The Hidden Queen

by Alma Alexander

  Perhaps he had unconsciously picked up the pace, or else he was simply unwilling to stop over for another night so close to the manor. In any event, the last day of their journey was by far the longest they had endured. Catlin was tired and well shaken by the constant jouncing of their wagon, and Anghara had passed through tiredness into exhaustion and was fast asleep by the time they drew near Cascin Manor. The moon was up and most of the house abed, but a messenger had been sent on ahead when Rima had conceived of this plan. Someone had been sitting in the gatehouse ever since word had come to watch for travellers out of Miranei. One of the two men on guard that night hastened ahead to alert the manor’s lord and lady as the other climbed onto the wagon next to the driver and directed him into the inner court. Lord Lyme was already waiting as March rode in and dismounted from his horse.

  “Be welcome here, all of you,” Lyme said. A childhood paralysis had left him the legacy of a withered leg and a carved stick without which he found walking difficult. He was now leaning on this, a man not yet past his forty-fifth year. The illusion of great age was strengthened by pale blond hair, almost white in the light of several small torches burning in the yard.

  “Thank you,” said March. Catlin poked her head out of the back of the wagon, rubbing her eyes, and scrambled to get down when she saw Lyme waiting. March turned to help her with instinctive courtesy, but his attention was still on Cascin’s lord. “Has there been any news out of Miranei?”

  “Some,” said Lyme. “You travelled slowly; news flies. It filters through the han, they know things there almost before they have happened; I keep a man at Halas constantly, and we hear anything new almost as soon as the han knows of it. Sif is at Miranei, with the army, but at the last count the keep was still holding against him.”

  March’s head came up, his eyes bright in his white face. “Still? They hold still? I thought…”

  “It can’t be much longer now,” said Lyme. There was sorrow in his voice; he saw Rima’s death in the eventual fall of Miranei, and he was deeply distressed. “The child?” he asked, thoughts of Rima followed almost immediately by thoughts of her daughter, the cause of this desperate journey.

  “She is asleep, my lord,” said Catlin. “This has been a hard day for her.”

  “Her room is prepared,” said a new voice, and Catlin curtsied lightly to Lady Chella, Lyme’s wife and sister to Dynan’s doomed queen, who had joined them in the court. “Were you one of my sister’s suite, lady? What is your name?”

  “Anghara’s own,” said Catlin. “I am Catlin.” Her voice cracked on a yawn she could not quite swallow.

  Chella smiled. “Let us bed the child down, and then perhaps you too can seek some rest. It has been a hard day for you all, and a harder journey.” Her eyes glittered in the torchlight as she came up to the wagon, clear gray, Rima’s eyes that Anghara had inherited. “Tomorrow we will have to think of a plan,” she said. “There are few in my household who know who the child is, and it is better not to stir up questions best left unasked. We will find you a place here, Lady Catlin, but she cannot be seen to have a personal attendant, not in the station in which she has been cast, or else people will start wondering. But for tonight, do you wish to share her chamber? She might find tomorrow easier in a strange place if she wakes to the sight of a friend.”

  “You are kind,” said Catlin in a low voice.

  Chella, who had reached into the wagon to gather Anghara into her arms, smiled down at the sleeping child. Sudden tears sparkled on her lashes. “Yes,” she said softly. “But kindness is a fragile enough cocoon for her, from whom so much has been taken. Kindness I can give her, and a kinswoman’s love. I only wonder if it will be enough when the cold winds find her?”

  They put Anghara to bed without her offering more than a faint, mumbled protest at the gentle removal of her travelling clothes. Certainly she had no memory of arriving at Cascin, or of being carried into the room in which she found herself when she opened her eyes into the bright light of the next morning. She had half expected to see the close hangings of the wagon all around her, and feel the gently swaying wagon floor beneath. For a moment it was strange to find herself once again in a room that, despite lacking the grandeur of her chambers in Miranei, still had more style and grace than the sparsely furnished and barely comfortable rooms offered by the average roadside han. She was alone, but Catlin poked her head round the door almost the moment Anghara opened her eyes, and the rest of her followed when she saw her young charge had finally roused.

  “Good, you’re awake. You’ve slept almost twelve hours; you must have really needed a good rest in a decent bed.”

  “Where are we?” murmured Anghara, or Brynna as she had learned to think of herself even first thing in the morning, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

  “Cascin. We’re here at last. Come now, get up; your breakfast has been waiting for the better part of two hours.”

  Brynna found herself to be ravenously hungry all of a sudden at the mention of breakfast. She swung her legs out of bed and sat up, pushing her long hair out of her eyes. She accepted, as every morning, Catlin’s gentle ministrations—shrugged into a robe Catlin handed her, slid her feet into slippers Catlin brought, sat still at the gentle tug in her tangled hair of the comb wielded by Catlin’s hand. But that was a vestige of Anghara, the princess who had always accepted such as her due. Now, coming fully awake and her mind clear and rested from her long sleep, she caught the faint regret in Catlin’s eye as the woman moved away to lay the comb on the bedside table.

  “I’m Brynna,” she whispered, “and you were Anghara’s. This will be the last morning, won’t it?”

  “Yes, my dear,” said Catlin, trying to keep the emotion out of her voice. “I’ll stay for as long as you need me, and be here for you; but they can’t see you being set apart like this. I can only be your friend now, and perhaps, later, in some things, your teacher—but no more than that, not here. Perhaps some day, when we go back…”

  “Then you’d better let me dress myself,” said Brynna. “Go and tell them I’m coming to breakfast as soon as I’m finished.” And then, realizing the power of command was hers no longer, not in this place, she lifted her chin and smiled in Catlin’s direction with a strange expression on her face. “If you would,” she added.

  Catlin looked down, a sudden wave of love and fierce protectiveness threatening to overwhelm her. She covered the moment by dropping gracefully into one of the deepest curtsys she had yet offered her young mistress. “Yes, my princess.”

  Then she was gone. The girl who used to be a princess finished plaiting her own hair, and shrugged into the clean dress left for her. Then she stood before the closed door and tried to still her wildly beating heart and enter this house of kinsfolk whom she must count as strangers. In her whole life as a child of royal blood, sheltered and safe, there had always been someone there—her mother, her nurse, and then, later, Catlin and her other women. Now, when all security had fled, when she needed support as never before, she walked alone. It was a strange new dance. Brynna might know the steps, and it was the Brynna identity to which the frightened child now clung. The princess called Anghara felt the absence of all the familiar props and flailed in nothingness; this was a country in which she did not know her way. But she would find it; in the tracklessness the goal rose like a light—her perfect memory of Miranei. From here, all roads would take her home. It just might take a little time.

  She squared her small chin with determination. Anghara retreated into shadows to wait her time; Brynna Kelen stepped out bravely to enter a new and unfamiliar world.

  4

  Breakfast was a rather solitary affair. The only other person who awaited Brynna in the small room where it had been laid out was Lady Chella. Brynna had hesitated at the door, her two personalities both aroused at once: Anghara could not but respond to the stamp of her mother, so clearly etched in her sister’s face, and Brynna was nebulously aware she must somehow keep control. Her aunt—her foster m
other—had noticed the confusion, and smiled.

  “Yes,” she said, “it’s hard denying something we both know. But even though I would love nothing better than to renew an acquaintance with the captivating little niece I left behind at Miranei almost four years ago, perhaps it’s best if you remain Brynna, even here with me. Brynna is someone whom I must still get to know; March tells me Rima’s account of her life is mostly wrong. So come, tell me about yourself.”

  So it had been Brynna who had entered and sat down to breakfast; and it had been both easier and harder to cling to Brynna in Chella’s presence than the girl who had been Anghara would have expected. She felt almost guilty, indulging in what must seem like pointless play-acting, with both of them knowing what they knew. At the same time, a gesture, a look, a turn of phrase would remind “Brynna” of the mother Anghara had left behind, and Anghara would cry out with the thwarted need to find something more of her mother in her aunt. On the other hand, she realized juggling Brynna with Anghara at a whim, depending on the company she kept at any given moment, would drive her mad within days. And besides, what if there was someone else with her aunt, a stranger, and she made some silly small mistake? Discovery could follow all too easily. So she clung stubbornly to Brynna’s thoughts and feelings; careful, thoughtful Brynna, who considered things conscientiously before she spoke, who would shy away from every unnecessary risk. Her first breakfast at Cascin was something of an ordeal, but at the end of it Brynna, although exhausted, was aware of a feeling of what was almost triumph—she had endured, and she had won. Chella had risen with her and given her a light kiss on the brow.

  “You’ll do very well,” she murmured. “You’re strong; you’ve got potential you haven’t touched yet. It’s probably just as well, for now. Do you want to go and explore a little? The grounds are quite safe, only don’t go falling into any of the wells, they’re still pure snowmelt. You might even run into the boys, they’re out there somewhere; they know you’re here.”

  Brynna colored a little and Chella chuckled.

  “They are your cousins, remember, but even if you take that away, they are now your foster brothers. You’re going to have to meet them sooner or later.”

  “How will I…” Brynna began, and then lost herself in the complexity of the question. She wanted to ask, without quite knowing how to go about it, how she was to know them, how she should approach them and win them. Her eyes dropped at Chella’s liquid laugh, but it was not unkind, merely amused comprehension.

  “They’ll know you,” she said, “and I hope I have instilled enough manners by now for them to introduce themselves and make a guest feel at home. After that, it’s up to you. To all of you. Perhaps I do wrong in not telling them the truth, but maybe it’s for the best—it’s yourself they will take you as, not a cousin whom they must accept for form’s sake.”

  Brynna wanted to ask what would happen if they didn’t like her. She saw months and perhaps years unfold before her in a black tunnel of loneliness as the single outsider, the youngest not counting baby Drya, the only girl in a clutch of boys—but it was a pointless question. There would be nothing Chella could do if those particular fears came true. So she merely gave Chella what she thought of as a brave smile, not realizing just how much of her soul was revealed in those expressive gray eyes, and obediently left the breakfast room to seek a way into the grounds.

  She was initially met with silence, with no sign or sound of children at play. The manor was set into a square of level, well-tended lawn which was nevertheless showing the effects of what must have been a recent retreat of snow—there were still patches of it in sheltered corners. The lawn was empty of any presence but that of what seemed to be a gardener skulking around the edges and picking at something—perhaps an early and hardy spring weed or two. What surrounded the lawn looked like wilderness. Brynna chose a direction at random, heading toward a copse of thinly spaced trees. They were still mostly bare, just emerging from winter, but there was a promise about them, a quickening in the not-quite-buds on twigs preparing to wake into spring. A long-tailed bird of a kind Brynna had never seen before balanced precariously on one of the topmost and most fragile twigs and filled the air with liquid song. Beneath the bird there seemed to be a tended path, and Brynna took it, exploring.

  Before long she heard the sound of water. She was soon to learn she would never be far from water in Cascin. The manor was set into a lattice of no less than seven streams bubbling down from the mountains at its back toward the River Tanassa at its feet; it was these that had earned its sobriquet of the House of the Wells. They had called Rima that, Rima of the Wells, but only now, here in the place where Rima had been born, did her daughter realize the name’s true meaning. In Cascin the streams were called wells, and the particular one Brynna had targeted was one of the smaller ones, clear mountain water rushing over smooth pebbles in its bed. Coming down to the edge, Brynna dipped a hand into the stream and gasped at the glacial water; beneath the surface odd-shaped stones and pebbles littered the stream bed upon a base of striated rock that formed the root of the mountain, interspersed with stretches of pale clean sand. A fragment of greenish rock caught her eye, rough-edged but carved into an intriguing shape by the water. It lay next to a larger stone, damp and slippery but at least partly out of the water and with a precarious possibility as a stepping stone in the middle of the brook. Balancing herself on this, she leaned over to retrieve the fragment, almost falling into the well despite her aunt’s explicit warning. She examined her prize with interest, still crouched and finely balanced in mid-stream on her wobbly stepping stone, and then, clutching the treasure in her hand for want of a pocket, glanced around at the glade surrounding the well.

  Two massive willow trees grew leaning into one another, directly opposite on the far bank. They were almost naked still, their grayish twigs and branches trailing disconsolately in the water as if they belonged to something that would never wake again. But even here there were signs, and Brynna realized the willows would form an almost completely self-contained grotto, a bell-like space beneath the spreading boughs, once summer put leaves onto their wintry skeletons. Intrigued, she crossed the well and pushed aside the trailing edge of the nearest willow. A few branch-ends caught at her dress but on the whole the barrier remained more visual than physical, and she was rewarded by the discovery of a quiet place, hidden by what would before too long be a screen of spreading branches. The outer edge, away from the well, was hedged by what seemed to be a sort of thorn bush, a guard against unexpected approach from the rear; and toward the stream the ground sloped steeply down to the water’s edge. It was carpeted with moss and bracken, and what looked like it might well develop into a clutch of bluebells.

  Brynna forgot about the other children she was meant to be seeking, sitting down with a sigh in this hidden place with so much potential for summer magic, letting go of her homesickness and confusion for a moment. She reluctantly abandoned the idea that the spot beneath the willows had been left unknown and unclaimed, as close to the house as it was; but, for now at least, the bracken was undisturbed, and there were no footprints in the soft earth. Not secret, perhaps, but certainly no man’s, not now. Hers, then, if she chose. In an act of claiming that was half childish and half pagan, out of time immemorial, she took the stone she had lifted from the well and planted it, sharp end down, into the soft earth on the highest point in the grotto. She worked it in until it looked properly rooted—not unlike a Standing Stone. A shiver of peculiar energy rushed through her, a feeling of having done something right, something she had yet to understand the significance of but which was nevertheless profoundly important in some way. And then, eventually, she left the tree-cave, careful to leave few traces of her passing, and resumed her search for Chella’s sons.

  They were still lurking in silence somewhere; she thought she heard a faint sound of raised childish voices once and tried to follow it, but it had soon faded. No matter; perhaps it was for the best. Perhaps it would be bette
r to meet all these young strangers, of whose welcome she was far from certain, in an environment made safer by the presence of friendly adults. At least then she would have the advantage of that first instant of acceptance forced by the presence of their elders, in the absence of any of her own. In any event, her thoughts far from Cascin, she had ceased looking for them when she finally emerged into what looked like a small, empty clearing in the woods as she headed back toward the house. When a sudden hissing sound broke the silence of the glade, she looked up—and froze, transfixed by the sight of an arrow heading straight for her. Perhaps it was only the sudden breeze, or the shaft had been sped a notch too high, but the arrow suddenly lost height and fell short, embedding itself in the ground at her feet, where she stood rooted with shock. The arrow was followed by an exclamation with equal portions of anger, dismay and relief, and the sudden appearance of a rangy, fair-haired boy holding a sturdy bow.

  She seemed to have found her cousins.

  The first boy was followed by another, dark-haired but with piercing blue eyes, and then by two more, obviously twins, their almost lint-white hair an unmistakable bequest from Lyme, their father. Brynna did a swift double take. Four? There were meant to be four children in Cascin, but only three sons, the fourth being a much younger girl, still in the nursery. And Chella had said nothing…she had said, the boys might be out there. Her words still applied. But nobody had told her there would be more than three…