The Hidden Stars

by Madeline Howard

  “There is something wrong with the way the infant is placed; the midwives tried to shift it, but without success. A healer might have done it with magic; the Princess herself might have done this thing, at any other time; but you know that all of the healers on Thäerie and Leal, from the Princess on down to the youngest apprentice, are helpless and ill, many of them unable to rise from their beds. They may yet recover, just as you seem to be recovering, but it will be too late to help Nimenoë.”

  Sindérian brushed away tears with the back of her hand. “I heard someone say—one of the midwives—the Princess is under a curse.”

  “An aniffath, yes. There is a prophecy, which has come again and again to our seers: ‘Not by the will of any wizard of Leal, or by the hand of any warrior of Thäerie, shall the Dark Lady of Phaôrax be driven from her throne and her temple, but only by the power of one who comes of her own house and blood.’ The wording changes, but the meaning is always the same. It’s Ouriána’s plan to twist this prophecy to her own uses by crowning her son Guindeluc as her successor during her own lifetime. But she fears above all that a child or a grandchild of her sister will someday grow powerful enough to challenge and defeat her. And so, when Nimenoë and Eldori were wed, Ouriána cursed their union. That was before the old Queen, Prince Eldori’s kinswoman, died and her magic ring passed to the Princess,” Faolein explained. “Had Nimenoë been wearing the ivory ring at the time, the curse would never have touched her. As it was, the Princess was barren for many, many years. When she finally conceived, she thought, we all thought—we who knew of it—that the curse had been lifted. But we were wrong: Ouriána’s spell had merely assumed another shape. First it took Eldori, and now it is taking the Princess.”

  Sindérian drew in a long shaky breath. “But if it’s a spell, can’t you and the other Master Wizards banish it?”

  “We have tried. Again and again we have tried. You know that Ouriána claims divinity, that she calls herself a goddess. It’s not true, of course, but there is no denying that her spells are very, very strong. And the fact that she was carrying a child at the time made this particular spell…extraordinarily powerful.”

  Faolein put an arm around her shoulders, dropped a self-conscious kiss on the top of her head, where the dark hair parted. Thyssop, pennymint, and other bitter herbs, that was what she smelled of, reminding him of his own mother, a notable healer, dead these ninety years.

  He was not a demonstrative man, the wizard Faolein, being of a mild disposition and temperate in all things; he had suffered few pangs on parting with his daughter, had been so busy during her absence he had rarely remembered her existence. Yet she was his, the last of his children living, almost certainly the last that he would ever father, and the affection he felt for her, if sometimes awkwardly expressed, was deep and genuine.

  Most often, it took the form of a lesson, a lecture, for as he valued knowledge so highly himself, he truly believed it was the best thing he had to offer. He had a dim realization that she needed something more, something his other children had never seemed to lack, being blessed or afflicted with his same placid disposition, but he had lived too many years as he was to change now. He gave her what he could.

  “You know how dangerous it is to kill a wizard with magic. It can—it almost certainly will—have unforeseen consequences, unless done very carefully. But an aniffath is not like any other curse or spell. It is more…insidious. It can take years and years to work itself out, it may manifest in entirely unexpected ways, and it can even use natural means to achieve its purpose. Because of all this, and its complexity, a curse of this sort can be difficult to unravel. Three of us, most skilled in these matters, set out to unravel this one, to follow the threads of all the myriad possibilities down through the years, to untie all the knots. We thought that we had succeeded, but we were wrong.

  “We tried again tonight,” he added under his breath, “and again we failed.”

  “Will the baby die, too?” asked Sindérian, very low. Slipping off his lap, she sank down by the fire, hugging her knees to her chest, resting one cheek against the thick russet wool of her skirt.

  “It is possible. But the Princess has vowed that her child will be born alive. I’m inclined to believe her. Those on the threshold of death sometimes see the future with amazing clarity.”

  Abandoning his stool, he knelt on the hard earth floor beside her. Reminded of the herbs he carried in a pouch of tooled leather over his left hip, he worked the catch and extracted a handful of dried chamfrey. “There is also this to consider: Ouriána may not even know that the child exists. The Princess has lived in this isolated spot all of these months, concealing her name and rank from the village folk—”

  From the room above came a horrible keening, like an animal caught in a trap. Then hurried footsteps crashed across the floor, a babble of voices rose and fell and rose again. At length, there came the shrill but welcome cries of a newborn infant.

  In the brief silence that followed, the wizard and Sindérian listened breathlessly. Then one of the midwives spoke. “Lady, you have a daughter. She is perfectly formed: beautiful and strong.”

  “She must needs be strong,” answered the Princess, weakly. “Neither I nor her father will be there to protect her.”

  “She has powerful kinsmen; they will make it their business to protect her,” said Éireamhóine, in his deep, resonant voice, and there was a low murmur of assent.

  But even as the other wizard spoke, Faolein felt a shiver of apprehension pass through his entire body. For a timeless instant he hovered on the brink of some revelation, but the revelation eluded him, and the cold thrill passed.

  Tossing his handful of herbs into the fire, he peered into its glowing heart, searching for portents. The flames turned from gold to green, figures began to form and to move about: tiny men and women flickering into a brief, bright existence, along with their fiery miniature castles, and cities, and towns, then gone again with another motion of the flames. His eyes must be tired; he could not see any of them clearly enough to know who they were or to guess what they were doing.

  Faolein sat back on his heels, looked to his daughter to see her reaction. She had raised her head from her knees and was gazing intently at the changing colors of the fire. Knowing she had gifts in that direction as well, he asked her: “What do you see?”

  Her lips moved, but she spoke so softly, he had to lean closer before he could hear her. “A woman in a casket made of ice. An oak with the moon in her branches. What does it mean?”

  “It is your vision,” said Faolein. “Therefore, it is yours to interpret.” Yet again came that pulse of fear.

  And he knew, as he sometimes knew things without knowing how he knew them—with a clear sight that owed nothing to the fire, or the crystal, or to any other means of divination—that the destiny of the infant just born would not be here on Thäerie, and not on Leal, the isle of the wizards.

  It would be complicated, dangerous: more tangled than a curse.

  2

  At malanëos, the hour of utter darkness, the Princess died. From one moment to the next she simply stopped breathing; the white face on the pillow went utterly still.

  Yet the death of any great wizard before his or her time is no small event. It shatters the pattern of cause and effect, it alters the flow of time and sends shock after shock through the world of matter, subtly changing all things so they can never again be what they were before. The three wizards standing vigil at Nimenoë’s bedside felt her passing as a disturbance in the air, a voiceless wind that swept through the chamber, circled the room a dozen times, and then escaped through one of the arrow-slit windows. Over their heads, right under the rugged roof beams, a series of discordant notes split the air like a jangling of harp strings as Nimenoë’s bindings broke, one after the other.

  But other magicians, in far-distant places, experienced her death, too. In the High King’s great house at Pentheirie, the wizard Elidûc felt the marble floor buckling and
sliding beneath his feet, as if in an earthquake. At the Scholia on Leal, spells that warded the college fragmented in rainbow bursts of color, startling apprentices, journeymen, and Masters alike. In the underground realm of Nederhemlichreisch, a Dwarf alchemist watched the gold he had spent seven years transmuting change back into base metal; and in the groves of a fairy queen, far to the south, all the swallows and starlings she had raised to speak prophecy, as one bird gave a single heartrending shriek, then fell silent forever. Spaewives on Erios, runestone readers on Skyrra, astrologers in Nephuar and Mirizandi, half a world away, paused in the midst of their divinations, dazed, uncertain.

  In Apharos on Phaôrax, two priests of the Devouring Moon saw the sacred fire on their altar go out as they performed their abominable rites. A violent pulse of energy passed through the entire temple edifice, rattling the carven doors, causing hundreds of brass oil lamps to swing on their chains, but the foundations held. And in her palace across the city, the Empress Ouriána, self-proclaimed goddess, was shocked out of sleep and into the knowledge that her twin sister was dead. She rolled out of bed and sprang to her feet, sweating and shivering. She had not expected this; the aniffath was more than a decade old, and Nimenoë’s death had been no part of her intention.

  Moving lightly in her white silk bedgown, she stepped into a pool of wan moonlight, shook back her long, auburn hair, and sent her thoughts questing across the miles, searching for answers: Why and how? But everywhere there was chaos, confusion. Magic mirrors cracked, stone circles danced, enchanted sleepers woke momentarily, looked around them with bewildered eyes, then slid back into slumber.

  Running barefoot across cold tiles, Ouriána left her bedchamber, surprising the two sleepy guards keeping watch by her door when she erupted into the corridor. With a Word, she lit a dozen torches in ornate iron sconces along one wall; with another, she roused every slave and servant in the palace. They all came running: with wine, with embroidered slippers, with velvet robes and fur-lined mantles to stop her convulsive shivering. She scarcely noticed. Her mind still reeled with questions, and the answers were nowhere to be found.

  But in the tower of Cuirglaes, a thick cloak of silence enveloped the upstairs bedchamber, heavy with portent. Stationed at the foot of the high oak bedstead where the body of the Princess rested, Faolein waited. Beside him, Curóide waited, his fair broad face and his light blue eyes intent, watchful. To their left, Éireamhóine stood alert, anxious, listening. For this was the moment, as the soul takes flight, when inspiration descends on those who watch; when prophecies blossom in the mind like rare, brilliant flowers unfurling their petals and revelation strikes like lightning from a clear sky.

  Nothing happened. The thoughts of the three wizards remained dark, unenlightened. With a sigh and a small impatient gesture, Éireamhóine brought Faolein and Curóide back to the present. Making the sign of the Seven Fates over the body, he began to chant an eirias, a prayer to the Light, and the others joined in.

  While the wizards chanted, a pale wraith in an earth-colored gown crept into the room and stationed herself across from Éireamhóine. Bending to impress a final kiss on one colorless long-fingered hand, Sindérian dropped bitter tears on the clay-cold flesh, on the linen bedsheets.

  As the last mournful phrase trembled in the air, there rose, as if in counterpoint, a high, tuneless wailing from the motherless infant.

  “Sindérian,” said Faolein gently, “look to your foster sister. She has need of you.”

  The child nodded, scrubbed at her eyes with one rough woolen sleeve, and turned away from the bed. Crossing to the wicker basket where the swaddled infant lay whimpering, she bent down, lifted the baby in her thin, wiry arms, and cradled it competently against her narrow chest. Her father could not repress a faint smile at her obvious expertise.

  Éireamhóine’s voice spoke in his mind: The infant is in deadly danger. We must reset the wards around the tower. And even then—

  Together, the two Master Wizards wove a spell of binding and blinding; they cast a charm of silence, so that no word thought or spoken within those walls of stacked stone could be carried on the wind or travel the ley lines under the earth to be detected by their enemy.

  Éireamhóine knelt by the bed and took the Princess’s hand in his for the last time. A wide ivory band that she wore as a thumb-ring passed from her hand to his. He held it in his palm for a moment, then closed his fingers around the ring and rose to his feet. Leaving Rionnagh and the two midwives to wash and prepare the body for burial, the men slipped quietly out of the room and took the steep circular stone staircase down to the ground floor. Sindérian and the now peaceful infant followed close behind them.

  Once downstairs, Faolein threw open the door and stood on the threshold under the weathered lintel, scanning the heavens for portents. They were not long in coming. A comet streaked across the sky, trailing glory. To his wizard’s sight, the very firmament seemed to reel, planets and constellations invisible to ordinary eyes to dance madly. Nydra the dragon rose in the east, a red star shining in his forehead like a jewel; across the sky, Qwilidan the watchman passed over the western horizon, swinging his starry lantern. Thaga the bat, Brüac the badger spun in place, and the swan plucked at her breast until feathers flew across the sky and the heavens ran crimson with blood. If the signs had been ambiguous when Faolein looked for them before, they were dangerously obvious now.

  He heard a sharp intake of breath behind him, and half turned. Curóide had joined him at the door. Peering over Faolein’s shoulder, the younger wizard watched the giddy revolution of the stars. “It’s no wonder the Princess was so fatally weary. She must have deranged the whole course of nature to keep her secret all these months.”

  Faolein nodded, stepped back inside the room, and Éireamhóine took his place under the lintel. “A tremendous effort to conceal the truth from any astrologer able to read a message in the stars—how much greater an effort to deceive the woman who commands the Dragonstones, the Talir en Nydra.”

  He sat down again on the three-legged stool he had used earlier, rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “But what Ouriána did not know before, she surely knows now. Her sister has just given birth to a prodigy, a child of prophecy. Can anyone question what she will do next?”

  “There is no doubt at all,” said Éireamhóine, gazing into the night. “Even now, across the miles, Ouriána will be plotting the infant’s death.”

  A distant rumor of men and horses announced the coming of the High King. Éireamhóine’s message, sent arrowing through the night on wings of starlight to Elidûc at the palace, shortly after sunset, had alerted King Réodan to Nimenoë’s peril. Assembling a troop of trusted warriors to serve as his escort, he had traveled at great speed, changing horses often, and arrived at Cuirglaes much sooner than anyone expected to see him.

  Riding into the village on a damp predawn wind, Réodan and his men clattered up the street and dismounted outside the tower.

  The battered oak door flew open; Curóide appeared on the threshold, bowing low before the King. Réodan left orders for his men to walk and water the horses, then followed the wizard inside.

  He entered the building in a swirl of sky-blue cloak, a tall, vigorous man, though no longer young, broad-shouldered and tawny-haired. His gaze swept the room, taking in everything at once: the disordered furnishings and smoldering fire; the stumps of yellow candles, standing in pools of melted wax; a scattering of broken crusts and empty wine cups—all evidence of a long night’s vigil.

  One glance at the weary, grief-stricken faces of the three wizards, and Réodan’s first question was answered before he spoke it aloud. “She is gone, then?”

  Éireamhóine bowed his head.

  “And her child?”

  “A princess, Lord King,” said Faolein, indicating with a gesture the bench in the wall, where a sleepy Sindérian sat rocking the baby.

  Réodan crossed the floor with a jingling of spurs and the faint ching, ching of chain mail
against plate armor. There was not much of the infant to be seen: just a tiny wrinkled face and a fuzz of pale reddish hair, inside a nest of wool and linen and squirrel-skin blankets. But the light eyes blinked at him; the tiny mouth moved, soundlessly, and that was enough to reassure him.

  “I will take her back to Pentheirie with me,” he said heavily.

  He felt a sudden constriction in his throat; for a moment, his sight blurred. He was only just beginning to comprehend Nimenoë’s loss. They had been allies more than friends, distant cousins raised side by side but never playfellows—for even as a child her gifts had set her apart—yet for as long as he could remember he had relied on her strength. It was, he realized now, the rock on which his own granite determination and stubborn will had been built. And had it never occurred to him—not once, in all his long years—that the woman who had remained beautiful, vital, ageless, while streaks of silver appeared in his own hair and beard, and his eyesight dimmed, could possibly die before him, could leave him as he was now, so terribly and shockingly bereft?

  “The daughter of the woman who warded this island for so many years, who fought our battles against the Dark, deserves all that we have to give,” said Réodan, turning abruptly to face the other men. “She will live in the Great House with me, share the same nurses and tutors as my own grandchildren.”

  There was a faint stir of protest from the wizards. “But can you keep her safe?” asked Faolein. “Among the hundreds who live at the palace, the hundreds more who visit there every day, it would take but one traitor, one act of betrayal, to endanger her life.”

  For a moment, indignation flared in Réodan’s heavy-lidded hazel eyes. Stripping off his soft leather gloves and thrusting them into his belt, his hard swordsman’s hands clenched and unclenched. “What would you have me do? If she will not be safe in my house, then where can she be safe at all?”