the mistake, imperceptible under normal circumstances, of allowing himself to glance at the door at this point, as though hoping for rescue, or escape. Ansen saw his glance. It was around his odd little foster sister that the whole mystery was woven; and, with terrier-like persistence, he would not let go.

“They did not even say goodbye,” he said, sounding aggrieved.

Feor bit back the impulse to ask why, in the aftermath of the Cerdiad incident, Ansen would have expected any of the other actors in the drama to commiserate with him in his plight. “They tried,” he said instead. “An…Brynna at least came up here, I know that much. She…”

But the slip was enough, however swiftly and smoothly patched. It could have merely been the first syllable of his own name, but the sound was different. Ansen suddenly knew with blinding clarity it was not his name Feor had been about to utter. He heard again the echo of Feor’s cry in the dining hall of Cascin on Cerdiad Eve.

Anghara! No!

“Anghara!” breathed Ansen, putting the goblet of wine down rather unsteadily. “So that’s it! She’s Anghara, my royal cousin who is supposed to be dead and buried! And Sif…Sif doesn’t know she is here!”

There was no possible use in dissembling. “No more is she,” said Feor tightly, recalling the curse he had formulated for the hapless healer and piling it on his own head with vengeful indignation.
Old. Old. You’re getting old. You should be meditating in some Sanctuary somewhere, not cutting the cloth of a world.

But Ansen, whose intelligence was the equal of Kieran or Anghara, for all that he chose not to apply it in class, was already leaping ahead.

“Where could you have spirited her away to?” he muttered. “She can hardly be easy to hide…and if she is hiding, that means Sif is looking. But my aunt must be dead, really dead, else Sif would not be on the throne, not with Sight to help her…” He trailed away into a brief silence, his good eye narrowing speculatively. “Sight…”he muttered. “Her mother is Sighted; as is my mother. Perhaps…Perhaps…It was Sight threw that glass at me, Feor, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?”

“She has the gift,” Feor said flatly.

“Well!” said Ansen, leaning back into his pillows. His eye gleamed in a sly way Feor did not like. “I guess it took this…” his hand drifted up in an expressive gesture at his face, “for the truth to come out. I wonder if Sif…”

“Ansen,” said a cold voice from the door to the room, “that is enough.”

Both convalescent and visitor turned to look. It was rescue, but for Feor it was far too late; he could only meet Chella’s eyes and give a small, resigned shake of his head. Even this, in his unnaturally percipient state, Ansen caught and interpreted. Correctly.

“You never would have told me, would you,” he said. “Just left me to wonder, and to shrivel out here while they…Why did you let Kieran out, Mother? Or Keda? Doesn’t this knowledge mean death or imprisonment for life? Aren’t you afraid they will…”

“They, no,” said Chella evenly. “You…He is your foster brother, and you drew a knife on him. She is your cousin, and…”

“She is my cousin and she blinded me,” finished Ansen bitterly.

“She was protecting Kieran,” Chella said.

“And you are protecting her,” said Ansen. “Even now you’ve managed to secrete her away somewhere. I suppose nobody who was there on that night actually remembers what really happened, do they, Mother? Your doing? Your Sight?”

Chella exchanged a quick glance with Feor. She had also seen the glint in Ansen’s eye.

“My Sight, yes,” she said at length, after a pause. “There isn’t a tongue in Cascin able to speak of Cerdiad Eve to someone outside this house. Except a few who are still free; who can be trusted. Feor, myself. You.”

“Yes. Me.” There was sarcasm in Ansen’s voice. “Aren’t you afraid I might…”

“You won’t,” said Chella, softly, firmly, with regret. “If you will not undertake to remain silent—and swear an oath I can trust—then, son or no son, you too will taste the interdict. Either that, or you will never leave this house again.”

“I might not anyway,” Ansen said, gesturing again at his eye.

“Stop it,” Chella snapped, losing patience. “Your father has dragged around a game leg all his life, and he was blameless in the getting of it. Yet I married him, and he is lord of this keep. Show you are deserving of respect, and no one will think the less of you for a disability.”