The Hidden Icon

by Jillian Kuhlmann

  His response seemed vague, as though he answered more questions than the one I had posed, that though he didn’t test me, others would. My next gesture was every bit in answer to his challenge, whether he meant it as a challenge or not. I brought a battering weight against him, all the force of my will that was not required to walk, to breath, to bid my heart to beat. I could feel him buckle against me slightly, our minds meeting like carpenter’s mallet and raw wood. The shock of it caused me to pull away immediately, and I flinched as though physically struck.

  Again.

  My lips parted in surprise, the tang of the cavern air sharp on my tongue. This time, without prompting, I used the scene he had given me when first we’d explored my own talents, and I was standing at a mountain’s snowy peak, ankle deep in his resistance. In the valley below were all his little houses of secrets. It was night, their windows glowing and winking with what could be mine, if I wanted it badly enough. I would sit by the warmth of those fires, I would carry forth a lantern to wherever I wished.

  I came tumbling down the mountain, gathering stones to me as I went, faster and heavier until I seemed to be made of stone myself, all my limbs and body built of them. The details of one of the houses came to me more clearly, a squat little place with gilded windows and shady, fragrant herbs growing along the path. I focused upon this place, but I didn’t intend to slow enough to knock upon the door, rocketing forward as though I would tear it off its hinges entirely.

  My stone body was gone; I had no body, and no eyes to look upon the woman who sat with her back to me, facing a fire that blackened the edges of a hearth. I circled like smoke to face her and the boy she cradled in her arms. He had the look about him of a child who is small for their age despite every attention of his parent, his gold hair pressed neatly against the crown of his head as he played intently with some object in his lap. I realized that it was a toy, a scroll case fitted with ribbons of many colors that he wound into the case and then out again, his tongue firmed between his teeth in concentration.

  The woman whispered something in his ear, tickling his ribs, and the stern little face evaporated as a smile broke over his lips, eyes crinkled in the kind of joy that can only be witnessed among the toddling young. Not in the stoic attention he’d paid to the toy had I recognized him, but in the smile I saw that it was Gannet.

  “It’s time.”

  The voice was hard and male, but I was as frozen as the pair by the fire and could not turn to see to whom it belonged.

  “If it must be,” the mother said, Gannet’s mother, and she lifted the boy from her lap and set him on his feet. She was striking and quite young, hardly older than I was now, and in her face I could see her regret but her faith, too, that what she was prepared to do she must do.

  “It will be easier if you give it to him,” the man continued, and the mother disappeared for a moment on the edges of what I could perceive, leaving me only the boy to contend with. His face, innocent, clear, and adoring, followed the form of his mother. He resembled little the man that I knew, and when his mother returned, I could see in her hand what had changed him.

  “Here, love,” she said, and she bent down to him, holding forth a little scrap of leather with tethers on the side that she hooked over the boy’s ears. She was crying, and I heard a sniff of disapproval from the man that waited in the shadows.

  Gannet, for he was Gannet now, yielded patiently to her work in fixing the soft leather mask over his features. It was the sibling of the mask he wore now but dangled from his tender features. When she had finished, his bright eyes were lost in the shadows it cast upon his face.

  The figures blurred as the man in the shadows stepped forward, the voices of the three lost as mother and son were parted and she was alone. I was alone then, too, drifting in the ether of Gannet’s memories.

  Come back, Eiren.

  My eyes opened, though I didn’t remember closing them. I was walking still, for my limbs had continued their tedious work while my mind was elsewhere. Now, though, I stopped, turning to face Gannet behind me. His eyes were cast down like a man careful of his footing, but I put my hand upon his arm, above his hand, where I could feel the warmth of his skin. My apology was given in a flood of detail: my own memories, fragmented and jumbling uncertainly as I tried to share with him what he had inadvertently shared with me. It was more than an apology, what I tried to do; it was a clumsy articulation of the desire I had now to sympathize with a man I had considered reluctantly my friend for having taken me from my home.

  He had been taken, too.

  I managed at last the earliest image that I had of my brother and sisters at prayer, bent with their brows and palms touching and lifting, fingers tickling each other when our father wasn’t looking. I was in my mother’s arms. She was observing our family with all of the love and devotion I could sense in her even then, the feelings that became a part of me even as I grew in the shadow of them all.

  This strange and tender moment was brief, for when I had stopped Kurdan had, too. He watched as I put my hand upon Gannet, the other trembling at my side. When I released him we stood there a moment, facing each other. I didn’t care what Kurdan thought, for I was seeking in the shielded eyes the boy that had once looked with fullness and feeling on the world. I didn’t need to ask if my lesson was concluded, if I had met Gannet’s expectations. It was, and he had none.

  The powers he had taught me in shielding my mind from entrance were turned then to contain it for another purpose, to keep from the touch and taste of every memory in the men who traveled perilously with me, the temptation to know them because I could in ways they could never know me. Not now when I became more like Theba every day, and every day less the toddling girl cradled in her mother’s arms.

  So we began to walk again, Kurdan without question, Gannet ready with unasked for answers, and my feet heavy as quarry stones. I could feel my heart in my throat, though this was no false feeling brought on by panic and the mysteries in the Rogue’s Ear. This was a mystery of another sort, a curiosity that turned on the sound of every footfall behind me, no matter how slight. I wanted to know the weight of his step, the curve of the ankle and calf within the boot. If it were a character that could be traced, I wanted to write it. As ink on my skin I would wear it. My face and neck were as hot as if I sat in front of a fire, fanning flames into my mouth.

  The day might have seemed interminable were it not for the sudden and unexpected temperament of our course. We wound up as often as we wound down, and the choices Gannet had promised we would need to make and quickly were thrown every hour before us when the path forked and branched. Neither man hesitated, not Gannet to call our path nor Kurdan to follow it. I was grateful I had no play in this, for all of our options seemed equal to me. The focus required was great enough to prove a distraction from my thoughts, for which I was also grateful.

  “We’ll emerge at the Maiden’s Brow, won’t we?” Kurdan spoke after many silent hours. The pressure was getting to him, as well. “It should be snowing, in this season.”

  “We may, yes,” Gannet answered, the response little more than a reflex. He, too, was somewhere else.

  “What’s the Maiden’s Brow?” I asked, the conversation harmless for all it was fueled by restlessness and worry.

  “It’s a low ridge of mountains, foothills, really, that line the Jhoschi Valley,” Kurdan replied quickly, his haste written off easily as a need to fill the deep earth quiet that surrounded us. I knew that I wanted to. From behind me I sensed a hint of indignance that flared and fell again as quickly as it had come. Gannet had wanted to answer. He liked to tell me things, to teach me, for all he insisted he wasn’t my teacher. My cheeks burned anew as Kurdan continued, his voice rising in pitch, words rushed together in an eagerness to speak.

  “We call the valley The Braid, for it has the beauty of a lady, too. We are sustained by the harvest from the valley, what we grow, and what the valley gives us without tilling,” he babbled, an odd hum of panic
in his voice. “Jhosch lies opposite the Maiden’s Brow, in the Re’Shran Mountains.”

  Whatever I noted in his tone was lost at his words.

  “Re’Shran?” I thought of our fabled king, and as I spoke his namesake my voice seemed like water dripping from wet stone.

  “Do you know the name? You should.”

  “Third left,” Gannet interrupted, a hand upon the small of my back, a push not in the direction he had stated aloud for Kurdan, but a different path. I stumbled and Kurdan wheeled upon the pair of us, his blade brandished. How long had he been holding it? Fear darted like a bird from a branch in me, and my dark sight fell away just as Kurdan threw his torch into my face and lunged with his sword.

  In one instant I heard Gannet call my name as he had the night in Re’Kether, clear and without pretense of any kind, not worry but anticipation of things most terrible in whatever answer I would be able to give. I saw in a flash of fire my outstretched arms, like a child trying to avoid a fall, Kurdan’s curved steel slicing through empty air. My senses were poised all in a moment and when I moved, it was with aching patience, as slow as clay and certain as death.

  The torch flared to uncommon brilliance before my face, brighter than any rag and tinder could make, as I did what Gannet hadn’t yet taught me to do and wouldn’t have to. Bolder and brighter the flame grew in what seemed to me ages, but there was only a moment between Kurdan’s tossing of the torch and my hurling it back to him. This time it was more than a source of meager light, it was a living blaze, suspended in the air like a body before it broke against Kurdan. He burst into flames, and time returned for me to its usual flow, my screams joined with his as I fell back against the stone to escape his flailing, blazing arms. Gannet tore off his cloak and threw it about the dying man, for he was dying. I could see his death like a cloud descending over the smoke that poured from his burning hair and clothes. I screamed and screamed, eyes blearing, long after Kurdan had stopped, when his life and body both had been snuffed out and there was no light to see by. No light to see what I had done.

  “Eiren.”

  Gannet’s voice was as delicate as moth’s wings fluttering in the dark, but I curled more tightly into myself against the wall, as though I could flatten myself into stone. If I could destroy why could I not create? For all Kurdan had meant to kill me, had worked himself up to it under innocent pretense, I couldn’t excuse myself what I had done. This was different than the howling man, than the foundering of the ship in Cascar. I had meant to do just what I had done. No matter what horrors lay within me, I didn’t want to die. As soon as Kurdan had turned on me, it was him or me. And I hadn’t hesitated.

  “Eiren.”

  My sob gave me away, croaked into shadow and rock. Kurdan’s smell of smoke and charred flesh flooded my nose and mouth, and I gagged, wretching against the wall I had turned to for comfort. When I turned away, lips slicked with tears and the contents of my belly, Gannet put his arms around me. I didn’t struggle, relaxing against him as though I had lost control of my body with such horrible control of my mind so recently realized.

  Any of my sister’s lovers might have whispered senseless things or stroked their olive cheeks, but I was filthy and had killed a man, and Gannet was neither lover nor a man inclined to whisper. Still, theirs were the only experiences I had to compare to the weight of his arms as he supported me a few steps back down the path the way we had come, the gentle pressure and the noted hesitance. If he treated me thus because I was a murderer, I wouldn’t blame him. I wanted to say his name as he had said mine, as though it would steady him as it had failed to steady me. Theba was a tempest. What manner of icon could he be, still as he was?

  I allowed him to lower me to the ground, and I knew that he stood a moment before me in the dark for all I couldn’t see him. Behind my pinched eyes Kurdan’s blade arced through the air over and over again, his limbs danced forever in fire.

  Sleep, Eiren.

  His voice grew in my mind like a drop of oil in water. I could slip inside and ignore the rest, which was just what I did.

  Chapter 15

  In my dream, my mother knelt beside my bed, dipping a cloth in herb scented water and pressing it to my brow and neck. I could smell the braziers burning, the familiar, acrid scent of the oil she used when someone took sick. My light bedding stuck to me like a second skin, and I was sweating as though I were trying to shed them both.

  “What were you dreaming about, Ren?” she asked, hands clasped patiently above the bowl as though in blessing.

  My brow furrowed. I had been dreaming, hadn’t I? I couldn’t remember.

  “I’m awake now,” I insisted, refusing her question in the same moment that I reached for her hand. I wanted to take it and be sure that it was real, to trace the calluses and lines of her fingers and her palm.

  She moved just out of reach, and I whimpered. I felt so weak; I couldn’t touch her without great strain.

  “What were you dreaming about, Ren?”

  Her tone was the same and she fell upon each word like striking an instrument.

  “I can’t remember,” I choked, hardly managing the words as my teeth began to chatter. I was cold, the sweat on my skin turned to a glimmer of ice. “May I have a fire in my room?”

  Mother rose from my side, the damp cloth dropped from her hands like a hot stone, landing with a slop against the floor. Her face was hard and unfamiliar, and the eyes were empty, like blue stones in a human skull.

  “Why don’t you dream one?”

  As she spoke her mouth seemed to glow until I realized her lips were red as a coal, her tongue a licking fire that spread from her mouth to her cheekbones and eyes, shriveling them in their sockets and racing over her dark hair. I screamed as she raised her arms, a woman turned inferno, and where she stretched her fingers the ceiling caught fire and the flame rolled like a wave the whole room across. My bed burned but I didn’t, and when there was no more air to breathe I found enough to keep screaming.

  Eiren.

  Eiren.

  “Wake up, Eiren.”

  That Gannet managed to hold me down against the ground was no mean feat, for I writhed and clawed in protest, trapped in the dream before my eyes could open fully, could register him there in the glow of a low campfire. This flame was a tame one, and he wasn’t my mother, nor the creature in the dream that had seemed to be her.

  Before I said anything I looked around, my gaze charged, but I didn’t see Kurdan’s body anywhere. I noticed, then, that while my face and hands were clean, Gannet’s bore traces of stone dust and earth, no doubt gathered during a hasty burial. I blanched, but I couldn’t be sick again. There was nothing in my stomach but air and swallowed screams.

  Without speaking, Gannet observed me, my motives and thoughts as clear to him now as they must have been then. He offered me a skin of water with a gesture that demanded I drink. I obliged, watching as he returned to the fire and rolled in the embers what looked to be potatoes wrapped in damp cloth to keep from burning. The tool he used I recognized as Kurdan’s, and I was surprised first that it had survived, disgusted second that this was my first thought in reflecting upon the dead man’s possessions.

  I shuffled over to the fire, muscles corded still from the stress of my dream and what had preceded it, saying nothing and hoping that Gannet could, for a little while, say nothing, too. I didn’t want to talk about what I had done nor that I had done it, not what had driven the man whose life I had taken. Despite these affirmations, when I accepted my meager dinner from Gannet my mind was racing already from memory to limited memory that I had of Kurdan, if I had noticed him even once before Antares had named him as our guard for the journey through the Rogue’s Ear. The hot mush in my mouth stilled my tongue, but I had no explanation to voice. I didn’t remember him before the Rogue’s Ear, he had been as peripheral to me as the howling man outside of Re’Kether. I knew them best because I had known them least, and they were both dead because of it.

  “I don’t k
now why he wanted to kill you, either,” Gannet said after we had finished our potatoes, my brooding having given over entirely to hazardous musings. His words surprised me, for we had encountered nothing so far that Gannet had not been able to explain; better still, that he had not had some part and purpose in.

  “I’m very dangerous. I’m responsible for the death of one of his friends,” I offered, unsure, as afraid of being without answers as I was of failing to hesitate again. “He must’ve known who I was, or guessed.”

  “The man in Re’Kether killed himself.”

  Gannet seemed certain of this if nothing else, cleaning his hands on his tunic, a futile effort after so many days underground. He clasped them under his chin, fingers hooked together like a series of keys to be played. I noted his shoulders rounded forward without the cloak to cover them, the cloak that likely served now as Kurdan’s burial shroud.

  “Do you think they were working together?”

  My question seemed paranoid, but it shouldn’t have. I trembled as I spoke, as though some presence in the Rogue’s Ear would judge me for what I had done.

  “I don’t know,” Gannet said softly, burdening me a second time with his ignorance. I needed him to know. My way from home was laid down by him, and I couldn’t abide a faltering of course.

  “The war’s end was only the beginning, like he said.” I remembered the man who had died outside of Re’Kether, what he’d said, the grim portent that made more sense to me every time I dared to act on my power. I waved my arms, needing little more to illustrate my meaning when Gannet could see every insinuation of my mind, bared in fear as it was.

  Gannet shook his head, staring through the fire, but not to the cavern wall that lie beyond it.

  “It was always going to be this way. Theba will be realized in you, and only through blood.”

  “Whose blood? All those who died while I was raised a weapon in ignorance, all of the deaths that were indirectly mine? Kurdan’s?” I breathed heavily, meeting his eyes in the dark with a demand greater than any words could convey. “Who’s next, Gannet?”