The Hidden Icon

by Jillian Kuhlmann

  “What every man wants, girl. Glory, riches, the love of a good woman, or, well,” he finished abruptly, dropping a gnarled hand into his lap. “Charrum did as he pleased, followed his own course. I thought to do the same, but things haven’t happened for me quite as they did for him.”

  My skin peppered with chill at his words, at the name he uttered. How had Charrum come to be in the home of an Ambarian lord claiming ancestry? I looked at the painting again, as though I might find some resemblance between the old man and the myth, as he’d asked. Rhale watched me, eyes narrowed, and I was glad he didn’t have my skills. But when next he spoke, I wasn’t so sure.

  “I’ve seen the way he looks at you. Your life hasn’t followed the course you thought it would, either, has it, icon?”

  Perhaps Rhale had come into the knowledge in the night or was more adept even than Gannet at hiding his true thoughts. He didn’t name her, but he knew. What Gannet’s attentions had to do with the dread goddess I didn’t know, and didn’t want to know. But there were other things I did.

  “I don’t suppose you have anything in here about me,” I said evenly, not wanting to give Rhale the satisfaction of having surprised me.

  “Icons have never interested me as much as other things,” Rhale admitted, his creaky tenor betraying just how unpopular was the opinion he voiced. “But,” and here he rose, sturdier than his slight frame first seemed, and moved slowly towards a shelf in the corner, gesturing to the highest shelf. “I have an account of Shran’s histories you might be interested in.”

  As I crossed to where he stood, nerves balled in my feet at every step, Rhale turned his sharp eyes on me once more. I smiled a little, thinking to set him at his ease, or me, but his expression didn’t change. While he clearly didn’t perceive me as a threat, I was no harmless child, either. He tapped a finger against a tome, but as I reached for it, his fingers moved as effortlessly to grasp my wrist. He was stronger than he seemed, though I had the feeling he would let me go if I struggled. I didn’t, at first, but leveled my gaze on him.

  “Do you think you will find more in there than you can in here?” He spoke, moving the hand he clutched over my heart. I thought carefully about my words before I spoke, keenly aware of the pressure of his fingers against my skin. They felt like twisted paper, cool and frail.

  “I am a stranger to myself,” I said softly. “So yes, I do.”

  Rhale released my arm, and I dropped it to my side. I didn’t reach for the book, for he retrieved it for me, setting it on the table with all of the others.

  “Most fear the icons, but some, like me, do not,” he paused, laying his stronger-than-it-seemed hand against the cover of the book, as though he were suppressing whatever lay within. “But everyone is afraid of you.”

  He trembled, but it was not from the stresses of his age, or even fear, exactly. The dread goddess was terrible but awesome, too, in her power. For the Ambarians, anyway.

  “Then why am I here?” I asked. Gannet had never said, but I had never doubted that there must be some proof for such trouble, such cost. I had been an unexpected boon of their war, but after what Rhale had said last night, I knew that the dread goddess had played a role in its waging well before I’d entered that chamber with Gannet and Morainn.

  Rhale looked surprised, but just as he opened his mouth to speak, our attentions were diverted by footfalls at the door. Gannet stood there, his hair untidy at his collar, his masked brow.

  “It was written.” His first words did not surprise me, predictable as bird song. Gannet’s next, though, was new. “When we are in Jhosch, we will go to the opera. Then you’ll know.”

  The way he said opera made it seem as though we would pay a visit to a sage or witness a great battle. My skepticism warred with irritation that he should interrupt now when I didn’t want him, looking maddeningly well rested. I thought to take the book from the table just to spite him, but I knew I would only have to return it and seem more a pawn before Rhale than I did now. I liked the old man, and hoped this wouldn’t be our last encounter. A nod, however, was all I could give him to indicate as much, for I was sure he did not exactly seek my favor, whatever he imagined me to be. I crossed the library to Gannet’s side, my temper cooled as other fires were stirred by the heat I could feel radiating off of his body. He was dressed already for traveling.

  “Strangers are more welcome some places than others,” Rhale offered, an unusual goodbye but framed as one nevertheless. He was looking at me and not at Gannet, and I smiled.

  “I’ll remember that,” I replied, hoping that we would someday have cause to return, and not just for the book the old man fingered lightly, as though he could read something upon its surface with just a touch.

  Gannet didn’t need to put a hand upon me to steer me out of the library and toward the landing where he would go down to see to our departure, and I up to ready myself for it. I would’ve shaken him off anyway. Without looking at him, I held his attention a moment, demanded it.

  “You could’ve interrupted sooner,” I speculated, for I hadn’t guarded myself there. In fact, I was surprised he wasn’t more critical of my lack of control. “Why didn’t you?”

  I could feel his eyes upon me, that he wanted me to meet them, but I looked away, focused upon a blank space over his shoulder. I had seen my mother often give this look to those who had displeased her, as though she listened but only out of obligation. It didn’t matter that I had asked the question. I was owed something, and Gannet had kept it from me.

  “You may think I know everything,” Gannet answered without a hint of pride, only bald assumption. His attention was unrelenting, his eyes hot as palms on my cheeks, my eyelids, my brow. “But sometimes I have to wait for you to show me what it is you want.”

  At this I laughed, a cold cough of a thing.

  “How could I want anything else, Gannet, but to know what it is I really am, and what I’m meant to do?” I couldn’t maintain my charade of not wanting to look at him, meeting his eyes. The landing was not well lit, and I could see almost nothing in his face but smoldering shadow. “Don’t you?”

  “You are Theba. You know what she is. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Of course it isn’t!” I exploded, a whisper that hissed like pressure from a pipe. I fancied I could feel steam heating my toes, my limbs bundled against the cold, my wet-hot heart. “I’ve done things and seen things that I don’t understand. I don’t have your faith.”

  There had been other moments like this one in the time we had spent together, moments where Gannet would share some part of his knowledge, open his mind to mine, and perhaps this was what I sought: an intimacy in what we were, if not with each other. But he had turned away from me not twelve hours ago, and he did so again now.

  “You only have two days to acquire it.”

  Down he went, then, to the horses, to Antares, to the guard that remained. I wished then that I had a mask to disguise what I felt, but would settle in for my hood and the fall of my hair.

  Chapter 18

  Morainn had been wrong about the rain. We were forced to stop early that evening when what rain had come and gone again throughout the day in a drizzle that delighted me, turned to a downpour the likes of which I would never have been able to imagine. It was as though the sea we’d been meant to travel over had come to us, but in reverse: the valley was filling up, and we were at the bottom of a soon-to-be ocean instead of riding on its waves.

  The Ambarians were prepared with supplies from Rhale’s village. We took shelter under trees, meager enough cover until Antares and the guards that remained with us were able to construct a few hasty shelters from canvas and spikes driven into the ground. The shelters were hardly bigger than trunks but they were dry, and though arranged close together, conversation was hardly possible without shouting. I was irritated that when it became clear the shelters could hold no more than two comfortably, I had to wait out the storm with Gannet. I was still sore with him over interrupting me that morning
with Rhale, but as we grew closer to Jhosch, remaining angry with him seemed like a waste of precious time. When we had our rations and the hour was all but impossible to determine through the thick sheets of rain, I thought it better to converse peaceably than to argue.

  “You mentioned the opera. What is it? Why haven’t you said anything about it before?”

  There wasn’t room enough in the shelter for much distance between us, so our meal was spread before our folded knees, our hands passing near to each other when we reached for water or bread.

  “You have to see it to understand,” he began, though gladly gave my temper no reason to rise again when he continued. “We don’t tell stories the way you do. We learn about who we are as a people at the opera. Yours will be told soon after we arrive, I think.”

  I knew that the story he spoke of was not mine but Theba’s, and I bit back the retort that fought to be voiced. Still, he caught my eyes and knew what I felt despite the restraint I showed.

  “You believe it but you do not accept it, Han’dra Eiren,” he said softly. “How is that?”

  “Rhale knew who I was. There are men here, I suspect, who know it, too. They know I am a killer, and still they follow me. How is that?” My voice was low, and my gesture to the camp of soldiers was a weak one, for my clothes were only now beginning to dry, and still I shivered. As I surveyed them, I was surprised to see Antares and Imke in a nearby shelter, he removing the blanket from his pack and laying it about the sturdy maid’s shoulders. She had given her own to Morainn, no doubt. What I felt was not jealousy, or if it was, it came from that part of me I wouldn’t claim, for I wasn’t sure what I wanted. Even if I knew, Theba would only pervert it.

  Gannet followed my gaze but when he turned back again I was looking off, my mind carefully walled against him. What he said next could only have been a guess, or the product of casual observation.

  “If you’re cold, Han’dra Eiren, you may have my cloak.”

  “I will be warm enough in a moment.” My words were all heat and regret. I flushed despite the chill, the sensation a strange one, hot and cold.

  Gannet seemed to accept this, and not looking at him meant I had to look out on the camp, imagining the conversations, the little intimacies that were none of them burdened as ours was. There were few safe avenues of conversation when I could not be sure of what I felt or why, what it meant for me to feel anything.

  “You promised you would tell me of Karatan,” I said, remembering the heated words we had exchanged after sharing Charrum’s tale and thinking again of the painting in Rhale’s library. The lines of what I knew to be real, and what I believed to be fiction, were blurred daily. It was no wonder I didn’t know my own heart. “Will you tell me now?”

  Gannet’s surprise flashed but a moment in my sense of him, and he drained his cup of tea before responding, as though he needed the moment to compose himself.

  “I don’t think it’s a story you will like. It’s not really a story at all,” he dodged, and I couldn’t help but smile, casting a sidelong glance at him and inadvertently catching his eye.

  “If you don’t want to tell it, you don’t have to.”

  There was some fiber of the usual man in Gannet, however slim, and he rose to my obvious challenge.

  “Karatan was an icon, the icon of Adah,” he said, and he remembered just as I did Herat’s tale, and her fate at the hands of that god’s particular brand of cruelty. “He lived many generations ago among my people, during a time when we turned upon each other for simple offenses, and murdered for greater ones.”

  Though he said this with as little emotion as he might convey a list of tasks or supplies, I could tell that the depths in their history, their real history, ran deep in him, too. Ambar had been forged in violence just as Aleyn had been in need and peace. Perhaps this is why of all the icons to have so integral in their culture, they had chosen Theba. Perhaps she had chosen them.

  “The icons have power of a kind now, but their power then was even greater. There were no established houses, no lords, only the law of one man, one woman, against another. Icons were feared, revered, for their ability to bend and sometimes break the laws of nature. Karatan didn’t abuse his influence. He knew that for the people of Ambar to survive they must learn to honor and preserve each other. His gifts, and the gifts of the other icons, some of whom were allies and others enemies, must be for some purpose. He wanted, he needed, to know what that was.”

  Gannet didn’t allow anything like fervor to color his tone, but I felt the same want and need in him.

  “He traveled far and dug deep into the living memory of his people. As the icon of Adah his was a balanced mind, and his meditations and questions lead him to the tomb of Shran, abandoned but for a few generations in his time, and now lost. He heard the whispers of the First People there, of whom Shran was the last.”

  “Who were the First People?” I interrupted, this part of Shran’s history a surprise to me. I had not thought there was anything of that family left to surprise me.

  “You told the story of his sons,” Gannet said carefully, avoiding speaking of the details of the brothers and their various betrayals, which surprised me, too. I had yet to see him waive an opportunity to mention Theba. “Salarahan was not the only one to be punished. Adah himself had judged the brothers, and through them all mortals. Shran and his sons, his wife Jemae and others were more akin to the gods than even you and I are, though they were not the equals of gods. Adah stripped from the First People their long lives, their physical prowess, the richness of their perceptions. His punishment we have been spared, as icons, for your family and mine pay it.”

  Gannet could teach me to see in the dark, to picture my mind a landscape and move in it as I would this terrain, but that he knew something like this, something from a story that I didn’t was the most surprising thing of all. And yet I believed him, my attention given over completely now. It was my turn to watch him while he found his words in the rain.

  “In Shran’s tomb Adah’s icon heard the whispers of the god, and Karatan knew that he, too, must level some charge against his kind if they could not overcome their barbarism. Like the First People, they would be driven to death.

  “He brought together those icons he felt could be trusted and together they sought the employ of one of the more powerful among the warring tribes, but also the easiest to manipulate. Through him they subdued the other icons, and the mortals who did not follow him were made to do so or die. It was through this lord that our line of kings was born, and myself, and Morainn.”

  “Surely this is not the story your people tell? It’s far from glorious.” I hadn’t meant to interrupt again, but Gannet had been right. I didn’t like this story.

  “Real histories rarely are.”

  “But your first king a weak and power-hungry man? You cannot make peace from blood.”

  Gannet didn’t respond for a moment, as though weighing what to say next. When he spoke I understood his hesitation.

  “Isn’t that what we’ve done in Aleyn?”

  He implicated me in his statement, my role in the reconciliation that had come to our people. I remained unconvinced and angry besides.

  “Is that it, then? You were right; it’s not a very good story.”

  “It’s not over,” Gannet said coldly, though there was a blade’s edge of sympathy in his voice that I chose to ignore. “When what needed to be done was done, Karatan offered his people something greater: a spiritual path. The icons, burdened with such profound gifts, were raised to serve and to advise, and the men and women of Ambar united to preserve what was in the past and plan for a shared future. It is very rare now that an Ambarian will turn against another Ambarian, and there is comfort in knowing the meanings of our lives.”

  I could only perceive such comforts meagerly, especially belonging to a people who had nearly the whole of my life suffered the Ambarians to pursue and subdue them. Sighing, I pulled my legs close to my chest, folds of fabric ga
thering around my body and still insufficient to combat the cold. During Gannet’s telling the rain had abated and stopped utterly, the clouds pulling apart like torn cloth to expose a bright moon. Though I would rather have resisted the urge to do so, I cast a look sidelong at Gannet, and met the eyes that had been fixed in study upon me. I didn’t flinch or turn away from his gaze, the moon flooding his face with unusual clarity of expression, even with the mask. I knew that he wanted to speak, to open his mouth or his mind to me, but what he wanted to say he didn’t share. Without the rain I felt exposed to the others in the camp, and though I hadn’t believed then that I would ever want to return to such a place, I longed for the strange intimacy the Rogue’s Ear had given us. I let him know this, let him live for a moment in the part of my mind that was not consumed with confusion and regret, but looked to a future no history of his could predict.

  And then I wondered over a part of the tale Gannet had merely glossed over.

  “Karatan visited the tomb of Shran. Why? He was our king.”

  His eyes were level with mine, his words soft.

  “Have you never wondered how we share the same gods, the same stories? Shran was our king, too. Re’Kether was the seat of a kingdom we shared, many tens of generations ago.”

  Though my first thought was to resist him, as I did always, I wondered how it hadn’t occurred to me before. The conspicuous absence of such detail from my stories also seemed deliberate, perhaps my mother’s doing. With such tales as one of our few comforts during wartime, why shouldn’t she omit a shared origin?

  But how far we had come, since Shran’s time. How different we were now.

  When I said nothing Gannet rose, and I thought he meant to leave. He did, but not before slipping his cloak from his shoulders. “You are still cold, Han’dra Eiren.”

  The heat of the heavy wool was for a moment increased by the pressure of his hands as he laid the cloak over my shoulders. It was his heat, the warmth his body had imparted, and I felt it sink into me as surely and naturally as the soil had drawn the rain. I didn’t thank him, and I closed my mind before he could know the depth of my pleasure, my desire for him as strong as my distrust.