The Hidden Queen

by Alma Alexander

  Brynna cast a glance back over her shoulder, a look of such panic that March’s smile slipped a little and his hands tightened on her shoulders.

  “What is it?” he demanded, speaking very softly.

  “The tutor,” Brynna gasped, glad to have found someone to whom she could blurt out the whole thing and remove the burden from herself, “the priest of Nual…he is Sighted, March, I know it, and I think he knows who I really am!”

  March looked at her gravely for a long moment, and then reached out to smooth away a wayward curl of red-gold hair. “Let us find Lady Chella,” he said at length. “Lord Lyme said you must have a proper education, but this was her idea. And the Lady of Cascin does nothing without a good reason. She knew what she was about.” He was a little uneasy, but he was not worried. Yet. Rima’s sister had made this decision. And yet, it was to Rima March had sworn to keep her daughter safe—and now, here, already…

  The time they took for this exchange in the corridor was enough, however, for Feor to forestall them. When March and Brynna were ushered into the lady’s chambers, they found him there already. The priest’s strange, luminous eyes met Brynna’s briefly, and she went white as she returned his look, again unable to control her reaction. Even if Feor had known nothing before, her chalky face would have condemned her, believing herself to have wrecked what had been a carefully laid illusion by betraying her secret at almost the very first test. Chella and Feor seemed to be exchanging cryptic messages with their eyes, in total silence, and then Chella smiled. “It’s all right,” she said softly.

  At the same time Feor, somewhat unexpectedly, suddenly lowered his long, angular frame onto one knee, bending his head before Brynna as a sign of respect before looking up at her. “Yes, it’s all right,” he said to her. “You see, Lady Chella was sure of me, and I think she was almost sure of you. Sure of me, because she knew I would guess almost everything within the first few moments I spent with you, and never tell; and sure of you, because she thinks you also have this gift that she and I and your mother share. And if I am your tutor in things like history and geography, I will have occasion to teach you…other things you must know. Am I right, Lady Chella?”

  “I am truly sorry to have given you such a scare,” said Chella, coming over to give Brynna a hug. Then she put her away, her hands still on Brynna’s shoulders, her eyes steadily holding the child’s. “I wanted Feor to read you unaware—if I had gone to him and told him of a Sighted child at Cascin, we would have had to plot desperately for him to have access to you. This way, you have been placed in his charge by Lyme himself, the lord of Cascin. And there’s another advantage to all this, another layer of concealment for you.”

  “If Sif comes looking for the female fosterling he may hear about at Cascin, he might think she is perhaps twelve or thirteen, not nine, if he hears of her being tutored by the same man who teaches Cascin’s older boys,” said March slowly.

  “Exactly,” said Feor. “And already I see she knows quite enough to stay with us. She certainly knows more than Ansen.” Chella grimaced at that and Feor, getting up creakily from his obeisance, could not help smiling. “So we’ll have a few private lessons, young…Brynna, but not all of them will have to do with history, even though Kieran and Ansen will have to think so.” He came up to her and cupped her chin in a gentle hand, tilting her small face up and searching her eyes. Brynna suddenly felt quite dizzy from the hypnotic depth of his look. “But not just yet, I think. In time. You are still so very young,” he murmured. “It’s astonishing to me that already we have been able to tell. In most children Sight does not show until they are into their teens. But you…” He shook his head. “I think you may well be a melding of two very strong Sight lines, my child. It runs in your mother’s family, although it seems to have passed by all her sister’s children. And by all I can gather from the history I teach, Red Dynan’s line had it as well, although they always shrouded it carefully away. I wonder if some of the old kings ever really knew the potential they were leaving untapped…but most Kir Hama kings wedded Sighted women. That alone should tell us something. Like calls to like, and you may be more than just a strong melding—you may be a culmination of many generations.” Feor let her go, and his smile was warm, full of comfort and support. Freed from the terror of having betrayed herself so easily to a stranger, Brynna found herself smiling back. It was hard to like Feor—he had a distant, other-worldly air that precluded closeness—but he could be a tower of strength to his friends, and Brynna suddenly realized he wanted to be her friend. That by itself was worth a great deal; another layer of safety added to her precarious existence, another ally in the devastating and swiftly emptied world in which the exiled child-queen had been set adrift.

  But ally or not, Feor was an odd and rather troublesome companion. He wandered Cascin like a restless spirit, popping up unlooked-for at unexpected moments, liable to come out with barbed double-edged remarks which could pass at face value with anyone who wasn’t listening for hidden messages but which would reveal a great deal to those who were. He seemed to take pleasure in this baiting, and while Feor was capable of judging his audience very finely, never actually saying more than was prudent, two days of this was quite enough to completely unnerve Brynna in his presence. It did not help that there was always the menace, all the more frightening because it was shrouded in silence, of impending instruction in arcane matters concerned with Sight. But having told her she had it and that he would help her learn to deal with it, Feor seemed to have forgotten about the whole thing. But Sight does not allow itself to be easily forgotten or thrust aside. It was only a matter of days before it rose to haunt them all.

  Less than a week after her first lesson with Feor, sitting once again in her by now accustomed seat by the fire, a shaft of indescribable agony lanced through Brynna’s skull and she doubled over with a moan of pain, clutching her head. Ansen glanced up, and Kieran surged out of his chair, but both were forestalled by Feor who, languid though he looked, could nevertheless move with remarkable swiftness and agility. He was already crouching by Brynna’s chair, his long, bony hands gentle on her hair.

  “It hurts! It hurts!” she moaned.

  “Don’t fight it,” admonished Feor in a low voice. “It will pass. Ride it.”

  “Are you a healer, too?” asked Kieran, his attention diverted briefly. Feor spared him a swift glance.

  “I was a lot of things in my time,” he said. His eyes were flooded with a strange sort of compassion, but Kieran could tell that, although Feor had looked directly at him, he’d been very far from seeing him. His compassion was all for Brynna.

  His attention was back on the girl, who sat small, fragile and somehow lost in the great chair, with tears streaming down her face. Feor seemed to be observing her with a furious concentration, his hands never leaving her temples. At length Brynna drew a ragged breath and he nodded, straightening up. “Good. You’re through it.”

  “Is she feeling ill? Shouldn’t she lie down or something?” asked Kieran, prompted, perhaps, by his memories of his own first days in a strange house as a new foster child—and other, deeper memories whose roots lay in his own childhood.

  “I’m fine,” said Brynna, wiping the tears with the back of her hand, sitting up straighter. She would not look at him, however. Kieran’s acquaintance with his newest foster sister was still very short, but already he had seen how her eyes mirrored everything she was feeling, her emotions revealed for anyone to read. Kieran knew what would have been written in Brynna’s eyes if she had looked at him—a residue of her pain; resentment she had succumbed so abjectly and a strange, still sort of fear, whose cause he could not pin down but which was always about her like a faint scent. Ansen, looking at him, suddenly snorted in what sounded like derision; Kieran looked away into the flames in the fireplace, aware that his own face must have been mirroring Feor’s compassion.

  Kieran would have liked the chance to have lingered, more curious than ever about this strange new classma
te. But between them, Ansen and Feor gave him no chance—the former dragging him out of the room at the conclusion of the lesson, and the latter claiming Brynna’s attention, excluding the two boys almost before they’d left the circle before the fire. Kieran glanced back from the doorway, but the teacher and the young girl were deep into a softly spoken conversation he could not hear—and then he was out, with Ansen closing the door almost pugnaciously behind him. He turned away, following his foster brother with ill grace.

  Back in the schoolroom, Feor was once again by Brynna’s chair. “You did very well,” he said encouragingly, “very well indeed for one so young. Perhaps I was wrong to wait. Perhaps you are ready to begin to learn.”

  “But what happened?” murmured Brynna, sounding a little lost, her eyes filling with tears even at the memory of the pain.

  Feor, who had stretched his angular features into a rare smile, looked sober once more. “As to that, I cannot say,” he said. “Something grave, though, else it would not have caused so much pain. Something very deeply connected to you. I do not know what might be happening in Miranei right now, but something of great importance for you has probably occurred there. If you were a little older, and maybe a little more trained, it would have come to you as an image, a sign. But you still do not know how to interpret these signs, even though you are obviously capable of receiving them. Let me speak to Lady Chella. Perhaps she could give us some answers.” He rose. “You look better. But you are likely to nurse a headache for a while longer; go to the kitchens and ask Mariela to give you an infusion of wirrow. It’s as well to try and prevent a major…”

  The door opened behind them, very softly and gently, but they both looked up with a sudden feeling of doom. Lady Chella stood there, her normally serene face drawn and white and her gray eyes dark with tears. Feor stiffened, glancing from aunt to niece, for the first time putting together this shared vision of pain into a picture that made all too much sense. The hand that suddenly dropped back onto Brynna’s hair was no longer that of a healer with Sight, instead it was the hand of a friend helpless to shield a child from a mortal hurt. He did not speak, merely giving Chella an awkward little bow before lifting the edge of his blue robe and gliding out of the room. Watching him leave, Brynna had an abrupt, unaccountable vision of Feor guarding the door from outside, as implacable and perhaps far more dangerous than any soldier. Chella came inside and knelt by the chair, taking Brynna’s small, cold hands in her own, lifting her face to the child’s. There was something subtly different about it today, and Brynna suddenly knew what it was—Chella’s eyes, the eyes that had reminded her so of her mother. They were unfamiliar now, eyes which might have had a passing resemblance to those of someone she loved, but nevertheless the eyes of a stranger. Something had vanished for good, a link, a nexus that was there before, binding the two of them into family. The disorientation lasted only for a moment, and then the world changed again, returning to something Brynna knew and recognized. She found herself looking down into painfully familiar eyes once again—and realized it was now Chella’s eyes that were familiar and reminded her of Rima, not the other way round. It was as though she had never seen Rima’s eyes, except in a distant dream…And then, just like that, she knew. “Mama…She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  Chella reached out to gather her in a wordless embrace and Brynna stared over her aunt’s shoulder into the leaping flames. She felt curiously empty, as though there were no more tears, as though she had cried them all, shed over nothing more than the pain which had wracked her so a moment before. The memory of Miranei, the perfect memory she still cherished and her last thought before she fell asleep every night, was intact. But in this instant it seemed to Brynna that the city and the keep were starkly empty of people and a woman named Rima had never walked its corridors or shared the Throne Under the Mountain with a king they called Red Dynan. There was nothing there, no memory of a face, of a form—nothing except a pair of beautiful and intense eyes which now existed only as remembrances, pale copies in the face of Rima’s sister, and that of her daughter.

  Chella drew away to look at her. “When it came to me I knew you must have felt it too,” she said, “and you had no means of knowing…it was a good thing Feor was with you. Come, Catlin is waiting for you upstairs. I thought…”

  But the thought of seeing Catlin was suddenly unbearable. Catlin was a potent reminder of Rima and the world that had been torn from Brynna, the latest in a series of deep wounds and gashes oozing not life-blood but an even more agonizing and incessant trickle of loneliness, heart-sickness, and a hopeless longing for what was irretrievably lost. Brynna dropped her eyes. “I don’t want to go to my room,” she said, and there was an echo in her voice of the girl who had known the power of command. “May I go for a walk out in the garden?”

  Chella glanced at the window. “But it’s raining,” she said.

  “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.