The Hidden Icon

by Jillian Kuhlmann

  I took a step forward, bolstered, but started when I didn’t approach myself any nearer in the mirror. My reflection stood perfectly still and after a moment moved entirely out of the mirror’s frame. A chill swept through me like the one that I had felt in Re’Kether. I looked quickly to the right and the left, sure that I couldn’t be alone for all I appeared to be. I continued forward carefully, sure that at any moment I would see myself again, dark eyes and brow trembling within the mirror’s confines. As I drew closer to the mirror, however, my surety faltered and escaped altogether, until I was flush with the mirror. I saw nothing there but the empty corridor, empty of me. A shadow darted across where my face would have been, and I looked about wildly. The shadow would have been on my face just like a mask, if my face had been where it was supposed to be.

  The thought of Gannet, however fleeting or phantom his presence, was a little flame in my breast that threatened to devour my heart, lungs, and head entirely, and with hands as daring as those that had gone to him, my fingers grazed the mirror’s edge. They dipped like water, like liquid and light, into the rippling surface of the mirror absent an occupant. For a moment I panicked at the uncanny nature of what I did. Though I had endured many strange things, there’d been nothing as physically and immediately impossible as the mirror’s surface yielding to me as it did now. Where my fingers touched the reflection rippled, and when I withdrew them in alarm, the image of the corridor behind me didn’t seem quite to settle. This was my path, however, and I had to take it. I didn’t wait for someone to stop me. I braced my hands against the mirror’s frame and plunged within.

  It was not the soft pad of the carpet I felt against my palms when they hit against whatever ground lay beyond the mirror, but the cold damp of interior stone. I glanced up as soon as I regained my bearings, struggling first to my knees and then to my feet. I was in a cavern illuminated by a ghostly light filtered from above, a distant cousin of the kind I had known in the Rogue’s Ear. There was no mirror behind me, nothing whatever to suggest that I had passed through anything but solid, unyielding stone. I pressed my hands against it as though to convince myself, but it was hard and real. Just like a story: the way in is never the way out.

  A way out, however, wasn’t of immediate importance. If Paivi hadn’t compelled me here, something else had. I wasn’t meant to leave, and didn’t want to. Not yet, anyway.

  I didn’t know if it was the gown or some other force that affected me, but I wasn’t cold, nor did my breath appear before my lips as I walked forward into the ample cavern. The shapes of the stone seemed common enough, but this was no natural place. Though lit, there were no visible openings for the light to pass through. The walls of the cavern were colored first like sand, then blood, before deepening to a bruise no stone could wear. As though wary that I would feel flesh instead, my touch was gentle, a guiding glance of fingertips across the rock.

  There was a pool of water at the center of the cavern where it was deepest, though the slope wasn’t treacherous. I knelt at the water’s edge. Unlike the mirror, which had seemed solid, the little pool was as liquid as it appeared to be. No other feature in the cavern stood out to me but this, and as far as I could see, there was neither exit nor entrance to be had in this place. So I settled down, if not to wait, then to think. Because my thoughts turned often to him now, it was Gannet that came first and most eagerly to mind.

  Could Morainn have read what I wasn’t sure was love, in him or in me? I’d never been in love, though I’d witnessed it many times in my sisters, and even in the boyish attentions my brother had once shown to a family scribe. There was little between Gannet and I that mirrored their enthusiasm, none of the careless tenderness, none of the little smiles and colorings that convinced me that my eldest sister had taken ill. As I dug my heels into the stone, my mouth filled with a taste as bitter as juice sucked from an unripe fruit. Wasn’t I just like? Theba wouldn’t abide flirtation, and Gannet was no ordinary, unburdened youth. It didn’t matter what Morainn perceived or even what was there to be seen. Nothing like love could exist between us, and certainly not in me.

  The pool opened up in waves, like a stone had disturbed the surface, though there were none for my feet to disturb. I looked quickly up and around. Though the light had faded a little, creating shadows where before there had been none, nothing in the cavern seemed to have changed. I could have been nervous, I supposed, to be trapped here with no means of coming and going, but I remembered the way I had shifted the stones in the tunnel in the Rogue’s Ear, and I wasn’t afraid. Though he’d been with me then, had made me act when inaction might have crippled us both, and he wasn’t here now. I laced my arms together over my chest, feeling sore and sorry.

  “It was your own heart you never knew.”

  The voice I recognized instantly, the sound as much a shock as looking up and seeing her there across the pool, slight and elegant as she had been in the last moment I had seen her.

  “Mother,” I started, but she raised her hand and I could see in the fractured light that it was not as whole as mine. Should I rush to embrace her, I would gather nothing but air to me. I panicked, thinking perhaps the Ambarians had broken their word to me. “Are you a spirit?”

  My mother, whatever she was, shook her head in the dismissive way she had used when one of her children came to her with some mild complaint. It was a gesture familiar enough to seize my throat, keep me from speaking again too soon.

  “I am neither spirit nor fiction, only a little of each. But I am your mother. I am a great distance from here, well and whole. Don’t worry.”

  It was a moment before I could respond, reconciling the vision before me with the memories I had of the woman who remained safely ensconced in Aleyn. If this shade was to be believed.

  “How did you come to be here?”

  Brows arched, my mother could have been chastising me for arriving late for a meal. “You summoned me, Eiren.”

  My eyes must have widened in disbelief or something more disturbed, for she continued in a more sympathetic tone, laying her hands flat against bare knees beneath the sheath that wrapped her sun-brown frame.

  “Where are we? Is this Ambar?”

  The request was so human that I answered without hesitation, grateful for this shred of normalcy. “I don’t know. I was in the capitol when I… when I came here, but I don’t know if this is a real place.”

  I did not add that her presence lead me to believe that it wasn’t. I sensed this projection of my mother had the same easily wounded sensibilities as she.

  “Do you like it there? Are you happy?” Her voice had softened completely, and I saw a visible change in her features as she became a picture of concern, of longing. I would touch her, if I could. I didn’t think I would ever have the opportunity to touch my mother again.

  “I have only just arrived,” I replied honestly, not wanting to answer her questions directly. “It’s cold and strange but I’m not alone, and they are not unkind to me.”

  Relief pebbled her austere face.

  “We think of you so much, and want to give you news, but we haven’t the means and,” her face darkened with the pause, rendered for a moment almost invisible by the shifting light and her sorrow, “we were told that we could not.”

  This surprised me, almost as though I were speaking with her truly of the things that had passed since I had left. I didn’t believe myself capable of conjuring any answer my conscious mind would believe.

  “That is probably best,” I answered, feeling instantly like someone else speaking the words, like Gannet. It was something he would say, favoring action that would spare him feeling, banish challenge. I felt like there was a great drain in my chest, and all of me sucked down into it. Lips pursed, only my next question could part them. “What did you mean when you first appeared, mother, when you said I didn’t know my own heart?”

  She was every bit my mother then, for all the real thing might have crossed to me and offered a comforting gesture for wo
rds spoken so frank.

  “You have known us all, even the things we didn’t want you to know, even when you didn’t mean to. But you cannot turn that keenness upon yourself. Your surprise and sorrow, the things that bring you joy, I could name them better than you.” She sighed, and I knew that this caused her great sadness. I knew, too, that she didn’t expect me to understand.

  “I know that I have loved and taken pleasure in the company of my family, and that I miss you still, always. I know the satisfaction of a story well told, of beauty observed,” I answered her a little contentiously, though she had neither asked a question nor warranted my attitude. I didn’t want to argue with her, only to show that she wasn’t right about me.

  Mother rose, but she didn’t cross to me. Her gaze was every bit that of an imperious leader. She reminded me of Morainn, or, I realized with a start, Morainn reminded me of her. “Do you know why you really left home? It wasn’t because you were told you must.”

  I balked at this, scrambling to my feet with haste enough to stir the pool with my boots and the hem of my dress. “I would be there still if the Ambarians hadn’t come!”

  Shaking her head, my mother turned, and I could see her becoming even more insubstantial. I panicked, waving my arms as though I could stop her, but the gesture seemed only to disperse more rapidly the shadows and light that made up her frame.

  “Breech babes begin their lives with their feet. They are moving away from you before they have the words to tell you why,” she said softly, her figure so ghostly now that the words could have come from the cavern walls. Tears burned hot streams down my cheeks, and now I felt the cold and keenly, my hood torn back by a wind that picked through an opening in the chamber that hadn’t been there a moment before. Dragging my feet out of the pool, I was surprised to find two figures reflected there, my mother and me, looking watchful each and ahead, to the opening. Perhaps she’d never been there at all.

  Because there was nothing to do but follow where I was clearly lead or wait all my days out in this strange half world, I strode away from the pool, towards the opening. Though my boots dried with unnatural speed and my skirts, too, the cold was raking a chill into my bones unrivaled by any of our nights traveling. I didn’t think of Gannet, or rather fought not to think of how he might warm me.

  Outside, a path wound thin as a lace between the mountain and a perilous fall. Trees clung to the cliff face like handfuls of hairs on an old man’s head. Though there was only one way for me to go, I didn’t see how I could, narrow and treacherous as it was. I couldn’t even see where the path lead, curving out of sight perhaps two hundred hands from me. While I was sure that I wasn’t in Ambar but some other world, I was sure, too, that I wasn’t safe from harm. If I should fall, consequences would be suffered, and as dire as those that would follow any great misstep in the real mountains that surrounded Jhosch. Still, there was nothing for it, and the tears I had not dashed from my cheeks had frozen there as I waited.

  “This is a test Jurnus would recognize,” I mused aloud, thinking of the training my brother had wanted for all he was never meant to go to war. Though we had all been encouraged, none of us had joined him but Esbat. I remembered the two of them perched upon a beam flanked on either side by our private guard. They were in a contest to land blows upon one another with knives too dull even for cutting bread, though their traded insults stuck plenty. Their cheers when the match was over, no matter the victor, would have had no place here. Still, their voices buoyed forth in my memory enough that it seemed when I laid my feet upon the path it was a little wider, the grit of the stone fit for feet.

  As I walked, each foot placed one in front of the other with an increasing tremor in my legs, I wasn’t sure if this was a test. I didn’t anticipate another visit from my family for all they felt near to me now, nearer than they had in weeks. Guilt lingered at my mother’s words, hanging like weights from my hips and knees. I had never given much thought to my future, if only because my present had always been so turbulent. The war certainly had not kept me from growing older, nor any of my siblings, though it had kept us from many of the things that might otherwise have filled our young lives. Our duties as leaders and diplomats, the possibility of marriage and families of our own, trades and crafts that extended beyond what could pass the time in the desert, none of these things had played as great a role in our lives as they would have if we hadn’t been at war. I had been lucky to favor something that required nothing but my memory and my power of speech, and stories had filled nights that might have been made merrier with the crafts of peacetime.

  I rounded the bend, and when the path continued around another, so did I.

  With the arrival of the Ambarians and my departure, no doubt my siblings had grown where I could not, and I in ways they would not. It was easy for me to see the decisions that they would have made, perhaps had made already: Lista and Anise, positions of influence and power, or as much influence and power as they would be allowed. And husbands, certainly. Lista would have heaps of children and Anise only one to which she would be exceedingly devoted. Esbat would pursue some scholarship, turning her mind to invisible realities, to the abstracts of invention. Forbidden a weapon, Jurnus would punish his body in some physical discipline.

  Or be killed, if he continued as foolishly as he had the night he’d visited the camp.

  The path grew narrower still. I thought of all the ways that I was unfit to do what my siblings had and would do, how I wasn’t so clever, so certain, so ambitious. Could I accept what my mother had said, that I would always have left? I couldn’t. But neither did I see a future for myself in Aleyn, not as I might have had if Gannet and Morainn and all of the others had never entered my life, and certainly not now.

  A figure stepped on to the path. It was Paivi.

  “Theba, matea tsisha a.”

  The words were the ones he had said to me when we had met at the gates of Jhosch. The language resonated with me, but even here I didn’t understand it.

  “I am the icon of Theba, not Theba herself. I would prefer you to address me as Eiren. You’re not called Erutal, but Paivi.”

  If Paivi felt some surprise at my knowledge of who he was, he didn’t show it. I wondered if this restraint had been taught to them all and was not, as I had suspected, Gannet’s special province.

  Paivi’s broad smile, however, had no trace of Gannet’s control. “If you wish, Eiren. I’m pleased you’ve dropped your title. You won’t need it here.”

  There were maybe ten steps between us, and the path widened considerably when I had taken them by half. Whether I trusted the man on the other side or not, I wasn’t going to linger on a mere thread of stone to avoid him.

  “There are other things you’ll find me less amenable to part with,” I said, eyeing him with open distrust. Paivi nodded as though to suggest he was quite sure of that. He smiled and held his arm out not to take mine but in a gesture that guided the both of us away from the narrow path and up a steep, if thankfully wide, flight of stairs cut right into the mountain’s side. I could see the top from where we stood and the fires that burned there. I didn’t think it a great stretch to imagine them altar braziers, and the mountain’s summit a prayer garden.

  I laid my foot upon the first step and crumpled, my face smashed against the worn stone as though a weight pressed down upon me. I didn’t feel hands holding me down, exactly, but I couldn’t lift my head, couldn’t even shift to keep blood from dripping into my eyes from a wound on my forehead. When Paivi spoke it was from a distance great enough that it couldn’t have been he that held me there.

  “Have you come so far to fail your last test, Eiren? You approach divine heights. There is no place for pride in your heart.”

  I could taste blood in my mouth, my tongue running over my salt-slicked teeth. I swallowed my curses, but I couldn’t contain the groan that escaped my lips when I tried and failed again to lift my head. A load of rocks could have been laid upon it; it could have been a rock itself
.

  “Pride?” I whispered, freeing my arms from beneath my body with some struggle, palms pressed flat against the dusty path before the stairs. “I’m not proud of anything I’ve done lately. Just the opposite, actually.”

  “Are you sure? You have plumbed the depths of your companion’s hearts and their enemies, too. You have defied the laws of the natural world, and conversed with creatures that have no claim in it.” His pause was pregnant with a smile that rivaled the length of the horizon itself. “You are proud of these things.”

  Again I resisted the urge to shout at him, forced myself to consider his words. This, too, was a test. Blood began to dribble down my chin.

  “Eiren,” and his face was close to mine now, his voice quiet, sympathetic. I opened my eyes and could see his through a film of blood, gold flecked with green, alien but honest. “I’m not here to try you, only to guide you. It is this place that tries us all.”

  Gannet had been my guide. I wanted him here now. He wouldn’t have helped me to my feet, but he would’ve been there waiting for`me when I’d done it for myself.

  I closed my eyes again, remembering the strength and the caution I’d felt in his arms when he had held me. How long had I wanted him to do that without knowing that I wanted it? How could I ever hope to share such an embrace again if I didn’t defeat what defeated me now? Paivi spoke of pride, but what I felt wasn’t pride but wonder in the mysteries that my unique gifts gave me access to. My mind was strong, but it was mine. My powers might be Theba’s, but she couldn’t appreciate them as I did. She would not use them as I had to explore, but to conquer.

  With a groan I lifted my head, cheeks caked with a mixture of blood and dirt. My arms and legs betrayed no lasting injury, and for this I was grateful. When my eyes met Paivi’s again, they were dark with determination.