The Hidden Queen (15 page)

But there were some who wanted to go, and March snatched at the idea. “Would they take the princess with them?” he had asked of Morgan at their last meeting. His loyalties were still pledged first and foremost to Anghara and the true Kir Hama line; he was ready to do his utmost to help Bresse in any way he could, but only after he saw Anghara safe. March would have been willing to take any Sister who cared to go into the mountains and lead them through the back ways down into Shaymir. Perhaps the prince would offer them shelter there. But only if Anghara was with them, if Anghara was safely out of Bresse.

Morgan gazed at him steadily. “Nothing could get from here into the hills unobserved,” she said. “Sif has learned from his captain’s failure. The area between the tower and the mountains is the most heavily patrolled.” She hesitated for a moment, then gave March a secret kept for many years. “There is a secret way. But it comes out close to the han, and that would be crawling with Sif’s men. There also the patrols would be thick. And if they discovered a secret entrance into the tower…”

“I could take care of one patrol,” March said. “Until the next one came, the path would be open. If any want to leave, I will help them. But I must try to get the princess out of here somehow. Kerun and Avanna! If Sif comes upon her penned in this place, you must know she would not live to see another day! And you…you would do well to consider going with them, lady. All of you. Sif will never forget what you have done.”

“If there are those who would go, and if there is a chance for them to make it, I would be happy to see them succeed,” said Morgan. “I will even make sure Anghara is with them. I know she can expect nothing but doom at Sif’s hands; for him, she is already dead—did he not watch her laid in the family vault in Miranei years ago? If he were to kill her here it would be no more than putting the seal of truth onto something long accepted as fact. If you can get her safely away, you have my blessing. But as for myself…I stay.”

This was why March was out alone on this moonless night, waiting for the patrol that had drawn the midnight shift. It was a last chance—let one patrol go missing, and Sif would react swiftly and violently. But if they could ensure Sif did not know of the patrolless shift until it was time for a changing of the guard, it might still be possible to evacuate into the mountains. March had been studying the pattern of the patrols since their inception; the guards were due to meet and change directly in front of the copse in which he crouched. March planned to eliminate the three who took over the new shift, quickly and as soundlessly as possible. Bresse would be waiting for his signal; it would be their last chance.

Except that Sif had made an unexpected change of plans.

When March saw the relief shift arrive with only two men, he had little time to think of anything other than that his task had been made easier. Perhaps it was this premature relief and the urgency to complete the unpalatable job—March had always been a soldier, a knight, never an assassin in the dark—which combined to make him careless. The arrival of a further two men, just as he was pulling his knife from between the ribs of his second victim, caught him completely unaware. He had no time to do anything but give a grunt of surprise—the hand which already held his bloodied knife made an instinctive motion of defense, but the small blade could not parry the downward swing of the bright sword already in the soldier’s hand. It was over quickly. One of the men loped back the way he had come, to make a report and bring reinforcements; the one who had wielded the sword knelt in the grass and peered dispassionately into his victim’s face, where life was fading quickly. The soldier bent forward when he thought the dying man whispered something, very softly, but he was too late; March was already gone. The words he had spoken hung in the air, unheard.
Rima…my queen…I could not save her…

There was no signal to Bresse that night. Morgan, who had known there would not be, gathered the Sisters of Bresse into a last council. Anghara, who was not a part of this but who had known of March’s plan, watched on the walls, alone, until dawn began to paint the mountains to the east pink and gold. When Morgan summoned her at last, she went slowly, almost in a daze, beginning to comprehend the only thing March’s silence could mean. Her eyelids were swollen, her eyes bloodshot; she had never looked less like a princess, more like a child driven past the edge of endurance.

Morgan met her at the doorway of the white tower, arms tucked into wide sleeves in a characteristic gesture.

“There was no signal,” Anghara said dully.

“I know,” said Morgan. “Follow me, and do exactly what I say. Do you understand?”

“Yes, my lady.” The voice that acquiesced to Morgan’s command was flat, exhausted, almost automatic.

They went into the tower, Morgan unlocking a small door in the side of the spiral staircase, which Anghara had never seen open before. At first sight, what lay inside was no more than a small storage cellar, piled untidily with odds and ends, empty barrels, a clutch of bald brooms leaning drunkenly against one another in a cobwebbed corner. Morgan entered confidently, going straight to the far wall and pulling aside a massive barrel, with too great an ease for it ever to have been anything more than clever camouflage, to reveal a narrow doorway. Sturdy oak planks were set fast into the stone of the tower. Morgan produced two small keys, which had hung suspended on a cord inside her robe, fitting one into the hidden door. The key turned with a grinding protest; the door, heavy and solid, yielded to Morgan’s hand and swung slowly inward. Darkness gaped inside. Morgan reached for a torch, which stood ready in a bracket just inside the door, and lit it. In the flickering light of the dancing flames another staircase was revealed, a twin to the one spiraling upward above their heads, this one twisting down into deeper darkness where shadows overwhelmed the insubstantial torch. The walls were raw stone, rough to the touch; the stair treads were dusty and looked old. Anghara stared into the dark depths, her eyes clouded.

“What is this place?”

“Follow me.”

Morgan moved away, her white robe glimmering as though silver in the dim, reddish glow of torchlight. Beyond the narrow circle of light darkness encroached again. Anghara, who had stood unmoving, suddenly shuddered as the last of the light began to vanish round a bend in the twisting staircase, and hurried after it, keeping just a step away from the edge of the robe which swept the stairs in Morgan’s wake. The Lady of Bresse walked in silence, making no move to acknowledge Anghara’s presence.

The stairwell seemed endlless, but finally bottomed out in a landing of cold, damp flagstones. This was empty of everything except, almost incongruously, a small travelling pack and a folded cloak beside yet another locked door, this one small, round and stout, with bands of iron reinforcing the sturdy wood. It looked like an entrance to a mountain troll’s den. Morgan produced the other key, twin to the one that had opened the door at the top of the staircase, and fitted it into the lock. Then she turned for the first time to look at Anghara, her eyes full of love and compassion.

“I would send half of Bresse with you if I thought it would help, but the presence of one of our own with you out there in the world might do far more harm than good. From here you walk on your own,” Morgan said quietly. “This leads into a tunnel which comes out at the river, just above Radas Han. Be careful there, Sif’s men might still be prowling around. After that, trust to water. If you will take my advice, seek a Sanctuary, and wait there until you are strong enough to claim your own.”

“You’re sending me away?” said Anghara, her voice muffled; her words an uncanny echo of the ones she had spoken in Cascin on the eve of her departure to come to Bresse. Was there never to be an end to running? “And what about Bresse? What about all of you? If Sif knows I’m here…”

“It’s you he wants,” said Morgan. “He will leave us alone. We have done nothing to him. And what he does here today will make it easier for you to return to Miranei. People will remember.”

“He will…he will…” Anghara’s agitation robbed her of words. She reached out with her mind, unravelling her thoughts too fast…the clearing by the water…the willows…the Stone…

The small dark antechamber exploded in a shower of sparks as the vision took her. Flame. Rivers of flame. Down the river, Cascin, the house waking to a dull gray morning with the promise of rain. Men coming up the long avenue from the gate, some with drawn swords, some with lit torches. The house was quiet. Too quiet. A male voice, too loud in the silence: “They’re gone.” A brawny hand round a torch.
Burn the place. Burn it.
Sif said. Sif said. And then…the mind blurs…there’s a protection on this place…pulsing blue light by the river…the soldiers stand, uneasy…one brings his torch down with an uncertain motion…the others seem to have forgotten why they have come. The rain comes down at last. The torches go out in a hiss of smoke. But in the minds of the soldiers as they turn to leave, bright and brave, a vision of a house in flames. Behind them, the house stands unharmed in the rain…

“This is happening…” Anghara heard a voice moan from a great distance. It sounded like her own. “Cascin…they went to burn Cascin…”

“You protected it.” Another voice, familiar, far away. Morgan’s arms around her. “You raised a Standing Stone in Cascin.”

But the smoke was still there, billowing black and ominous. The vision was not done. Smoke…black smoke…black horse, man in bright armor, bareheaded, red-haired, bright sword in his hand…white tower…black smoke around a white tower…rising into the morning sky…voices…screams…
felt, unheard
…dying, dying, they were all dying…a solitary girl, watching from a distance…

Anghara struggled out from beneath the vivid pictures cascading and tumbling through her mind, gasping for breath, her eyes wide and wild. “He’ll kill you! He’ll kill you all!” she cried, finally able to interpret the vision she had never clearly understood before.

“He may,” said Morgan calmly, her arms still around the younger girl, protecting, sharing strength.

Anghara raised wide gray eyes awash with tears. “He’ll kill you all,” she repeated with conviction. “And you…you’re sending me away…I can’t go, I can’t leave you. None of them even know why! It’s because of me…”

“They all know,” said Morgan. “It will all have been for nothing if you do not leave. Everything has its appointed hour. That of Castle Bresse has come. And you, you must go out and keep the part of Bresse we have given you alive in the world. Dark days will come for our kind, and you will be their light, Bresse their beacon. But if you do not go, then darkness claims it all. Bresse has done its duty—the price was high, but it will be paid. I do not know what the price will be for you, but part of your debt is to keep the memory of this place alive when it is no more.”

“You knew,” said Anghara slowly. “You knew all the time.”

“I have known for a long time that this would come,” said Morgan.

“And still you took me…”

“I was in the path of the Gods,” said Morgan. “So are you.” She bent to plant a kiss of blessing on Anghara’s brow, holding both the girl’s hands between her own. “Go now, Queen of Roisinan. May the Gods watch over you.”

“Morgan…” Anghara was not even aware she had omitted the honorific it had been second nature to use, but Morgan didn’t fail to notice. She merely smiled and folded Anghara’s cold fingers around the stem of the flickering torch. She lifted the pack she had prepared for her, shaking out the cloak and settling it around Anghara’s rigid shoulders. It looked familiar; for a moment her mind was blank, then her hand brushed it and memory came flooding back. The cloak was Kieran’s, the one she had worn when she had ridden into Bresse for the first time.

“Go,” Morgan said, and the word was a command from Lady Morgan of Bresse to the youngest of her novices. “Go, and remember us.”

Anghara obeyed as though in a dream, ducking through the low doorway. She heard it being closed and locked behind her. The tunnel before her was narrow and claustrophobic, but dry; the dust of many undisturbed years lay at her feet. Slowly, moving as if she were in pain, Anghara began to inch forward into the unknown.

Morgan climbed the twisting stairway in the dark, sure-footed as a cat. She stood for a long time on the top stair, looking down into the shadows from which she had just come with an odd expression on her face. This secret way was something each matriarch of Bresse bequeathed to her successor, along with the power to obliterate it. Morgan would be the last Lady of Bresse. After generations whose task had been to preserve, it fell to Morgan to be the one to destroy. With a soft prayer, Morgan reached for a stone in the lintel, which her predecessor had pointed out so many years ago. Her eyes were full of tears, but her hand was steady as she grasped the protruding stone and pulled it forward.

She only just had time to close and lock the door and haul the concealing barrel into place before she heard a muffled roar behind her as the secret staircase tumbled into ruin. She paused for a moment, sparing a thought for Anghara, to whom the noise must have sounded like the coming of doom. Then she took the cord which held the two now useless keys and dropped it behind one of the barrels before meticulously slapping telltale dust from the folds of her white robe and coming out into the tower proper, closing and locking the door of the “storage cellar” behind her. Even as she turned to leave, she heard the sonorous sound of steady blows upon the barred outer gate; and accompanying them, more an echo in her mind than sound that carried to her ears, a voice calling out:

“Open! Open in the name of the King!”

I
t was Sif himself who rode into the inner court of Castle Bresse when they opened the doors to his knocking. He wore armor, but no helmet, and his red-gold hair flew free in the cool breeze drifting down from the hills. His sword was naked in his hand, resting gently in the crook of his left arm; above it, his eyes were two chips of blue ice. Sif was dangerous, bright, finally within reach of sitting unchallenged on the ancient throne at Miranei. Feor would have recognized him easily, his Sighted vision cast in mortal flesh.

Morgan waited for him at the door of the white tower, her hands tucked in her sleeves, completely calm in her knowledge of what was to come. She stood immobile, making Sif come to her; and he did, stopping his great black war-horse barely two paces away. His eyes bored into her and she met them levelly, head held high. A slight shiver of light danced down his blade—his hand may have trembled, perhaps—but his voice was steady enough when he spoke.

“Give me what I seek,” he said softly, pitching his voice for her ears alone, “and I might forget where I found it.”

“Bresse holds nothing that is yours, King Under the Mountain,” Morgan answered, using his ancient title. “We can give you nothing. Not even absolution.”

That struck home. The naked blade twitched as his hand closed harder around it; his mouth thinned into an angry line. “We can take by force what you choose to withhold,” he said, and the voice was edged with threat. “I can order this place taken apart stone by stone.”

“You can,” said Morgan, admitting to no more than the king’s undisputed ability to destroy Castle Bresse. “You will not find what you seek, and you will leave only rubble as your monument. People remember such monuments for a long time.”

It had been a long while since anyone dared speak to Sif like this. His patience snapped at last, and the sword came arcing up from its resting place. Three men, summoned by the signal, immediately peeled away from the detachment waiting by the gate to gallop to his side. Two wore the insignia of a captain.

“Gar, Hury, take the sheds. I want every man to know this place better than the house of his birth by the time you’re done. Insel, post a guard on the gate and on the postern—nothing leaves this place but that I hear of it.” Sif sheathed his sword in a swift, violent motion and swung down from his horse. “Then get ten men and come with me. We’ll take the tower.”

Morgan simply stood aside and let him pass. If he had suspicions before that the searching would be in vain, they now coalesced into knowledge—Sif was suddenly utterly certain Anghara had been here, and just as certain she no longer was. There was something in Morgan’s eyes, a telling glitter, which required no spoken word to let Sif know Morgan knew exactly what he was thinking. The perception that she was mocking him, letting him show off his empty power, suddenly unleashed a red rage in his brain. With his foot on the first step of the spiral staircase, Sif turned. “Insel!”

“Yes, my lord?” His captain, halfway across the yard already, turned in a fluid motion, alert, awaiting further orders.

“Bring all the women into the refectory. Everybody. Have a guard at the door until I can deal with them.”

Insel sketched a salute and loped off to obey. Sif threw a challenging look at Morgan, but she merely smiled, bowed, and came toward the staircase with a graceful, gliding step.

“Where do you think you’re going?” snapped Sif, goaded into ungraciousness.

“Following your orders,” said Morgan gently, as though explaining something very complex to one too young to be expected to fully understand. “The refectory is just off the first landing.”

She was making him feel like a child again, him, a crowned king. Sif turned and took the stairs two at a time, his fists tightly clenched underneath his royal cloak.

He and Insel searched the tower with a lot more force and roughness than strictly necessary, the men taking their cue from their king, who in his turn had given way to an impulse of angry destructiveness the white tower seemed to feed into a frenzy. There was nothing here of the barely concealed anxious fear the first expedition had shown, waiting to be stopped or crossed at any moment by invisible and potent forces of concentrated Sight. With Sif, fear had long been subsumed by his anger and loathing; he would have almost welcomed an intervention so he could pit himself against it, and win. But nothing stopped them, nothing stood in their way. The men’s heavy booted tread echoed eerily in passageways which had never known anything but the gentle whisper of women’s slippers; they kicked open doors, tore down curtains in alcoves, slashed at rugs to hammer bared floors for secret trapdoors or places of concealment. They turned Morgan’s room upside down, leaving a mattress bleeding straw from savage sword-thrusts and naked windows with russet curtains pooling beneath them like blood.

The women penned in the refectory could hear the dull roar of the soldiers’ passage through the kitchens; there was the occasional crash of shattering crockery or the metallic ring as a clutch of kitchen knives spilled against stone, the sound of cooking pots clanging hollowly on flagged floors. Men swept out the fires laid on the cooking hearths and climbed in to peer up into the chimneys, with spilled embers glowing dull red amidst pale ash on the scrubbed kitchen floor. By the muffled remarks which drifted through, someone had even speared the carcass of the calf they were to have butchered for tomorrow’s supper. “Nobody hiding in here,” a half-facetious voice was heard to say. At least one kitchen cat, by the sound of a pained and abruptly stilled yowl, met an untimely end. Some of the younger Sisters, now that the consequences of the choice they had made were beginning to be borne in upon them, were clinging to each other and crying, or simply sobbing softly on their own, hugging their shoulders with pale trembling hands, in fear and confusion. Morgan sat apart, erect and dignified, her hands folded in her lap. She looked as though she were praying.

At last the men had had enough. They were tired, hot and bad-tempered; they had spent hours on a futile search, which had turned up precisely nothing. Sif, his rage far from spent, called a halt. He was breathing hard, his eyes narrow slits of blue fire. Thwarted, by the Gods! Thwarted again by Sight, and the Sighted! The first slight he had risen above—Sight had not been enough to save Rima, after all, or prevent him from claiming a crown. It took a loyal army to do that, and to raise his own mother, who could have been queen but for Sight, into her own rightful place. But the child of Dynan’s Sighted and lawfully wedded queen moved on paths eased by Sight, where Sif could not follow. Anghara, whose claim, by virtue of that Sight, was more valid by the laws of Gods and men than his own, had once again slipped through his fingers. And the women of Castle Bresse had done it—taken her, sheltered her, and then, in the instant before his nets closed, somehow set her free.

“Enough,” Sif growled, deep in his throat, softly enough for Insel, the man closest to him, to turn his head sharply in his direction, unsure if his lord had just issued a command. Sif had not, but the movement drew his attention to the small knot of men surrounding him and something crystalized in his mind in that instant, a thought terrible in its clarity of purpose. He straightened, squaring his shoulders.

“Insel,” he snapped, “torches.”

When he flung open the door to the refectory, dishevelled and dusty but with a fierce glow of emotion wrapping him like a cloak, he stepped into a spreading pool of silence, with even the youngest Sister stilled by the sight of this avenging king.

He sought Morgan’s eyes again. Somehow, it had become personal. If he had planned murder, she had planned sacrifice; Sif knew, in a part of his mind that was still rational, that martyrs live forever, but he was too far gone to care that his hand was giving them eternal life.

“This place,” he said in a voice which was steady with incandescent and savagely ridden rage, “has fostered treason against the Throne Under the Mountain—fosters it still, sheltering what the king seeks. So speak I, Sif Kir Hama, King of Roisinan. You forfeit your sanctuary, your status, and your lives. Castle Bresse dies today, and with it all that it stands for. My father’s line has been royal—and human—for many years before the taint of Sight seeped into it. It was enough for Roisinan, once. It will be enough, again. I will rule human in Roisinan; when I am done, Sight will be a memory, a legend to frighten children. Sight dies, here, today, with you.” He turned his head, gestured to Insel and Hury, the other captain, who were standing behind him with lit torches. The faces of the two men reflected their thoughts clearly—there was a sort of terror there, at Sif’s sheer audacity and at the bloodthirstiness of his revenge; there was also a blind devotion. If Sif decreed death, they would deliver it.

“Bar the doors,” said Sif in a voice made all the more terrifying by the very softness with which it unleashed catastrophe, “and put this place to the torch.”

He strode out without looking back.

He had half expected cries to follow him, entreaties for mercy, for clemency, for pity. There was silence. Pleas might have swayed him, even then, in his extremity; but nothing came. Out on the cobbles of the inner yard, he paused, glancing over his shoulder, his face a rictus which was hard to read—his teeth bared in what might just as easily have been a feral smile as a snarl. One of his men ran past with a sketchy obeisance in his direction, arms full of kindling. Suddenly sick at heart, Sif turned away; but it was only a moment’s weakness. He thought of Rima, and of his mother. Of the lives that could have been. Human. He was
human.
The witches had done enough. The man who was king, mounting his restive horse in the yard of the castle he had condemned, closed his heart; his eyes as he turned the beast’s head toward the gate were bleak, but hard. The decision had been made, and he would stand by it. Something changed in him in that instant, and the man he might have been was lost in the wind. He fully realized that what he did now at Bresse would haunt his reign until the day he died—and could not bring himself to care, if he could but achieve his goal of clearing Roisinan of the treacherous witchcraft which tainted his land’s blood.

And yet…the first wisp of smoke came drifting out of the doorway of the white tower as Sif was riding away. There were no regrets in his mind, but his faithless body would never forget the acrid smell of the black fumes which curled around him to sting his nostrils and hang before his face like a curse.

Away on a hillside above the river a girl sank to her knees with a cry, the hood of her travelling cloak slipping back to reveal hair almost the precise shade of the man who had just passed the death sentence on Bresse. He could not hear them, but the voices of the women dying in the flames echoed in her mind, their death, however freely chosen it had been, a bitter reproach. It was darkness, something that descended on her and wrapped her like a skin; a sadness, a yearning, something that would always be a part of her. She lay as though lifeless on the ground, her eyes open but unseeing, her mind filled with the vision of the black smoke and the white tower crumbling, writhing, falling within it. Dying. Dying.

Feor felt it, deep in his fever, and called out incoherently, struggling to rise, his cheeks wet with tears. Along the length and breadth of Roisinan women with Sight crumbled into a black swoon. Some keened the death of sisters they had never met, tearing their hair and pouring ashes over their heads; others stood in silence, gazing unerringly in the direction in which Bresse lay from their own threshold, with welling eyes and tears which carved their passage down salt-stiff cheeks. They did not know yet of Sif’s decree, and what it would mean to them. Instead they mourned the passing of something powerful and precious which would probably never come again in their lifetime.

Ansen, pale with the toll that his guilt at not running to Cascin’s succour had exacted, had the misfortune to be waiting for Sif in the han when the king returned from Bresse. Sif’s black mood upon his return could perhaps have been predicted, but Ansen had no way of doing so—as far as he knew Anghara was still at Bresse, and already captive. Not gifted with Sight, he had not felt Bresse’s dying; he waited for Sif, torn between anxiety and excitement, ready to present himself as the man who had led the king to his quarry. He was a little nonplussed to see Sif riding in alone, unaccompanied by Anghara, but he had not paid much attention to the grimness on Sif’s face, believing it to be merely the result of a distasteful campaign. He could not know, when he came to kneel before Sif and announce he was Ansen of Cascin, that Cascin was a name which could be counted on to prod the barely cool embers of Sif’s passion and fury back into leaping flames.

Ansen had missed all the signals, but he could not fail to read the message written in Sif’s eyes as the king looked down on the kneeling young lord at his feet. Far from the friendliness and joy Ansen had expected, Sif’s cold gaze seemed to convey nothing but an ominous distance and cold loathing.

Sif never spoke a single word directly to Ansen. After that first baleful look, the king’s eyes focused somewhere beyond Ansen’s shoulder and he swung his cloak aside, almost as if he did not wish it to touch Ansen as he passed him by. “Confine him,” was all he said, over his shoulder, to one of the captains who walked behind him.

“My lord…” Ansen called, aghast, as two brawny soldiers laid hands on him and hauled him upright. But he spoke to the king’s retreating back. The captain gazed at Ansen with something resembling pity.

“You picked the wrong moment, lad,” he said, in a voice that was almost friendly. “What possessed you to accost him now, of all times? And just how in the world did you get past the wretched guard anyway? I’ll have to have a word with the officer in charge before the king thinks of that. Come on, me lad. With a bit of luck, my lord will have forgotten that you…” But then his eyes clouded suddenly, and he lapsed into silence. To Ansen, this was even more ominous. His earnest request for information went unheeded. The captain marched in silence beside the two men who half-led, half-dragged Ansen between them toward a room with a stout wooden door and sturdy iron lock. Then he simply turned abruptly away to walk off in another direction with his head bowed in what seemed to be troubled thought. Cascin’s heir was thrust, none too gently, into the room and the door locked behind him. There was a window, but he discovered, when he crossed to it almost automatically in what might have been an instinctive urge to escape, that its wooden winter shutters were firmly locked and barred. He was a prisoner.