The Hidden Queen

by Alma Alexander

  They were clear of the forest by now, and after a short stretch where the wide central plains of Roisinan spilled flat as a sheet on either side of the river, the land slowly changed. First it began folding itself into gentle hills, and Anghara could see occasional emerald squares of small vineyards on the slopes. Then the hills grew steeper as the river plunged into what was almost a shallow gorge. A few stretches of the river, foaming fast and treacherous with underwater rocks, were quite tricky to negotiate.

  “I told him he’d have a disaster!” cackled Anghara’s companion knowingly as she felt the boat lurch and thud against some invisible obstruction. The captain had little time for frivolity, having his hands full trying to get his boat through undamaged. It was a tense time for the crew, which could not help but spill onto the passengers, and when they came out into gentler country again, the river rolling silky and placid between low hillsides, it was as if everyone let out a collectively held breath. The captain steered his vessel into the next landing stage and decreed they would stay there that night and most of the next day.

  “We’ll leave tomorrow at midday,” he said. “Take the chance to give your legs a good stretch. There are not many landings we can stop at between here and Calabra. It will be a long journey.”

  Anghara’s cabin mate wrapped a knitted shawl around her head and stepped gleefully onto dry land as soon as she was given the chance.

  “Don’t really like boats,” she confided in Anghara. “Never have. Unsafe things, boats. And they seem to have a nice little han here; maybe I’ll set me up in a corner and tell a few nice fortunes, that will keep me in coppers until we get to Calabra.” She patted Anghara on the arm. “You enjoy yourself. I heard one of the gents say there might be a dance later. It’s not every day they get this many new faces. You enjoy yourself.”

  Anghara said she would, but stayed behind on the boat after her cabin mate had departed, staring first down the quiet river toward Calabra and then up at the dun-colored hills which embraced the few houses which had sprung up around the landing. The captain, emerging from his cabin not much later, found her standing alone on the prow of the boat.

  “I was serious, take a walk on dry land,” he said to Anghara, to whom he’d taken a paternal liking on the journey. “There’s a Dance up on that hill,” he added after a moment, following her gaze up the grassy slopes. The way he said the word made it patently obvious he was not talking about the same dance as the old lady. “You’ve plenty of time to go and see it if you like. It’s probably the best-preserved one in Roisinan. I’d take you, but Gramin tells me we hit something up river and there might be a weakened strut or two in the belly of this beast. I’d better have that seen to before we go any further.”

  “Thank you, I will,” said Anghara. She had not seen many true Standing Stones in her life, despite the ease with which she had “recognized” one in the pebble she had planted at Cascin. A dimple suddenly appeared on her cheek as she remembered her cabin mate’s parting words as she’d hurried to the han where she meant to make her fortune. “You’re the second person to tell me about dances since we got here. Old Selina just told me there might be one tonight in the han, the common-or-garden variety.”

  “Perhaps you ought to go,” said the captain, smiling at her gently. “They’re a pleasant clan out here, and they’re said to be mean fiddlers. It might be fun for you young folk.”

  She almost didn’t go to the village dance. Apart from one or two court balls, at which she had made a fleeting appearance before being bundled off into the royal nursery, and a few festivals in Cascin where she danced a simple step or two with Kieran or one of the twins, Anghara’s experience of dancing was severely limited. Still, the distant sound of spirited music which drifted across the pier toward the boat soon proved too great a temptation.

  Old Selina, safely ensconced on a chair near the hearth, spotted Anghara as she sidled into the common room of the han, and waved her over; the old lady’s feet were tapping in time to the music, and her face was wreathed in a smile.

  “You wouldn’t believe it, looking at me now, but I used to be quite a dancer in my day,” she said complacently. “Young men used to queue to dance with me. Why don’t you join in?”

  “I’m…not sure I know how…” said Anghara. She felt an unexpected reluctance all of a sudden, and only part of it was due to the prospect of making a complete fool of herself in front of all these strange people.

  “Rubbish,” said the old lady peremptorily. “Go on. You’ll soon pick it up.”

  The crowd on the dance floor were involved in what was a complicated measure involving a large number of people dancing in a huge circle which seemed to wheel faster and faster as the music kept speeding up. Selina almost shoved Anghara toward the dance floor, and she staggered onto it to have the circle open up immediately and swallow her, each of her hands grabbed by dancers on either side of her without their missing a beat.

  “I don’t know how to do this!” she yelled apologetically to the young man to her left as she lurched into him, thinking the circle was moving in the opposite direction. He grinned good-naturedly.

  “Just do what everyone else is doing!” he called back over the music and the high-pitched whoops of other dancers across the floor.

  A couple of dancers, a girl from one side of the circle and a young man from the opposite end, seemed to drop spontaneously out of the circle and gravitate into the middle where they wove a short burst of an intricate dance pattern around one another before withdrawing back into the circle. Another pair followed them; then a third. The circle spun furiously, faster and faster, then the music swirled to an abrupt crescendo and ended on a prolonged wailing note as the sound of violins was allowed to die gradually away. There was a moment of silence and then everyone began clapping and shouting their approval at the small knot of musicians who had been precariously packed together on a raised podium above the dance floor. They smiled and nodded, bobbing their heads in pleased acknowledgment.

  “You did quite well,” Anghara’s neighbor said, a few decibels lower now that the music had given him a lull of relative silence, with another slow smile. “You’re from the boat, aren’t you? Bound for Calabra?”

  “Yes,” said Anghara warily.

  “Well, you don’t do a bad roundel for an outsider. My name’s Brem, my father owns the han. Are you from Calabra, or up country?”

  “From the mountains,” said Anghara, and fought down a sudden lump that rose in her throat at this reply. She was far from the mountains now; the Gods alone knew when she would see them again. Brem’s words had invited her own name in exchange and she hesitated, if only briefly, between giving her alter ego or her true name. But caution had been bred into her too deeply by this stage. Granted, Sif must know all about Brynna Kelen by now, but it was still safer than announcing a solitary traveller who bore a royal name. “I’m Brynna.”

  “They’re going to play something simpler now,” said Brem. “Will you dance with me?”

  Anghara blushed violently. “I really don’t know how…”

  “That’s what you said just now, and you did fine. But it’s easy, I’ll teach you. There they go, come on. Give me your hand.”

  They stumbled about for a bit, but he was so nice about all her mortifying blunders she could not help but laugh at herself and by the end of the tune she was doing passably well. Better, it seemed, than one of the fiddlers, who was good enough to cover his occasional slip-ups but not entirely good enough to stop making them. He kept on wincing and offering apologetic little smiles in the general direction of the dancers; but, much like Brem with Brynna, they seemed to be taking it in good part.

  “He’s been co-opted,” Brem felt impelled to explain to Anghara, defensive of the honor of his clan, as he whirled her around. “He’s not a regular member of the group, and they didn’t have time to practice before tonight. But my mother just doesn’t seem to be able to play any more. Not since…”

  His face was suddenly
bleak. Anghara knew that good manners mandated changing the subject, but there was something about his words that struck a cold chill of premonition into her.

  “Your mother is ill?” Anghara asked carefully, keeping her voice sympathetic but neutral.

  There were three of them, apparently, in this small village who were similarly afflicted—all their Sighted women. They had simply collapsed one day, fainting clean away, and they hadn’t been themselves since. Brem’s mother had walked around like a wraith for days. One of the other two had still not left her bed. And the day…the day was the same day on which Bresse had perished under the hammer of Sif’s wrath.

  The echo of the tower’s dying, which Anghara had needed to smother away under a layer of practicality necessary to survive her river journey, was a familiar specter which now suddenly rose bleakly to haunt Anghara once again. How could I? How could I come dancing? And they less than a month dead?

  The vivacious spirits of a fourteen-year-old who had only just begun to find delight in her first dance faded as though they had been so much vapor. Brem’s dance partner meta-morphosed in his arms from a bright-eyed, pretty young girl to someone who suddenly withdrew deep into herself, retreating into the impregnable walls of some private castle, pulling up the drawbridge behind her. Brem, bewildered and full of completely unjustified self-reproach, did his utmost to try and repair the damage, but it was a task far beyond his powers. Anghara would not dance again, and when he left her to run and bring her a mug of elderberry wine she slipped out of the hall and into the night, in desperate need of solitude and darkness.

  A few whispering, giggling couples had crept outside as well, to take advantage of the cold brilliance of the full moon hanging low in the sky like a gold coin. Anghara avoided them, detouring round to the pier where her boat was tied. Within reach of the boat, hanging back in the shadows, two things made her suddenly pause in her intent to gain her cabin. One was the unmistakable figure of old Selina stepping on board. The other was the captain who, after having helped the old lady on, stood squarely in Anghara’s path, talking with a group of his crewmen and another man who, by the size of him, could only have been the vil lage smith. Anghara would have to pass by this handful of men, and quite possibly have to answer the captain’s well-meaning queries as to why she had left the dance so early. Then, in her cabin, she would have to endure Selina’s questioning until the old lady fell asleep—which, given her garrulous curiosity and the impossibility of it being satisfied by Anghara’s inadequate explanations, could prove to be uncomfortably long.

  She hesitated, biting her lip, her eyes welling with tears she could not hold back. Through the sudden veil of tears the moon blurred into shapelessness, the sharp shadows it cast vanishing into trembling darkness. Turning away and blinking rapidly several times to clear her sight, Anghara found herself looking straight into the black silhouettes of the hills.

  The other Dance.

  Part of her mind told her she was insane to even think about negotiating an unknown hill path alone in the darkness, not knowing what she would find at the other end. Another part knew, with equal conviction, that her grip on her reason depended on finding the Dance this very night. Pitting herself against physical darkness, and winning, would be the only thing that would bar the flooding of that other, more dangerous darkness of her soul.

  Pulling Kieran’s cloak closer around her against the evening chill, Anghara resolutely turned her back on the boat and struck out on her own on the pale, glimmering road which led up into the hills. The illuminated han, the bobbing lights of the boat reflected on the water, everything faded from her mind as though it had never been; every step she made took her deeper into a trembling vision, weaving her into the hillside and moonlight, taking her further and further from the world of the common man and, once again, into the paths of the Gods.

  14

  She opened her eyes to light. The sun was slanting oddly, too gold; this was not morning. Anghara sat up, jolted fully awake, and rubbed her eyes, looking around her.

  The Dance of the Tanassa Hills rose up above and around her, the stones glowing in the sunlight with a pale, golden gleam. She was quite alone, and had been curled up, wrapped tightly in Kieran’s cloak, in a bracken-filled hollow by a fallen lintel, one of only two which had succumbed to the hollow tooth of time and toppled to mar the perfection of the Dance. She could pin down fleeting fragments of dreams, never enough to make an entire and coherent picture—but how could she have allowed herself to fall asleep? How long had she been here? Slowly, the memory of last night came trickling back, so tangled with dreams and visions that Anghara had to fight to separate truth from fantasy, if indeed the division existed. The memories were oddly fragile—brittle, delicate things with wings like butterflies, they fluttered in her mind, uneasy, yet with a sort of preternatural clarity of recall.

  She had climbed steadily, smoothly, as though she had known this particular hill path all her life. There was nothing around her except the whisper of wild grasses in the breeze and soft white moonlight pouring over the hillside; in that silent night she was the only thing that moved. Her sense of time fell away from her, pulled back into the human world she left behind and of which it was such a fundamental part—but she had no need of it, not up here. She fell into the rhythm of her stride, and after a while could not have said if she had been climbing for minutes or for hours. And then, very suddenly, the hill flattened out into a level space, and the Dance was there, ghostly in the white light.

  Anghara felt her hackles rise as she stepped into the circle, under a massive archway with the great lintel stone spanning the two uprights far above her head. There was an ancient power here, a power which sang to her—something achingly familiar in its sense of strength and of danger, a feeling she knew very well, having wrestled with it at Bresse for long months. She had never been this close to a true Standing Stone before, but she had known instinctively what they were like when she had plucked a pebble from Cascin’s well and named its nature. Her own little stone had defied her, giving visions where she had sought only inner peace—but there was something here in the Dance which she could learn, could master. It was far more ancient, perhaps, than the Sight which was in her blood but the old magic called to it in a language which she could almost—almost—understand…

  Again, time slipped from her like a discarded cloak. She sat touching eternity, her back against the cool stone of one of the uprights and her knees drawn up into the circle of her arms, and simply stared wide-eyed into the empty circle flooded with light.

  There were things there which perhaps only she could have seen—and accepted without courting madness; the wraiths of the dead whom she had loved rose to speak with her. Morgan, with her strength and her gentle smile, Morgan with the message she had left in Bresse and which Feor had already discovered: The young queen lives—that’s you, my child; one day you will return to Miranei, and it will be yours again. And Anghara, still bowed under the agony of her betrayal that night, would have cried out—Already, already I have forgotten you! The touch of the night breeze on Anghara’s cheek might have been Morgan’s fingers: They all chose to stay in the end, knowing everything, and none need be on your conscience. Morgan had never said these words, but her spirit was saying them now, giving her young queen the absolution she had withheld from Sif. There was nothing you could have done, except die with us. Live for us instead, Anghara. March, sturdy and dependable, turning to what was still a little girl—ah, but it wasn’t so long ago—soon after their arrival in Cascin: Remember this place. This is where I will leave the second copy of the document witnessing your coronation. One day this will take you back to your throne. Rima, smiling through tears in the throne room of Miranei: They will remember this. Her father, Red Dynan of the battles—a true wraith, wordless, passing by with a distant smile and a gentle touch on her hair with the calloused sword hand of a warrior king. Ansen…can he be dead?…Ansen, an angry boy stepping forth from his concealing shrubbery, imp
atient and brusque with the interloper who had wrecked the shot which was to prove his superiority over his foster brother…Ansen slumped unconscious, with rich blood welling through the fingers of the hand over his eye…Ansen, hands bound, glancing up with pride and pain at the sky gleaming with dawn, and in the background, ominous, the shadow of a swinging rope that was waiting…

  And then others crowded in, the living, visions of things which she knew as true deep down in her bones but which had played out far away from her, visions running down one another like water…Sight dies here, today, with you—Sif’s rigid shoulders, then only the icy blue eyes…I will rule human in Roisinan…Kieran, no longer the boy she remembered, kneeling breathless in a trampled, bloody field with the hood of a chain-mail shirt thrust back and his head held high—the bright flash of a descending sword…Anghara cried out, flinging an arm out in an impotent attempt to shield him from the death which was plunging toward him, but the sword landed gently, on his mailed shoulder…Rise…be a valiant knight, Kieran of Shaymir…but Kieran’s eyes were suddenly troubled, and the voice he was listening to was different, familiar, old: I am too old…you are the hawk I will loose to look for her…you are all I have…you are all I have…

  Anghara could remember, through all this, the moon sailing with graceful purpose across the sky which showed the stars of midnight and then, slowly, those of morning. It was not quite dawn yet when her eyes closed in what was utter exhaustion, both of body and of spirit, but a pale golden glow was stirring in the east, and the morning star was bright above her.