The Hidden Queen (8 page)

“I know,” said Brynna, her voice ringing with equal measures of obstinate need and dull resignation.

Chella reached out to stroke her hair. “You’ll get soaked,” she said gently. “If you’d like to be alone, that’s all right. Only come up to your room. Nobody will disturb you there until you call, I promise you.”

It was too much effort to argue. Chella took the now silent child upstairs and left her alone in her room. But it wasn’t solitude Brynna craved so much as air; caged, the four walls began to bear in on her. It was open sky Brynna wanted; the manor was too small to contain her pain. In the end she succumbed to this urge, stronger than herself, stronger than the years of obedience instilled deep within her. Leaving her room unobserved, she made her way down the back stairs and let herself out through the scullery door, taking the path through the kitchen courtyard and stable yard and making for the woods. It was a measure of her state of mind that she had not even taken a cloak.

Something took her back to the willows, the place where she had planted her little Standing Stone only days before. The stone was where she had left it and it looked as though nobody had disturbed this place since Brynna had last been here. But the grotto was wet, dripping, uncomfortable; the willows’ leaves still only a promise on the graceful branches, far from sufficient to hold off the rain.

Brynna was unused to this soaking Cascin rain—back at Miranei, weather came in a louder, rougher, but shorter guise. The mountain thunderstorms there could be vicious, the winds sometimes strong enough to make burly soldiers stagger and fall on the open battlements, the rain with the feel and strength of wet whipcord—but the storms came, exploded, and vanished all in the space of a few hours. Here in Cascin it had been raining steadily, deliberately, for days.

Brynna had thought her tears cried out. She could recall in vivid detail the sense of emptiness that held her back in the schoolroom in Chella’s arms. But whether it was the open sky releasing a grief too huge to be contained between four walls or whether, as March often used to say, the air was only now getting to the wound and waking the real pain, she found there was a well inside her, still untapped. Tears mixed with rain on her face. She knelt beside her Standing Stone, dimly aware that she was exceedingly wet and muddy, and part of her cringed inwardly at the reckoning to come. But another part knew she needed this release, without it the air would never have reached the wound at all—it would merely have been wrapped and bandaged, and it would have festered beneath the loving care. All who loved her wanted her to forget, but before she did, she knew she needed to remember.

Out here Rima was much closer; the color of the sky was the color of her mother’s eyes. Leaves whispered in the crisp breeze blowing from the mountains in the exact timbre of her voice when she whispered her daughter goodnight. The touch of rain on her cheeks was the touch of Rima’s gentle fingers. The memories woke and raged. Weak in their back-wash, she bent over the rain-sluiced little stone she had planted and wept.

And so it was that Kieran found her.

Perhaps it was just the proprietary way Ansen had laid claim to him after the day’s lesson, but for some reason Kieran found Ansen’s company more stifling by the minute after they left the schoolroom. Within a quarter of an hour things had flared up into a swift, hot quarrel; Kieran was under no restrictions, and stormed out into the stable yard via the scullery door, his cloak carelessly thrown over his shoulders, the hood flapping uselessly between his shoulder blades. A sudden gust of wind flung the fine rain into his face and he lifted his head, closing his eyes for a moment in something like pleasure. He had been born in Shaymir, on the edge of a desert, and even after three years at Cascin he relished the feel of water on his skin as something close to miraculous; rain was all too rare in his small village.

He had gone first to the stables, but the silent companionship of his horse proved as inadequate, for its own reasons, as that of Ansen. He stayed for a few minutes in the dry refuge of the stable, and then, driven by a strange compulsion to seek the solitude of the woods, he emerged again, skirting the waterlogged lawn and plunging into the trees at random.

Whatever effect Brynna’s indisposition may have played in this sudden restlessness was debatable; Kieran was certainly not thinking of her when he stepped into the wood. She was the last person he expected to see as he rounded a rain-slick tree and was faced with the spectacle of the crying girl in the middle of the willow grotto he had always thought of as his own.

After Brynna’s last visit, he had found the Standing Stone and wondered at it, but left it untouched. Now it seemed obvious to him that only one person could have placed it there, the girl now bent over with trailing strands of loose, wet hair hiding her face and draping her shaking shoulders. Whatever he had expected to find in the woods on this odd, driven expedition, this explosion of passionate grief left Kieran surprisingly shaken. He stopped, nonplussed, searching for something useful to say, but there seemed to be little that would allay the wretched suffering which lay bared before him. In the end he said nothing, simply stepping up and dropping his own damp cloak around her shoulders.

Brynna started, her head snapping around toward him, and he found himself held by the devastation in her face—held, and then flung back into the realm of memories.

If it weren’t for the rain and the dripping trees, he could have been back in Shaymir, in his father’s house in Coba, when word had come of the accident in the copper mines. If Kieran had been able to call on the powers of logic, he would have realized one of the reasons he had not simply turned and walked away was the grief he recognized in the set of her shoulders, in this instinctive fleeing of people and seeking of solitude. He understood these things, intimately. He had seen Keda, his older sister, run from the house when news was brought of their father’s death. He’d run himself, up into the copper-bearing hills, to a place where the warm wind blew in from the desert through a fold in the land, bringing the sweet scent of distant desert sage, a place where he could be alone. That had been four years ago; he’d thought he had buried the past. The freshness of the memory, the pain of it, stopped his breath. But logic was far from his mind, here in Cascin’s woods. Without a word being spoken, pure instinct told him Brynna’s loss had to have been catastrophic. He reached out almost without thinking, gathering her closer, rocking her gently against him. He still said nothing, but the gesture said much.
You are not alone.

It was affection freely offered and freely accepted, a bond forged between two lost and exiled creatures far from home. At first sight they were utterly mismatched—a thirteen-year-old boy was hardly fit company for a girl barely nine, their interests and inclinations following different paths. For all that, they accepted one another as natural allies. Brynna, whose initial fears of loneliness at Cascin could have very easily been borne out, would never again be alone. Kieran would still be best friends with Ansen, because that was the way of things; he could hardly take Brynna to archery practice or fencing lessons. Nonetheless, Ansen would never again lay claim to more than this superficial layer. It would be Brynna and not Ansen with whom Kieran would share the secrets of his soul.

But Brynna would not share hers, not all of them, and not yet. She took him then as closer than a brother, yet it was a deeper instinct still that stopped her from telling him everything. To him she was still Brynna Kelen, and would have to remain so until everything changed, until she could speak her name freely. Not even Kieran would know the real story, Brynna’s true loss, not yet. Now more than ever, with Rima gone, the secret of Anghara Kir Hama had to remain hidden if her sacrifice was to have any meaning.

Brynna was far from ready to go back and face the adults, but Kieran had a deeply practical streak which resurfaced almost immediately after the initial shock of this encounter. He reached over and flipped the hood of the cloak up over her hair, a gesture as futile as it was affectionate, since both the cloak and the girl were already as wet as it was possible for them to be. Brynna had enough presence of mind to stifle a waterlogged giggle and Kieran smiled in the sudden way he was given to. “It’s getting worse,” he said, glancing up at the sky. “A roof is beginning to sound like a good idea.”

Brynna, whose first paroxysm of grieving had spent itself, felt the discomfort of her wet hair and gown. Kieran’s words sounded eminently sensible. She glanced down at the muddy hem of her dress. She tried to push away a wet strand of hair stuck across her cheek, opened her mouth to speak and instead surprised herself with an explosive sneeze.

That seemed to decide Kieran. “You’ll catch your death,” he said firmly, getting up and drawing her to her feet. “Come on.”

At the edge of the trees Brynna checked suddenly, looking out across the lawn. Kieran narrowed his eyes against the rain. A posse of anxious adults led by March and Feor was beginning to fan out from the house, heading for the trees. Kieran glanced down.

“Do you want to…” he began, jolted out of his own idea of taking Brynna back to the house by seeing the forces the household had mustered to look for her. Now, in the manner of many a boy cornered by adults bearing retribution for some childhood transgression, he was suddenly intent on escape.

But Brynna, watching March’s face, felt a kind of serenity flood back into her spirit and smiled. “It’s all right,” she said. “They’re friends.”

Kieran looked far from convinced, but when she stepped out from the concealment of the trees, he followed.

Seeing the bedraggled child who had once been his princess, March took refuge from his concern in a fit of righteous indignation. “Young lady, you have most of the household hunting for you! What were you thinking of? Look at you! You’re absolutely drenched!” He reached down and swept the child up into his arms, cloak and all, turned on his heel and all but ran back toward the house.

“Wait!” cried Kieran, whom March had ignored almost completely, taking a few steps after them and raising a helpless hand to halt March’s implacable charge.

The hood fell away as Brynna turned her head back to where Kieran had been left standing in the rain. “It’s all right,” she called, echoing her own words of a moment before, speaking over March’s shoulder; there was something very tender in her face as she looked back on Kieran. That was new. Feor, too, had been left behind, and did not fail to note the subtle change in this relationship.

“Feor, don’t let them shut her in…they don’t understand…”

Feor looked at one of the most eloquent pupils of his career grown suddenly and oddly incoherent, with eyes that glittered. “They will do her no harm,” he said with a deceptive placidity which in reality had very little to do with his true character. “She is too important to many people, that one.”

Kieran did not blink. She did not tell him, thought Feor. He has no inkling of the truth. “That was your cloak she was wearing,” he remarked while shepherding Kieran in the direction of the house, his comment forking into two subtle and quite separate meanings—bland comment on Brynna’s apparel, query as to the reason behind it without seeming to ask.

“She went out without her own,” said Kieran, not taking the bait, shaking the water from his hair as they came inside.

“I see,” said Feor. “It is well. She will need a friend.”

The innocuous words rang with the iron truth of a prophecy; Kieran swung around to look at Feor, but already he was alone, Nual’s priest knowing how to make a dramatic exit. Kieran already knew any direct questions would be fielded with finesse, and he had as much chance of coaxing anything out of Feor by means of wheedling or blandishments as piercing a suit of armor with one of Lady Chella’s sewing needles. The emphasis Feor had laid on the concept of friendship, however, implied that one day much more might be required of Kieran than just a foster brother’s cloak.

“So be it, then,” Kieran muttered to himself, casting a last glance up at the staircase where March had spirited Brynna. The boy had been sensitive enough to hear the cadence of prophecy in Feor’s voice; he seemed utterly unaware of his own, the few short words uttered in Cascin’s hall having the force of a vow. They hung in the air as he turned away and clung to his shoulders, content to let him carry them into the future.

D
uerin Rashin, King of Tath and Pretender to the Throne Under the Mountain, had been wounded and defeated in the battle which saw the death of Red Dynan, but he was far from ready to give up his dreams. For him, the kingdom of Tath, once Roisinan’s southernmost province, had always been a bone flung to his ancestor while the choice meat, Roisinan itself, had been snatched away. Duerin was clear-headed enough to realize the time to strike at Roisinan was now, while the land was still recovering from the sudden turmoil that had taken her Royal Family and given the crown to Dynan’s illegitimate son; now, before Sif consolidated his gains. Barely had Sif been crowned in Miranei when the Tath armies, led by Duerin’s son Favrin, began once again to nibble at Roisinan’s southern borders. Sif was a fledgling king; his realm needed governing, needed all his attention. He had none to spare for the war being foisted upon him. Fodrun had been a good general but he was now Chancellor of Roisinan and his duties lay elsewhere. So it was an army with a host of newly dubbed generals that rode out to meet the forces of Tath.

It was not that they were incompetent, or foolish. But by the time the main Roisinan force reached the border, Favrin’s men had already crossed the Ronval as well as the Tolla, and overwhelmed the garrison left as the Roisinan rearguard at Tollas Han, commandeered from its landlord as army barracks. The Tath forces had also anchored themselves comfortably in the hills above the han, and from this high ground they rode in lightning raids against the larger, slower army of Roisinan, still shaking down under its new command. Favrin’s men gnawed irritatingly at its flanks, there and gone before anyone could turn to meet them. The Pellen was too shallow to hold them, and chasing after small guerilla bands into the hills was more often than not suicidal as the pursuers were drawn into artful traps. The southern plains of Roisinan smoldered with a sullen, desultory war; it dragged on for weeks, for months, with no real end in sight.

It was hardly surprising that Roisinan suddenly chose to recall the slights, insults and hurts Tath had been guilty of for generations. The Tath capital, Algira, had been one of Roisinan’s jewels before the division of the two kingdoms; it had been not been surrendered easily. Now there were impassioned mutters for Roisinan to take her city back. But that would embroil Sif in a fully fledged war on enemy territory. He was not unaware of the dangers such a course of action would pose for him; his undoubted personal magnetism faded with distance, and going into Tath would mean leaving Miranei. Rather than rush into something he could later have cause to regret, he waited, biding his time, delaying any major decisions until he could be more certain of success.

At Cascin, Feor had abandoned ancient history and now studied the current conflict with his pupils. Kieran was voluble on the subject, but calm; Brynna mostly just listened, holding her peace, aware that whatever she said would be ripped to pieces by Ansen purely for the pleasure of contradicting her. Ansen himself was fired up, as fiery a boy-general as any who ever watched other men’s wars from behind the safety of high walls.

“Why don’t they flank them?” Ansen would say, fretful at what he saw as delay, poring over Feor’s map. His finger stabbed the hills above Tollas Han. “Here! There’s a saddle! They could come up and attack them suddenly from behind, and then they’d soon know from which quarter the wind was blowing!”

“It wouldn’t work, Ansen,” said Kieran patiently.

“I was about to say the same,” said Feor, turning to Kieran. “But let us hear why you think so.”

“It’s too far, for a start; travelling from that saddle to the spit where Tollas Han lies would mean making a long trek through terrain which is much more suited to their kind of loose fighters than to an army. It would be one long ambush, as soon as Favrin Rashin realized what they were doing.”

“Quite correct,” said Feor. “It would be best for us if Favrin’s men could be drawn out from the mountains. They are a natural fortress.”

“Sif Kir Hama ought to go himself,” said Ansen in a tone close to worship. Sif’s military prowess was widely spoken of, especially in the short time since he had become king. His victory at the Ronval not so long ago, turning the battle that had slain his father into a rout for the Tath forces, was already the stuff of legend. A whole new generation saw him as a younger, more powerful incarnation of the legend that had been Red Dynan. And for Ansen the pull of that legend was stronger than for most. Red Dynan had been an uncle by marriage; Sif was, if only technically, a cousin.

Brynna could not help tossing her head at Ansen’s words, and Ansen, adept as ever at noticing things not meant for his eyes, glanced up.

“Oh, don’t you think so?” he asked, rather nastily. “Do you have someone else in mind?”

The reply came, somewhat unexpectedly, from another quarter.

“Sif Kir Hama is only a man,” said Kieran.

“He is his father’s son,” Ansen said, his head snapping round to face his foster brother.

“Duerin Rashin’s army destroyed Sif’s father,” Kieran said quietly. He had jumped in to deflect the barb from Brynna, and was surprised to see her flinch at his words. Ansen, for whom the remark had been intended, had kept still, staring sullenly at the map. Feor adroitly steered the conversation into safer waters, but it was of short duration. Ansen was something of a bulldog; once he had an idea in his head he hung on to it for dear life, and he was utterly involved in this war, his mind jumping with possibilities.

“Don’t they take pages, Feor? Squires?” Ansen asked pas sionately at the conclusion of the lesson, as Feor sat rolling up his map into a tidy scroll. “I’m good enough, I’m good enough to fight with them right now. You know that, Kieran. You remember what Master Yall said to me only yesterday?”

“Pages don’t fight, Ansen, and squires do no more than carry their masters’ weapons,” said Feor with an almost plodding calmness, so unlike him that both Brynna and Kieran looked up in what was almost consternation. “You can’t fight unless you’re a soldier, or a knight. And you cannot be either.”

“Why not?” Ansen lashed out.

“You have to be at least seventeen to be a common soldier, and eighteen for a knight, after at least a year of gruelling preparation and elaborate ceremony. As you well know. And you, Ansen, can lay claim to only thirteen summers come your next birthday.” Feor still spoke in the same serene tone of voice, swatting gently at the ends of his scroll to get them even, peering shortsightedly at his handiwork. He fussed with the cord and the tying of a precise knot until he sensed Ansen was beginning to simmer down. Then he looked up, dismissing his class. “Tomorrow,” Feor said placidly, “we will backtrack a little. We will look at last winter’s Tath campaign; see if we can discern any lessons to be learned for the conflict at hand.”

That was a cue to leave, and the three took it.

“I could go,” muttered Ansen, subdued but still mutinous. “Sif would have me, if Mother asked. He was son to her sister’s husband. I could go.”

“You have to be thirteen to be even a page,” said Kieran, spouting the catechism of rank both of them knew so well.

“I will be, in only a few weeks!” said Ansen obstinately.

“You also have to have the permission of your father,” said Kieran, “and I doubt that yours would give it. You’re Cascin’s heir.”

“You could go,” said Ansen slyly. “You’re fourteen, and your father is dead. You’re your own man.”

“Sif is nothing to me,” Kieran reminded him, “no cousin, no friend. And I would rather wait my chance at knighthood, if ever I get one, than spend my life uselessly as no more than some general’s errand boy on the field of battle.”

“The trouble with you,” snapped Ansen, stung into the retort by the implied rebuke, “is that you’ve absolutely no sense of adventure.”

Kieran smiled cryptically, and turned away.

Ansen did ask his father for permission to join a knight’s entourage as a page when he turned thirteen, although he did not mention Sif’s name, his nerve having failed him at the last instant. In any event, Sif was still not in the field himself when Ansen did the asking. But by the time summer came and brought with it the long-awaited birthday, that had changed; Sif had taken the field to run a swift and determined summer campaign. Ansen, however, was not part of his army. Lyme’s reply had been short and to the point, and Ansen was forced to watch the war unfold from the news which filtered through to Feor’s classroom, and smolder at his own impotence.

Other things had changed by this time. Duerin was more than a king who commanded an army; while he could not tease out all the details, he saw a dim plot outlined in Sif’s sudden accession to power. It was not only with the sharp-edged weapons of war that he sought to undermine Sif’s precarious hold on his throne. It was impossible to prove anything, but Sif would have had to be blind and stupid not to see the subtle touch of Duerin’s hand in the rumors sweeping Miranei in his absence.

Word reached him while he sat in his tent on the banks of the Ronval and tried to think up a plan to dislodge Favrin Rashin from the strategic high ground he’d been lax enough to let him gain in the first place. Dispatch in hand, Sif’s thoughts had been suddenly and forcefully diverted into channels where they had not sojourned for some time, full as his mind had been with the burden of governing Roisinan. Reading Fodrun’s carefully worded letter, the prudent euphemisms with which the Chancellor worked round a name which was studiously never mentioned leapt out at Sif; he crumpled the dispatch in his hand, and began pacing the tent angrily. His servitors, all too familiar with this mood, tried to keep out of his sight.

“Anghara!” Sif spat, indifferent to who might overhear, with undisguised hostility. “Will she haunt me forever?” He stopped pacing and scowled, lifting the parchment of the dispatch closer and peering at it again.

There was always that quandary. Sif was no fool. Given a little bit more time to plan and act, he knew he could overcome Favrin Rashin; but Fodrun’s letter made him wonder whether he would still have a throne in Miranei to return to when the fighting was done.

In the end, of course, there was no real choice. The campaign would have to be left to his generals, to carry on as best they might. Sif crumpled the letter in his hand and flung aside the flap of his tent with a quick, furious gesture.

“Ready the horses!” he called out into the night. “We ride for Miranei in the morning. But first, bring me a couple of good archers. There is a plan I want to try at dawn. A parting gift, for Favrin to remember me by.”

The plan was somewhat foolhardy, and perhaps not what Sif would have chosen to do, under normal circumstances. But he was maddened by the impasse and the dispatches, and decided to blood Favrin with his own hit-and-run tactics. There were guards posted at the han, but it was built as a hostelry, not a fort, and visibility was limited.

Favrin had done what he could, cutting down one or two large trees which the Roisinan men, who recalled their beauty, mourned and swore to avenge. Even so, Favrin’s lookouts were encumbered by the set of their posts, and were not expecting this kind of attack from the usually slow and methodical Roisinan forces. So far, Sif’s army had persisted in doing things by the very rules their attackers flouted with such impunity. As a result, in the dim hour just before dawn, the Tath sentries waited eagerly for their relief and never suspected an engagement from across the river.

The han was sturdy, roofed with tiles in the manner of the south, not thatch. This may well have been why nobody had tried something similar before—but the building itself was wood, and the summer had been dry. By the time Favrin’s men noticed the fire arrows embedded in the han walls, the fire was already eating at the timber frame. Sif, sitting astride his horse behind the phalanx of mounted soldiers waiting on the riverbank, smiled grimly at the chaos he had wrought. In the early morning stillness sound carried, and voices drifted across the broad, placid, shallow Pellen.

“The horses! Look to the horses!”

“Stand still, fool, your back is on fire!”

“Watch the shore!”

“The beam! Watch the beam!”

And, finally, one with more authority, “Retreat! Into the hills!”

Sif leaned down and whispered into the ear of a squire who stood holding his horse’s reins. “Now. Bid them follow. Take back the river.”

The squire trotted off to pass the quiet words to a young knight Sif had placed in command. No order was called out aloud. Sif’s forces moved in eerie silence, urging their mounts into the river, blades drawn. They looked, for the moment, implacable and invincible, with the first rays of the rising sun stealing over the tops of the hills to touch their armor with metallic fire. Soon the sound of voices from the han was replaced by incoherent cries—some of agony, some of exultation. Sif chose this moment to turn and ride away.

Back in Miranei, events blew no less hot than the flames he had chosen to fan at the River Pellen. Granted, the rumors subsided when he returned to court and publicly laid remembrance wreaths at the graves of his father and the rest of the royal family. It was a foolhardy man who would dare to repeat rumors infringing Sif’s rights or his dignity to his face. Nevertheless, the seeds had been sown. There were many who genuinely mourned Anghara Kir Hama. There were others who watched Sif closely, and waited. He would eventually make a mistake. It was only a matter of being on hand to witness and proclaim it.