The Hidden Queen

by Alma Alexander

  “They did not even say goodbye,” he said, sounding aggrieved.

  Feor bit back the impulse to ask why, in the aftermath of the Cerdiad incident, Ansen would have expected any of the other actors in the drama to commiserate with him in his plight. “They tried,” he said instead. “An…Brynna at least came up here, I know that much. She…”

  But the slip was enough, however swiftly and smoothly patched. It could have merely been the first syllable of his own name, but the sound was different. Ansen suddenly knew with blinding clarity it was not his name Feor had been about to utter. He heard again the echo of Feor’s cry in the dining hall of Cascin on Cerdiad Eve.

  Anghara! No!

  “Anghara!” breathed Ansen, putting the goblet of wine down rather unsteadily. “So that’s it! She’s Anghara, my royal cousin who is supposed to be dead and buried! And Sif…Sif doesn’t know she is here!”

  There was no possible use in dissembling. “No more is she,” said Feor tightly, recalling the curse he had formulated for the hapless healer and piling it on his own head with vengeful indignation. Old. Old. You’re getting old. You should be meditating in some Sanctuary somewhere, not cutting the cloth of a world.

  But Ansen, whose intelligence was the equal of Kieran or Anghara, for all that he chose not to apply it in class, was already leaping ahead.

  “Where could you have spirited her away to?” he muttered. “She can hardly be easy to hide…and if she is hiding, that means Sif is looking. But my aunt must be dead, really dead, else Sif would not be on the throne, not with Sight to help her…” He trailed away into a brief silence, his good eye narrowing speculatively. “Sight…”he muttered. “Her mother is Sighted; as is my mother. Perhaps…Perhaps…It was Sight threw that glass at me, Feor, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?”

  “She has the gift,” Feor said flatly.

  “Well!” said Ansen, leaning back into his pillows. His eye gleamed in a sly way Feor did not like. “I guess it took this…” his hand drifted up in an expressive gesture at his face, “for the truth to come out. I wonder if Sif…”

  “Ansen,” said a cold voice from the door to the room, “that is enough.”

  Both convalescent and visitor turned to look. It was rescue, but for Feor it was far too late; he could only meet Chella’s eyes and give a small, resigned shake of his head. Even this, in his unnaturally percipient state, Ansen caught and interpreted. Correctly.

  “You never would have told me, would you,” he said. “Just left me to wonder, and to shrivel out here while they…Why did you let Kieran out, Mother? Or Keda? Doesn’t this knowledge mean death or imprisonment for life? Aren’t you afraid they will…”

  “They, no,” said Chella evenly. “You…He is your foster brother, and you drew a knife on him. She is your cousin, and…”

  “She is my cousin and she blinded me,” finished Ansen bitterly.

  “She was protecting Kieran,” Chella said.

  “And you are protecting her,” said Ansen. “Even now you’ve managed to secrete her away somewhere. I suppose nobody who was there on that night actually remembers what really happened, do they, Mother? Your doing? Your Sight?”

  Chella exchanged a quick glance with Feor. She had also seen the glint in Ansen’s eye.

  “My Sight, yes,” she said at length, after a pause. “There isn’t a tongue in Cascin able to speak of Cerdiad Eve to someone outside this house. Except a few who are still free; who can be trusted. Feor, myself. You.”

  “Yes. Me.” There was sarcasm in Ansen’s voice. “Aren’t you afraid I might…”

  “You won’t,” said Chella, softly, firmly, with regret. “If you will not undertake to remain silent—and swear an oath I can trust—then, son or no son, you too will taste the interdict. Either that, or you will never leave this house again.”

  “I might not anyway,” Ansen said, gesturing again at his eye.

  “Stop it,” Chella snapped, losing patience. “Your father has dragged around a game leg all his life, and he was blameless in the getting of it. Yet I married him, and he is lord of this keep. Show you are deserving of respect, and no one will think the less of you for a disability.”

  “Mother!” gasped Ansen, caught unprepared by the thinly veiled contempt in his mother’s voice. Her face softened.

  “We’ll talk of this again,” she murmured. “You’re tired. I will come and see you when you have rested. Feor, come. He still needs a lot of sleep if he is to heal. I’ll see the women bring you a draft.” She leaned over to brush Ansen’s forehead with her lips, just at the edge of the bandage.

  Ansen’s eyes, much to his disgust, suddenly filled with tears. Or at least his one good eye did. They brimmed on the lower lid, and spilled; Chella reached to wipe them gently away.

  “Am I loathsome?” he whispered, very softly.

  “Of course not, darling,” his mother murmured.

  Feor was already outside; Chella followed, closing the door behind her, leaving Ansen alone in the firelit chamber. He squeezed his eye tightly shut, trying to keep the tears back, but new ones came, hot ones, rage and self-pity.

  Am I loathsome?…Of course not, darling…

  She was lying. She was lying! How could he not be loathsome, fettered in his bed with an eye doomed never to see light again? A sound bubbled into his throat; he swallowed, but it filled his mouth with a taste of mold and ashes. His lips opened almost inadvertently, and it came out, first oozing gently in a soft moan, then building to a crescendo until it peaked in a howl of outrage, horror, thwarted passion. He seized his half-full wine goblet, heavy silver, and threw it with all his strength at the far wall. It struck and spilled, leaving a long smear to trickle down like blood and pool slowly on the wooden floor.

  Eventually he found out where Brynna was, or Anghara, as he supposed he must now learn to think of her. He eased it out of his mother, playing her expertly. Once again she had not needed to tell him the whole story, only enough for him to surmise the rest—he knew about her own stay at Castle Bresse. In fact, he did it so well she was unaware she had spilled the secret. It was Feor who, with skill equal to Ansen’s own, made the young patient betray himself by an unwary word. When Chella heard of his plan to write a letter to Miranei in which he would detail Anghara’s whereabouts, she lost no time in extending the interdict, which, until then, had excluded him. It was with bitterness that Ansen received this new wound. He found himself helpless to utter Anghara’s name to anyone but Feor or his parents, and even there the cocoon of silence was tight around him if anyone else was near. His hand would not write the word, and if he tried to wrap it in euphemism or riddle even they were sufficient to confound him utterly. The name of Anghara, and anything that grew from it, were trapped inside his head like the ancient insects imprisoned in amber the children occasionally found in the woods. He raged against it, but he had no gift of his own to break Chella’s fiat.

  And then he went quiet one day, very suddenly, very deliberately. It was the day he was allowed to leave his room for the first time, wearing an eye patch made from black silk. The long sojourn in his bed had made his legs weak; his knees trembled as he walked, but he would accept no friendly shoulder, no stick, leaning against a wall or a banister when he needed support. It was as though he wanted no further handicap to mar his emergence from convalescence. He insisted in dressing entirely in black for the occasion—saying, in the disturbing tone of voice he had adopted, that he had better learn to match that which would be his constant companion for the rest of his life. It suited him, setting off his pale hair, his white skin; he looked like a tragic prince from a harper’s tale, and people he met in the corridors hurried to him to smile and to say how marvellous it was to see him abroad again. Lyme had even allowed the twins to bring Ansen’s favorite hound into the house, and the dog nearly flattened him in the initial explosion of its joy—as did his brothers, even the taciturn Adamo finding words with which to welcome his brother back.

  And Feor, watching, saw Ansen
accepting it all, his head held high. He also saw the instant when Ansen’s good eye swept across the hall, pausing only infinitesimally at the closed door of the dining chamber. He also saw exactly when it occurred to Ansen that his confinement in this house and his mind was not permanent. This was his heritage—one day this would be his. And when it was, when his parents were gone, it would be easy to work his will. Until then…well, someone else could easily tell Sif where Anghara was, but it was hardly likely to happen in the nest of Sighted women they’d spirited her away to. And as long as she stayed there, Ansen would know where to find her. Would know where to tell Sif to find her. It wouldn’t bring back his eye, nothing would, but at least he would have the satisfaction of taking from her something equally precious in return. Certainly her freedom; perhaps her life. Sif was a king, in name and in deed; Anghara was already dead. It would cost Sif nothing to meet that condition in truth. All he needed were a few trusted men. Perhaps, one day, Ansen would be among them. Perhaps Sif would look past the missing eye.

  Feor shivered where he stood. Oddly, it was not Anghara’s face that came to him as he stared at Ansen’s shadowy, triumphant smile; it was Kieran’s. Kieran, as Feor had once seen him, dark hair slicked with rain. He heard again his own voice. It is well. She will need a friend.

  Kieran. Not March who huddled faithfully in a village close to Radas Han and kept watch on his hidden princess, but Kieran. There was a cloud hiding Anghara’s future from Feor’s questing mind, a cloud oozing out of the blackness which draped Ansen’s thin frame; and Kieran’s name shone from within it. Feor suddenly knew that when the time came for Anghara’s friends to come for her, March would already be dead.

  Ansen did not return to lessons with Feor. Instead, he spent weeks and months first trying to get the strength back into his wasted limbs and then, once he had accomplished that, trying to regain his mastery of the arts of war. He rode out to the hunt with his father, carrying his hawk on his gloved wrist, every inch the young lord. He worked up a lather in the tilting yard, occasionally partnered by one or the other of his younger brothers whom he soon taught to respect him since he gave no quarter, and expected none. He found he had lost his unerring aim in archery, and fought bitterly to regain it, adjusting his stance and grip to compensate for his disability; but had to come to terms eventually with the fact that he would never be as skillful a shot as before. He’d lost the depth of vision essential for accuracy. It was one more black mark against Anghara Kir Hama. Black was his color now, in more ways than one; since he had emerged from his sickroom, he had worn nothing else. Even his mind was obsidian, black, gleaming and utterly impenetrable. It was no longer possible for any Sighted person at Cascin to know what Ansen was thinking or planning behind this smooth facade. Feor had his fears, but they were insubstantial ghosts. The atmosphere in Cascin hummed with undercurrents where before there had been only clear waters; Ansen was the most direct cause for this, of course, but this, too, was a legacy of Anghara of Miranei.

  Something irreplaceable had been taken from Chella—a vitality that had been hers, a quiet joy in her life had gone, vanished largely the instant she saw her eldest son with his hand held up to his bloodied face. What remained ebbed away slowly, and the change in her became increasingly obvious as her shoulders stooped a little more each day and she made no attempt to hide the gray hairs which now dimmed the familiar brightness of her hair.

  “Are you ill, my lady?” became a mournful refrain for Feor as he watched the dark circles grow around her eyes and her hands tremble sometimes as she lifted a goblet or a spoon.

  “There’s nothing you can do, my friend,” was the customary reply.

  When she eventually took to her bed, Feor knew she would never leave it.

  Distressed as Lyme and Feor were at the inevitability of a bright life ending, they failed to realize the repercussions of her steadily weakening condition until it was entirely too late. When Ansen mentioned Anghara by name in the presence of a servant, Feor did not realize the implications until much later. He was sitting with Chella in her chambers, reading aloud from a favorite book as she lay back alone and small in the great bed. When he did make the connection, Feor stumbled as the words ran into a sudden blur on the page before him. Chella’s eyelids, almost transparent now, fluttered open at the silence.

  “Feor?” she whispered softly, her voice lifting in a query.

  “Ansen. He spoke her name to me today. He said her name…and we were not alone.”

  Chella’s white cheeks suddenly flamed as blood rushed to her face. “The interdict…”

  “I should have bolstered it months ago!” groaned Feor, in an agony of self-reproach.

  “Do not…blame yourself. It is I who should have realized…sooner.” She breathed for a while, very carefully, as though she had need of some deep well of power she had not tapped yet—and as though she was far from sure she had strength for the tapping. Her eyes stared at the tapestry adorning the wall, and the shadows flickering upon it from the fire in the hearth. It was warming up for spring, but a fire was laid every day in Chella’s bed chamber; she was so often cold. “Let me see…if I can’t make it…”

  “Lady, no,” said Feor, coming to his feet and holding out his hand in a gesture that was almost supplication. “You haven’t the strength. Let me try.”

  “Perhaps he hasn’t had time. Perhaps…it’s not too late. Feor, bring me…my son.”

  This was a bad idea, Feor felt it in his bones, but could not ignore the pleading in the dying woman’s eyes. He hesitated for a moment, then bowed, turning away and striding out of the chamber in search of Ansen.

  He did not have to seek far. Ansen was on the lawn, standing on the stone circle where the Cerdiad bonfires were lit each year. Dressed in his customary black, his feet planted arrogantly apart, his hands folded behind his back, Ansen stood looking up at the house with an odd, crooked smile playing upon his lips. It widened as he saw Feor emerge and hovered for a moment on the edge of a sneer.

  “I wondered,” he said conversationally as the priest approached, “how long it was going to take you.”

  “Your lady mother wishes to see you,” said Feor, refusing to rise to the bait.

  “By all means,” said Ansen, with exaggerated courtesy.

  Feor walked a step behind him as they climbed the stairs, watching the almost jaunty step of the younger man with deepening misgivings. There was something here…but the mind was still closed, still obsidian, if anything harder than ever. Ansen was now close to seventeen; he was fully grown, and his mind had not been that of a child for years. At Chella’s door Feor had a sudden urge to leap into Ansen’s path, forbid even at this late stage his audience with his mother—but even as he hesitated it was too late. Ansen crossed to the bed to lift one of his mother’s limp, pale hands and kiss it ostentatiously.

  “And how are you today, Mother?” he said. “I am told you sent for me.”

  “Sit down, Ansen.” The voice was stronger, firmer, than it had been only a short while ago. Feor didn’t know what she had done while he had been out of this room, but it had worked. “There is something,” said Chella, her fingers tightening on her son’s, “I have to ask you.”

  But Ansen had already decided a game of cat and mouse was not what he had in mind; the crudest thing to do, the thing that would best retaliate for the years of silence imposed upon him, would be to tell the bald, unvarnished truth.

  “Yes,” he said, “I know. But you won’t like your answer. You see, I sent the letter to Miranei almost two weeks ago.”

  Chella’s fragile strength shattered. Her fingers fell away nervelessly from Ansen’s hand, and her face was once again a hectic scarlet blush. She tried to draw breath, and it came out as a dry, labored rattle. Feor sprang forward, pushing Ansen out of the way, hands that had once been a healer’s already reaching for the woman who lay rigid.

  “Get out,” he said to Ansen, his voice cold. “Bring the healers, call your father. I will do what I
can in the meantime.” A beat later he looked up to see Ansen still frozen at the bedroom door. “Call your father,” he repeated. “I hope you loved her at least that much.”

  Ansen’s eye was very bright; it might have been tears, but Feor had no time for him. Ansen murmured something Feor only half heard—it might have been I’m sorry. But the time was past when a simple word of regret might have served to heal this kind of wound. In any event, he had vanished when Feor next spared a glance his way. But it was already too late. By the time he returned, with Lyme and the same plump healer who had kept the hard truth from Ansen almost three years ago, Chella was gone, beyond all Feor’s efforts to save her.

  And so had a treacherous letter, meticulously planned and dispatched. What years of peace and education Anghara had enjoyed were unequivocally and finally over. The hunt was closing in.

  11

  There was a family vault in the foothills behind Cascin, in the fork where three of the wells joined into one stream and went rushing down to the River Tanassa. They took Lady Chella there the day after she had breathed her last. There were few mourners: Lyme, speechless with his grief; Feor, gaunt and pale, standing very still with his hands tucked out of sight into his sleeves; one or two of the oldest servants, who had known Chella since she was a child. Her daughter was considered too young to attend, but the twins were there, Charo looking merely bewildered at the unseemly haste in which his mother had left him, Adamo with a deeper sadness in his eyes, a deeper understanding.

  Ansen was not there.

  It was a gap none could ignore; by his very absence, he was more firmly present than anyone there. There were those who knew where he had gone but did not wish to speak of it; there were those who did not know, but felt with a fine instinct that it would be better not to ask. Lyme himself looked as though his tongue kept on returning to probe an abscessed tooth; the grimaces of pain that crossed his face every now and again had little to do with the loss of his beloved lady. He was finding it hard to come to terms with the treachery of his eldest son.