“And Keda?”
“Keda will go her own way. She’s a musician; she’s going to fledge out in the world. She would not stay even if she was Sighted, and she is not.”
Travelling with Keda would be bittersweet, because of her link with Kieran and, indirectly, to Cascin. Brynna had not wanted to ask, but the sense of his loss was greater than her resolve. Her mouth formed the words even as she fought against them in her heart. “And…Kieran?”
“He’s gone to one of Lord Lyme’s friends, a knight with a keep near Tanass Han,” said Feor. “He’s to be a squire in the household.”
That was all they told her. That was all she could ask. Perhaps one day…but, for now, it was safer for everyone if nobody knew exactly where anyone who had been in that fateful room had gone. Ansen, Brynna suddenly knew, would probably be told very little, if anything at all, about the sudden disappearance of two of his foster siblings in what almost amounted to a midnight flit. Brynna was told to pack immediately; Keda would be leaving within the next two days.
She managed to say goodbye to the twins, who were mystified and fretful at the upheavals shaking their world; she left her dog—given when she had first arrived—in Adamo’s care. Ansen was under a strict regimen of sleeping drafts and still asleep, wrapped in his stark bandage, which made him look as though he had no face at all. She whispered next to his ear, never to know if he heard or understood her heartfelt apologies. She did not ask if he would forgive her; she was leaving him much to forgive. When she left him, finally, he looked as though whatever dreams might come in his drugged sleep would be anything but pleasant.
Keda and Brynna left early in the morning, two days after Kieran’s departure. Catlin stood crying in the doorway; Feor, beside her, looked like a statue cast in stone. Lyme and Chella had already said their farewells inside, out of sight of prying eyes. March was gone, trying to find a place to watch over his charge; the twins were asleep, Ansen adrift in his drugged dreams and his pain. Nobody else had roused to see them go. The sun had risen, but Cascin’s woods were still in deep shadow, and Feor suddenly shivered as Brynna’s pony vanished within. He looked up into the promise of a blue summer sky, filling his mind with the soothing image of a pool of clear water as he sent a prayer winging to his God. Nual of the Waters, protect her, keep her safe…
Keda had bargained for a ride on a flat-bottomed river barge from Halas Han’s docks a few hours later, and the boat took them and their horses up the Rada River. Keda was silent and preoccupied; Brynna, afraid of the future, burdened by the past, might have opened up had Keda made an overture, but the older girl seemed sunk into her own thoughts. The camaraderie of Cerdiad, only days past, seemed as though it belonged to another life.
The journey was uneventful, almost tedious, leavened only with rumors of border skirmishes, which were endlessly chewed over by the crew. But even those palled after a while, and the next place for reliable news was at Radas Han, at the far end of their journey. They greeted it with something like relief, the boatmen hurried to the han tavern to wet their throats and re-stock on gossip and Keda quietly took Brynna to their room. The next day they were off again, taking the ferry across the Rada and riding north into the foothills. They both found their eyes drawn to the west, for different reasons, and thought themselves alone in this until they both looked away in the same instant and happened to meet each other’s eyes. Keda’s face acquired the ghost of a smile.
“What do you see?” she asked, and she did not mean the empty, rolling moors stretching across the Rada toward the distant western mountains, no more than a smudge on the horizon.
“Home,” said Brynna almost inaudibly. The perfect memory of Miranei, so cherished, so carefully husbanded, rose almost solid before her eyes. She offered a halting word of description, then; a glimpse of pennant, a swift glance at a battlement, the hewed stone corridors of the citadel, the mountain-buttressed sky that vaulted across the ancient walls. It started as a trickle and ended as an emotional tor rent, leaving the girl who had been Anghara trembling in its wake. Keda looked at her with surprise and wonder.
“And I thought I was a poet,” was all she said. But that was praise enough; and later, when they rested, she took out her harp and drew out strange, haunting passages evoking the things of which Brynna had spoken.
“It’s beautiful,” said Brynna, listening with rapt attention.
Keda looked up with a slow smile. “It’s the first music I have played which is truly my own,” she said. “When I get to Miranei, I’ll play it there, tell them it was a gift from one of their own whom I met on the road.”
Anghara jumped, her face flushed. “But not…”
“No, of course not.” Keda put the harp away with a sigh, reaching for one of the younger girl’s hands. “I haven’t been the best of companions,” she said, “not what you needed. I’m sorry; you’re hardly to blame. It’s just that I’m finding it difficult to come to terms with the last few days. Too much has happened; I came to spend some time with my brother, and I wound up driving him from a place where he was happy, which he was far from ready or willing to leave.”
“But it was I who did that,” said Brynna plaintively. Her eyes filled with tears again, at the thought of Kieran. “He was the only real friend I had, and now I don’t even know where he is…”
“I just hope Sif doesn’t send his master to the borders,” said Keda, thinking aloud, coming to herself with a start at Brynna’s sudden gasp. “It’s all right,” she said quickly. “Kieran is a man already, and knows how to protect himself. I’m not worried he’ll die. It’s just…I would have wished that he came to war a little older. Not at all, if I could help it, but if needs must, not when he is still not properly sixteen. I always thought taking young boys to war is barbaric. Who needs a page on a battlefield?”
But the topic of conversation seemed to agitate Brynna, who had not thought of this horrifying possibility; Keda tried to change the subject, but Brynna worried at it like a puppy at a bone. As she rode, she had waking nightmares of Sif ordering Kieran into the mountains, the woods bristling with hidden spears of ambush as he entered the forest shadows. So wrapped up was she in this bloody fantasy, appalled but unable to shake herself free, she almost screamed aloud when Keda gently touched her shoulder.
“We’re here,” said Keda. “Look.”
Castle Bresse was not a conventional castle, not a citadel like Miranei or the parapets of walled Calabra. Instead it was a tall white tower surrounded by an inner ring of smaller, thatch-roofed dwellings and an outer skirt of stone sheds and outbuildings that faced them across a circular paved yard. There was a gate in the outer ring, closed, with a huge iron ring fastened on the outside. A white pennant flew from the steeply sloping roof of the tower.
“It looks like a Tower of Avanna,” said Brynna, who had expected…she did not quite know what, but certainly something quite different.
“I think it probably used to be one, before the Sisters took it over,” said Keda. “Come on, I think they’ve seen us.”
Sure enough, the gate was opening as they approached, revealing a knot of three Sisters dressed in plain white. They waited in silence.
“Greetings,” called Keda as they drew closer. “I am a harper from Shaymir, and I ask for your hospitality for the night.”
“You have it,” said one of the Sisters with a solemn smile. “Will you honor us with a tune at evenmeal, harper?” Keda inclined her head graciously, slipping off her horse before the gate. The Sisters moved aside to let her pass as Brynna joined her, one of them waiting until the visitors dismounted to gather up the reins of their horses and lead them away in the direction of the stables.
“They will be cared for,” said the Sister who had spoken earlier. She walked a little ahead, with Keda at her elbow, her smile slightly quizzical. “Forgive me, but it can’t be just the desire to let a few cloistered women hear the heavenly sounds of the Aymer harp that brings you all the way to Castle Bresse,” she said. “We
are hardly on paths frequented by your kind.”
Keda smiled, relaxed and at ease. “I bring a message,” she said, “to Lady Morgan.”
“And a recruit, perhaps?” said the Sister, glancing back to where Brynna walked behind the other two Sisters, on her own.
“Perhaps,” said Keda.
The Sister tucked her hands inside her wide sleeves. “Lady Morgan will see you after evenmeal,” she said. They had reached one of the thatched buildings at the foot of the tower, and one of the other Sisters stepped up and pushed the door open. “Our guesthouse,” she said. “We hope you will be comfortable. Evenmeal is almost ready; the bell will summon you when it is time. Any Sister will show you where to go.”
Keda thanked them, and they withdrew. Brynna’s eyes were round with wonder. “Am I going to have to stay here forever, then?” she asked, almost frightened. The Sisters had a disturbing air of permanence.
“I don’t think so,” laughed Keda. “Not everyone who comes here does, and you of all people are a special case.”
“My aunt and my…my mother were both here,” said Brynna carefully.
“Yes,” said Keda, seeing through the logic, “and they both came to leave. All you have to do is stay here until you learn what they have to teach you.” She looked at Brynna with eyes that were suddenly shadowed, and her long fingers could not help clenching into a fist for a moment. “Avanna,” she murmured, “yours is a gift I am glad I was never born with. Not after…what happened at Cascin.”
A vision of Ansen’s bandaged face flashed across Brynna’s mind, and she cried out, burying her face in her hands. “I didn’t mean it…”
Keda crossed the room in one long stride and took the other girl into an almost maternal embrace. “I’m sorry. You’re hardly to blame. He was mad that night, mad! And who’s to say that, if it hadn’t been for you, it wouldn’t have been Kieran lying wounded in his bed? I can pity him, but I cannot bring myself to grieve for what happened to Ansen.”
It was absolution, of a sort. In any event, they were not given time for more, as a melodious peal from a high, pure bell echoed through the settlement. It was all they could do to drag a comb through their hair and splash some water on their faces and hands before they joined the company of white-clad Sisters streaming toward the open door of the white tower.
The meal was simple, and relatively short. For Brynna it lasted a lifetime, knowing that all too soon, after Keda had sung for their supper, the harper would vanish up the stairs to the private sanctum of Lady Morgan, head of this community, and Lady Morgan would open Chella’s letter. Brynna dreaded the aftermath. They might question her, demand to know what it was she had done to Ansen—the truth was, she did not know, and was in fact almost sure she could not do it again if she tried. It had been instinct, pure and simple, when she had seen the knife raised against Kieran; the rest came…from somewhere beyond her. But Feor seemed to think the likelihood of it happening again was not as negligible as Brynna believed. That was why they had sent her here—to blunt the killing edge, to teach her to wield her blade with more circumspection.
But when Bresse came to claim her, it was gently. Lady Morgan came back to the guest lodgings with Keda and bowed her head to Brynna in a gesture as unexpected as it was, in its own way, proud. It was an obeisance to a queen from one who was herself a queen of sorts in this, her small realm. But the queen gave way almost instantly to what might have been a loving grandmother, with Morgan bending down to smile and take Brynna’s small hands into both her own brown, aged ones.
“I grieved for your mother,” she said, her voice low, husky, rich with her years. “I bless the day I learned I have to grieve for you no longer, my princess. Sleep well, child; tomorrow we will begin the work that is before us. Tonight, Castle Bresse will keep you safe.”
9
If there was something out of the ordinary in the fact that the Lady Morgan of Bresse herself undertook the teaching of the youngest novice in her Sisterhood, the girl still known as Brynna never suspected. Brynna was allowed her freedom and Keda’s company for as long as the harper was at Bresse. The morning after Keda left, Brynna was deposited, garbed in the ubiquitous white robe of Bresse, in Morgan’s chambers and left to cool her heels in the empty room until the lady was ready for her. At first she waited patiently, sitting on the edge of a wicker chair by the hearth, but when the minutes stretched into a respectable part of an hour she began to fidget, kicking the leg of the chair with her heel. Eventually she rose to wander round the room, examining the few objects left lying about for her to see. Morgan was giving nothing away; her room was remarkably free of anything personal by which her nature could be read. The pickings were poor; Brynna ended up standing by the window, one of her hands clutching childishly at her thin wrist behind her back. The window faced west. Unbidden, Keda’s question of only a few days ago returned to whisper in her mind.
What do you see?
This time, it was different. Perhaps it was just the change of perspective, but it was not Miranei which rose to haunt her so much as its dead queen, herself once a novice here in Castle Bresse.
Her mother’s voice, the flushed cheeks of excitement. They will not forget this. The crown of Miranei, trembling above Anghara’s head. They saw the crown upon your head. It looked as though it belonged there. They will not forget this, Anghara. When you can come back to Miranei, I will call you.
But she couldn’t call. She was gone. And her daughter was Anghara no longer; she was plain Brynna Kelen, coming to Bresse from the hand of Chella of Cascin…
“She does not have to beckon from the battlements to call you home,” said a voice at Brynna’s elbow, answering the flow of the girl’s thoughts. Brynna’s eyes snapped up to meet Lady Morgan’s serene smile.
“How did you…” she blurted, shock wiping all the proprieties she had ever known from her mind. This easy mind-reading was not something even Feor had done.
“That,” said Morgan, “is just one of the things we will teach you at Bresse. But first of all, we must see what you already know. Come, sit. Let’s talk.”
At first they avoided any mention of the Cerdiad festival at Cascin. Morgan explored the little things, the triggers Feor had taught Brynna to use in order to touch her gift, the manifestations he had tried to teach her to control. Morgan muttered once or twice, with a twinge of impatience, that there would be not a few things that Brynna would have to unlearn; but on the whole she seemed satisfied with her new pupil. In the end, inevitably, they came to it as Brynna had known they must—the night when the carefully cultivated control had shattered and power had flooded from her like spilled wine.
It took one mention of Ansen’s name, and Brynna closed up like a bruised flower. Morgan, perhaps surprisingly, had not expected a wound this deep; it would have to be healed before it could be explored. The most dangerous of Brynna’s gifts would have to be left until last, until the girl had learned enough of the art to forgive herself for what she thought she had done. With a sigh, Morgan left it there.
“We will start from the beginning,” she announced instead.
Brynna looked up in something like dismay. “Then is nothing that Feor taught me right?”
“I did not say that,” Morgan said. “But if Bresse is to have a hand in you, then it is our disciplines you must learn. And you may as well start afresh. What you already know might make it easier for you—or harder, I don’t know. We’ll have to see.” She paused, looking down onto her hands, folded gracefully in her lap. “What is Sight?”
Outflanked, Brynna blinked in consternation. “Lady?”
“You have seen it, you have experienced it. Now tell me, what is Sight?”
Brynna tried; but there were no words. Sight was the banked glow that told her what Feor was, that told Feor what she was, within moments of setting eyes on one another. Sight was her mother’s healing touch when Anghara had grizzled over some childhood megrim. Sight was Rima’s true dreams; it hid in the way Brynna could tel
l truth from lie, could force truth by no more than a glance from one determined to slide by on a falsehood. Sight was within a thousand small things, all around her. Familiar; completely unknown. She stammered, mumbled, finally swallowed hard and came to a grinding halt, certain she had failed an important test.
To her surprise, Morgan only smiled.
“No worse than some of the Sisters could offer,” she said unexpectedly, her expression almost wicked. “Sight,” she carried on in a voice quite changed, sliding almost imperceptibly from the glimpse into the girl she must once have been into the dignified teacher and mistress of her own small domain, “is all around us. They called it that because it was first recognized as something they called Second Sight, when village spaewives predicted next week’s weather or the way a marriage would turn out. But we have grown far beyond that. There were things done with you, which were done with Sight no village spaewife would recognize.”
“What things?” said Brynna, latching onto the specifics where they had to do with herself. “Like magic?”
“Not magic,” said Morgan. “Power. Power ordinary women have learned to reach out and take from the well where it abides. Or, rather, power for which they have learned to allow themselves to become vessels. Those of us born with Sight are no different from any other human being—except there is a knowledge and ability within us to sense and control something to which ordinary people are blind. Your first task at Bresse, therefore, is to learn to empty yourself before you can reach for the power.”
The Hidden Queen Page 13