The Hidden Queen

by Alma Alexander

“Bar the doors,” said Sif in a voice made all the more terrifying by the very softness with which it unleashed catastrophe, “and put this place to the torch.”

  He strode out without looking back.

  He had half expected cries to follow him, entreaties for mercy, for clemency, for pity. There was silence. Pleas might have swayed him, even then, in his extremity; but nothing came. Out on the cobbles of the inner yard, he paused, glancing over his shoulder, his face a rictus which was hard to read—his teeth bared in what might just as easily have been a feral smile as a snarl. One of his men ran past with a sketchy obeisance in his direction, arms full of kindling. Suddenly sick at heart, Sif turned away; but it was only a moment’s weakness. He thought of Rima, and of his mother. Of the lives that could have been. Human. He was human. The witches had done enough. The man who was king, mounting his restive horse in the yard of the castle he had condemned, closed his heart; his eyes as he turned the beast’s head toward the gate were bleak, but hard. The decision had been made, and he would stand by it. Something changed in him in that instant, and the man he might have been was lost in the wind. He fully realized that what he did now at Bresse would haunt his reign until the day he died—and could not bring himself to care, if he could but achieve his goal of clearing Roisinan of the treacherous witchcraft which tainted his land’s blood.

  And yet…the first wisp of smoke came drifting out of the doorway of the white tower as Sif was riding away. There were no regrets in his mind, but his faithless body would never forget the acrid smell of the black fumes which curled around him to sting his nostrils and hang before his face like a curse.

  Away on a hillside above the river a girl sank to her knees with a cry, the hood of her travelling cloak slipping back to reveal hair almost the precise shade of the man who had just passed the death sentence on Bresse. He could not hear them, but the voices of the women dying in the flames echoed in her mind, their death, however freely chosen it had been, a bitter reproach. It was darkness, something that descended on her and wrapped her like a skin; a sadness, a yearning, something that would always be a part of her. She lay as though lifeless on the ground, her eyes open but un-seeing, her mind filled with the vision of the black smoke and the white tower crumbling, writhing, falling within it. Dying. Dying.

  Feor felt it, deep in his fever, and called out incoherently, struggling to rise, his cheeks wet with tears. Along the length and breadth of Roisinan women with Sight crumbled into a black swoon. Some keened the death of sisters they had never met, tearing their hair and pouring ashes over their heads; others stood in silence, gazing unerringly in the direction in which Bresse lay from their own threshold, with welling eyes and tears which carved their passage down salt-stiff cheeks. They did not know yet of Sif’s decree, and what it would mean to them. Instead they mourned the passing of something powerful and precious which would probably never come again in their lifetime.

  Ansen, pale with the toll that his guilt at not running to Cascin’s succour had exacted, had the misfortune to be waiting for Sif in the han when the king returned from Bresse. Sif’s black mood upon his return could perhaps have been predicted, but Ansen had no way of doing so—as far as he knew Anghara was still at Bresse, and already captive. Not gifted with Sight, he had not felt Bresse’s dying; he waited for Sif, torn between anxiety and excitement, ready to present himself as the man who had led the king to his quarry. He was a little nonplussed to see Sif riding in alone, unaccompanied by Anghara, but he had not paid much attention to the grimness on Sif’s face, believing it to be merely the result of a distasteful campaign. He could not know, when he came to kneel before Sif and announce he was Ansen of Cascin, that Cascin was a name which could be counted on to prod the barely cool embers of Sif’s passion and fury back into leaping flames.

  Ansen had missed all the signals, but he could not fail to read the message written in Sif’s eyes as the king looked down on the kneeling young lord at his feet. Far from the friendliness and joy Ansen had expected, Sif’s cold gaze seemed to convey nothing but an ominous distance and cold loathing.

  Sif never spoke a single word directly to Ansen. After that first baleful look, the king’s eyes focused somewhere beyond Ansen’s shoulder and he swung his cloak aside, almost as if he did not wish it to touch Ansen as he passed him by. “Confine him,” was all he said, over his shoulder, to one of the captains who walked behind him.

  “My lord…” Ansen called, aghast, as two brawny soldiers laid hands on him and hauled him upright. But he spoke to the king’s retreating back. The captain gazed at Ansen with something resembling pity.

  “You picked the wrong moment, lad,” he said, in a voice that was almost friendly. “What possessed you to accost him now, of all times? And just how in the world did you get past the wretched guard anyway? I’ll have to have a word with the officer in charge before the king thinks of that. Come on, me lad. With a bit of luck, my lord will have forgotten that you…” But then his eyes clouded suddenly, and he lapsed into silence. To Ansen, this was even more ominous. His earnest request for information went unheeded. The captain marched in silence beside the two men who half-led, half-dragged Ansen between them toward a room with a stout wooden door and sturdy iron lock. Then he simply turned abruptly away to walk off in another direction with his head bowed in what seemed to be troubled thought. Cascin’s heir was thrust, none too gently, into the room and the door locked behind him. There was a window, but he discovered, when he crossed to it almost automatically in what might have been an instinctive urge to escape, that its wooden winter shutters were firmly locked and barred. He was a prisoner.

  The injustice burned him all the more because he knew Sif was a matter of a few rooms away, all the while unaware, perhaps, of the truth of things. All right, so it had gone badly; but surely he could not blame Ansen for that? It looked as though they hadn’t found Anghara, somehow she had managed to get away. But if it hadn’t been for Ansen, Sif wouldn’t have known where to look for his vanished half-sister in the first place. Surely, once he’d had a chance to cool down and think about it, he would send someone for Ansen, to talk to him, perhaps to ask him if he had any idea where she might have gone. Ansen sat bolt upright in the room’s only chair for hours, clutching its arms, waiting for the sound of approaching footsteps—someone coming, at the king’s command, to set him free.

  No one came.

  Sleep eventually overcame him and he slept where he sat, slumped uncomfortably in the rigid-backed chair, his hands slipping off its rough arms to dangle limply just above the rush-strewn floor.

  It was, in the end, the sound of the key in the lock which roused Ansen. The cold light of early morning was seeping through the closed shutters, and at last somebody was at the door which stood between him and Sif’s approbation. They had come for him. Ansen still believed with unshakeable faith that Sif had sent for him at last. He straightened his aching back with a soft groan, rubbing life back into his stiff shoulders; his muscles were tight and strained, his clothes rumpled, and, he thought as he rubbed a hand ruefully over his chin, it seemed as though he needed a shave. They simply had to let him have a few moments to make himself presentable for the king, he could hardly be expected to go into Sif’s presence looking as he did.

  “By your leave,” he began, even as the door began opening, wincing as he stood on a foot where a fierce tingling was only now beginning to restore life to a limb numbed by a night’s uncomfortable sleep, “I would appreciate a few moments to make myself a little more…”

  The captain in the doorway, the same one who had escorted him here the previous night, stood watching him in silence, and the pity in his eyes stilled Ansen’s words. Ansen swallowed convulsively.

  “What is the king’s will?” he managed to ask at last, through a throat tight with incipient panic.

  “Eh, lad,” said the captain, his voice oddly gentle. “Many died yesterday at his order. He was inured to death.” He shook his head. “It was an ill fate that sent you
to him yesterday, lad. I am sorry.”

  “What…what did he…”

  “We leave for Miranei in a few hours,” said the captain, his voice changing to the official tone, brisk and abrupt.

  “We leave…” echoed Ansen, color flooding into his face at this restoration of hope.

  The captain shook his head. “Nay, not you, lad. You’ll be staying behind. You’ll not be leaving this place again.”

  The color, quickly risen into Ansen’s cheeks, fled just as quickly, leaving him white with shock. He was only just beginning to understand the depths of his folly. Swaying, he reached out behind him blindly and sagged very slowly back into his chair.

  “You’re to be hanged this morning,” said the captain abruptly. He was all soldier now; his eyes veiled. Not for him to question his master’s word. “Come with me.”

  “But…but…now? Right now?”

  The captain nodded.

  Ansen fought the urge to howl like a child. Inured to death…what had Sif been doing up at Castle Bresse? Just what had Ansen unleashed?

  “Do you want a moment?” asked the captain, after a pause. The pity was back in his face. His thoughts were mirrored in his eyes. He’s so young…it’s too cruel to tell a man he’s to die just as he wakes from a night’s sleep…and this one…he’s just a boy…what could he have done that Sif destroys him this easily?

  Ansen could only nod, mute. The captain withdrew, shutting the door behind him. Ansen heard the lock snick home.

  When they led him out, he walked with his back straight and his head held high, but his face was that of a boy being punished for a misdeed of which he has no knowledge. He raked the han anxiously with his good eye, hoping to see Sif somewhere, that the king’s presence would lend dignity and pride to at least his death if not his life—but even this was denied him. The only witnesses, it seemed, were a kitchen maid who watched him pass with her eyes suddenly brimming with tears and the few soldiers who were the execution detail. They did not ask if he had a last request. He died early that morning, in silence—it seemed, in vain—just as the sun was beginning to pour itself upon the waters of the nearby river.

  Perhaps the burden would have been lighter if he had known that Sif had indeed watched him walk to the tree, from one of whose sturdy branches they had hung the rope. Watched him walk every one of his last steps, and watched him raise his face to the sky only just beginning to be gilded by dawn.

  “What was he, lord?” one of his captains asked as Sif turned away from the window.

  “Nothing,” he said abruptly.

  Nothing, and yet everything. This was the death that paid for all the other deaths, the throttling of the snake which had poured the first poison. It was Ansen of Cascin who had set Sif on this path—his feet were now too firmly on it for him to turn back. But Ansen’s death was almost an act of expiation for what he had done. It did not work—entirely. Sif would always be haunted by his actions at Bresse; Morgan had been right when she said the Sisters could not grant absolution. But Ansen was, in a strange way, a personification of the guilt Sif would never acknowledge again—would never think of without adding, silently, I did what had to be done. Killing Ansen was killing the guilt. What Sif felt when his eyes slid away from Ansen’s dead body dangling from its tree was not the burden of another death upon his conscience, but a sense of peace.

  The king’s men rode away within the hour. The han was quiet for a brief while, and then life returned, like water pouring through a breached dyke. The gossip eddied in the common room, batted from one man to the next, wild stories growing wilder with every retelling; the king’s visit soon assumed the status of a legend from another time. Now and then someone would glance outside where the body of the strange one-eyed young man had been taken down that morning, or fall silent remembering briefly the smoldering remains of Castle Bresse. But already the whole thing was almost a dream; when a slightly built young girl with dark circles under her gray eyes passed through like a shadow, most people paid her no mind, and nobody thought of her as someone who had lived the horrors and bore its tracks. She passed by, and was gone, into oblivion. Country life shook itself free of tragedy like a wet dog shedding water, and took up where it had left off.

  Feor recovered slowly from his fever; when he felt strong enough to rise from his bed he made the short journey to where Castle Bresse had stood. It was almost enough to kill him. Not the journey itself—he weathered that well, with the miller’s youngest son and a placid gray donkey along to help. But the blackened ruin that was Bresse was imbued with such a potent power that Feor came close to succumbing. Only the vivid life force of the boy and the tranquil living warmth of the donkey against which he leaned prevented him from accepting freely the death which hung around the Castle. For those who could hear, Morgan had left a message no edict of Sif’s could ever erase: We died here, the Sisterhood of Bresse, for the sin of Sight.

  “Are you all right, Master?” the miller’s boy asked him with a careful, self-effacing wariness; there was something profoundly unnerving about this old man.

  The youthful voice, waking echoes of other young voices which had crowded his schoolrooms over the years, made Feor draw back from the brink. He opened his eyes and managed to smile at the boy. “I will be,” he said. “Will you take the donkey and wait for me, there in those trees? I need to be alone for a moment.”

  The boy did as he was told, with considerable alacrity.

  Feor cast his mind into Sight, groping for trace of Anghara. If she had died here…but there was nothing of her, nothing except…very soft…beneath the words of Morgan’s epitaph…We died here, the Sisterhood of Bresse, for the sin of Sight…The young queen lives.

  The young queen lives.

  Hope woke in Feor’s breast. Perhaps March had managed a miracle and Anghara was safe somewhere, in hiding again, waiting.

  He hobbled back down the hillside to where he had sent the boy; he found him pale and shivering outside the trees, keeping the body of the donkey between himself and the copse.

  “What is it?” asked Feor, disturbed by the boy’s face.

  “There’s a dead man in there,” the miller’s son said.

  “Wait here,” Feor said, picking up the skirts of his robe and turning to enter the copse. The thorns of a black premonition had already begun to prick the bright bloom of his hope.

  The body was several days dead, buried cursorily under a shallow layer of soil beneath one of the trees. A hand en crusted with the black scab of dried blood had slipped free of concealment, with a strange pale band around one finger where a ring might once have lain. Feor knew the vanished ring: a signet bestowed by a queen of Roisinan on a faithful knight. Anghara might have escaped, but March was not with her. She was alive, but she was alone.

  “Ask your father to have someone bury him decently,” Feor said quietly to the boy when he came out of the copse. “He was a brave man.”

  He left the village that very day. The owner of the boat he took down the Rada toward Halas Han could have told him of a quiet girl who had asked for passage down-river only days before, a girl whom he had been obliged to point to another southbound boat leaving sooner than his own. But Feor did not ask, and the boatman had long ceased to give the solitary girl a second thought.

  The first rumor that Cascin might have been razed to the ground reached Feor as he disembarked on the pier at Halas Han. It was immediately contradicted by another, quite at odds with the first, and then he heard a third, differing from both. It was obvious people didn’t know what had happened at Cascin, and were loath to go and find out for fear of what they would discover. Someone recognized Feor as belonging to the Cascin household, and ventured to ask the truth of him. Feor told the questioner, rather more brusquely than he intended, that as far as he knew Cascin stood and lived as always; but the brusqueness was born of fear. He did not tarry at Halas Han, as he had planned, to rest bones which had suddenly grown old over the past week, but saddled his horse and rode at once
toward the manor.

  The house was ominously quiet as he approached it. Nothing stirred in the stables or the kitchen yard. The mansion itself was whole and unharmed, but it had an odd, derelict air, as though it had been abandoned for years.

  Feor dismounted and crossed to the kitchen door, giving it a desultory push he did not expect to yield much reward. To his surprise, the door gave, and he stepped inside. The kitchen was clean, but cold and empty, with no fire on the cooking hearth, no stirring of steaming pots or bustle in the scullery. His heart like lead, he passed through and into the house proper. It had the echoing air of a mausoleum. There was dust on the usually gleaming wooden banisters. A striped cat usually confined to the kitchens darted warily across the hall into the dining chamber and seemed to be the only life stirring in this place.

  “Sif,” murmured Feor through bloodless lips, “Sif, what have you done?”

  He turned on his heel, suddenly acutely aware of his solitude and aching to get to his horse again, to try and track down, if they were still alive, the family who once laughed and loved and lived in this place.

  A tall youth wearing bright armor stood squarely in the arched doorway leading through to the kitchens, filling it with his presence, barring Feor’s way.

  His first stab of panic was replaced, almost instantly, by a rush of recognition and relief. Feor clutched at the banister of the main staircase for support, closing his eyes.

  “Kieran! By all the Gods, Kieran!”

  Kieran pushed back the cap of mail covering his head, releasing his familiar dark hair, and crossed the hall in two long strides to offer a strong arm in support. He noticed with some surprise that he was of a height, perhaps even marginally the taller, with Feor, whom he had always thought to be so tall. Feor clutched at his arm with long bony fingers which suddenly belonged on the hand of an old man.

  “I was never so grateful to see a face in my life,” said Feor. “Do you know what happened…”

  “They are fine. The family is fine,” Kieran hastened to reassure his old tutor, painfully aware of the naked need in a face which had always been so firmly controlled. “They fled when Sif’s soldiers came, but they are all right. Adamo says the soldiers came to burn the house; he isn’t sure what made them change their minds. They took the horses with them when they left, and killed most of the dogs. They aren’t likely to come back, but Lord Lyme doesn’t think it’s safe to return just yet, and I agree. Where Ansen is, I don’t know; nobody will speak of him.”