The Hidden Queen

by Alma Alexander

  Anghara, who had laid her copy of the council document carefully into the open trunk, obeyed. Her last farewell to her mother was a swift backward glance of those strange gray eyes, filled with a depth of understanding too great for her tender years. Rima blew her a kiss from the tips of her fingers, and Anghara smiled a little as she turned away. “March,” said Rima, and March slipped into the room as Anghara left it, closing the door behind him.

  “Lady?”

  “The other scroll…if she should ever have need…in our secret place in Cascin.”

  March took the document, folding it into the breast of his travelling tunic. “I will keep it safe.”

  “March…”

  “And her, my lady. I will keep her safe.”

  Rima turned away, unable to bear the compassion in his eyes. He waited for a moment, but she said no more. “I will send a man for the trunks,” March said at length. “He can be trusted. The Gods watch over you, my lady.”

  Rima kept her back to him, hearing him quietly close the door behind him. She had no intention of being here when March’s man arrived. The departure of her daughter had already left a great gaping hole in her soul, added to the wound of Dynan’s passing. Somehow, seeing those two small trunks disappear would be worse than saying goodbye. It would be a haunting and permanent farewell.

  Rima had no illusions; when Sif came to Miranei any siege would last a bare day or two—a week, if the defenses held at all. There were too many who were Miranei born and bred in the ranks of his army, too many who knew Miranei far too well. If there was a weakness, they would know it as well as the defenders. There would be someone in his army who knew rumors about secret passages; and they would know all the postern gates. There weren’t enough men in Miranei to keep out Miranei’s own army, even if all chose to fight, which was by no means certain. And when Sif gained the castle, Rima knew she was dead. As would Anghara be, if she were to wait within those walls, so secure against anyone but their own children. But Rima could buy precious time. She could stay behind, inviting speculation; she could send three different expeditions in three different directions, at least one, with a girl answering Anghara’s description, into a sanctuary of Nual. The priests wouldn’t lie, but they would be fed only half-truths—if anyone did come knocking, the priests could not swear they were not harboring the vanished princess. Perhaps Sif would be content to leave her there, knowing she could never leave the sanctuary alive.

  And other, truer paths she had already swept clean of tracks. She had sent a letter with March. By the time Anghara Kir Hama arrived at the manor of Cascin, Rima’s childhood home now belonging to her sister Chella and her husband, Lyme, the fosterling by the name of Brynna Kelen, whose identity Anghara would assume, would have been “living” there for two years. Rima trusted her sister—Chella had the ability to make the entire household swear to that, if Sif should choose to inquire. Even the children…Rima allowed herself a moment of bitterness. There, at Cascin, no more than a small manor in the hinterland of Roisinan, were three sons waiting to inherit—while here, at Miranei, there was but one small girl to take up the burden of a kingdom. It was not fair. It was not fair! If only she had been able to give Dynan a son to supplant his first-born child by another woman—a true-born son instead of Sif, who gloried in his right to bear Dynan’s name. Because Dynan had taken him, accepted him, set his stamp on him that all might know the boy for the king’s own. He had loved Anghara, but Red Dynan came of a line of warriors, and all his pride had been for Sif. And now the daughter of his love could easily fall beneath the onslaught of the son of his pride. And Rima was a frail enough barrier to raise between them. Yet—there was still one last thing she could do, one thing her Sight could do for her daughter.

  She left her room, and climbed the battlements facing south. There were several carts on the road from Miranei, folk fleeing the inevitable attack. One of them might well be the one carrying Dynan’s daughter away from his keep. In a last moment of full and free memory, Rima was deeply grateful for the numbers on that road; they would mask Anghara’s departure even more thoroughly than Rima could have hoped. Then she ruthlessly erased all traces of Anghara from her mind after the last bright vision of her daughter’s small face beneath Roisinan’s crown, deliberately left to torment Sif if he ever came close enough to Rima to question her. There was one small trigger, inaccessible to anyone but herself, that would restore her memory of Anghara’s sanctuary; but Sif could not get at it. Even if she survived his assault on Miranei long enough to become his prisoner, he would never be able to drag the secret from her. He could not force her to divulge what she no longer knew.

  Both were gone from her now, Dynan whom she had loved and the daughter for whom she fought even as she chose to forget her. There was a great yawning hollowness inside her, a longing that could never be met, part of a puzzle that could only be resolved when Sif arrived in Miranei and she, Rima, went to whatever fate that hour held for her.

  But now she was tired, empty. She crossed her arms upon the cold stone of Miranei’s ancient stone battlements and rested her chin on them, staring unblinkingly across the moors into the flat horizon, as if she could already see in her mind’s eye the dust raised by Dynan’s army. Sif’s army, coming to conquer. Roisinan’s army, death behind them, death before, coming to bring a new king to the keep under the mountains.

  2

  It was not that Sif had counted on having Miranei handed to him without a blow struck in anger, given his manner of having claimed its mastery, although it would have gratified him to have been welcomed there with acclamations. But neither did he expect the keep to hold out against him for so long. Even Rima had not realized the depth of the feelings that ran in the keep’s defenders. Faced with a horrifying choice, divided within itself, its people’s loyalties shredded in the storm of Sif’s coming like cobwebs in a high wind, Miranei was still the king’s keep and he that waited beyond it, for all the claims of his blood, was not yet the king. And what was the king’s was still within the walls, and would be defended. The garrison fought like men demented, even against those who rose up in Sif’s favor in its own ranks. Miranei suffered agonies of both body and soul, but it held out for the heiress of Red Dynan for almost ten days.

  Even then, Miranei’s gates were opened to Sif from within. Once in, the army’s superior numbers made short work of any remaining pockets of resistance. But the aftermath, the picture that met Sif’s eyes when he rode in to claim his city, was a swathe of blood and destruction. There were bodies in the courtyards, bodies hanging awkwardly from battlements. Torn, bloodied cloaks lay trampled underfoot; bright blood pooled on stairwells, left long, dull smears on walls. Those men who were still alive wandered about in a daze. A few recognized and greeted Sif according to the manner of their most recent feelings about him—some with a weary kind of joy, others, less subtle, simply turning tail and running for cover. There was an odd smell in the air, partly that of death, partly something more intangible, a smell, perhaps, of treachery, or regret. Someone had torched a grain storehouse and the fire hadn’t fully caught—the roof still smoldered dully, adding acrid, murky smoke to the already polluted atmosphere. Sif, unaccountably, felt cheated.

  “I wanted to ride into my father’s city in glory,” he said to Fodrun, riding beside him. He lifted a hand from his black stallion’s reins, waving a waft of smoke from before his face. “There is no glory in this.”

  Fodrun could only agree. It was easy to forget in the heat of battle, but what they had just vanquished was not simply a body of men opposed to their own, it was the spirit behind those men, the spirit of a nine-year-old girl. There was something bitter in the thought, something dismal about Miranei, something that jarred badly at Fodrun’s bright memories of it. But he could not put his feelings into words. He merely nodded. “But there is time for that, my lord. You will make the glory.”

  Sif’s mood was too bleak for prophecies of splendor. He merely signalled forward a pair of troopers wh
o rode at his back. “Go,” he said to them, “take a detail and secure the royal tower. If there is anyone there, detain them in comfortable confinement. Go.”

  One of the men bowed from the saddle in acquiescence, raised a hand, motioning to a company of mounted men. They peeled off from the main group and made for the royal gate; a few, obeying a sharp hand signal, wheeled and passed under an archway leading from the yard, rounding the tower and vanishing from sight. Going for the postern, Sif noticed fleetingly, with approval; he made a mental note to commend the men whom he had set in command of this cheta for their thoroughness. The men would not be surprised to find their new king knew them by name. That was part of Sif’s power, part of the reason the army cohorts at his back, who had not all been entirely happy in the beginning at what they saw as Fodrun’s treachery, were now behind Sif to a man, as once they had belonged to his father. This, if nothing else, had stamped Sif as Dynan’s, and their own.

  Sif made a thorough tour of the battlements, offering a few well-chosen words to men he met on his way. But there was nothing he could have usefully done or changed there, all orders having been given and confirmed before Sif had ridden into the keep. Fodrun, walking two steps behind, could not help but think the tour was little more than a delaying tactic; Sif was as reluctant to join his men in the royal tower as Fodrun himself. Suddenly, here, Princess Anghara had returned to haunt Sif’s general with a persistence he had never expected; being a practical man, he saw no pleasant future for the little princess once Sif had time to think about her potential as a focus for those who might plot his downfall. If he wanted to hold on to what he had won, Sif could not afford to let Anghara live at liberty, if he could afford to allow her to live at all.

  At last Sif turned toward the royal chambers where a hard decision awaited. Dynan’s queen had never liked him, and Sif had accepted that—how could she? She resented him; he resented her. How much more he could have had than the crumbs from Dynan’s table, had Clera been queen, had he been born prince instead of king’s bastard?

  But Anghara…After Dynan had acknowledged him and had him brought to court, Sif had seen his half-sister frequently. He vividly remembered the day of her birth, the day his hopes of Dynan’s putting aside his queen, marrying Clera and announcing his only son as his heir had been finally dashed. If Rima had resented Sif, he had paid it back tenfold by resenting Anghara, with the implacable hostility of a twelve-year-old boy who saw in Dynan’s new daughter the ruination of his dreams. But she had never hated him. She always had a way of keeping a friendly distance, a knack many an adult woman would have envied, if their paths happened to cross a little more closely than usual for a high-born girl-child and a bastard-born youth who spent most of his time in places she rarely frequented. She had never found occasion to pay him much attention, both from the point of view of being secure and unchallenged in her exalted position, and from the natural disinterest and incomprehension bound to follow from the discrepancy in their age and sex. Before that, she had been too young. And now Sif held her life in his hands. His face was clean of expression, but his hands were tightly clenched at his sides; Fodrun could tell his self-possession was hard-won.

  It shattered without warning when they entered the queen’s private chambers, and Sif saw the woman laid out on the bed. He slid from tight-leashed composure into a blistering rage within the time it took to blink.

  “I wanted her alive!” Sif snarled, having paused aghast in the doorway. The guard who stood at the foot of the carved four-poster bed cringed.

  “She is, lord!” he had time to squeak, wincing in anticipation of a stinging blow across his face.

  The blow never landed. Sif had himself in hand. “Explain,” he said brusquely, and the naked edge of his voice was no less dangerous for having been sheathed in a brittle control.

  “Lord,” the soldier began warily, “somebody was here before us. The room was a mess…whoever was here might have been looking for something, but it looked as though she had not fought her assailant—perhaps she knew them—but by the time we got here they had already gone.”

  “Did you search the tower?”

  “Yes, lord, we did. But there were blood-spattered men everywhere. If some of that blood was the quee…was hers…we could not know.”

  Fodrun allowed himself a small grim smile at the man’s frantic attempt to retrieve his slip of the tongue. Sif would not want reminding of who had been queen in Miranei. And the guard’s clumsy reconstruction of events may not have been far from the mark. Rima may well have known who attacked her. What she may not have known when they entered her chambers was where their loyalties had been given.

  “She was wounded,” the guard was still babbling, “but she was not yet dead, and three of us came to see if we could help. But she had a knife, lord, one of those wretched small ones so damnably easy to hide, and if she had failed to fight the one who came to murder her, she certainly fought us, who came to help. She slashed at Radis’ face—and then Talin grabbed at her arm—he didn’t mean to break it, lord—and I…I pushed her away…and she fell…across that.” The fender he indicated ringed the hearth, and was delicately spiked. Some of the spikes, ornamental but deadly, were anointed with blood. There was more pooling by the hearth.

  They had lifted the half-swooning queen onto the bed, the guard explained, and tried to bind the worst of her hurts, but by the time Sif had arrived the bed was soaked with blood that seeped through their makeshift bandages. Rima lay still, her face a bloody mask; her eyes were closed, but she was still breathing, very shallowly. Fodrun, no stranger to death, saw it stamped on her brow; but it was no part of his soldier’s brief to see women laid out thus. He found himself feeling queasy. Part of the reason for this supplied itself a moment later when Sif asked the question Fodrun’s subconscious could not formulate.

  “And the girl? The princess?”

  “Some of the men are still searching, lord. She was not in her quarters, nor here. Perhaps she is hiding somewhere; or perhaps…”

  Yes. Perhaps somebody had already solved Sif’s dilemma for him. Perhaps whoever had tried to do away with the mother had succeeded where the child was concerned. Sif dismissed Anghara from his mind for a moment, crossing over to the bed and bending over Rima’s prone form. As though aware of his presence, her eyes flickered open. They were already filmed, glazing.

  Sif reached out and shook her, none too gently. “Who was it? Why attack you? Why now?” he demanded. “Where is Anghara?”

  She murmured something, and both Sif and the guard instinctively leaned closer to hear. “What was that?” said Sif impatiently.

  “She said…sign? Signed?” volunteered the guard. Rima made a faint movement of her hand toward her breast, but lacked the strength to carry it through; the hand fell back. Sif’s eyes narrowed.

  “Did you search her?”

  “No, lord!” said the guard, sounding faintly shocked at the idea.

  Sif had no such scruples. He’d followed the unfinished gesture to where it would have landed, and saw a subtle bulge there that belonged on no woman’s body. Now he reached out and ran his hand over it, not able to suppress a quick grim smile as his fingers met parchment.

  “It’s my guess it was for this she was attacked. ‘Sign,’ she said. Or ‘signed.’ Something signed. What document is this?”

  It was much crumpled and partly stained with Rima’s blood, but it was still legible enough. As Sif tried to make sense of it, Fodrun watched his face change again, sliding into the cold fury only lately quelled. When he looked up, even Fodrun quailed at his icy eyes even though the anger was not for him. Sif spoke to the guard without even turning his head in that direction. “Find me one of those Sighted women; there used to be dozens in the keep. Find me one, now. I want her here within five minutes. Move!”

  The guard, suddenly anxious to depart from Sif’s volatile presence, scurried to obey.

  “My lord?” Fodrun ventured.

  “She wasn’t attacked for
this, but for that of which it tells,” Sif spat, tossing the unsavoury parchment to Fodrun, who caught it awkwardly. “She had the council sign a declaration. That’s just a statement of its existence; but that declaration, the original document, is a confirmation of Anghara’s succession, signed by every lord on my father’s own council. I can form a new council, but this, this will bind them, too—this is a legal document, signed by a legal government in its full powers. Anyone producing the original, or proof of its existence, can hold a sword at my throat. This can bury me. I want that document. If none know of it but she and the council, then I can still…”

  “Lord, you wanted…”

  Sif grabbed the dishevelled, elderly woman whom the guard dispatched for Sighted prey had produced, his hand closing round her arm like a vice. Her eyes were round with horror, and she whimpered like a puppy at the new pain. Sif shook her, and she blinked, seeming to start out of deep shock, staring at him in fear.

  “This woman is dying,” Sif said, “and you will read her for me. I want answers, and I can no longer extract them myself. Come on.”

  “The queen…” moaned the Sighted woman, suddenly catching her first sight of the subject she was to probe. “I can’t…”

  “Oh yes, you can,” said Sif grimly. “She was your queen. Right now, I am your king, and you will obey me. What is your name?”

  “D…Deira…”

  “Listen to me, Lady Deira, and listen very carefully. I want to know two things. I want to know where the original is of the document the general is holding. Do you need to see it to know what to ask?”

  She seemed to have lost her voice completely; Sif made an impatient motion and Fodrun handed him the document. Sif thrust it at the woman, who received it almost mechanically. “Look at it!” he snapped, and she did, although it was doubtful she took any of it in. Sif didn’t mind, he would have preferred her never to have seen it at all—if she couldn’t understand what she was holding, all the better, as long as she had the vital link to get the truth out of Rima.