The Hidden Queen

by Alma Alexander

  “I know, ai’Farra,” Anghara said. “But we are not at the oracle now. Let me perform the sacrifice.”

  In a moment of unguarded astonishment, ai’Farra’s eyebrows actually rose, and even ai’Jihaar looked blank for a moment.

  “I took nothing the desert did not give me,” said Anghara into the silence. “I am an’sen’thar, ai’Farra, just as much as you, by your own word. Let me make the sacrifice.”

  Without taking her eyes from Anghara’s face, ai’Farra stepped aside mutely and motioned Anghara to take her place, pausing only to sheath her dagger. The chicken sat quiescent on the slab of red rock that served as their altar. Anghara laid her own dagger, the one that had once been ai’Jihaar’s, beside it and raised her voice into the salih’al’dayan invocation she had first heard one night at the edge of the Stone Desert, where an oracle had just died. And now, here, they were giving thanks for another, newly born.

  There was no blood on Anghara’s sleeves as she laid the chicken’s lifeless body down on the altar, the sacrifice done. But, seeing through a shimmering haze of power and a god-presence almost thick enough for the Gods’ faces to manifest in the air between them, ai’Farra stared in silence at the tear tracks sparkling on Anghara’s cheeks. Once before, on the roof of the temple in Al’haria, Anghara had wept at the moment of sacrifice…

  As though sensing these thoughts, Anghara looked around to meet her eyes.

  This is the way it has always been done, ai’Farra said, more to reiterate this to herself than to tell anyone else, but Anghara picked up the stray thought from the surface of the other’s mind and replied in kind. It was the first time the two had come into this close a contact.

  I would not take the gold for death, she said, and the tears still sparkling in the gray eyes held ai’Farra almost hypnotized, and yet death is all that it means…or does it? I weep for every life spilled for the Gods to feed on. There are other ways, ai’Farra. There are other ways of reaching for them.

  Are there, Anghara? For our Gods?

  I do not yet understand completely, but I will. And once already I have made one of your Gods a different kind of sacrifice.

  Twice before. First there was al’Jezraal’s sister, whom you snatched from al’Khur…I still do not know how. You gave something instead for her, and we still do not know what bargain you made there. And then there was the silk-seeker I tried to have you slay in the Confirmation Service. Twice; and both times the Gods came for you. But for us, Anghara…for us, there may be no other way of touching the Gods whom we revere. Blood has been the bridge between us for too many ages.

  Anghara’s eyes were silver, luminous. One day, there will be other bridges, she said, gazing up at the cliffs towering above their heads. Lost amongst those crags somewhere was the Stone of Gul Khaima. They are already being made. The first prophecy of Gul Khaima was made without a blood price.

  “But there was a blood price,” said ai’Farra, very softly, out loud; her eyes came to rest on the bloody altar stone.

  “But only because you chose to pay it,” said Anghara. “It was not demanded. The first prophecy of the oracle we have raised was given freely.”

  “Yes,” said ai’Farra, smiling cryptically, looking at her again. “Freely. To you. The only one amongst us who does not offer blood as a price for knowledge, and for power.”

  Things had moved so fast Anghara really had little chance to think through the enigmatic phrases ai’Raisa had uttered earlier. Not being able to refute this statement—the words had indeed been offered to her directly—Anghara turned away. The village gray had already removed herself and the remains of the sacrificed chicken from the scene of the rite; ai’Jihaar stood waiting a little distance away. Anghara’s eyes softened as she looked at her teacher and friend; all of a sudden ai’Jihaar looked almost impossibly frail.

  “Take her back,” Anghara said to ai’Farra. “She needs to rest.”

  “And you?” said ai’Farra, something sharp and almost motherly in her own voice. “Of all of us, you…”

  “Probably did the least,” smiled Anghara, “aside from talking al’Tamar into the midnight excursion and finding the stone…and then standing around and telling everyone else what to do. I’ll be all right, ai’Farra. I just…need to be by myself for a while.”

  For another long moment ai’Farra looked at her and then, unexpectedly, bowed deeply before she turned away. Anghara saw her lay a light hand on ai’Jihaar’s elbow and heard the murmur of soft conversation, too far away to make out. Then the two women, gold robes glimmering amongst the reddish rock, walked away.

  Anghara waited until they were well out of sight and then left the place of sacrifice, wandering aimlessly toward the ocean. The shore, with its upturned fishing boats, was once again deserted when Anghara came to the water—except for a few children scrambling in the surf who, once they had seen her, seemed to vanish almost before her eyes. If she had been asked, she would have said they had quietly dissolved into the foam which had up until a moment ago been washing their feet. But they went, and Anghara found herself alone. She walked slowly along the shore, turning her back on the Gate and the village, and the spire of rock her hand had hallowed. Her thoughts were strangely vague; her senses, as though to compensate, almost preternaturally sharp. She watched the way the bubbles of white foam caressed her ankles as she stood shin-deep in the water, aware of every individual lacy sphere. Twice she bent over the ruined beauty of a shattered shell, whose broken carapace seemed to have been wrecked simply so that she could see the intricate convolutions which had lain hidden within. And then she saw the jellyfish.

  It was almost dead, tossed by the ocean to the edge of the water line where the sand had just enough traction to hold on to it against the water’s occasional attempt to reclaim it. Beached, dying, out of its element, it still retained an iridescent beauty—the sun caressed the slowly deflating bubble that was its body and coaxed coruscating rainbows which shimmered like jewels. Ordinarily it would have been just another casualty of the indifferent cruelty of the ocean—but Anghara’s senses were not her own. The rainbows glittered and sparkled before her eyes, filling them with radiance, making her dizzy to the extent that she had to sit down suddenly before she collapsed. And still she could not take her eyes off the jellyfish. The colors ran together and spiraled into endlessly changing patterns—then everything flashed up into a brilliant white light, and beyond that there were shadows…shadows playing on a stone wall…firelight…cool mountain air…

  It took a moment before Anghara recognized her, but the last time she had seen this girl she’d been a veiled bride, and then, later, there had been the vision of Sif’s hands over the child-queen’s in the bedchamber. It was only now that Anghara saw the face of Sif’s queen.

  Senena sat on the wide hearth, hunched by the fireside, prodding the flames desultorily with an iron poker. Everything about her was still childish—her body was hardly formed, her breasts still small and high, her waist a handspan. At that moment, drooping by the fire, wearing nothing but a loose shift and with her wheaten hair unbound over her shoulders, she looked as if she still belonged in the nursery. But a marriage ring glinted on her finger as if in mockery, and her eyes were older, much older, than any nursery child’s.

  She was not alone; another girl sat with her, older, more decorously garbed. But even though the latter’s hair was gathered and held back by a pearl-studded net it was unquestionably the same golden shade as Senena’s and there was something about their faces that instantly proclaimed them sisters. Lliant was Senena’s elder by less than two years, wed just before Sif had come to carry Senena off; neither ever forgot for long that he might well have taken Lliant, if she had been free. For a while Lliant had been jealous of her sister’s fortune—she, Lliant, the elder, was a mere knight’s wife, where her sister was a crowned queen—but it had not taken long for envy to disappear. The reason was simple—Lliant had found contentment in her marriage. It was patently obvious Senena had not
. Lliant’s initial envy soon metamorphosed into sympathy, and then pity, for Sif was not easy on his queen. He had picked her because of her pedigree, and her youth—she could be expected to provide a sturdy heir, of good lineage, and she had been young enough to have been no man’s before him. Love had nothing to do with his choice. He was fond of her, but in an impersonal sort of way; he tended to treat her a little like a favorite niece most of the time. But there was always the night—night, when she ceased to be anything but a vessel for his seed. He wanted a son; the impatience burned in him, and reached out through him to burn her—the king did not see the terrified child’s eyes on the body which lay waiting for him in his bed every night. Passion was Sif’s nature, and he brought it to everything he did, but he could not take the time to teach it to this naive young girl. As a result, it was inevitable that Senena came to look on passion as violence. And the idea of a child born of this violence sickened her to the core—it was as though Sif was tearing her very insides from her. Nothing was her own any more.

  And there would be a child. She had known for almost a fortnight, and had not had the courage to tell Sif. Nobody knew, except a wise woman of her chamber. And now, because it was tearing her apart to know and not tell anyone else, she had summoned her sister to her chambers one night when she knew Sif would not be there.

  Lliant sat clutching the arms of the chair in which she sat, staring at her sister’s white, pinched face.

  “He does not know? You are with child and you have not told your husband?”

  “What will he do, Lliant?” Senena asked, and her voice was very small. “What will he do when I do tell him?”

  She was asking for reassurance, but there was none to offer here.

  “He has a right to know, Senena,” said Lliant, gently but firmly. “Avanna! You carry the heir to Roisinan!”

  “He will take it away from me as soon as it is born,” said Senena dully, poking the fire. “I am not the kind he would allow to rear his son. The minute he is born he will be taken from me. Even that I will not have.”

  Lliant slid from her chair and knelt on the floor beside Senena, taking a cold little hand into both her own. “Senena, Senena, you cannot know that. And perhaps…perhaps it will be a daughter…”

  “Yes…maybe I will have a daughter,” Senena allowed dubiously. Her eyes sparkled with tears. “But then…it would all start again…” Her eyes were unfocused, staring somewhere past the flames in the hearth. “He is kind…sometimes,” she whispered. “But most times I do not exist for him, I am a gnat who annoys him and gets in his way; he comes to me at night, he takes his pleasure, and if he bids me a gentle goodnight then that is truly a good night. I do not think he has talked to me—truly talked to me—since the first night he bedded me, and even that was only to explain to me he needed a son. After that, all that was important was the begetting of him.” Her breath broke into a sob, and she snatched her hand from Lliant’s and buried her face in her palms. “Oh, Lliant! You do not know how lucky you are! Nobody has loved me…since I left Father’s house…and my husband has me smile while I am sitting on my throne beside him, so nobody will see I am unhappy. And he will never understand—what do I have to be unhappy about? I am queen, I wear jewels and silks like no other woman in the land, and all I need to do for all this is give him a dynasty.”

  “He is a king, Senena,” said Lliant, and it was hard to know if she meant it as a rebuke or a lofty explanation of Sif’s behavior to a child incapable of understanding otherwise. Or perhaps neither—simply a bleak statement of fact. Senena shuddered, lifting her head and wrapping her arms around her still flat belly. Lliant recoiled at the pale, implacable flame in her younger sister’s eyes.

  “He is a man, and then he is king,” Senena said. “I carry his seed—son and prince, perhaps, if the Gods have willed it; Sif has commanded it, and so it came to pass. But if he can lay claim to this babe’s body and blood, I swear to you, Lliant, I shall never let Sif have his heart, or his soul. That much of my son I will keep. Enough of him I will keep to be able one day to tell the king he is my son, not his—and it will be true. It will be my dynasty that rules Roisinan; Sif’s blood, but my heart. And I will not let Sif die before he knows this—knows that he has failed.”

  She moved her hand, and the wedding ring sent a lance of firelight into Anghara’s eyes. Anghara blinked, and was instantly back on the shore of a strange ocean, sitting beside the dying jellyfish. The thing was dull now, fading fast; the vision died with it.

  A line of ai’Raisa’s verse came back to her: Beneath an ancient crown the unborn die. The unborn. The unborn in Senena’s womb? Die? How?

  And how did the rest go? Something about a bleeding land…Reaching from the dark, the bleeding land waits…and then, a line or two later, In fires lit long ago the blameless burn…That was Roisinan, surely. A Roisinan which called to her. A friend and a foe—indeed, more than one—might well be waiting for her on her return, as another line went, but the rest of it was hopelessly cryptic. Whose was the broken spirit spoken of, and what was the secret? And what was the prey that would snare the hunter? One hopeful interpretation, fueled, perhaps by the very last line, would be that Roisinan’s Sighted would regain what they had lost and, somehow, take their revenge against Sif. But then, there was the line about giving love to him who hated…

  A soft step sounded behind her, and Anghara spoke without turning her head. “I think it is time I went home,” she said quietly but steadily.

  The old an’sen’thar’s voice bore a world of sorrows, but also pride, knowledge and understanding. “Yes,” she said. “I know.”

  24

  Perhaps the Kheldrini were all endowed with more gifts than they knew, or maybe it was just a combination of sharp intelligence with the proverbial ability of the desert nomads to glean news from the whispering of the sand at twilight, but Anghara’s decision to leave was no sooner made there on the shore than almost the entire village seemed to be aware of it. Although al’Tamar was not there when Anghara and ai’Jihaar returned, al’Jezraal met them on the beach with an offer of sturdy ki’thar’en and supplies, as well as an escort as large as Anghara wanted and the promise of a safe sea passage once in Sa’alah. With both her customary stubbornness and a blunt affection she had no other way of expressing, ai’Farra said she would attend to the necessary ceremonies to ask the Gods to look kindly on Anghara’s journey. And when her eye locked with Anghara’s, it held a wry amusement of which Anghara would hardly have believed her capable.

  When al’Tamar returned, toward sunset, he sought out Anghara where she sat outside the village sen’thar’s house with ai’Jihaar; it seemed that he alone had not had the news, or, at the very least, he made no reference to Anghara’s leaving.

  “I have a present for you,” he said instead, cradling a package. The outer wrapping looked suspiciously like his own burnoose. “Have you ever seen raw sea amber?”

  Anghara shook her head, and al’Tamar emptied the burnoose onto her lap. Six or seven large, creamy yellow globes tumbled out, gleaming dully and ai’Jihaar reached out to draw the tip of a sensitive finger along one.

  “These are deep sea,” she said, and her voice had the edge of accusation on it. “What have you been doing, al’Tamar?”

  “Deep sea?” asked Anghara, staring down into her lap with fascination. She lifted one globe; it was oval, smooth, and very heavy. “Are there other kinds?”

  “There is the kind that washes onto the shoreline,” said ai’Jihaar, a little grimly, “but those are smaller, rougher, often irregularly shaped. These, they had to be dived for—and diving for sea amber is not the kind of prank untutored boys who have not seen the sea for years should be attempting.”

  Anghara looked up. The silvery-blue soul fire was kindled, the aura bristling defensively; al’Tamar was guilty as charged. More; he knew of her leaving. He must have known even before she did. When he heard ai’Raisa speak the oracle’s words, he had known at once. And the knowledge w
as there in his eyes.

  “Thank you,” she said simply.

  “If you bring them back to Al’haria,” he said, “I can make them into a say’yin for you.”

  “You?” asked Anghara in surprise. “You know how?”

  “My uncle is generous with free time, and my duties are often light,” al’Tamar said. “I learn that which is offered. Yes, I know how.”

  Anghara gathered the amber into a fold of her robe. “I would treasure such a say’yin,” she said.

  “Making a say’yin takes time,” said ai’Jihaar laconically. “How long did you mean to stay at Al’haria, then?”

  Anghara bit her lip, closing her hand over the amber. Now that the decision to go had been made, it burned in her like a slow fire. “I meant to pass through, because it lies in my way,” she said. “I had no wish to linger…”

  But ai’Jihaar suddenly seemed to regret her sharpness. She reached out to cover Anghara’s hand with her own. “There is time still, child. You are not yet seventeen…”

  “Sif was only three years older when he took Miranei,” said Anghara after a pause, with an edge of defiance.

  “And he was a trained warrior,” said ai’Jihaar, “a knight in all but name.”

  Anghara laughed, lifting her arms to show off the gold robe she wore. “And so am I,” she said, her voice silky. “Perhaps not quite a knight, but thanks to you, I am also trained. I am not one of those poor Sighted wretches in the villages who have nothing to raise against him. I am Sighted, I am an’sen’thar, I am queen by right of blood.”

  “Using your gifts as a weapon…”

  “I would not, and you know it. But it is time I returned, ai’Jihaar. It is past time,” Anghara said, more gently. “And time…I do not have.” She glanced up at al’Tamar, and then stood and pressed the handful of amber back into his hand. “Guard them for me; make the say’yin. One day, sen’en dayr, I will be back to claim it.”