The Hidden Icon

by Jillian Kuhlmann

  And why can’t it be me?

  I railed against the crushing desire to break down into tears again, the guilt hot as lead in my veins that I did not, would not, cry for a man that had wanted me dead. Until that moment I had done him no personal ill, and something in me was sure that what had happened with the man at Re’Kether had nothing whatever to do with Kurdan’s motives here.

  “I don’t know that, either,” Gannet said. I was as sure as I was of the heat from the fire that he knew my thoughts, my will cast inevitable as a shadow across the cavern floor. “All will become clear when we arrive in Jhosch – ”

  “Don’t make me promises you can’t keep,” I hissed. I could see his thoughts, too, the certainty of our parting when we arrived in the Ambarian capitol, the darkness that followed. Did he know to what destiny I went to there? And why I had to pursue it without him?

  Gannet’s lips closed over whatever he had been about to say, and we returned a moment to silence, to the murmur of the fire. I was inconsolable, alone. Despite my anger, I wanted him to put his arms around me again, but this I didn’t let him know.

  “Before Kurdan attacked you, what you saw and did after,” Gannet began, and though I was sure my desire was shielded, we had arrived at the same place. I should have forgotten in the glut of my foul feeling over Kurdan what Gannet and I had shared, but I returned to it now in desperation. I nodded dumbly, waiting for him to continue, wanting him to. “Your power didn’t surprise me, but it’s… not common for such clarity following so much force. That memory is an old one, and one I would not have readily shared.”

  “I didn’t seek it,” I said hastily, though Gannet knew as well as I did that I had not sought anything. Had I coaxed that particular memory to the surface, or was it near enough then, or all of the time, for someone like me to see?

  Though there wasn’t anyone quite like me.

  “I won’t tell anyone,” I offered lamely, as though this were some consolation. I wondered if he brought this up because he expected that it would make me feel better. But I only felt worse.

  Gannet hesitated. When I cut my eyes to him, I saw that he was gazing into the fire, his lips brooding so that I didn’t need to see his eyes to know it. His hands reached to either side of his head after a moment more, and he tugged at the straps there, far sturdier, more permanent, than the ones his mother had first fastened when he was a boy. I thought he might remove it and I swallowed my breath, but he didn’t. He never did.

  “Do you know why you wear it?”

  My question was spoken so soft it was almost as though I had not asked it, that it had come whispering instead from the dark of the Rogue’s Ear, one more secret for this place to keep.

  Gannet’s fingers stilled upon the bindings, but did not drop, poised as though he might work them loose at any moment. My heart was pounding and I wanted to put my hands over his, create laces with our fingers that would rival any that had been created for him to wear. The thought overfilled me, and I promised myself that it was his secret I wanted. His secret only, if I could just touch his hand, his head.

  “It’s a punishment.”

  He spoke, too, in hushed tones, though we were more alone than we had been since we had first met. As alone as we could be, each of us someone else on the inside.

  “No single lifetime contains suffering and time enough to repent for the crime, though I’ll be the last to wear it, now that you’re here.” He looked at me then, hands falling to his sides, draining the air from me at the bare depths in his eyes. Conflict and curiosity and want, pools of it I could have dropped bodily into below the curved, molten brow.

  “Gannet…” I began, and no will could have contested mine as I reached for him, laying a hand on his arm, fingers touching lightly where I had made contact with him before, given him my memories in apology for taking his. He flinched, but did not withdraw his arm. I allowed my thumb to brush lightly against his skin, smooth, wiped free of the grit of his work while I had been asleep. When he spoke his voice was as raw as his eyes.

  “I begin to understand how my punishment will be gravest of all.”

  He did pull free of me then, and my hand hung in the air like a bird shot through with an arrow, a second frozen in flight before it plummeted down, dead. I clasped my hands together in my lap, heart grown sluggish. I couldn’t put a name to what it was I wanted, but it wasn’t this. I felt lamed, like Tara, the maid who was blinded and must find her way without this most fundamental sense. She didn’t even know where she was going, but because it was in her nature, and the nature of all women, she goes.

  I felt Gannet gather himself together again beside me, the familiar severity, the certainty, what was steady and sure about his guise instead of whatever burdens he felt in it.

  “It’s late,” Gannet said, though I was thinking of everything but the hour and he was, too. “You should sleep more.”

  I obliged, but only because I couldn’t bear to sit beside him any longer before the fire as though it were natural, as though we could share anything without secrets and shames between us. If I’d found anything in him during our days within the Rogue’s Ear, it was overshadowed all by what I’d had to do to see the other side.

  When we began walking the next morning, our way soon felt easy and light. But my heart was the heaviest it had been. Though Gannet had buried Kurdan well out of the way of any course we might take, the Rogue’s Ear wouldn’t let us go without passing the mounded earth, covered over with crumbled stones. No matter what he had intended for me, I was sure Kurdan had never meant to come to such an end, buried in obscurity, far from any lover or mother who might’ve visited his grave. I didn’t know the funereal practices of his people, didn’t know what would be appropriate to say, if anything, being the one who had put him there. In death, it didn’t matter that he’d meant to kill me, only that I’d killed him.

  Hours passed before it was not my imagination but true light coloring our course, filtered in from somewhere above. I knew without asking that this meant we were near the end of our time here, and allowed my sight to fade in favor of navigating by the weak, natural light. I couldn’t see as well the tight slant of Gannet’s shoulders in this light, and this was a relief.

  Something had stirred in me that could not now be stilled, and though I might not have the words for it, I had a story for everything. Last night I had killed a man, and today my mind was consumed with what it meant to love one.

  I chose to tell it aloud because I couldn’t stand the silence, what wasn’t filling it. But I wouldn’t have welcomed Gannet’s protest or enthusiasm, either. I wasn’t ready for it. If he felt anything at the start of my telling he kept it to himself, though it was a mercy for us both that I filled the uncomfortable quiet between us.

  “Massoud was the son of the king and a prince, but he could not have been less the sort of son his family wanted. While he was as happy fighting and riding as other boys his age, he didn’t go anywhere without the little snail that had been his companion since he toddled on two legs. When he took meals, the creature squatted beside his plate. During his lessons, the snail perched on his shoulder. When sparring, Massoud put the snail inside a sturdy case he had made to protect her and keep her close, hanging around his neck.

  “What neither Massoud nor his parents knew was that the snail was not a snail at all but the goddess Alyona, who is known to prefer an animal shape to any other and is found more often in the company of mortals than others of her kind. Alyona delighted in mortals, and so thoroughly in Massoud that in his eighteenth year she decided that she would marry him.

  “Alyona knew the hearts of mortals well, however, and didn’t think that Massoud would take well to the ruse that had been her shape his whole life, and so one night, while he was asleep, she slithered near his ear and whispered that he must take her as a snail for his bride. When he had done so, she would be transformed to a beautiful woman.”

  Subtly, I shared with Gannet the face of Massoud I had always ima
gined, youthful and open as a book. Alyona as a snail had a shell of many colors, iridescent. As with the story, he gave me no sign that he appreciated my efforts, but neither did he close himself off to me. With Gannet, I could only consider this encouragement.

  “Massoud met with great resistance from his family, who claimed they would forsake him if he insisted upon such a marriage. His brothers wouldn’t speak to him and everyone in the court began to whisper that their prince had gone mad. Still, Massoud would marry her and had two rings fashioned from fine metals, one for himself and one for his snail bride.

  “No one in the kingdom would perform the ceremony, so Massoud placed Alyona in the little case around his neck and traveled to the next kingdom, and when denied there, the next and the next until he came to a land so far away that no one had before heard his name or would even have known to worship the creature he carried. Married at last, Massoud slipped the ring around Alyona’s shell, though once he had done so she was unable to transform to a shape that would please him, bound by the ceremony and his love.

  “Alyona had not known her man as well as she imagined, for he didn’t want her to change. He settled quietly in the village where they were married, making a small and honest living and whispering his secrets to her as he had always done. For thirty years they lived this way, the whole of Massoud’s life they shared. As he lay upon his deathbed Alyona slithered to his ear and whispered the truth of what she was. Massoud replied that he had always known, but he could love her as an equal only when she occupied such a form. So he had done and didn’t regret it.

  “When he died, Alyona was freed from her snail form and brought his body to her sister, Dsimah, whose province is sowing and harvesting and who is known to bring life to any soil, no matter how infertile. Alyona begged Dsimah to bring life to Massoud again, for if any god could do so, it would be she.

  “Dsimah couldn’t do what Alyona asked, but from Massoud’s body she grew a great, flowering tree. When Alyona swallowed a fruit from the tree, she bore a child that was cradled in its roots and raised dancing beneath its heavy boughs. So Alyona and her daughter, Massoud’s daughter, can be found still, sheltered beneath her husband’s arms.”

  My sisters had always sniffed and wiped at their eyes at the end, and Jurnus returned from wherever his attentions had wandered, nodding appreciatively and entirely for my mother’s benefit. My interests had always lain in the art of the telling so that I could tell it myself in the future, perhaps to my own children. I’d wanted to be more like my mother, but all of the steps of womanhood between she and I were quite beyond me then. Now I could see how those years might be the most complicated in a lifetime’s worth of years, how they might give and take away, or seem only to take without the scope of age to temper them. And those years were mine now, the months I had shared with the mysterious man walking before me the very heart of them.

  Gannet passed beneath a wide patch of sunlight, cold and white as a flare upon his light hair. It did not seem natural to have so much to say and so much want to say it only to open and close one’s lips without managing a word, but that was exactly what I did. When we rounded a rock face and saw before us the tunnel’s opening, flooded with a light so blinding I had to shield my eyes, I knew that I had missed my opportunity to speak.

  Before I could see properly hands were upon me, but they were not Gannet’s. I was being guided out of the Rogue’s Ear, the buzzing of voices settling finally into something like sense.

  “Kurdan? Where is Kurdan?”

  I closed my eyes, but it wasn’t the light that hurt them.

  “He was taken.”

  Gannet’s stern assertion was met with greatest shock from me, for my eyes snapped open again to behold the others gathered around; Antares and Morainn nodding in grim acceptance.

  “We lost several,” Antares began, casting a quick look at Morainn before continuing, “including Triss.”

  I gasped. Triss, gone? What terrors lurked in the Rogue’s Ear that we had escaped, if not my own? No one asked anymore about Kurdan, nor did they press Gannet and I immediately for any news of our passage. He didn’t need to lay a hand upon me, didn’t need to share more than a look that encouraged silence now, questions later. Exhausted from ordeals within and without, I obliged, turning instead to see where we had come. Their camp was not so lived in as to suggest that they had emerged much before we had, but any interest I had in the ground was given over immediately to the horizon.

  The Rogue’s Ear had deposited us above a valley that ran like an emerald ribbon laced in dark curls, mountains more treacherous than any in the low lands from which we had come. It was wild to see so much verdant below and sheer, white capped peaks above, dark trees like teeth cutting down the mountain’s sides before giving over to rock, and then to rolling green. The fields did not spread uninterrupted, however, for I could see the little settlements clustered between forests and along a wide swathe of blue, a river. Behind us, too, rose mountains as wicked as we faced, a fitting crown for the uncertain pass that ran beneath them. My lips parted, jaw askew, as though I hoped to swallow some part of the view or all.

  “Eiren,” Morainn said softly at my side, and I felt her hand upon my arm. The touch was a reminder that I was part woman, still, and incapable of devouring lands. The cold returned to me in that moment, as well, more virulent than what we had left on the other side of the Rogue’s Ear. Already my fingertips and nose began to burn, and I stuffed the former under crossed arms.

  “Where do you live?” I asked, trying to ground myself again for all my eyes drifted down, admiring the scene like I would the stage of a play. I hadn’t known it would be like this, beauty cradled between the sheer, perilous arms of such mountains. How could this not be enough for them?

  Morainn gestured, sure and heavy with the weight of what lay beneath her outstretched arm.

  “There. At the base of the witch, Zhaeha.”

  I didn’t need my sense of her to know to what she referred. The tallest peak was also the sharpest, seeming chiseled as though by great hands into a shape no natural stone could take, black and hooked against the cool blue of the sky. A peculiar feeling stirred in me at the feature’s name, though I felt, if anything, that Zhaeha meant something else entirely, if not necessarily what.

  “It’s midmorning,” Antares interrupted, casting his eyes from Morainn and I to Gannet, who stood apart, watchful of the valley below for reasons of his own. “If you’re not overtired, we are well rested and ready to make the waypoint.”

  Gannet nodded without asking me, though I wouldn’t have delayed near the Rogue’s Ear for anything. After a draw of fresh water from a filled skin that Antares passed me, I greeted Circa like an old friend. The horse seemed no worse for her time in the Rogue’s Ear, and I wondered if whatever forces designed the trials of that place considered beasts below their notice. Or, I wondered idly, above the trials required of their wicked masters.

  We had more horses than riders now, I noted grimly. It was no longer necessary to ride in pairs, and what was a blessing for the horses and should have been for me did not seem so as I watched Gannet mount a solitary mare. What I couldn’t say I could perhaps have committed with a touch, but I could not, would not, now.

  Our path allowed me to ride beside Morainn and I grasped at this opportunity, heart hardened against the comfort of the formation I had fallen into with Gannet in the Rogue’s Ear. If Imke had not planted herself on Morainn’s other side, I would have pretended contentedness completely. The air was fresh in my lungs, if cold. This was the proper north, it seemed, and the cloak I had neglected during my time underground was hugged close once more.

  “We’ve been waiting a full day and night,” Morainn began, relief in a voice I was sure had not an hour ago expressed only worry. Though she spoke with me, I knew her attention, too, was with her brother.

  “We had some trouble,” I admitted, pale with the guilt of lying to her even if I only did so to protect myself. Or perhaps becaus
e of it.

  “The Rogue’s Ear makes trouble for the wicked,” Imke said, eyes dark on the trail ahead. A squirming heat filled my stomach at her words, and was not soothed by her next. “Kurdan wasn’t the man he thought he was, nor Triss a virtuous woman.”

  “Be quiet, Imke,” Morainn spat, lip and brow shaking in anger. Foolish though she might sometimes have been, Triss was a great loss to her mistress, perhaps because she had not expressed as much when she was with her. I put a hand upon Morainn’s shoulder, careful to shield her from my own foul feelings. Imke observed the touch with more discomfort than she had her mistress’ scolding, and rode ahead, leaving us with only a guard riding with enough distance behind that we had something like privacy. It was clear they expected no danger here. If I hadn’t escaped in the dark of the Rogue’s Ear, it was unlikely I’d bolt now.

  “I don’t think it’s possible to be prepared for the challenges of that place. I wasn’t,” I said, my sympathy touched with my own trials below ground. Morainn placed her hand upon mine, briefly, and I glimpsed Antares, ash-faced and up to his eyes in water, felt the blade-chill of it in my bones. She hadn’t meant to share this memory with me, but it was so near to the surface of her mind that I could not help but live it with her. Gannet and I had not passed through water, and I was more convinced than ever that the Rogue’s Ear was no mortal place, to change as it did.

  “You were lucky to have Gannet with you,”Morainn murmured, looking ahead to her brother, stiff-backed on the mare. I shivered, and it had nothing to do with the cold. She couldn’t know just how lucky.

  “Why is it a secret, who he is?” The question leapt unbidden to my lips. Morainn’s expression clouded completely now, and I worried I had pressed her too much. I wasn’t the only one to have suffered in the Rogue’s Ear. “I’m sorry, Morainn, I’m not supposed to know. He’s said as much before.”