The Hidden Queen (18 page)

The other Dance.

Part of her mind told her she was insane to even think about negotiating an unknown hill path alone in the darkness, not knowing what she would find at the other end. Another part knew, with equal conviction, that her grip on her reason depended on finding the Dance this very night. Pitting herself against physical darkness, and winning, would be the only thing that would bar the flooding of that other, more dangerous darkness of her soul.

Pulling Kieran’s cloak closer around her against the evening chill, Anghara resolutely turned her back on the boat and struck out on her own on the pale, glimmering road which led up into the hills. The illuminated han, the bobbing lights of the boat reflected on the water, everything faded from her mind as though it had never been; every step she made took her deeper into a trembling vision, weaving her into the hillside and moonlight, taking her further and further from the world of the common man and, once again, into the paths of the Gods.

S
he opened her eyes to light. The sun was slanting oddly, too gold; this was not morning. Anghara sat up, jolted fully awake, and rubbed her eyes, looking around her.

The Dance of the Tanassa Hills rose up above and around her, the stones glowing in the sunlight with a pale, golden gleam. She was quite alone, and had been curled up, wrapped tightly in Kieran’s cloak, in a bracken-filled hollow by a fallen lintel, one of only two which had succumbed to the hollow tooth of time and toppled to mar the perfection of the Dance. She could pin down fleeting fragments of dreams, never enough to make an entire and coherent picture—but how could she have allowed herself to fall asleep? How long had she been here? Slowly, the memory of last night came trickling back, so tangled with dreams and visions that Anghara had to fight to separate truth from fantasy, if indeed the division existed. The memories were oddly fragile—brittle, delicate things with wings like butterflies, they fluttered in her mind, uneasy, yet with a sort of preternatural clarity of recall.

She had climbed steadily, smoothly, as though she had known this particular hill path all her life. There was nothing around her except the whisper of wild grasses in the breeze and soft white moonlight pouring over the hillside; in that silent night she was the only thing that moved. Her sense of time fell away from her, pulled back into the human world she left behind and of which it was such a fundamental part—but she had no need of it, not up here. She fell into the rhythm of her stride, and after a while could not have said if she had been climbing for minutes or for hours. And then, very suddenly, the hill flattened out into a level space, and the Dance was there, ghostly in the white light.

Anghara felt her hackles rise as she stepped into the circle, under a massive archway with the great lintel stone spanning the two uprights far above her head. There was an ancient power here, a power which sang to her—something achingly familiar in its sense of strength and of danger, a feeling she knew very well, having wrestled with it at Bresse for long months. She had never been this close to a true Standing Stone before, but she had known instinctively what they were like when she had plucked a pebble from Cascin’s well and named its nature. Her own little stone had defied her, giving visions where she had sought only inner peace—but there was something here in the Dance which she could learn, could master. It was far more ancient, perhaps, than the Sight which was in her blood but the old magic called to it in a language which she could almost—almost—understand…

Again, time slipped from her like a discarded cloak. She sat touching eternity, her back against the cool stone of one of the uprights and her knees drawn up into the circle of her arms, and simply stared wide-eyed into the empty circle flooded with light.

There were things there which perhaps only she could have seen—and accepted without courting madness; the wraiths of the dead whom she had loved rose to speak with her. Morgan, with her strength and her gentle smile, Morgan with the message she had left in Bresse and which Feor had already discovered:
The young queen lives—that’s you, my child; one day you will return to Miranei, and it will be yours again.
And Anghara, still bowed under the agony of her betrayal that night, would have cried out—
Already, already I have forgotten you!
The touch of the night breeze on Anghara’s cheek might have been Morgan’s fingers:
They all chose to stay in the end, knowing everything, and none need be on your conscience.
Morgan had never said these words, but her spirit was saying them now, giving her young queen the absolution she had withheld from Sif.
There was nothing you could have done, except die with us. Live for us instead, Anghara.
March, sturdy and dependable, turning to what was still a little girl—ah, but it wasn’t so long ago—soon after their arrival in Cascin:
Remember this place. This is where I will leave the second copy of the document witnessing your coronation. One day this will take you back to your throne.
Rima, smiling through tears in the throne room of Miranei:
They will remember this.
Her father, Red Dynan of the battles—a true wraith, wordless, passing by with a distant smile and a gentle touch on her hair with the calloused sword hand of a warrior king. Ansen…can he be dead?…Ansen, an angry boy stepping forth from his concealing shrubbery, impatient and brusque with the interloper who had wrecked the shot which was to prove his superiority over his foster brother…Ansen slumped unconscious, with rich blood welling through the fingers of the hand over his eye…Ansen, hands bound, glancing up with pride and pain at the sky gleaming with dawn, and in the background, ominous, the shadow of a swinging rope that was waiting…

And then others crowded in, the living, visions of things which she knew as true deep down in her bones but which had played out far away from her, visions running down one another like water…
Sight dies here, today, with you
—Sif’s rigid shoulders, then only the icy blue eyes…
I will rule human in Roisinan
…Kieran, no longer the boy she remembered, kneeling breathless in a trampled, bloody field with the hood of a chain-mail shirt thrust back and his head held high—the bright flash of a descending sword…Anghara cried out, flinging an arm out in an impotent attempt to shield him from the death which was plunging toward him, but the sword landed gently, on his mailed shoulder…
Rise…be a valiant knight, Kieran of Shaymir
…but Kieran’s eyes were suddenly troubled, and the voice he was listening to was different, familiar, old:
I am too old…you are the hawk I will loose to look for her…you are all I have…you are all I have…

Anghara could remember, through all this, the moon sailing with graceful purpose across the sky which showed the stars of midnight and then, slowly, those of morning. It was not quite dawn yet when her eyes closed in what was utter exhaustion, both of body and of spirit, but a pale golden glow was stirring in the east, and the morning star was bright above her.

And now the morning was done, and afternoon shadows lengthened on the grass.

Anghara scrambled to her feet with a sudden muffled cry. The boat—when did the captain say they were leaving? How long did she spend up here? How long would it take her to get down? Would they even notice she was missing?

Most of the river was hidden from this hilltop by the fold of the hills, but a snatch was visible, gleaming bright gold in the sunshine. Anghara peered at it, shielding her eyes with her hand—was that black speck a boat which had left without her? But it was too far, and the sun was too bright, making her eyes water even as she gazed.

“Oh, dear Gods…” she moaned softly, aloud, as she shook out her rumpled cloak and lifted her hands to her tangled hair even as she took the first rapid steps toward the road which led down to the village. And then she froze, feeling eyes upon her back, acutely aware that she was no longer alone. Her heart climbed into her mouth—this, after all, was a Dance of Standing Stones where only hours before ghosts had walked in the moonlight. Letting her hands drop to her sides, very slowly, she turned her head and scanned the empty archways. Nothing. And yet…The power stirred in her, unsummoned, the faintest nimbus of gold haloing her head.

“Peace,” said a strange, low voice. “I mean you no harm.”

She could have sworn there had been nobody underneath the arches at her back when she’d looked moments before, but there was now—a slight figure, shrouded in a dusty, dark cloak which seemed at least three sizes too big, its face hidden behind a white mask. Anghara knew such masks; beggars with disfiguring disabilities or scars used them sometimes on city streets, to spare the sensibilities of those of whom they begged a few coppers for their next meal. They were far more common in the south than they were in Miranei, but there had been enough for the young princess to notice them. This particular mask had its eye slits filled in with white clay; this beggar was blind.

A blind beggar? Alone on a hilltop, in a ruined Dance?

“Who are you?” said Anghara, in a voice which was commendably steady given the rapid beating of her heart. There was something uncanny about the cloaked figure—as though it had truly been dreamt into existence, a product of Anghara’s own visions of last night. “How did you get here?” she asked, after a barely perceptible hesitation. There was a lot of courage in the question. Some things one had to ask; this did not necessarily mean one wanted an answer.

The woman reached with uncanny accuracy for a white staff which leaned against the closest upright. “I walked, of course,” she said matter-of-factly, as though the very question was absurd; Anghara thought she might even have smiled beneath the white mask. The mask was turned in Anghara’s direction, and she was uncomfortably aware of a piercing scrutiny which should have been entirely impossible. “I watched you, and over you, last night, this morning,” the beggar said, her voice oddly foreign in its accent and cadences, in the choice and order of words. “There are few in this land who would willingly spend a night in this place.”

This was true. The builders of the Dances were long forgotten in Roisinan, as were the original purposes of their handiwork—what was left were the dregs of power, strong enough to touch someone far less sensitive than Anghara, and the rumors of old magic, blood magic, practiced upon these ancient stones after nightfall by those who invoked the dark and hungry aspects of the Elder Gods. While many Roisinani would come to see a Dance in the bright light of day, none walked willingly under the shadows of the Stones after sunset—some of those who had tried had been found dead or mad with unspeakable fear.

If she had not been in the grip of something far stronger than herself, it was doubtful if even Anghara, doubly armed with Sight and the ancient royal blood which bound her to her land, would have considered spending the night here alone. By her own admission, the blind woman had not only done so as well, keeping the same vigil as Anghara, but she had also had the presence of mind to “watch over” Roisinan’s lost princess as she wrestled with her visions.

Anghara felt for a brief moment like a vessel filling with light, on the verge of understanding—the Gods who had driven her here last night…was it for this? Then it faded, leaving her empty and frightened and very much aware of every one of her fourteen years—too short a lifetime for all that had befallen her. If she’d had the life she should have had, if the arrow hadn’t taken her father and her father’s son had not slain Rima of the Wells on his road to power, Anghara would have been waking this morning in her own bed in Miranei to light and laughter, a few more years of unclouded and sheltered childhood behind the impregnable battlements of her father’s castle…but Sif walked those battlements now, death in his eyes, and the beautiful fantasy shattered even as her thought lingered lovingly on it. That was all gone, vanished, torn from her. Her childhood was here and now, facing the unknown in a ring of power raised by hands which had been dust and ashes for a thousand years.

This land.
The slender form, the foreign voice.
This land.

Once, a long time ago, a man from the desert country of Kheldrin had come to Miranei, bringing four matched dun’en to the king—worth a king’s ransom, the dark, glossy horses of the desert, with their grace and power and the spirit of the open desert in their eyes. Anghara had been barely five years old—old enough to feel the electric excitement the arrival of the animals and their handler had produced in Miranei’s halls. She had wheedled, cajoled, and finally commanded her nurse from the full height of her rank to take her to the stables.

She would never forget the first sight of them, their gleaming coats and slender legs which looked infinitely fragile, as though made of glass. Beside a desert dun, all other horses were heavy, awkward and clumsy. Dynan’s great stallion, his head poked out of his stall, was snorting furiously as though in derision at these new inhabitants of the stables he ruled. But he was vanquished at the start, nothing but a great lumbering brute next to creatures who looked as though they had been dreamed up in a bard’s vision.

Now, on a hilltop above the River Tanassa, the memory came flooding back to Dynan’s daughter. Not because of the horses, although it lingered on them with a delight undimmed by the years, but because of the man who had been standing at the head of one of the beasts—the man who had brought them all the way from their desert home. He had been small-boned, slender, his head barely reaching Dynan’s shoulder. His skin was a deep bronze and his hair, straight and worn long, sprang from high on his forehead and was the color of beaten copper. There was nothing on his face that was not found on the face of any man—but every feature was achingly different. His chin was too pointed, his mouth thin-lipped, narrow, folded into itself; his nose impossibly narrow and sharp, nostrils mere slits, and his profile was almost a straight line down from his prominent forehead. His eyes were a dull gold, with black pupils huge in what must have been dim mountain light after his desert sun.

This land.

The rest could all mean nothing—there were wasted old women enough in Roisinan who would have looked no different from the beggar woman who stood before Anghara if wrapped into the beggar’s shapeless cloak and muffled into anonymity behind the white mask. But the voice was not of Roisinan, had never been, and neither was the courage to brave a nightfall in the presence of Standing Stones. Anghara suddenly knew beyond any doubt that what lay behind the concealing mask was the bronze skin and cat-like eyes of a woman of the desert country.

“Kheldrin,” she said, out loud.

For a moment the woman—whatever she was, she was almost certainly no beggar—seemed startled by the name, blurted so abruptly; then she bowed her head slightly in acknowledgment. Anghara once again heard a hidden smile in her voice as she spoke.

“Yes. I am of Kheldrin.”

“Here?”

It was a thoroughly incoherent way to ask a dozen questions which milled in Anghara’s head.