3
Anghara had been very quiet during the first part of the journey from Miranei. Lady Catlin, who rode with her in the back of the covered wagon together with their trunks and bags, made no attempt to draw her out and wisely left her to herself for a while. Anghara had stared at Miranei for as long as she could see it through the rear of the wagon, where the flaps of the wagon covering had been tied back. They made good time. The great keep grew smaller and smaller, finally vanishing altogether; it was then that Anghara closed her eyes, sealing in the memory.
Catlin thought that the girl dozed, as their horse kept up its steady pace and carried them further and further into the night. But Anghara was not asleep; her senses, if anything, seemed to have been sharpened by the last few hours to something almost supernatural. She was aware of the way the lantern hanging by the side of the wagon swung and bounced, its wavering light keeping time to the rhythm of the horse’s hooves striking the road. She was aware of the stars winking above in a sky deepening from salmon-pink and apricot clouds into shades of amethyst and indigo. She heard the tuneless whistling of the wagon driver on his seat, his back to them, and the dissonant counterpoint of another horse’s hoofbeats, March’s great heavy beast, pacing the wagon just out of her line of sight. This day’s sunset, star-rise, swift travel on unfamiliar roads, these things were being burned into her and would stay with her for the rest of her life. Without fully understanding what it was that had touched her and brought her to this dark hour, Anghara tasted the bitter grounds of exile.
They stayed at a roadside han that night, anonymous travellers. The driver would sleep in the servants’ wing; for the rest of the party, the han-keeper assumed the obvious and placed March, Catlin and Anghara into a large, spacious family room. They made no protest. March left the room in tacit understanding while Catlin, fastidious court lady that she was, and the girl who had until a few short hours ago been a princess, prepared for bed. Anghara was still mostly silent, and it was only when Catlin became aware of her darting eyes that she realized the child was looking for something. Seeing the turned-back covers of the wide bed she would share with Anghara, Catlin’s hands suddenly flew to her face and she gazed at her in blank dismay over the tips of her fingers.
“Anassa! I forgot Anassa!”
Anghara’s eyes were strange, both sympathetic and utterly blank at the same time. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, very quietly, climbing into the bed.
“But you have slept with her ever since you were a baby,” said Catlin remorsefully. Tonight of all nights Anghara should have had the comfort of something warm, familiar. But Anassa, the battered doll that had been Anghara’s favorite since babyhood, had slipped Catlin’s mind when she had been given orders to pack the child’s belongings back in Miranei…was it really only a few hours ago? And now she stood blaming herself bitterly for the oversight, for the little bit of home she should have thought to bring into banishment for the little girl who had already left too much behind.
Anghara turned away and curled up on her side of the bed. Catlin doused the lights, climbing in carefully beside her; she listened for a while, surreptitiously, but Anghara’s breathing was deep and regular, no sound of crying. She seemed to have fallen asleep almost instantly, although Catlin was a little incredulous at the thought—especially after being severed in such a violent manner from a favorite bedtime companion of many years. In the end it was Catlin who shed quiet tears in what she thought was the privacy of solitude with her charge asleep beside her, and it was Catlin who drifted off into sleep first. Anghara lay motionless for a long time, wide awake, staring into the darkness and remembering the way Miranei had faded from her horizon, the odd finality of it, almost as though it had been swallowed by the approaching night, or the yawn of immeasurable time. She was conscious of what was almost terror beating within her, a fear that she was somehow sundered from her home for good. Or that she would only come back after everything had changed, come back to rubble, or a different city altogether, with every street distorted and every tower different from her memory. Should she forget the smallest detail of the place, it would happen, she knew this with a dreadful certainty; this was her nameless fear. She lay in the dark, trying to capture the perfect memory of Miranei, which lived within her heart. And yet, when she did fall asleep, it was only to dream the same dream that had haunted her waking hours—the vision of Miranei of the Mountains vanishing gently, slowly, into darkness.
The darkness also frightened her, for it lay before her as well as behind. She had no idea where they were going, and aside from her mother’s vague warnings of danger, no inkling why. She clung to her silence for the first day of their journey, but eventually the thought of leaving her home further and further behind while going forward in no certain direction drove her to March, who at the very least seemed to know where they were heading.
She caught up with him at another roadside han, having followed him into the stables. He had not heard her drift in after him; he had gone to have another look at what might have been causing the increasing lameness of one of the wagon horses. It may have been the intensity of her regard that made him lift his head from his perusal of the gelding’s left front hoof and look at her, with some surprise.
He dropped the hoof and straightened, pulling his fur-lined winter cloak, flung back so as not to hinder his examination, down over his shoulders. “And what are you doing here?” he asked lightly. He had never addressed her condescendingly, adult to child, but always, with a built-in deference that went without saying, as though they were equals. They had dropped all titles when they left Miranei and Anghara had instinctively understood, it was a matter of their disguise; but March’s unspoken “princess” still hung between them in the small warm stable of the roadside han like a charm.
“March…Mama told me nothing about this journey. It all happened so fast; she only said there was danger, and she would call me back when it was over. But why didn’t she come with us? Why couldn’t I have stayed?”
March suddenly realized how little she knew. Nobody had found the time or seen any real necessity to explain any of the actions of the past days to a child who, royal or not, would simply do what she was told in the end. But Anghara was frightened and more than a little lost, crowned in Miranei’s Great Hall by her father’s council lords one moment and fleeing madly into the winter night the next. All she had ever known had been torn from her in a matter of a few hectic hours. She had been sent away from everything familiar with only vaguely couched words of warning about a nebulous danger, which must have sounded like a dragon of legend and a few even vaguer promises about returning soon. It was to her credit that in the beginning, while time had been of the essence, she had obeyed those she trusted without question. But she was far too intelligent to take obedience into blind submission. March would have been disappointed if she had.
“We’re going to Cascin,” he said, glancing around to make sure they were alone. “Where your mother was born. You will be staying there for a while, with your aunt and uncle.”
“Mama took me there once,” said Anghara slowly. “I was still a baby, I don’t remember it at all. But Aunt Chella came to visit Mama at Miranei, when I was five. She had a baby with her, a little girl.”
“Yes. Your cousin Drya. She would be about four now. There are also the twins, Adamo and Charo, they are only a year older than you. And Ansen, he’s the eldest, he’s turning twelve this year…or is it thirteen?”
Anghara, who had been rendered a solitary child through the circumstances of her birth, suddenly quailed at the thought of all those children, all those unknown cousins. The only one she had ever seen had been little Drya, and even that couldn’t really count as any sort of acquaintance. The others, the boys…doubly alien, older than her, and male. Would there be any common ground there at all? At least they were kin; that ought to count for something…
March subsided onto a nearby bale of hay and patted the space beside him for Anghara to join him
. “There are some other things you’d better know before we go much further,” he said, and the seriousness of his voice distracted Anghara from her thoughts on kinship. “Now seems as good a time to tell you as any. When we left Miranei, we left a great deal behind—but you left something you haven’t even missed yet. Your name.”
Anghara stared at him in blank incomprehension.
“When we get to Cascin,” said March, “you go there not as Anghara Kir Hama, Princess of Roisinan. You’ll be someone else, a little girl called Brynna Kelen, come to foster at the manor. Your aunt and uncle will know who you really are, but not the children; you’ll meet them as a new foster sister, not blood kin.”
“But why?” wailed Anghara. Even that which she thought immutable in a world of chaos, her own identity, was being taken from her; nothing was left, nothing. She was being forced to take herself apart, and put herself together as a different person. And all for…what? She still did not know what the danger was which hunted her, but by this stage it had grown into something huge, incomprehensible, all-powerful—something capable of reaching across half her world and tearing from her the very name that made her who she was.
March gently touched her hair. “There is another who wants what is yours, my princess,” he said, very quietly. “Someone who wants to be in your place badly enough to destroy you, if he knew where you were. Someone who is coming to Miranei to steal your crown.”
“But my father was the king,” said Anghara, with implacable nine-year-old logic.
“So was his,” said March. “You know him. You share the same father, the same name. But it is your mother who is queen, not his, and that is why he has had to take by force what is rightfully yours.”
“Who?” Anghara asked, genuinely bewildered.
“His name is Sif.”
To Anghara it was as though the great black monster stretching against the wall showing huge, frightening fangs was suddenly revealed as nothing more than the shadow of a kitchen cat yawning quietly by the fire. “Sif? But Sif would never harm me.” That, because she knew him, knew of him. The first reaction was to Sif, the person. But then…“He would not dare. The lords swore the oath to me.” The unconscious arrogance was there, the same arrogance Sif had shown in the army camp by the River Ronval. The same man had fathered these two; they were more alike than they knew. And yet, March had seen enough of Sif Kir Hama to expect no mercy to stay his hand, not this close to the fulfillment of all his dreams.
“Yes,” said March, “but oaths can be broken. And even if they held, Sif comes with your father’s army, and he will take Miranei if it will not be given. And once he takes it, he will have his own lords. Ones who swore no oaths to you.”
“But Mama gave me…” Anghara’s hand leapt from the straw, and then sank back, slowly, as she had time to think the motion through, even here, with March, whom she trusted. But March was anticipating her.
“The seal?” he said. “It’s all right, my lady told me what she intended. I know you hold it. Yes, that might slow him, but not stop him. He can declare it lost and have a new one carved. But unless he can prove it lost or you dead, he will never sit securely on your throne. My lady the queen knows you are too young to resist him now; but if we can keep you safe, in a few years you can face him, and nothing he can do will stand against you. You are King Dynan’s true heir, and Sif knows that as well as you. But until then, you must remember you are Brynna Kelen, not Princess Anghara of Miranei—because if he finds you before you are ready, it might go ill for us. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” said Anghara. “It won’t be for long.”
All the same, she glanced back at her bright name with yearning as she laid it gently for safekeeping into deeper recesses of her mind. She tasted the other, the one to be hers for a brief while before she could rise to reclaim her own lineage and name. “Brynna,” she said experimentally. It felt foreign, but not unduly so; she started to practice wearing it. “Who is she, this Brynna?”
March impulsively discarded everything Rima might have concocted as Brynna’s “history” in her letter to Chella, turning to the child beside him with an air of conspiracy. “I think,” he said with a quick smile, “we will leave that to you. Who do you want to be? Nothing too involved, mind; you are trying to disappear. If you draw too much attention to Brynna Kelen you might as well wave a flag to announce where Anghara Kir Hama might be hiding. Do you want to think about it?”
He had distracted her, and there was a gleam in her eyes. Already she was creating a new self, something she would do far better than trying to live up to whatever artificial biography Rima had prepared. March would simply warn Chella in advance of the slight change in plans.
Anghara came to him again when they reached Halas Han, only a day or two’s travel from Cascin, and gave the seeds of her new life into his keeping. She had sensibly made Brynna from Miranei. March initially thought it dangerous, pointing an unerring finger to the place from which Anghara had fled; but then he saw the wisdom of it. It would have been nice to have made Brynna an exotic from Shaymir or from some seafaring family of Calabra, but Anghara knew little about either place, and her hesitations would have shown her as a fake within minutes to anyone who cared to probe the disguise. This way, nobody could trip her up on her story; she knew Miranei too well, even for one who had spent most of her short life immured within castle walls. She explained away her knowledge of the court by making Brynna a minor aristocrat, one of the dozens Anghara had observed around the palace, with enough access to the court to have first-hand information of what she “knew.” It would also account for the clothes she was bringing in her trunks, rich enough for someone of standing, although Catlin had been warned to pack the simpler gowns and to leave the richest ones behind. Although only nine, Anghara was proving to have a gift for subtle intrigue; she was creating an effective camouflage, allowing just enough truth to shine through to make the lie convincing.
“Very good,” March had said approvingly, once it had all been told. “You’ve done all the right things.”
“Then call me Brynna from now on. I suppose I’d better get used to it. You should,” she said with a faint air of admonishment, “have done that from the beginning.”
This was entirely true and March had already berated himself for not thinking of it before. He agreed immediately, and found it remarkably easy to think of her as Brynna—already she was no longer the Anghara he had known. Catlin was worse. She kept slipping, and Anghara would turn instinctively at the sound of the old name, then a strange closed look would come into her eyes as she caught herself doing it. But she trained herself until it became second nature to respond only to Brynna. At the last, March felt his hackles rise as he watched her raise her head on one occasion at the sound of Catlin’s voice, and then glance behind her with a motion as natural as breathing to see who it was that Catlin wanted. It was as though she had turned to look for her own lost soul. But in that moment she had achieved a total victory over herself; she had lived through a moment during which she had truly thought of Anghara as “other.” It was what was needed; but March had turned away with something suspiciously like tears prickling at the back of his eyes. He caught himself wondering whether they could ever really give back what had been taken from her on this journey.
Halas Han was one of the bigger hans, more of a small trading town than a simple wayside inn. It had small quays poking out into three different rivers, and there was a constant coming and going as porters bearing mysteriously wrapped bales staggered from quay to warehouse, or from the storerooms to the river boats waiting on the water.
The stables did a brisk trade, and half a dozen grooms were kept on the hop, saddling one horse, unsaddling and boxing another. Glancing into the cavernous depths of the han’s stable as he passed his horse into the grooms’ custody, March glimpsed two desert horses from Kheldrin. These were rare, usually fabulously expensive, and a badge of someone very highly born or very rich, someone who wanted to flaunt the
ir wealth. He had only seen seven others in his life, and four of those had belonged to Red Dynan’s own stables. He felt an abrupt pang of misgiving at the sight of desert horses deep in the heart of Roisinan. Who owned this pair? If the owner had been to the court at Miranei and seen Anghara, she was in danger. They could still lose everything, even here, at the very threshold of safety. He had pondered confining Catlin and Anghara to their room for the duration of their stay.
But Halas Han was a good place to be for someone seeking to stay lost. It was constantly bustling, crowded, new faces coming and going in a confusion of impatient men whose motto, howled unanimously from a thousand throats on every conceivable occasion, seemed to be, “I’ve no time to waste!” In keeping with han tradition, there was only one hostelry, a rambling building of motley architecture, spreading up and out over three floors and half a dozen haphazardly built-on wings added as and when it seemed necessary. A guest in one wing could go for a week without setting eyes on anyone from another wing, and a week was considerably longer than any guest would be expected to spend in Halas Han. The landlord was a man with a prodigious memory for guests, especially those about to depart and due for an accounting—but even he could hold only so much in his head. Even if March’s anonymous lord tripped over Anghara in this bubbling cauldron, the girl who called herself Brynna had taken to wearing her bright hair in two long plaits, and looked nothing like the royal princess spirited out of Miranei several days before. If the lord should think the face was familiar, even so, enquiries with the landlord, if they produced any results at all, would yield only a false name. And Anghara’s best protection would be an innocence of danger. Any sign she was guarded in the presence of strangers might jog the memory of a name to go with that face, and could trigger an unwelcome train of thought.
But fears for their safety proved unfounded. They were only there for one night, and gone again far earlier in the morning than a pampered lord could have been expected to have been astir. They made their departure cleanly, and were certain to have been wiped off the slate of the landlord’s memory, making space for new arrivals, as soon as they had settled their account with the queen’s gold. Their passing left hardly a ripple in the constant bubble and simmer of Halas Han. And the next stop was Cascin—safety at last, and, for March, home. This was country he knew well, the land of his boyhood. While Anghara travelled deeper and deeper into exile, March was returning from a long one of his own.
The Hidden Queen Page 5
