The Hidden Icon

by Jillian Kuhlmann

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for. I can’t tell you what I don’t know. But if you think your hand poorly dealt for having been cast as Theba, count yourself lucky you’re not whoever it is Gannet suffers himself to be.”

  “Hasn’t anyone ever guessed?” I whispered, but still could see Gannet’s chin sharp in outline as he turned and looked at the pair of us and away. His eyes were colder than any wind that threatened the hem of my cloak.

  “Someone knows who he is, and that’s exactly why we aren’t allowed to know,” Morainn said darkly. She sat straighter in her saddle, a princess again who would answer no more of my questions. For her own protection, and for mine.

  But mostly, for his.

  Was some greater evil anticipated of Gannet? I sifted through my memories for stories of a manifestation more foul than Theba, and while there were wrongful deeds aplenty, no god or goddess was as thoroughly ugly as she. I couldn’t even see the sense in keeping something like that from him, for surely they would have done the same with me. I had been told so I might have some measure of control, though I hadn’t showed any yet. Didn’t Gannet deserve the same chance?

  For all of the mystery Morainn had dispelled, I wasn’t surprised that she had introduced yet more. It was easier to be quiet then, to suffer the pretense of a cheerful spirit. I was resigned as a sister even to Imke in our collective melancholy, though where her mind and Morainn’s flew I did not pursue. I had sorrow enough for myself.

  Ambar did not disappoint, for we were but halfway down the ridge, only a few hours from the Rogue’s Ear, before a party approached us, military men all. Their hands were raised in greeting, and I could feel in them many efforts to restrain their relief to see Antares, who dismounted and moved towards them with no such self-control. I couldn’t hear him, but I could see his smile, the hands clapped upon shoulders. His lips parted in speech that I imagined promised our wellbeing, the victory he had returned to share with them.

  And then their faces changed, all of them, and I wondered if perhaps Antares had given news of Kurdan, or the howling man, or others, men and women lost before even I had joined them. But it wasn’t any of these things, for their eyes followed Antares’ gesture to settle on me, a fervor there, and fear, and awe. They muttered to each other but didn’t look away from me. Morainn’s horse distanced itself a little, at her command, no doubt, and I saw on Antares’ face resignation and sadness, but Gannet I saw best, sensed best. He reigned in his horse to turn his back on the men and inclined his head lightly to me, as though proving a point. But he had just had his point proven for him.

  Things would change now, and I would change them.

  Chapter 16

  The waypoint was a village with children at play, roaming dogs, folk returning from fields or woods or mines. I felt more apprehensive even than I had when we first arrived in Cascar. The sun was setting behind us, and I imagined we entered the village as shadows, figures thrown black and menacingly thin before us. Two weedy boys hovered uncertainly on the path, which had grown wide and beaten enough to be called a road. They held their hands above their eyes as though in a salute, but they were only attempting to make out our faces.

  Recognizing no one, they scampered into a modest but well-built wooden building on the side of the road. We slowed, and a moment later a man appeared in the doorway, whiskered and bewildered. Antares dismounted once more and approached him, the colors he wore announcing him as a military man and eliciting a slight incline of the man’s head. Behind him strode the scouts, and I was glad their attentions were for the moment diverted from me. Though I had traveled as usual ensconced between guards and servants and Gannet, they had been irritatingly preoccupied with me, where I was, the pace I drove Circa, which direction I looked. Ambar did not take many prisoners of war, it seemed.

  “Is your lord in residence?”

  I watched their exchange carefully, how the scouts seemed to assert themselves at either side, an unnecessary show of strength.

  “He is,” the bearded man answered, the children visible now on either side of him in the doorway, their eyes in shadow. He coughed nervously. “But if I may, does your return mean the war is over? It’s ended?”

  My attention was fixed. Though I didn’t move lest I draw more attention to myself, I gave over my sense of things utterly to the speaking pair, silencing the vibrations and subtle sounds of the minds around me. Antares didn’t seem to want to draw any attention to me, either, for though what he said next no doubt referred to me, he was careful not to gesture.

  “Our victory was complete.”

  The man grinned widely and I was overwhelmed by the relief in him, washing out like a water tub overturned, or the whole of the sea itself. I couldn’t see but could feel the happy hum of the children’s backs underneath of his two hands. I reached out to him tentatively and could see a woman of middle age but strong, hair coiled thick on her head in the style of the women who served in the Ambarian military. Antares didn’t need my gifts to deduce the same.

  “Your wife will be returned to you in time, by the southern pass,” he offered, eyes falling carefully on the children who were beginning to smile, too, slowly aware of what was transpiring. “By midwinter she will come home to find you as tall as her shoulders.”

  There was such warmth in the words that I forgot for a moment that I was the enemy, the viper darting among the sheep, that it was my people who had been numberlessly slain and we who had lost. How could Antares be sure that their mother, the bearded man’s wife, lived? That she hadn’t been among the soldiers to remain in my home, enforcing the fragile peace of martial law? And I was here now, fangs sharpened with every shred of knowledge Gannet shared with me.

  I caught Gannet looking at me and I stared him down, my anger and my longing as potent as any serpent’s poison. There was a flash of surprise behind the mask. No amount of sun or shadow could keep his feelings from me now when I wanted them, when I didn’t restrain myself. Roused by the violence of the scouts’ attentions, I turned upon him, sharing with him a brief memory of my brother as a boy, a spotted viper easily as long as he was tall trapped between two hands. He had but grazed his palm against the creature’s fang and nearly died in a sweat that bedded him for two weeks. It was not difficult to imagine instead the face of one of the boys before us, clinging still to his father’s trouser leg.

  Gannet didn’t turn away, surprising me by reshaping what I had given him: the snake turned slippery, a plait of hair unraveled from a weary head, the mother and son reunited on the doorstep we now faced. I shuddered and broke away from him, for if Antares spoke in ignorance, Gannet did not. He knew the mother lived by means I couldn’t know. This was something new. It was a power I felt strangely certain we didn’t share, and never would.

  We didn’t linger with the bearded man and his children. When they turned indoors, relief went with them and dread with me as we proceeded down the road. Now all of the village’s inhabitants seemed to have gathered to watch and whisper, their movements subdued but hopeful. Morainn they either did not know or did not recognize, and they were too busy, besides, in gawking at me. She had pulled her hood over her dark hair, obscuring much of her face, so perhaps they might have known her if she’d wanted them to. Imke rode in confidence beside her with a cold little smirk for me before I looked away, embittered. I didn’t want to be Imke’s enemy. I had not wanted to be anyone’s.

  The lord of the village lived in a stone structure that was modest, or as modest as something three stories high and as many wide can be. A guard of two men – boys, really – lazed in the cold afternoon light, the colors on their jerkins faded but the same that Antares wore. They leapt to their feet at the sight of us, though how they had remained oblivious to the commotion within the village at our coming I didn’t know. And then I remembered how my sisters had seemed to me at their ages: more distant and dull at thirteen than I had thought possible. While I’d wanted to storytell and run out of doors, they’d made time for little mor
e than brooding and mirror gazing.

  “If you will announce us to Lord Rhale,” Antares began, but there was more cause for the boys’ alarm yet, as a richly dressed man appeared in the doorway, waving dismissively at each young guard as they scampered to assist him from the step. I could see that he was quite frail, with no more hair than a newborn babe could boast, his clothes filling out a skeletal frame.

  “How lucky for me that I am the first to welcome you,” he announced, his voice light but shrewd. His eyes were milky and vague, and he couldn’t have known Morainn or Antares by sight. He would’ve been lucky to see more than a few steps in front of him.

  I had tact enough to keep from trying to read him, cutting my eyes to Gannet. He nodded curtly at my restraint. One right thing could for a little while sustain me.

  “Lord Rhale.” Antares greeted the elderly man with a modest bow, which seemed to please him. Morainn stepped forward, as well, her pretense abandoned when she pushed the hood from her head. She might have been placing a crown there for all the weight of the gesture, and she waited patiently for him to acknowledge her. Lord Rhale required the assistance of his youthful guards, one on each side of him, to bow and recover his footing again. Morainn’s face was for the moment as stern as her brother’s. I felt more certain now that we would be expected to behave quite differently than we had. Like children without the watchful eyes of their parents I could see that Morainn and Gannet had done as they pleased, but they were nearly home now, and already their roles seemed to me infinitely more complicated.

  As for me, any certainty I had about myself vanished as I became increasingly unsure of my companions.

  We were welcomed inside with a few words exchanged between Lord Rhale and Antares, his guard moving toward the smells of food and animals. Morainn, Imke, Gannet, and I were lead upstairs. Lord Rhale didn’t accompany us but servants appeared to be sure we didn’t lose our way. I wasn’t sure I could have watched the agonizing display that would have been the old man’s slow ascent. I felt choked inside by the nearness of death, for I knew it now, and his decline was lingering like a bad smell over everything.

  Morainn was given the best of rooms, one adjoining for Imke and what protection was offered by her little knife. I was grateful to be further away from her than a few doors as both Gannet and I were lead up again, to the third floor, and finally, to the fourth.

  “Lord Rhale assumed you would want the chapel available to you,” the servant explained, a coppery fringe escaping his tight cap. I had never seen hair his color, and tried not to stare.

  Gannet nodded his agreement, though shared nothing of what this meant with me, gesturing only that I take the room next to the one that would be his. I obliged, if only because the servant was beginning to fidget, avoiding looking at me but from the corners of his eyes. I didn’t think his reticence had anything to do with my hair color.

  The room was opulent, but sorely neglected. There was a thick layer of dust on two fine chests pushed up against the wall, and I didn’t need to lay an experimental hand upon the heavy bedspread to know that it, too, would puff forth a cloud of disuse.

  I waited patiently while the servant laid a modest fire, and more patiently still for him to leave so I might coax it hotter and higher, better for soothing my spirits and my chilled limbs. I was interrupted as soon as he’d gone, however, by Gannet opening and closing my door behind him, the flames settling low again as my concentration failed.

  For a moment I studied him there, a frown creeping from my lips to my brow at the sight of a new cloak lain about his shoulders to replace the one he had left in the Rogue’s Ear. He had seemed less severe without the cloak, the breadth of his shoulders more that of a young man than what this bulky wool belied: a burdened spirit, an icon with little need for youth or humanness.

  “What is the chapel like?” I asked, quick to dismiss my thoughts of human need. I didn’t want to dwell on his, not when mine were so mixed up. Gannet answered only because I suspected he had come on related purpose.

  “It’s not so different than what you’re used to,” he explained, but I was sure no sanctuary here could imitate the cool, secret stone places I had knelt in with my mother. I missed her so much I felt almost blown over by it, like a weak tree in a storm. I didn’t have any roots here.

  I nodded, finally, neither denying nor confirming what Gannet had said. I rose from where I’d been seated before the hearth because I knew he wanted me to, but wouldn’t ask. I felt like a child’s toy manipulated with strings; would I feel them all, all of the other icons, as keenly? Would I do as they wanted simply because I knew it, and it was easier to comply?

  Or was it only Gannet I sought to please?

  “The chapel is usually a private place, but I’ll go with you, this time,” Gannet explained as we left my chamber, passing down the hall to a flight of narrow, worn stairs. Wooden frames had once reinforced the stone, and both had been well polished by the traffic of human feet.

  “Then it’s not like what I am used to,” I said, though I wasn’t attempting to provoke him. “Are you afraid to leave me alone here, too?”

  The cloak effectively masked whatever the set of Gannet’s shoulders might have told me about his response, and without seeing his face, or daring the energies to peer beyond his guard, I could only assume he spoke in earnest.

  “It has nothing to do with fear.”

  Curiosity piqued, I followed him up the stairs. I was surprised when I felt the sharp chill of outside air again, a simple wrought gate rising between us and a roof landing. I felt rewarded for my obedience when the scene before me unfolded to a familiar one, the nearest the Ambarians had yet to come in showing that we were anything alike.

  Potted, scrubby winter trees were tangled with a canopy of vines, thick with waxy leaves and dark berries. Wood beams and altar stone provided some shelter from the wind, but only a little. Braziers burned in the four corners, and I could smell their incense on the air, a sweet, slightly bitter scent that could not have come from any herb but the same that we gathered underground: mudcap, light as air where it grew, but brittle as sculpted sand when harvested and dried. We burned it for the smell which, my mother claimed, usually within earshot of my more reckless siblings, could lull even the wickedest hearts to penitence.

  The worship benches were organized just as they would’ve been at home, too, growing more narrow and squat the nearer the altar they were. In this fashion, those who came to offer their devotions would be forced to consider them fully on their knees with their head bent low, and to consider the needs and wants of their fellows in prayer. Only in desperation would someone approach the bench nearest their idol, where they would be almost completely prostrate on their bellies. None of the benches were now occupied, and I wondered if the Ambarians had learned humility as we had?

  Or perhaps their temples were merely for show.

  The irony of so many gods represented here, and each of them embodied somewhere in Ambar by a living being, made me wonder what exactly I was expected to do here. Was I meant to worship Theba? I certainly couldn’t believe that she would deign to worship anyone else.

  “We keep faith as Aleyn keeps it,” Gannet said, though I didn’t know if his words were in response to my thoughts, or simply in continuing the conversation we had begun earlier. When he continued, he wasn’t speaking of Ambarians. “It isn’t the same for us, of course.”

  “You mean I can’t just ask myself for guidance?”

  I knew I was being ridiculous, and in front of the gods, no less. But I didn’t care.

  Gannet ignored me, striding to the center of the prayer garden and to the left, out of sight. I followed, passing the stone faces of several benevolent idols whose eyes had been all but rubbed away by the wind. If they could see, I didn’t think they would recognize one of their own, caged in wiry flesh and sullied cloth. Part of me was relieved, and the rest sure that it was inevitable that everyone would, in time, know me for what I was.

  H
e had stopped before an altar which had only one bench for worship, so low that one’s nose would meet the stone before their brow. There was no guide on the altar and no offerings, either, only a copper mirror, green with age and reflecting nothing. This altar I’d never seen before, and I knew why. Aleynians didn’t worship monsters.

  This was where the penitent came to seek Theba’s favor, if she had such a thing.

  Gannet hadn’t knelt in approach, and neither did I. Instead we both stood at a respectful distance, side by side, as though something was represented there, nameless but powerful. But she had a name, and it was mine.

  “I wanted you to see it, before you’re tested.”

  “Tested?” There was an edge to my voice that hadn’t been there, not before I’d seen the mirror.

  “I know who you are, but like any icon, you must be tested.” I was sure his voice had taken the tone he favored when his words were someone else’s, repeated for my benefit but far from convincing.

  “If you’re so sure, what’s the point?”

  Gannet looked down at me, uncertainty and disappointment plain in his features.

  “You more than anyone should understand that many things are done without a reason, even when it seems otherwise,” he answered, looking away, gaze settling again on the copper mirror. He saw something there, more than anything it could reflect even if it had been highly polished. But it wasn’t the same, the things I had done, the things I might still do. I put a hand upon his arm, fingers clutched persistent against his sleeve.

  “Haven’t I been tried enough? I’ve done everything that you’ve asked. I can’t do anymore.”

  It was a threat I hadn’t intended until it was there upon my lips and then sprung from them, unfolding in the air between us like a hot breath. Gannet looked from the mirror to my face and away, as though he could see my words between us and studied them. Without looking at me again, he took my hand deliberately from its desperate perch, holding the tight fist in one careful hand.