The Hidden Queen

by Alma Alexander

  The oldest blond boy scowled at her darkly from across the clearing. “You thundering idiot!” he said sharply. “I could have hit you! I still don’t know why I didn’t, you were such a perfect target! Who are you? Don’t you know this is our practice range?”

  “No,” said Brynna, goaded into equal sharpness by the unexpectedness of this second attack. “How could I? I only got here last night.”

  “It must be the new fosterling, Ansen,” said one of the twins, plucking at his brothers sleeve. Brynna, her eyes dancing from one to the other, already despaired of ever telling them apart.

  “Yes. It must be.” Ansen put down the bow, but the scowl still didn’t leave his face. “All the same, you shouldn’t wander in our woods until you know where you should go.”

  “Or where you shouldn’t, I suppose,” the dark-haired boy said, with a sudden smile. “Lay off her, Ansen, she didn’t do it on purpose. We were pretty well hidden; you would have been even more upset if she’d seen right through our hiding place.” He stepped forward, the first of them to do so. “I am Kieran Cullen, of Coba in Shaymir. I’m the other fosterling at Cascin.”

  “My name is Brynna Kelen.”

  Ansen seemed to remember his manners. “I’m Ansen, and these are my brothers, Adamo and Charo.”

  “Which is which?” said Brynna, looking from one to the other in almost comic disbelief.

  One of the twins giggled. “I’m Charo,” he said. “If you hear one of us talk, it’s usually me. Adamo only really speaks when spoken to.”

  Adamo succumbed to a slow flush at this brotherly gibe, but said nothing to disprove Charo’s quip. Ansen crossed the clearing and bent to retrieve his arrow. He examined it minutely, and scowled at it again.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “It’s straight and true. By all rights it should have skewered you.”

  “Give over,” said Kieran, his voice suddenly sharp. “Would you have rather it had?”

  Ansen made no answer, wiping the point of the arrow clean of forest earth on his trousers and sliding it back into the quiver slung across his back. To say he was upset would have been putting it mildly; he had obviously set great store on the shot he had loosed—and he was right, it should have connected. And yet it had dropped like a stone when it came to within three feet of her.

  “Where are you from?” asked Kieran, breaking the awkward silence lengthening between them.

  “Miranei,” said Brynna.

  That earned her a quickening of interest from Ansen, at least. “Miranei? My aunt lives there, she’s the Queen of Roisinan.” It wasn’t entirely unexpected; Ansen looked as if he had already enjoyed plenty of mileage out of his royal connections. Perhaps the best path to his acceptance would have been to tell him outright who she really was; he would likely never have left the house without his “royal cousin” in tow. “My father says there’s a great battle going on there right now. Did you see it?”

  “No,” said Brynna, whose heart had missed a beat. Battle? “We left before the…before. There was no battle.”

  “Miranei,” said Ansen. “That’s not so near. Why did you come here?”

  “I’m from Shaymir,” said Kieran reasonably. “That’s a lot further.”

  “Yes, but you’re a boy,” said Ansen. “They hardly ever send girls far from home.”

  “Maybe she ran away from the battle,” suggested one of the twins ingenuously.

  That was getting rather too close to the bone. “But there was no battle!” Brynna protested. It only earned her another withering look from Ansen.

  “You’re only a girl,” he said scathingly. “And probably a precious and pampered one. They might have heard the battle was coming, and they sent you away as far as they could so you wouldn’t be there.”

  “Little did they know,” said Kieran in a tone ripe with amusement, “that they would send her straight into the path of your arrow, foster brother. If it hadn’t been for her, you might even have hit your target.”

  “Of course I would have hit it!” Ansen bristled, shooting another venomous look in Brynna’s direction. She seemed to have wrecked a bet; and Ansen’s failure, together with Kieran’s teasing, seemed to be setting Brynna’s relationship with her oldest cousin and, now, foster brother, into a mold of pique and resentment right from the start. She had not begun well.

  They started out for home in a sort of unspoken common consent—it went without saying the morning was ruined for Ansen. Kieran’s interest in Brynna seemed to have been exhausted by his defense of her in the face of Ansen’s rage and spite, and he walked ahead with Ansen, the two of them muttering something between themselves, too low for the other three to hear. Brynna was left to the mercies of the twins, or, rather, of Charo, since Adamo still maintained a grave silence. Charo, however, seemed to want to make up for his brother’s sins of omission, for he didn’t shut up for a minute during the short walk back to the house. Brynna learned all about the wells, Cascin, Lyme, Chella, and every beast in Cascin’s mews, stables and kennels. This last appeared to be the topic of the moment, since one of the bitches in Lyme’s prize hunting pack was about to whelp and the twins had been promised a puppy each from the expected litter.

  When Charo stopped to draw breath, Adamo startled her by speaking for the first time.

  “Father said Kieran might have a puppy too, if he wanted,” Adamo said. He had a lower voice than his twin, and spoke in slower, more measured tones; Brynna suddenly knew she would have no trouble at all telling them apart, once they opened their mouths to speak. “I guess you’re also our foster sister now, same as Kieran is our brother. Maybe Father will let you have a puppy as well.”

  It was an attempt to accept her, to make her feel as though she belonged to this family; Brynna suddenly warmed to Adamo. Charo immediately took up the notion and took over the conversation again, but Brynna saw Adamo was the brother who originated ideas in this twosome and Charo was the chatty, bright, social face the twins presented to the world—a kind of a mask.

  Ansen, too, had a mask—several of them. It was hard for Brynna to read him. When they reached the house and met Lyme in the hall, it was Ansen who told, in light, self-deprecating tones, of the incident with the arrow. Anyone would have thought he had dismissed the episode without a second thought—anyone who hadn’t witnessed his reaction, or who didn’t see, lulled by his light banter, the curiously intense look he gave Brynna as he related the story. He lingered only long enough to explain the whole thing to Lyme, as though afraid someone else might beat him to it with a different account, then he was gone, vanishing somewhere with the agility of a mountain cat. Kieran, who greeted Lyme with real affection almost surpassing that shown by his true sons, added nothing to Ansen’s tale, and followed him into whatever refuge Ansen sought. The two were of an age, and obviously pursued their own interests when not lumbered by the younger brothers.

  The twins, though, seemed to have adopted Brynna, something that seemed to amuse their father. Nothing would do but she had to go with them to inspect the canine mother-to-be in the kennels, and get caught up, which she found herself doing with surprising ease, in speculation about what the impending puppies would look like and which of these phantom puppies each would choose.

  The children ate lunch with all the adults in the dining hall, but Brynna had the distinct impression, from the twins’ table manners, that this was not an everyday occasion. Indeed, it wasn’t long before she was confirmed in her assessment by a whispered aside from Charo.

  “Maybe it’s because you’ve arrived, and they wanted everyone to have a good look at you at once, and you at them,” Charo had hissed as a footman, bearing a decanter of wine, made an ostentatious detour around the end of the table where the children had been seated. “But when Kieran came they didn’t…”

  “We’ve probably got a new tutor,” said Kieran with a comically doleful face, eyeing an unknown guest a few chairs down from Lord Lyme, in what might have been an indirect attempt to explain Charo’s
words.

  Seeing the man was March, Brynna couldn’t help grinning; the smile brought her Ansen’s immediate beady attention, distracted from the wine-steward’s retreating back. He had been allowed wine for the first time that year, and had developed a taste for it; he had been caught up in wishing the steward had not detoured quite so comprehensively.

  “Do you know him?” Ansen asked, after a last disgusted look at the water in his goblet.

  “He brought me from Miranei,” Brynna answered, truthfully if not completely.

  Ansen gave her a measured look. Brynna was instantly on her guard; she backtracked, thinking on what she’d said. Would an ordinary girl from Miranei rate an escort? Did she just plant a seed in Ansen’s mind that she might be more than she looked? Thoughtfully, Brynna added a snippet of extra information. “He comes from here,” she said. “He was coming home, and I came along.”

  Ansen still looked as if he wouldn’t believe the time of day from her. Once again, unexpectedly, it was Kieran who stepped into the breach. “I don’t suppose he looks like a tutor,” he said, assessing March with a long, cool look. “Not unless he came to be our Arms Master, Ansen.”

  Distracted as always when it came to arms and fighting, Ansen’s attention wandered from Brynna, and she breathed a surreptitious sigh of relief. All the same, she couldn’t seem to uncoil a tense knot somewhere within her. Avanna! she thought desperately. It’s not fair! I can’t watch him all the time! It was the thought of a child, but that, after all, was what she still was.

  The question of tutors cropped up the very next morning. Brynna had retired to her chamber after breakfast, but it wasn’t long before someone came for her and delivered her into a bright, spacious room with several bookshelves along the walls. Any remaining wall space was hung with an eclectic collection of items—mounted sets of twelve-point stag antlers, a large and brightly painted shield bearing Lyme’s heraldic arms and several artistic displays of polished swords. A large window looked out onto the open lawn. The weather had turned foul again, the tail-sting of winter, and the window was lashed by sudden slaps of cold gray rain; there was a fire lit in the grate, and four chairs were set around it. One was empty. From another, the tallest, a long, lanky figure dressed in the blue robe of a priest of Nual rose as Brynna was deposited inside the library and the door closed behind her escort.

  “I am told,” said the priest, “that you are a new student. Come in, sit.”

  His voice was kind, but Brynna’s heart was beating like a drum. In Miranei she had several tutors—but there it had been expected of her, as Dynan’s heir, to be familiar with the history and the geography of the land she would rule. This was entirely unexpected, a cold surprise, especially the sight of her co-students in the other chairs—Kieran and Ansen peered at her, not the twins, whose age she was nearer and with whom she would more plausibly have been placed if education had been an issue. After all the talk of concealment, what were Lyme and Chella trying to do here?

  The priest studied her as she approached, settling back into his chair, as she took the one he indicated. “We are none of us here what we seem,” he said cryptically, and Brynna stiffened in alarm before she’d had a chance to control her reaction. She forced herself to relax, but her hands stayed clasped in her lap, her fingers twisted almost painfully into one another. “For myself, my name is Feor, and I was not always a priest of Nual. I was trained in Kerun’s schools, given Kerun’s knowledge, but I left the temple when I was of age and sought sanctuary. I have been Nual’s, ever since. Hence this.” He fingered a fold of his blue robe thoughtfully. “When Lord Lyme sought a teacher for his sons, I heard of it, and he took me,” Feor continued. “That’s what I’m doing here. As for the others, Ansen is twelve, and has been my pupil for two years; but a scholar’s robe is just a disguise for his other inclinations, I very much suspect, and this room is, alas, rather too potent a reminder of what they might be. Even now he would rather be swinging a blade, or training a hawk in the mews, or chasing after some stag to put another set of antlers on the wall.” Ansen looked both thunderous and abashed at this, but he held his peace; he obviously had great respect for the priest. “Kieran is thirteen and, like yourself, is not of this house,” Feor continued. “He probably has other secrets I have yet to discover. And now there is you. Why would Lord Lyme require you to join us at our lessons, young Brynna? As far as I can gather, you have barely turned nine, and…forgive me…educating daughters does not seem to be a priority for most fathers in Roisinan.”

  Brynna had had a chance to recollect herself, and think. When she spoke, it was with a cool logic, offering unvarnished truth. “I’m not just a daughter, I’m an only daughter. An only child,” she said, and Feor nodded, interpreting smoothly.

  “Ah, not just an heiress, an heir. Your father is grooming you to take over…something, after his passing. That does explain the education, of which you have probably had a bit already. But enough to hold your own in this schoolroom with boys three or four years your senior?”

  Anghara’s response would have been a snap, rooted in the royal arrogance inherited from Dynan and never really discouraged by those who surrounded her. But Brynna simply looked down into her lap, concealing eyes that danced with the challenge Feor had thrown her. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Well, we shall see,” said the priest, settling back into his chair. “Throw another log on the fire, Kieran, and you, Ansen, tell me where we stopped in our history lesson the last time.”

  “The Interregnum,” said Ansen. His inspiration seemed to dry up after naming his subject, and he glanced toward Kieran for support.

  “Continue,” said Feor, giving him no chance to malinger. Once again, however, Ansen was being forced into a position where Brynna would witness a humiliation, for he sat mute and mutinous, his back straight, his face flushed with more than simply his close proximity to the flames Kieran had fed a smidgen too zealously.

  Feor, who had been sitting back and watching Ansen through hooded eyes, sat up again with a sigh, lacing his fingers. “Very well, we will get back to you. Kieran?”

  Throwing an apologetic glance Ansen’s way, Kieran launched into an edited version of the first Rashin grab for the throne of Miranei. To Brynna, once again almost wholly Anghara at hearing these lessons of her childhood, this was exquisitely painful. It had not been concealed from her where her father had died, how, and why. Sooner or later they would come to the battle he had fought. That he had died in. It was too close, too close to home…

  “Brynna? What happened next?” said Feor with impeccable timing, stopping Kieran with a gesture of his hand in mid-sentence and turning to face her.

  Brynna would have hesitated a little, wondering, waiting to see what was expected of her. But Anghara sat without looking up from her folded hands, not seeing the sudden interest in Ansen’s and Kieran’s faces, and in Feor’s own. She hesitated not at all. She launched into a very soft but errorless accounting of what followed the point in time where Kieran had halted.

  “Stop,” said Feor after a minute or two of this. He thought for a moment, and his three pupils sat in silence, Ansen and Kieran staring at Brynna with a sort of fascination with which they might have watched a winged horse, Brynna her self watching her teacher, too late, with a wary uneasiness from beneath lowered eyelashes.

  The priest’s face was inscrutable, his thoughts veiled. But the pause lasted less than a few heartbeats, and then Feor merely smiled.

  “Very good,” he said. “I can see that Lord Lyme has sent me no undeserving student. We should have a session, young Brynna, where I can determine just exactly how much you do know of what we have done here. In the meantime…we’ll get back to the Interregnum. For now, let us skip forward a little to the battle where Garen Kir Hama, King Dynan’s grandfather, regained his throne. We’ll take a closer look at the Kir Hama kings.”

  There was knowledge in his voice, so solid Brynna could almost feel it settle on her shoulder like a heavy hand
. But when she looked up, mortally afraid at the blunder she had just committed, Feor was looking away into the fire over his steepled hands as he began a reckoning of King Garen Kir Hama’s return to Miranei after the temporary exile contrived by the Rashin. The two boys, knowing they would be interrogated later until Feor was satisfied they had this latest lesson down pat, had their attention firmly held by their teacher, whose own mind seemed to be focused tightly on his subject matter. All the same, Brynna felt his vivid interest in her, not lessened in the least by the fact that he was very efficiently doing something else entirely. She had met that before, at home, several times, this subtle ability to communicate feeling masked by some quite unrelated activity, except that there it had only emanated from some of the women in her circle, and from Rima. Never yet had she seen it manifested in a man. But in Miranei it had a name. They called it Sight.

  5

  Brynna had the feeling that Kieran, at least, was curious and intrigued by his new classmate, and would have liked to linger and talk to her after the lesson was over. Ansen was, perhaps predictably, in a deep sulk—once again, unhappily, one precipitated by his new foster sister. But Brynna made her escape from both tutor and fellow students as soon as she possibly could, staying only long enough for Feor to demand her presence half an hour earlier the next day in order to assess her knowledge.

  The first person she ran into in the corridor, perhaps fortuitously, was March. He was safe, a link with home who knew all her secrets, and she rushed up to throw her arms around him, heedless of who might be watching or what conclusions might be drawn.

  “Well, hello,” he said, disentangling her small form from his midriff, “how are things going? I saw you whispering with the others at lunch yesterday, you looked as though you might have been talking about me.”