The Hidden Icon

by Jillian Kuhlmann

  When we reached the base of the stair I didn’t want to ascend, didn’t want to leave the strange magic that had been stirred below. If we could only stay, the horrors that had followed me here might not find me again. Though I was among those who had known me first as Theba, I had not, since Gannet had told me who I was, felt further from her than I did then.

  “Eiren,” he said softly, his free hand falling upon mine where it rested on his arm. It could’ve been a gesture of urgency, that we must climb the stairs and return to the world whether I wanted to or not, but his touch answered a want of another kind. My fingers bore into his sleeve and I lifted onto my toes, he was lifting me, his mouth and mine meeting with the sweet taste of intention. It was not at all like I had imagined, to be held and kissed, though our circumstances were as dire as any pair of lovers in my favorite tales. This was a closeness complimented by thoughts shared between the bridge that our bodies made, both of us thrilling, driving worry and regret as far as seeking lips and hands could banish them. I might at one time have considered him mad, another woman would perhaps have been flattered, but all I could think was that we had wasted so much time.

  The kiss deepened but briefly; Gannet couldn’t allow it to last. I felt his hands travel to my shoulders and he withdrew, holding me at arm’s length as though to better study me.

  “I have to leave tonight. I wanted you to know.”

  I laid my hands upon his and on an impulse raised them to my neck, the heels of his hands against my jaw. I wanted him to stroke my face there with his thumbs, and he did.

  “Why do you have to go?” I asked, though I knew the answer before he spoke. The words were softened, though only slightly, by the gentle pressure of his fingers, cool against my flushed skin. My own hands moved against his arms, drawing us together again.

  “There are things that I have to do.”

  “How can someone without a name have so much to do?”

  Gannet didn’t sigh, but he couldn’t disguise himself from me when I stood with my cheek pressed against the throb of his chest. I could sense his worry, his hesitation, and already, his regret. I released a breath, gathering a great lungful of him before stepping back out of his reach.

  “You hope that a few weeks here will rob me of the desire to ask such questions,” I assumed, and Gannet shook his head, drawing his cloak against the cold that threatened where my body had been. When he spoke, he gestured his hand toward the stair, toward the palace and my chamber, where he couldn’t follow.

  “I hope that a few weeks here will grant you what you have always desired.”

  Chapter 22

  The next morning Gannet was gone as he had promised he would be, and I knew better than to ask where. There was no breakfast with the court, and it was the twins, Jaken and Shasa, who came to collect me from the palace in Paivi’s stead.

  When I asked them where he was, their grins were light, amused.

  “You’ve passed your test, so he won’t have as much to do with you now,” Jaken began, his sister following his words almost without a pause for breath. “You may be Theba, but you’re still coming to know her. It’s better for you to be with us, for now.”

  “Will I be allowed to see Morainn?”

  “Of course, but she has many duties, as do you. Perhaps later.”

  We descended through the gate in the garden into the strange underworld of the icons, and I was momentarily disturbed by how like a homecoming it felt to me. It didn’t last, not when Najat was waiting in the common room and others, too, when we shared a meal that had none of the discomfort, the current of gossip, as the morning meal in the court. Though of varying ages and surely having come from different classes, the icons seemed to have complete trust in one another. Jaken and Shasa confided to me that they had been born to a family of carpenters in the north, the youngest pair of children numbered fifteen altogether. I didn’t bother to ask them if they missed their family, for it was clear that they had found another one. Again, I could be troubled only a moment by this, and then I was being passed warm bread and chutney, what chill had entered my body leaving through fingers that clasped an earthen cup of tea.

  After breakfast, Najat shared with me what she had wanted to last night, and their work proved to be the greatest surprise of all. In addition to maintaining a library of ancient, crumbling texts, some of them kin to the strange book Gannet had shared with me and others in our shared tongue, they seemed to be a part of Jhosch in the way those who lived above could not be. I had wondered upon entering the city how it was that it could exist, seemingly carved out of the mountain and yet still sound, and filled with ghostly architecture and trees besides. The tunnels below seemed to correspond in part with the avenues above, and when we came upon a narrow chamber where the icon of Dsimah sat at a crude table working in a great pot of soil, Najat paused in what had begun to seem like a tour.

  “Dsimah, will you show Eiren what you can do?”

  I wondered for the briefest of moments when they would begin to call me by the name of my icon, but the mild figure of Dsimah, rising and inclining her head to the both of us, captured my attention.

  In many of the tunnels I had noted great bunches of roots hanging, some of them gathered together and bound up, others hung with lights, though the ones in this chamber were shaggy and rough, heavy and free of the mottled earth above. Dsimah placed her hands, stained with the soil she had moments ago been in up to her elbows, upon one great fat root and then another, and where she touched the roots began to glow a soft, buttery yellow. I watched the light, for that was what it was, spread from where Dsimah touched up and down the length of the root to the roof of the cavern. As though placed in my mind, I saw far above us a great tree, one of the many strange hybrids that grew throughout the capitol, seem to shake and stretch, leaves flush with color. It was not a picture that came from Najat or Dsimah, but it was a true one. Perhaps it came from the tree itself.

  Dsimah removed her hands and stepped away from the roots, and for a moment there was the blaze of her handprints visible and then nothing, the roots hanging just as they had the moment before. She returned to her pot, her smile one I was sure had more to do with the pleasure of what she did than in having been observed. When we had passed out of the chamber, Najat turned her eyes upon me, anticipating the questions I wasn’t sure how to ask.

  “Does she maintain all of the trees?”

  “Some. Not all require her touch, at least not all of the time. As with all things, we use what we are given. We shape the elements of the natural world that are already there. The trees were planted with hands and fed first with water and soil. Dsimah gives them what others can’t.”

  And there were others. Tirce we found working in stone, and I knew him responsible for the spidery archways and impossibly fragile constructions in the mountain’s side. Hamet I would have liked to have had in the desert, for she worked in the deepest places, coaxing water from the unyielding rock. It was there already, Najat explained, buried and unreachable by human interference. But not Hamet’s. Not ours.

  What I noticed, too, was that everyone worked alone, and when again we came together in the library, the icons that worked there shared between them the love of brothers and sisters, nothing more and nothing less. There were no children, though the icon of Mehve was only just grown. In her uncanny way, Najat seemed to sense my interest, and we joined Mehve where she sat transcribing.

  “Hello, Najat. Eiren.”

  Though her tone was more adult even than my sister Lista’s had often been, her smile was that of a child eager to have their work interrupted. A cloud passed through me, if only for a moment. She should have been playing. Had Gannet, too, been robbed of play?

  “Good afternoon, Mehve. What’re you working on?”

  Obliging, Mehve turned the bound text before her to face us both. I recognized some of the characters there, like the ones embroidered into my robe.

  “It is an account of our exile,” she continued, when her g
esture failed to bring the light of understanding to my face. Like with the other icons, I had a sense of what she meant without prying into her mind. For Mehve, the exile she spoke of was for all Ambarians. “When Salarahan drove us out, and we were forced to make our own way in the cold and the dark.”

  I balked, but didn’t know how to respond. I studied the characters in the book, willing them to make some sort of sense without my having to ask.

  “What does this say about Salarahan?” I asked finally, curious how the Ambarians would paint a figure who was in Aleyn a paragon, his brothers’ demons.

  Mehve, who perhaps knew less of me than every other person in the room, seemed puzzled by my question, but answered obediently.

  “He betrayed those of his own blood, and denied his immortal mother, Theba.” Mehve paused, casting her eyes at Najat. She didn’t read in the older woman’s face whatever it was she wished to, for she continued, but with some hesitation. “Surely you feel the pain of his betrayal, as the icon of Theba.”

  “I don’t,” I answered quickly, the color that flooded my cheeks surprise that this young woman, hardly a year out of her girlhood, could fail to mention Salarahan’s betrayal at the hands of his own brothers. Either they told a different story, or the brothers’ crimes was not deemed as grave as Salarahan’s own. My obvious discomfort stirred Najat to speak.

  “Mehve, Eiren isn’t like any other icon you have met. She’s still learning.”

  If Gannet had been there, nothing would have kept me from speaking. Asking the questions I might have put boldly to him was more difficult, however, with gentle, patient Najat. I found when it came to it I wished Mehve to answer.

  “What do you know about Theba, Mehve?”

  Perhaps it was a boon that Gannet had gone. I had the feeling he would’ve stopped her, or answered the question himself in a fashion that was not answering it at all. I couldn’t even have laid a hand upon him to know better, for the touch would ignite, I knew, feelings of another kind.

  Mehve sensed none of my struggle. Her attention was entirely diverted from the book now, and she glowed with the light of an eager student.

  “Theba is the stonecutter who must break so we can build. She labors in the fields and forest, culling and harvesting, taking life so others may live. She brings balance. She’ll take us home.”

  Najat didn’t look at me as Mehve spoke, and I kept my eyes fixed upon the table, eyes swimming in the strange characters of the book the young woman had abandoned in favor of talking to me. I could see why she might, for her words glowed with a fanatic’s devotion. Like Gannet, she spoke of the future in riddles, and I began to wonder if what they knew, or thought they knew, about what was coming was all like this: vague feelings and predictions, certainty grounded in metaphor.

  “Thank you, Mehve,” I replied lightly, tightening the grip I had around my own mind for all I was sure no one in the room would be able to see into me. If Shran’s ancient throne was out there somewhere empty, and they wanted it, they could have it. When I had led them home, would I, too, be allowed to go?

  But Gannet wouldn’t come with me, and I would return with yet more gifts my family wouldn’t understand. I would know there was a darkness in me that had not been there before. Even if I still refused to believe that I was the icon of Theba, something had been stirred by the suggestion that had given rise to terrible deeds.

  “Perhaps you would like to eat,” Najat offered. Mehve assumed this as some cue that she return to her work, and as I looked at her slight profile inclined above the ancient tome, I wondered what her true name was, if she even knew. Was this a gift that only Gannet had been given, to know who he had been meant to be, if not who he was? I didn’t ask, but rose in response to Najat’s suggestion.

  We returned to the common room, Najat and I, and she did not moralize with me as Gannet might have after such an encounter. Still I wanted him there with me more fiercely than I had ever thought I could want anyone who wasn’t my family in those first few, hard weeks on the barge. I thought of the sacrifices made in the story of Massoud and his snail-bride, of Alyona who after his death lived her immortal life in the shadow of her love for him. Her daughter, too, half-mortal, had perished, and Alyona had gone on still. How was it that something that could knit two people together could rend them from each other, from themselves, just as easily?

  Jaken and Shasa met us for tea just as they had that first evening, and after a time others joined us. I wasn’t asked to tell a tale and was given instead the rare pleasure of listening. I couldn’t deny the comfort I felt in the company of the other icons. These were different feelings than those I had known with my family. Then I had not been able to understand what a gift it was to be accepted and welcome, I had never been separate or alone. Because the icons shared burdens akin to mine, because their senses were uncanny in a way my sisters’ and brother’s never had been, I began to understand what Gannet had meant when he said he wanted what I desired to be mine. I had thought that I belonged, but now I knew that I did. Whatever they wanted with me, whatever they intended for me to do wittingly or unwittingly, I claimed them, and this place, in my heart.

  “Najat, do you know the tale of the sandal maker’s daughters?” I asked during a moment when the room quieted, as if in anticipation. My hands had moved almost of their own will to refill our tea, my eyes to light warmly upon first Shasa, and then Jaken.

  Najat inclined her head in thanks before replying. “I do.”

  “Will you tell it, please?”

  And she did, just as I remembered and, with the sighs and soft murmurings of the other icons as evidence, so did they all.

  More than a week passed this way. Someone would come for me and underground we would go. Though the others always had work to attend to, I was left to observation and idleness. Paivi spent some time with me each day engaged in what I could only presume were measures of my skill, though for what purpose he didn’t share. As I had with Gannet he would attempt to enter my mind, and while it seemed to me that I’d succeeded in keeping him out, I didn’t trust my perception. On the one occasion I did allow him some access, simply to have some basis for comparison, there was none of the warmth and energy of Gannet’s mind. I had thought then, perhaps, that this was simply the feeling of an active mind, but Paivi was as cold and as calculated on the inside as Gannet appeared to be on the outside.

  I learned, too, that his initial use of his given name with me was an affectation. The others called him Erutal and I struggled to do the same, for all it seemed strange to me that he could be the icon of such a temperamental fool. A god, surely, but a fool.

  In addition to his failed explorations of my mind, Paivi wished, too, to see my performance in complete darkness. He would place several objects within a chamber, some as miniscule as a pin, and shut me inside. When I took too long to recover them all to his satisfaction, I argued that even natural light would have made for a challenge.

  “I’m not interested in excuses, Eiren.”

  His response maddened me, and being shut up in a room made me madder still. As surprisingly content as I felt in the company of the icons, sharing their meals and stories, I felt my temper all of the time, too. I didn’t know why I was so angry. There had been lessons I disliked in the past and powerfully, but they hadn’t made me feel as I did now, and I wasn’t even sure that it was Paivi who was the source of my increasing frustration.

  His work seemed to be, in addition to tormenting me, arranging for special audiences with various icons. Though there were any number of chapel gardens in Jhosch, it seemed that many came to the city to lay their complaints and desires directly at the feet of the icons. I watched several of these meetings from behind a latticework screen, and it made me uncomfortable to see those who I knew merely as individuals, for all their names and their work, accepting tribute and making promises. The coin that was exchanged to arrange these encounters provided for the living of the icons, their food, clothing, fuel for their fires. I could
see the necessity, but it felt like a charade.

  There were, of course, many who had requested already to speak with me, and Paivi had denied them all.

  “I explained to them that you’re like a child. One doesn’t seek an audience with an icon until they are more than Mehve’s age, at least.”

  He cut his eyes to me when he spoke, his words a subtle barb. I refused to look at him, though I could feel his eyes on me when he continued all the same. We were sitting alone in the chamber where only moments before Dsimah had met with a prosperous farmer, and left with her deep robe pockets jingling.

  “They don’t understand that you were raised in ignorance. They don’t know what life is like in Aleyn.”

  He knew he was provoking me. I was glad there were no other icons about, for I didn’t want to offend them, for all I in some ways still failed to understand them.

  “And yet you’ve been at war for more than a dozen years.”

  “They’re not the only ones who are ignorant of their enemies,” Paivi had said, a note of irritation in his voice. We hadn’t talked anymore after that.

  I learned to expect less from Paivi then I’d enjoyed even in my earliest acquaintance with Gannet. In Gannet there had always been the desire to disclose, if not necessarily the will, but Paivi had neither. It was clear they answered to the same master, though whether that was some innate knowledge of their icon or some leader among them I had yet to meet, I didn’t know.

  The longing I felt for Gannet I couldn’t have anticipated. It troubled me, too, for I had seen no lovers among the icons, nor did they appear to have any relationships of that kind with the folk of Jhosch. I didn’t know if what I wanted was allowed, though I was sure with Theba’s influence it wasn’t wise. Morainn could neither confirm nor deny my suspicions about the other icons, and didn’t seem to care either way.

  “I may not have yours or my brother’s presence of mind,” she claimed delicately ten days after he had departed, “but you should pursue what brings you peace.”