The Hidden Icon

by Jillian Kuhlmann

The figures that had retreated to the shadows begin to sing, crawling forth on their bellies and broken limbs to kneel at Theba’s feet. I couldn’t understand them, and wouldn’t even if the language had been one I knew. I was clouded with anger and horror and triumph and the desire that sprang from Gannet’s fingers still on my skin. I couldn’t pick out what emotions were mine and which belonged to the fierce figure on the stage.

  “Eiren,” Gannet whispered, and I turned back to him as the chorus continued, swelling even as the fires’ light diminished further. His thumb traced a pattern now, one that sent a strange fire dancing down my limbs. “Eiren, I can’t stop what is coming.”

  What he could not stop was more than what happened on the stage, what it represented, more than my sliding easily from my chair to his lap, careful not to dislodge his hand from my cheek. I felt a parting like two pages in a book splayed open for an herb to press, like my lips against a hot cup, eager for the sweet tea below the humid rim.

  Don’t stop.

  When Gannet’s left hand raced opposite his right, my own swept to the steady plane of his chest, he bending and I reaching so our mouths could meet. I knew enough of thirst to recognize in him a deep desire to drink, and he was in the same moment hard and sweet and soft, practiced severity entirely absent as he kissed me. There was none of the restraint he had shown weeks before, and I wouldn’t have known how to stop had I wanted to. Little more than a breath passed between us; only the most witless sound of pleasure was given room between lips parting and pressing again. I couldn’t hear the chorus on stage for the rebellion in my ears, the fire burning up my chest that had nothing, nothing, nothing whatever to do with Theba. It was Eiren who claimed him with a hand fixed just so above where his heart pounded, the lines in my palm pulsing with a rhythm they could not forget. A human hand, a human heart.

  Theba could not make me take anyone, or kill anyone, or betray my people. Theba, who knew so much of betrayal. If I were to build a kingdom it would be in peace, as Salarahan had done.

  “Eiren, Eiren,” Gannet’s lips hummed against mine, but my attention was drawn suddenly below. The players had moved to the top of the stage and were bowing not at Theba any longer but out, towards us. It seemed they were finished, for there were no fierce visages among them, but smiles, and hand holding, and even the fires had grown brighter. But then there was a scream, and chaos burst through the line of happy players. Dark figures moved among powdered ones, and as they did the players fell, shadowy stains spreading over their spare clothing. This was not the trick they had played earlier, but real blood. I couldn’t see their faces in detail, but their thrashing was like none of the mimicry that had come before it. Gannet rose and I was lifted in part by my own will and his hands, which had dropped to my arms and gently, if urgently, tugged me up.

  I saw her, then, the Theba figure, held between two figures covered from head to foot. I saw, too, the glint of a knifepoint against her throat. I half expected that she would look at me, accusing, terrified that she should die in Theba’s name, my name, but her eyes were fixed on a spot on the ground floor of the opera, where no doubt a lover, mother, or friend stood. She was only a girl, so young; I could see that, now that the guise of Theba was gone.

  There was a swelling in me as the knife slashed across her throat, as her blood splashed across her garment and on to the stage. So much, vibrant and thick, and as it ran so, too, did my sense of myself. While Gannet had held me I had been completely Eiren, but now I was Theba, all cold and outrage.

  “You will never do what you have come to do, Theba!”

  “We will go to our graves if we cannot bring you to yours!”

  The attackers’ voices rang out from below, chilling me to the bone as I recalled the same words from the man who had attacked me, who had died by Antares’ hand. These, too, seemed to have no concern for their own lives as they leapt to the ground and began to lash out indiscriminately with their weapons. Yes, I thought, or Theba did, stealing from heart to vein to head. You shall.

  Even as I felt myself ready and wanting to unleash some judgment upon them, Gannet locked my arms against my sides, forcing me to look at him.

  “Eiren, you have to go, get out of here. Find Najat, if you can.”

  He kissed me and it was enough to bring me back to some part of myself, but too, too brief before he was thrusting me away, his keen eyes on the stage. I saw the fires flare there, and wondered that the attackers had not anticipated this sort of retaliation.

  “I can help you!” I shouted, but even as I did I felt the cold anger rising in me again, blotting out the heart of me that wanted to stay with him because I cared to preserve his life. The cry for vengeance was stronger still.

  “It’s you they want, icon of Theba, and no matter how strong you think yourself they will have you if you do not go,” he insisted, his last a command I couldn’t refuse. I tripped down the stairs, a tremor in my bones that was fear of what waited for me below, and all that had been woken within.

  Chapter 24

  Below was chaos. I lost myself in a tangle of limbs, fabric, and screams as everyone who had been in the opera house tried desperately to get out. For the moment, despite my lurid robe and the story it told, no one was paying any attention to me. It was a grim relief, to have the death of Theba onstage eclipse her presence in me.

  It didn’t make it any easier to move against the crowd. I would be too great a target if I tried to escape by the front entrance, so I struggled instead deeper into the theatre in the hopes that there would be another way out. I squeezed through and stepped over several bodies, but this was not the work of the assassins. These were the victims of panic, but I didn’t stop to help, I couldn’t.

  I was surprised when I reached the stage, confronted by the slick reflection of blood in the brazier light. There was more pooling on the stage than seemed like could have come from only one woman, or even ten. Though the fleeing citizens of Jhosch still swelled and shrieked at my back, I felt myself suddenly alone. And more than a little frightened.

  “Eiren!”

  Paivi’s voice was followed quickly by his hands, taking me roughly by the shoulders and pulling me back into a recessed pit near the stage. His thoughts projected forward from his mind, easy to read: he was surprised to find me here, and highly agitated, too.

  “Gannet sent me away,” I explained, feeling a little like a child who had been caught somewhere she shouldn’t be.

  “I will show you another way out. The assassins are holding at the main entrance,” he offered, and I had little choice but to follow him. At the mention of the assassins I grew cold again and hot, too, thinking that if their numbers were not diminished entirely by the guard I would have the rest. I had no weapon, but I felt in me the potency that had burst free in the Rogue’s Ear when Kurdan had attacked, when he had driven me to such brutal and final retaliation. It was there now like a tool I could lift and use at the moment of my choosing.

  Paivi led me behind the stage where the curtains hung in blood splashed folds, to a panel in the floor that had been lifted away and exposed a dark stretch of tunnel. I didn’t want to go in, and certainly not with Paivi, but I had no choice.

  “Who were they?” I asked when Paivi had followed me down, lifting the panel over the opening to conceal it from the assassins. I suspected the players used this tunnel to go to and from the stage, or hoped its purpose was so mild.

  “They’re heretics. What happened tonight wasn’t the first act of violence against us,” he said, continuing after a considerable pause. “Their activities are usually far more covert. They’ve murdered before, but not like this.”

  My shock was like something bitter swallowed and spit back up again, and the response that rolled off my tongue was sick with it.

  “It’s because of me.”

  It wasn’t a question. Perhaps I might once have hoped that this wasn’t the case, but I knew better, now, and Paivi did not soften any blows.

  “It has always been b
ecause of you, Eiren.”

  He didn’t say anything else, but I wasn’t sure if I should be grateful or sorry. Though I had questions, I didn’t trust Paivi to deliver the answers.

  There were several chambers below the stage for the players, and we were soon moving away from the opera house and into the city, the tunnel akin to the one we had taken to reach the icons’ chambers below ground. I wondered how the heretics had come to be onstage, I wondered at the last anticipatory breaths the players had taken beneath the stage before climbing above and to their deaths. How many more would die by my hand, or because of it?

  What troubled me most was that these heretics were more in line with my way of thinking than with Paivi’s and the other icons. The opera had given me much that I already knew, but the idea that they expected me to turn on my own family, my people, to lead the Ambarians to lord over the lands we had once shared, was outrageous. I would not be rebuilding our kingdom, but leading one half to conquer the other, to finish what they had started. Is this what Morainn and Gannet had wanted to keep from me? Would there be no end to my family’s suffering? Thinking of Gannet, even a little, stumbled me. The memory of our kiss was clouded already with the blood on the stage. There was far too much of Theba in such a remembrance for me.

  “There is more that you should know, Eiren.”

  There was a stillness to Paivi’s mind now, like an empty cell. I studied him, but couldn’t read anything but a sliver of anticipation, and fear. His feelings were mirrored in the tremor of exhaustion that unsteadied my words.

  “There’s always more. What is it?”

  “You haven’t been told the whole truth.” He came nearer, but there was nothing threatening in his posture. We’d stopped walking now, facing each other in the potent darkness of the underground.

  “I’m not even sure of what truths I have been told,” I said dismissively, wanting to seem stronger than I felt. I didn’t want to be the murderous Theba I had seen upon the stage, a young woman who was dead now, perhaps, for having played such a part. Neither was it enough simply to be Eiren. Not for these people.

  Paivi shook his head. “What we have kept from you, we have kept from everyone. I need you to know that you are not the first.”

  I searched Paivi’s face, but there was nothing there. In his mind there were only images like the ones we had seen on stage, blood and murder.

  “What do you mean?” I asked hesitantly, for the first time not sure if I wanted the answer I sought. I sensed an eagerness in Paivi to be rid of this weight, and though he came no closer, he leaned forward slightly, as though his head were heavy with it.

  “Gannet told you that we have been waiting for you, for Theba, for a very long time, but this isn’t true. You are not the first icon of Theba, but the nineteenth.”

  I gasped. I might have gathered all the shadow in the room into my mouth, making it impossible to breathe or speak after he had done. Even before I could demand an explanation, Paivi stepped forward and put his hands on my arms, the contact flooding me with the memories that he carried, his own lifetime and the lifetimes of the icons of Erutal before him.

  “Each and every one, murdered in her infancy, or soon after,” he said quietly, and I saw with crippling detail the broken bodies of babes, swaddled still or on their first legs, hair dark as earth or light as candle flame. “Her will to live again no doubt drove her to Aleyn, where these monsters have no reach.”

  I was hardly listening, fixed instead upon the last memory that Paivi had shared with me: a girl grown enough to be called such, her features showing the distinct promise of beauty in adulthood. Her throat was cut as neatly as if a thread had simply bit into her neck, and a woman held her, wailing, though there was no sound in the memory, only their faces, one forever frozen, the other desperate and torn.

  “She was the last,” Paivi whispered, letting go my arms. “I was a young man, then, and suspected who she was. What you see… was what I saw, when I arrived.”

  I gulped air, pulled myself roughly out of Paivi’s grasp and out of his reach.

  “I can’t believe it. I won’t.”

  “You have no choice.”

  “I’m tired of hearing what I can’t do, what I must do!”

  I was shouting now, and it wasn’t enough just to stand apart from Paivi. I was running, but in the wrong direction, back toward the opera house. I heard Paivi behind me, could feel his outstretched fingers rake across the robe’s hood as he tried to stop me, to pin me against the tunnel wall. The walls felt too close, but it wasn’t just the tunnel, or the grand opera house above. It was the whole city. It was a cage.

  I might’ve clawed my way right through the stone if I hadn’t plowed right into a soft but unyielding body before me. Not one body, but many, the hiss of shock belonging, to my surprise, to Imke. Her mind was a dark cloud, wreathed in red thoughts, and I met her narrow eyes before being hauled to my feet.

  “Eiren, what are you doing here?”

  It was Morainn, and behind her were several elite soldiers, her parents, Antares at the rear. Paivi had caught up with me, and it was he who had pulled me up from the tunnel floor.

  “The icon of Theba’s safety is paramount,” Paivi answered. I stared mutely at the group before me, their faces blurred with projections of what Paivi had shown to me. It was as though I had seen not one murder tonight, but dozens. “The passage to the palace is known to us, and I thought to use it.”

  “Of course,” observed Morainn’s father, his gaze shrewd on the pair of us. Torchlight deepened the creases of age on his face, rendering him a creature of shadow and flesh. We were far from the observant eyes of his people now, and I was nearly driven to my knees again by the mad hunger, the worshipful lust I felt from him. I was driven wild by it, like a feral animal. I was a prisoner rattling hopelessly the bars of her cell, if only to make noise enough to drown out the drumming of her own heart.

  “Tell them, Paivi. Tell them what you told me.”

  Paivi stiffened. If he’d had my gifts, he would’ve pressed us both through the stone wall and away.

  “Tell us what?”

  Colaugh seemed to grow, his shadow big enough to swallow his wife and daughter whole. The spear points of the soldiers behind him were like spines on the back of a monster. Paivi looked at him, but to his credit, did not shrink in the fear that I felt.

  And before he spoke, I knew why.

  “Drech, what she asks… you already know.”

  Their hearts were pounding, their heads swimming, and I was dashed about with every rogue thought, every bloody memory. The last icon of Theba, the child, her wailing mother was the king’s sister. An aunt and a cousin Morainn had been robbed of, just as she had been robbed of her brother. Paivi had said they had kept this secret, but there were only so many secrets you could keep from a man twice cursed: a niece and a son. But he had surrendered to it, just as Gannet had, just as they all did.

  It was too much.

  I pushed Paivi away from me, oblivious to the force I had shown until he stumbled back hard against the tunnel wall. My face was flooded with color, blood pumping hot and high like a river pulsing at its banks after a wild rain. I couldn’t deny the edge of Theba in my anger, the excitement, but this served only to drive me to greater fury. Were it not for her, for them, I could have been simply Eiren, a sister and daughter, not a leader but a follower, living a quiet life instead of this wrecked one.

  If this was it, if this was all I could be, I would wreck it completely.

  “Eiren, no,” Paivi pleaded, following the course of my thoughts as plainly as if I had spoken them aloud. Perhaps they heard me above, knew that I was coming. Perhaps Gannet would have the sense to run. There was no room in my heart for longing for him, only the horrors at hand.

  “Don’t get in my way.”

  I spoke to Paivi, but I looked at Morainn, her parents. I considered opening her father’s mind as I might crack the rind of a melon, spill the insides and sort them for myself if
there were more secrets to be had. There was a flicker of zealotry on his features, but my rage doused it as easily as a candle flame. I pushed past him, and when spears lowered to bar my way, their points softened and dropped to the floor with a single hot breath.

  “Please, Eiren, don’t,” Morainn raced behind me, shouting. The soldiers, too stunned to stop her, only followed in a helpless line. She had none of her brother’s skill, but she knew me. She knew what I wanted to do. “You’re not like Theba. If there is a terrible thing to do we have done it, waking her in you.”

  Her breath came fast, her doubt and her fear as plain to me as they would’ve been in the minds of any of my sisters, my brother, my parents. She had a place in my heart, just as they had. I knew what she needed in the same way that I had known as a girl when Esbat had a nightmare and wanted waking, when Lista needed most to be told she was pretty, when Jurnus needed an ear for boasting and when my father wished he had been a better man, a better leader, a better father. I wanted to comfort her. I wanted to tell her about Gannet’s kiss, his hooded eyes, his hands, but I burned up instead over the flash of knives on the stage, the memories Paivi had shared; they were knitted together in my memory, a tangle of beauty and blood.

  I couldn’t give her what she wanted, couldn’t have what I wanted, either. Not the sister, not the brother. Theba had claimed my heart, and everything else besides.

  They followed me because they were fools, because they cared, because they hoped to stop me, because they knew I couldn’t be stopped. I climbed onto the stage, dragging my fine robe through the blood. The hem and my feet paired and parted as I ran, telling another story in the stone. The assassins had been driven back into the opera house, warring still among the crowd, blades flashing, bright swathes of fabric shredding. There were so many, and there were all the same. I hated them, the heretics for deciding the nature of their victims before they had grown, the icons for deluding an entire people about what we were, what we could do, who we could be. Everyone was guilty. Icon or assassin, they had stolen from so many all the sufferings and joys of a true and full life, and I wanted to do the same to them.