The Hidden Icon

by Jillian Kuhlmann

  I hardly slept that night for fear of my dreams, and more that they might spill over from me to the camp and be seen or felt. It was not just Gannet that might have my secrets. They were strong and many, and when Morainn narrowed her gaze on me the following morning, I thought they must be obvious, too.

  For several hours before we reached Jhosch, I had the pleasure of watching every detail of the city sharpen and grow. Eerily not unlike the ancient fortresses deep in the deserts of Aleyn, Jhosch was carved from the mountain itself, spires of natural stone cutting like teeth skyward, the hollows in the rock the windows and passages of human habitation. The sparse settlements we passed through lead me to believe that much of the Ambarian population must live in the capitol. I could see the witch, Zhaeha, loom and curl beyond, more strange and surreal the nearer we came, instead of less. I hadn’t spoken with Gannet since the rain, but because I had exhausted all possible conversations with Morainn since, I asked him about it.

  “It’s said that to pass beneath her crooked nose is to know the smell of your own death,” Gannet said, managing to drain the horror and mystery from the statement entirely with his dull tone. “There’s nothing beyond but more mountains, and more treacherous. No one lives there.”

  I quirked a brow playfully, not caring if he’d appreciate or even acknowledge my efforts.

  “That sounds like the beginning of the story for those that do,” I insisted, though I didn’t have the will for stories, now, not even as Morainn perked at my mention, and one or two of our guard, as well. The only tale I could conjure was my own, half-finished and full of dark promise. Gannet, however, came as near to a slight chuckle as he had since before we entered the Rogue’s Ear.

  “It does indeed,” he said softly, eyes fixed ahead of us on Jhosch or the witch, or both. “I’ve never been there, so how should I know? If you’re willing to risk heralding your own demise, perhaps you should venture that way when we are near.”

  Even as Gannet made his own grim attempt at levity, I felt him retreat to a darker place, his own treacherous mindscape. If I put my hand upon him, would I see again the child Gannet, masked for the first time?

  “You tease Eiren on purpose I think, Gannet,” Morainn said lightly, her efforts to lift our spirits much appreciated, at least on my part. There was none of the glow in her cheeks that bespoke someone coming home after a lengthy absence, not the one I would imagine in my own if I had the pleasure, anyway. Neither sibling seemed to show particular excitement at having nearly reached our destination, though I wasn’t surprised by Gannet’s withholding of whatever it was he truly felt on the occasion.

  “I would never tease her on accident,” Gannet observed, and though his lips did not quirk in the slight fashion that usually signified a smile, I felt the tension dissipate even as we passed into the shadow cast by the great city. Imke perked in her saddle. I caught her eye, perceiving the scowl in it for all she turned quickly away. I wondered, not for the first time, if Imke and Kurdan had been close. She hadn’t spoken expressly against me, not even in those veiled moments when she spoke with me alone. Still, I didn’t trust her, not for the hungry way she looked when speaking of Ambarian conquests; not for her eyes, girded with the sort of careful, surreptitious observation normally seen among diplomats, not servants.

  There was not much more talk after that, and I had my eyes and ears full, besides, of the sights and sounds of the approaching capitol. It was like a living thing, moving as deliberately as we were, halving the distance between us with measured, subtle steps. We were expected here, for word had been sent ahead of us. There was no anonymity for Morainn, her people dropping to their knees, waving their hands or shielding their eyes from the setting sun so they could better see her. I imagined they were protecting themselves from her brilliance. My wonderings were cut short when I was seen a moment after, riding a few paces behind.

  If Morainn inspired them, I drew them down again, lower than they had been before. Mothers and fathers looked on me with a mixture of awe and fear in their faces, holding their children against their chests and legs as though I might have reach enough to snatch them away. There was no confusion in their faces, nor in the faces of the armed among them, whose only doubts seemed to lie in whether they should raise or lower their weapons as my horse cantered near. If Gannet had thought himself keeping my secret, he was wrong. They knew. Here I would never be Eiren, storyteller, daughter, the youngest and mildest of many siblings. Here I was Theba, and I would not tell stories. I was one myself.

  Almost as though it had been planned, I rode alone between grouped escorts. I wasn’t a prisoner, but a terrible prize. More and more people tumbled out of doorways and stables, from gardens and groves heavy with fruit for harvest, all of their features awash at once with joy and moments later, trepidation. I couldn’t look at them, but neither could I look down, as though ashamed of what I was. Would they think I was plotting some ill in the churning mud beneath the horse’s hooves? I might tangle the legs of Morainn’s mount and send her toppling. I might frenzy the soldiers that had served us so well to turn against their own. Theba wouldn’t have settled for less.

  My bold looks were not to be tolerated, for just as I thought perhaps we had passed through the bulk of the crowd, they pressed in upon us, and the anonymity of so many faces, limbs flailing, mouths open, allowed for insults to be shouted, curses and calls of a kind I had imagined, but never experienced. Wives called for their husbands and mothers for their sons and daughters, blood was in their words and beneath the nails of the fingers that were clawing at the air. For those who had not the sense for words there were only wails, grief a language of its own.

  I was more afraid of those that didn’t speak, those that knew me and kept silent, brooding, as Gannet had the first time that I had met him. Did they know better than these common folk? Were they the powerful ones, the servants and protectors as Gannet had described them in the tale of Adah? I could feel my eyes burning as though smoke was building inside of me, a fire that the growing crowd fanned. It couldn’t be tears for what I had become, because this had always been inside of me, waiting.

  Gannet put a hand on my forearm. I could feel it despite the many layers the cold forced me to wear, and while it might’ve seemed to the watchers that he was restraining me, through the touch he flooded me with all the tenderness of friendship: my mother and father as clear as his brief memory of them could construct, the hands and abstract smiles of my siblings swarming around me. He hadn’t known us, but he could understand. As the crowd parted and we passed through, I didn’t see them, but saw instead my memories and Gannet’s imaginings pieced together. I could feel my sister Esbat’s breath on my face as we waited beneath Lista’s bed to grab her ankles and make her shriek, could trace the warmth of my brother’s embrace after a rough practice with sword and stave.

  Morainn he drew, as well, and I realized he knew well what a comfort she was to me and I to her. I watched her riding tall before me with her guard on either side and I saw, too, those spare moments with her handmaids on the barge, our laughter over something insignificant breaking down the barriers between us. I could see that he played a role in this vision, too, for the shadows had space enough to accommodate a man who would only watch, could only.

  “Gannet.”

  And without asking or allowing for hesitation, I slipped out of my glove and pressed my hand over his. Again the crowd might have imagined, and perhaps did by the few gasps I heard, that I sought to throw him off. What I did instead was thread my fingers in the hollows between his knuckles, imagined Morainn and Imke and Triss in those memories as formless, glowing light that made no room for shadows. We stood together in this memory turned dream, and as we came at last upon the entrance to Jhosch, the maw of stone and colored banners spilling like blood into the road, I took his hand there in the memory as I could not now. In the same moment I let him go in the physical world, unable to bear the disappointment of his letting go first.

  The guard f
ell back, leaving Morainn, Imke, Gannet, Antares, and I mounted between the mob behind and an assembly ahead of citizens more orderly, formal, and no less reverent of Morainn and terrified of me. More guards appeared and when it seemed safe to dismount, we did.

  “Drech Colaugh and Dresha Agathe celebrate your return.”

  No herald was needed to announce Gannet and Morainn’s parents. Both were tall with the clear, bold eyes of their daughter, and the pretty mother I had encountered in Gannet’s memory grown to her station. She was the rare sort of woman who acquires majesty with age. Her hair was as fair as her son’s, gathered on her crown in a thick, pale braid. No other artifact of her reign stood upon her brow.

  Their father, Colaugh, had the darker curls and demanding carriage of his daughter, though his command seemed effortless as he strode forward, the grooms that had come for our horses scurrying away with reins in hand. Agathe followed behind, fingers pinning in the robes at her sides as her husband took both of Antares’ gloved hands in his own.

  “We are pleased to see you home and safely,” Colaugh said, his voice rough and deep, furred like the great cloak he wore. Antares inclined his head in reverence, though stepped shortly out of the way for Morainn, who was gathered up by both parents, their words hushed enough that I couldn’t hear, their gestures lingering and tight. I was uncomfortable with her homecoming, for I saw in it all of the things I couldn’t have. I couldn’t be happy for her. Was this selfishness Theba’s, or mine?

  Gannet stood apart from all of us, and I didn’t know if this distance was because of a family he belonged to and couldn’t share, or because their attentions turned immediately from their daughter to me. He wouldn’t want to seem too close. Hadn’t he said soon after our arrival here that I would be turned over to others, to teachers or worse? I could feel his eyes on me, could feel the slight weight in the air that was all of him contained against the world. And as my eyes passed between Colaugh and Agathe, I could see that he had inherited more from his mother than the brushed light of their hair. Even without a mask, her eyes were shadowed and full of secrets.

  “Han’dra Eiren,” Colaugh began, and unlike many of his people, he didn’t struggle with the little inflections. But he met my eyes for only a moment before turning away, addressing the crowd. What I’d seen in that brief contact was mirrored in his words: brute intelligence, control, and a strength of will to rival that of both of his children.

  “The war is over, and a new era begins. We welcome the icon of Theba.”

  His words were empty, exhausted of feeling. They weren’t his, not originally. His thoughts were like a tense vibration, a note that I could hear but could not recognize. I noted the practiced way he avoided looking past me to his son.

  “We welcome the icon of Theba,” Agathe echoed, and as she did so the greeting seemed to swell like a tide in the gathered crowd, soft at first and firm soon enough.

  “We welcome the icon of Theba.”

  I could feel Gannet like a pulse, like my own heart and blood threatening to spill from lips and eyelids and ears. I would drown us both.

  “We welcome the icon of Theba.”

  Morainn had turned and uttered the same, Antares and Imke, too, without hesitation, each embellishing the greeting with hands that came together and parted again over their eyes. Imke’s hands were shaking. Had I blinded them, or would they blind me?

  “We welcome the icon of Theba.”

  “We welcome the icon of Theba.”

  “Theba, matea tsisha a,” came the last, the loudest and surest. Gannet’s feelings spiked behind me like a wave, like the waters I had conjured in Cascar and sent smashing through the ship. Several figures approached, repeating the greeting in a language I didn’t understand. There were three, but I noticed most the one that strode a measured step in front of the other two, in the center.

  Hello, Eiren.

  I didn’t quake but how I wanted to, as I could in an instant feel him rummaging about in my mind like a miser through his treasures, a beggar through trash. I could see both in him, this man with hair cut crudely but intentionally across his brow, blue eyes set like bits of glass in an ageless face.

  I am Paivi. Did Gannet tell you about me?

  I exhibited none of the control Gannet had warned me to maintain. I thought of the conversations when he had explained to me how things would change, the moods that had settled upon him darker even than usual. Paivi smiled softly. I blanched and struggled, aware of nothing but my own disappointment before he was standing in front of me, taking my hands in greeting as none of the others had. His smile widened.

  He has never liked me, but you have no reason not to.

  “Come, Han’dra Eiren, and let us make you welcome,” he spoke aloud at last for the benefit of the others. He had caused me to forget them but they were still there, respectful and watching around me, their own greetings having fallen from their lips and leaving them with nothing but wearied silence. Colaugh was dwarfed by Paivi’s presence, if not his stature, and I wasn’t sure I believed Gannet now when he said that the icons had less power than in Ambar’s turbulent past. From where I stood, they had all of it.

  Paivi kept speaking but I wasn’t listening. I looked at Gannet as one might contemplate shelter in a storm, the hands of Paivi’s companions touching on either of my shoulders and leading me past where the royal family now waited. I didn’t listen because I didn’t need to. I already knew what he was saying.

  Come, Han’dra Eiren, and let us make you.

  Chapter 19

  I was alone again before I could make room enough in my mind and heart for all that I had seen, for the people, my uncomfortably public entrance, and Paivi.

  He had joined our escort, along with a host of servants and councilors, to the vaulted apartments where the royal family held court and conducted their lives behind closed doors. Jhosch was built within the mountain, not simply carved out of the side of it, with all manner of clever systems to carry the smoke and smells and waste out. The stone itself was delicate and webbed with designs that had been cut out by hands, human or otherwise, and here and there fountains splashed up water from beneath the ground. Spindly trees grew along lanes beaten by foot and cart wheels, and I wondered what ingenuity could compel them to grow within when so many generations of their kind had flourished only in the valley below. I wanted to sit down and simply look at the city, but I was hurried by the guard and everybody else besides. I felt Paivi’s attention, harsh as the sun. Ambar didn’t need the heat and the glare, for it seemed they had unnatural means for brilliance.

  The royal family didn’t keep a fortress or castle, though their home, which spiraled incomprehensibly forward out of the stone, balconies like wings unfolding, dominated the grand lane that wound through the center of Jhosch. A great deal of light was let in here, which though beautiful, served only to deepen the shadows that weren’t touched by it. Once within, the walls were damp with secrets, like the deep places of the world. I touched them more than once, surprised that they felt dry as bone.

  I was tucked away into a room to rest, too exhausted and overwhelmed to admire it. I lay on top of the rich blanket, shivering, so I might stay awake and think better on my situation. There was a fire, but my chill had as much to do with the temperature as other things. I was sure that I should have been prepared for this, whatever it was. If Gannet hadn’t seen fit to do so per his sense of duty, surely he might have done better by me as a friend?

  He had shown me only one kindness since Paivi’s appearance, the slight brushing of his hand against my sleeve, a gesture that was not lost on the former and illuminated him greatly for me. Paivi was the icon of Erutal, who was mild enough in the stories that I could recall, or, at least mild when compared to Theba. His province was for music, dance, and song, and there were many tales of his being seduced by the charms of mortal women. When they were pleased with him he, too, was pleased. When they were not he was as careless with human life as any of the pantheon. That he was
the icon of a fool god didn’t make him any less a threat to me.

  I didn’t allow myself to grow too heated in thinking of him or of Gannet, fearful now of just how much I betrayed myself in the slightest rise or fall of my temper. Whatever his icon, Paivi was like the looking glass in one of my eldest sister’s favorite stories, a mirror that saw right through you when you thought to see through to yourself. If you had a pure heart you would see yourself as you were, but if you were wicked, each sinful thought and hateful deed would plump like a wart upon your cheek. While the depth of Paivi’s powers were unknown to me, I wasn’t willing to take any sort of chance.

  Despite my efforts to the contrary, I did sleep, and as I slept, I dreamed. I was Theba, or perhaps Theba was me, leaning out of the window of my childhood room. It had the width and breadth I remembered and my body was a girl’s, hands gripping the stone sill and hair caught in a dance of wind. We laughed, Theba and me, and I could see her hanging in the air before me like a reflection just out of reach. We had the same eyes and crown of hair, but her mouth was cruel, teeth tearing a monstrous path in her lips. Our lips. I shrieked and the window closed around my growing form, woman again with the weight of me trusted too much on the sill. As I toppled forward Theba snaked her hands into my hair, and for a moment I felt the pain of being suspended by it.

  She lowered me slowly onto the path below, a terrace walkway our guard had used and we, too, for pleasure. Theba passed into me again and we were the same. She propelled us forward.

  The terrace was different, broad leaves like those of the plants I remembered in Cascar brushing against my calves, spilling and flowering out of contained spaces that bordered the path. It was a rooftop garden, but not one I recognized. I could see a figure ahead, cloaked. But it wasn’t a cloak, only a shadow cast by a tree, curved unnatural to hang over a stone bench.