The Hidden Queen

by Alma Alexander

  Brynna greeted this with a blank stare.

  “Every Sister at Bresse has what we call a talisman,” Morgan continued, by way of explanation. “I do not know what yours is; you will have to find that out by yourself. Mine is a white rosebud; I watch it opening in my mind, and when it blooms, I am ready to let the Sight in. You are welcome to try that, but the same talisman seldom works twice. Others have chosen a candle flame, a seashell, a butterfly. Anything that you love, that you think beautiful, that brings you a sense of serenity and peace. Anything you can hold in your mind until there is nothing there except your vision, strong enough for you to see it almost solid before you.” Morgan’s hands moved underneath her gaze until she might almost have been holding the ghost of her rosebud; Brynna swallowed.

  “And when I have done it?”

  Morgan had to smile again, at the unconscious arrogance of this. “It isn’t as easy as it sounds. Other thoughts are loath to leave your head. But this is something you will have to master before we can go any further, and it is something you will have to do alone. Cheating is easy, but pointless, and if you come back to me and tell me you’ve achieved this task, I will know if you are telling me the truth or not. You are welcome to seek my advice, or any other Sister’s, if you need help; but until you have chosen your talisman, and learned to enter it, the rest of the disciplines of Bresse are impossible to master.”

  “Do I have to tell you what I have chosen?”

  It could have been a rhetorical question, but her tone left no room for doubt. “You have chosen already?” said Morgan, lifting her eyebrow. “No, you don’t have to tell me. It is a secret useless to anyone but yourself. It is entirely up to you.”

  She asked no further, but simply pointed the way to a staircase leading up into the Novice Chambers, high in the White Tower. Brynna was to go and claim one of these and wrestle with her talisman, reporting her progress to her teacher the next day.

  But she was given only an hour to bend her mind to this task. There were no servants in Bresse; every Sister took her turn at the chores of the Castle, from weeding the garden and feeding the cows to doing laundry, cooking meals and washing the dishes afterward. Brynna was just another novice and the newest one at that, ripe for the plucking. The community at Bresse did not know she had been a princess, was indeed a crowned queen, but even if they had known it would probably not have made any difference. In Bresse, she was nothing until she earned her rank by her skills and talent. When one of the older Sisters came to the Novice Chambers to round up a clutch of girls for kitchen duty, Brynna was one of the haul. Her sleeves rolled up above her elbows, she was set with another novice to peeling potatoes by the kitchen hearth.

  In truth, she was far from annoyed at the interruption of her meditations. She had thought Morgan’s task would be easy enough, but the talisman she had set her heart on kept slipping from her grasp. Every time she thought triumphantly I have it! she was reluctantly forced to admit she did not, else she would not have been able to think about having it. She struggled with it until she was flushed and breathless, with a thundercloud of an incipient headache rousing on the horizon of her mind like the purple storm hammerheads of Miranei. In the end she had to concede that, for the moment at least, her talisman had defeated her. She had almost welcomed the potatoes.

  Which is not to say she was making an unqualified success of them, either. She had peeled very few potatoes in her life, and it showed, painfully. In the time her peeling partner had taken to peel three, Brynna was still struggling with her first, gouging out respectable quantities of the flesh together with the peel.

  “With those white hands,” said the other, breaking the silence that lay between them and pausing to survey Brynna’s work with a mixture of amusement and disdain, “I’m not surprised you peel a potato as though with a broadsword. Do you think there’s going to be any of yours left to cook by the time you’re done with it?”

  Brynna looked up, biting back a retort.

  “High-born?” enquired the older novice conversationally, as she took up another potato. “Here, for the sake of all our suppers, watch me. This is how you do it.” Her hands were deft, fast; the potato gleamed creamily, pale and bare of skin, in her palm in seconds. Then she relented, having shown Brynna up in no uncertain terms. “You don’t have to do it that fast, not in the beginning. I have a year of potato peeling behind me in this place. I’m Bly, my father is Sir Machin of Nevan. Aren’t you a bit young to be here?”

  There was the faintest trace of envy in Ely’s words; if young, the new novice must have been all the stronger in Sight for her gift to have been discovered already. And that meant the younger girl would be better than the common flock, destined for higher things.

  Brynna bent industriously over her potato. “I’m Brynna,” she said, “from…Cascin.” She could not say Miranei—not here, when Miranei seemed so close. It was too painful to lay claim to a place which had not been home for so long—and perhaps, although this was no more than an afterthought, even risky. Brynna knew of Nevan Manor, close enough to Miranei for its family to have been a part of court life—she did not remember Bly, but that was not to say that Bly, prodded in the right direction, would not come to realize Brynna might be more than she seemed.

  But what she said had triggered something almost as dangerous. “Cascin?” said Bly, tossing the second potato she had finished since Brynna had laboriously begun her own into the bowl set out to receive them. “Cascin of the Wells? I seem to remember there were only three sons in that manor.”

  “There is a daughter, too.”

  “Oh yes, I do recall. We haven’t had much contact with Cascin lately, but one summer, it was a year or two ago now, my lady mother spent quite a lot of time with Lady Chella of Cascin. Still, the daughter would be much too young to be you.” Her interest piqued, Bly left off the potatoes, measuring Brynna with a steady gaze.

  “I fostered there,” said Brynna blandly. She lifted a pitted potato for Ely’s inspection. “Will this do?”

  “A somewhat lighter hand would still be advised,” said Bly, peering at it.

  Brynna made a deliberate mess of her third potato; anything to divert Bly from her line of enquiry. It worked, after a fashion, especially after the Sister who was in charge of the kitchen came to cuff them into greater industry, if they wanted to eat that day. Wary of betraying herself with an inadvertent word, Brynna decided her best chance of safety lay in solitude. She fended off Bly for the moment and, after her, one or two other novices who tried to make some kind of contact. Before her first week was out she had acquired a reputation for being withdrawn and aloof; some even said haughty. There were those who resented being rebuffed by someone who was their junior, both in years and in status. The Sisters were kind to her, and gentle, as they were with everyone, but very soon her peers left her to herself. It was safety, in a way.

  Morgan, keeping an eye on her newest charge, saw a danger Brynna had entirely overlooked. Isolation made for conspicuousness; if anyone came asking who was the most mysterious, most intriguing and most tantalizing novice in Bresse, the one most likely to hold dangerous secrets, Brynna Kelen would have had no competition. For someone who wanted to stay unobtrusive and unremarked, it was poor strategy. Still, there were no enquiries after her, and it would have made her stand out even more if she suddenly changed tack and began cultivating friendships. Even people who had remained indifferent might have started to harbor suspicions. Morgan decided to leave the matter alone.

  Brynna learned quickly how to peel potatoes, milk the cows, feed the chickens and make vegetable broth for fifty people. Her studies took a little longer, though. It was true she had chosen her talisman without thinking twice that first morning in Morgan’s chambers, almost in the same instant she had first heard of the existence of such a thing. Taming it, though, proved to be a beast of quite a different color.

  She would start well enough, focusing first on Cascin, then the path she knew so well, leading from the h
ouse to the woods and the well on whose banks the willows dreamed lazy summer dreams. Using the same facility that had kept Miranei alive for her in her years at Cascin, Brynna found she could charm up an image of the willow grotto in such perfect detail that she could see every individual leaf on the two old trees in her mind’s eye. She could almost feel the softness of the springy moss beneath her feet, and there, on the highest point of the little mound, virtually touch the greenish pebble her own hand had planted there. In Brynna’s vision, the little Standing Stone stood in the midst of an aura of…something, a pale green light, a shroud of its own small sphere of power. This alone in the picture was strange and unfamiliar, the sole thing Brynna could not remember having seen at Cascin. And it was precisely this aura which proved to be her problem. She focused flawlessly on the idea of her talisman until she came to the vision of the stone; but as soon as her mind reached out to touch the light around it, her concentration would vanish in a shimmer of scattered thoughts, dreams and memories. The stone would disintegrate into motes and slivers, sparkling like sunlight on water, and in the welter of visions that were its gifts, Brynna found it difficult to remember the stone at all.

  Some of the things it showed her, she recognized. Kieran holding her as she wept in her pain when Rima had died; herself drowsing against the warm trunk of the willow on a summer afternoon; hunting for Charo’s puppy, after it had run after a baby hare and lost itself in the woods. She saw Keda throwing an apple peel in slow motion over her shoulder on a moonless summer night; Cerdiad…the Cerdiad bonfire…ah, but I don’t want to see this…shattering glass…men with scowling faces, smoking torches, eyes full of tears…This isn’t Cerdiad…this hasn’t happened…they’ve come to burn the house…no…No…No!

  She’d cry out loud, coming to herself bent double with pain on the mat in her chamber, with tears streaming down her face. When she calmed down and took a few moments to catch her breath, she’d doggedly try again—and come up against the same vision, or different ones, no less potent. Touch the stone and be swirled into madness, that seemed to be the impasse she shipwrecked against time and time again. And yet…she couldn’t understand it. The willows had never given her anything but peace beneath the green bower. Now, far away, the place seemed to hold nothing but chaos and confusion.

  She struggled with it alone for almost two weeks. Perhaps she would have gone to Morgan sooner if she hadn’t been so aware of having given the impression of choosing her talisman so blithely in the first place—but stubborn pride kept her at it until the thing simply defeated her by its sheer persistence. Beaten, exhausted, she sought Morgan’s wisdom.

  “It’s as though it has a mind of its own,” Brynna complained. “I can catch it, I can hold it, but then it fills my mind with other things even as I am thinking of it, and it’s gone.”

  “Perhaps you had better tell me,” said Morgan, frowning, “what the talisman is.”

  Brynna hesitantly described the willows, wishing she didn’t feel as though she was laying bare a hallowed place to infidel eyes. “I had a stone from the well when I first came under the willows,” she said, gazing down into her lap. “I planted it there, in the ground, like a small Standing Stone. That was what I took as…”

  “A Standing Stone?” echoed Morgan blankly.

  “Not a real one, just a pebble…it was only I who ever thought of it that way,” Brynna said.

  “But…a Standing Stone…” Morgan shook her head; realizing only now just how different her charge was from the rest of the girls in her care. “What made you pick that, of all things? Don’t you realize you’re crossing power with power…I don’t even know myself what you’ve done here. It’s quite possible you’re lucky you aren’t dead!”

  “Should I choose something else?” asked Brynna queasily.

  “You can’t,” said Morgan, in real perplexity. “The connection has been made already; it’s often said that novices don’t choose talismans so often as they are chosen by them. For some reason this stone of yours has picked you. But, my dear child, I’m not at all sure just where we go from here. It is unlikely that a Standing Stone will ever allow you the freedom you need for it to be the talisman you require.”

  “But it’s only…” began Brynna again.

  Morgan shook her head. “It’s no longer only anything. Whether or not it is a Standing Stone raised for obscure purposes by those long dead or a pebble planted all unknowing by a girl unaware of the power of naming which lies in the gift of her Sight, it’s all the same in the eyes of the Gods.”

  “You mean I made it a Standing Stone just by willing it so?” said Brynna, a little breathless at the magnitude of this.

  “It would seem so—even if it is just for yourself. It may serve a useful purpose for you—from what you said, it appears that many of your stone’s visions are concerned with things which are yet to come to pass. But taming this wild beast to be ridden as your talisman…I don’t know, Brynna. Try again, here, with me. I will try and follow you, perhaps then I will be able to see what to do.”

  Brynna obediently focused on Cascin again—the house, the path, the trees…the stone…Her mind brushed it, and dissolved almost instantly in a tower of flames wreathing a column of white stone, an unearthly wail of terror and distress rending the air. Her eyes flew wide, her mouth opened and gasped for air. She was dimly aware that one of the voices in the fugue of fear and dismay was her own, her cry loud in the silence which remained behind after the vision faded. It was the only cry she heard as a sound…the rest…the rest had cried out in her mind, had been felt there, and had been silenced…For a few moments dark ness took her, held her, then her eyes cleared. She realized with a start that the grip on her shoulders was Morgan’s hands. They were both kneeling on the floor before the fireplace—Morgan’s face almost as white as her robe.

  “Kerun and Avanna!” Morgan gasped, invoking the protection of almost every God she knew. “You had to cope with this every time?”

  Brynna reached up to wipe salty trails of tears off her cheeks, tears she could not remember having shed. “It’s not usually…this bad,” she finally managed to say, her voice oddly hoarse. “What was…that place?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Morgan, very slowly.

  She lies, said Brynna’s mind with cold clarity.

  But Morgan was too wise in ways of Sight to be drawn out by the long, hypnotic stare of Brynna’s truth-gaze. Brynna was not going to hear from her that she could put an interpretation to the vision the Stone of Cascin had seen fit to give them. It was obvious that Brynna had not recognized the tower writhing in the fire. But Morgan had, having lived in it for almost half her life: the white tower of Bresse. There was no denying the truth in the revelation—with powers of her own Morgan could tell that much. Castle Bresse, which had stood for almost two centuries, was going to fall; and it was beginning to be painfully obvious to Morgan that the oracle predicting its downfall was also the trigger that would spark it. It was something Brynna herself could not but become aware of in the fullness of time, but Morgan did not see why it should be necessary for her to be burdened with the knowledge before it became inevitable.

  She steered her thoughts, instead, into more productive channels. The disciplines of Bresse demanded a talisman; it was obvious Brynna’s stone would not do at all. And yet…there had been the choosing…

  “Are you all right now?” asked Morgan carefully, reaching out to cup Brynna’s chin in her long fingers. When the girl nodded, Morgan let her go and sat back, arranging her robe around her. “I think I may have your answer,” she said. “It’s only the Stone that is your bane, not the clearing itself. So let the clearing take its place—or something else within it, something close to but not of the Stone. The moss around it perhaps, or the willow tree. It is much more difficult to hold a pure image of an entire physical space than that of a single object, but I think you’re well able to do it.” She did not offer to explain the reasoning behind this declaration of faith; in truth she wa
s still reeling from the purity of the images she had seen in Brynna’s mind. A part of her found it difficult to believe the white tower was not already in flames around her.

  “But the Stone…”

  “Yes, there is a risk that your new talisman holds within itself this seed of danger; you have to make sure you are warded in your mind against the Stone’s touch, unless you are in need and actively seek it.”

  “Seek it?” echoed Brynna, her eyes haunted with stonesent dreams.

  “You may well have an oracle within you,” said Morgan gently. “We might never have known if you hadn’t…the Gods preserve you…decided to pick a Standing Stone as your talisman. The choice is made, the damage is already done; but we can still hope to turn this to advantage. But we must go slowly, and very carefully. The least of my problems right now is that this has never been done before, and I shall be making up the rules as we go along. Ignorance always means danger; and you, of all people, we cannot lose.” She reached out to touch Brynna’s cheek in an almost maternal caress. “It’s you who will be blazing this trail,” she said, “I’ll just follow, learn, and keep you out of trouble if I can.”

  But trouble seemed to follow the girl who had once been Anghara Kir Hama, of Miranei under the Mountains, like a shadow. Castle Bresse, protected and secluded, was shelter for a while—but the storms that beset Anghara’s young life were far from blown out.

  The first touch of the cold wind came early, when young Brynna Kelen of Castle Bresse was only just beginning to find her feet in the dangerous streams and eddies of Sight. Brynna, with Morgan’s help, had succeeded in centering on her substitute talisman—the spongy, yielding moss which surrounded the little Standing Stone at Cascin. Morgan had objected, again, arguing that the stone itself was standing in the midst of the moss and it would be all too easy to touch it by mistake—with consequences which, by now, both teacher and pupil knew well. But it seemed to work, and proved adequate as a basis on which to build. However, the first stirring of coherent power from Brynna whipped up an unexpected wasp’s nest.