The Hidden Queen

by Alma Alexander

  And now the morning was done, and afternoon shadows lengthened on the grass.

  Anghara scrambled to her feet with a sudden muffled cry. The boat—when did the captain say they were leaving? How long did she spend up here? How long would it take her to get down? Would they even notice she was missing?

  Most of the river was hidden from this hilltop by the fold of the hills, but a snatch was visible, gleaming bright gold in the sunshine. Anghara peered at it, shielding her eyes with her hand—was that black speck a boat which had left without her? But it was too far, and the sun was too bright, making her eyes water even as she gazed.

  “Oh, dear Gods…” she moaned softly, aloud, as she shook out her rumpled cloak and lifted her hands to her tangled hair even as she took the first rapid steps toward the road which led down to the village. And then she froze, feeling eyes upon her back, acutely aware that she was no longer alone. Her heart climbed into her mouth—this, after all, was a Dance of Standing Stones where only hours before ghosts had walked in the moonlight. Letting her hands drop to her sides, very slowly, she turned her head and scanned the empty archways. Nothing. And yet…The power stirred in her, unsummoned, the faintest nimbus of gold haloing her head.

  “Peace,” said a strange, low voice. “I mean you no harm.”

  She could have sworn there had been nobody underneath the arches at her back when she’d looked moments before, but there was now—a slight figure, shrouded in a dusty, dark cloak which seemed at least three sizes too big, its face hidden behind a white mask. Anghara knew such masks; beggars with disfiguring disabilities or scars used them sometimes on city streets, to spare the sensibilities of those of whom they begged a few coppers for their next meal. They were far more common in the south than they were in Miranei, but there had been enough for the young princess to notice them. This particular mask had its eye slits filled in with white clay; this beggar was blind.

  A blind beggar? Alone on a hilltop, in a ruined Dance?

  “Who are you?” said Anghara, in a voice which was commendably steady given the rapid beating of her heart. There was something uncanny about the cloaked figure—as though it had truly been dreamt into existence, a product of Anghara’s own visions of last night. “How did you get here?” she asked, after a barely perceptible hesitation. There was a lot of courage in the question. Some things one had to ask; this did not necessarily mean one wanted an answer.

  The woman reached with uncanny accuracy for a white staff which leaned against the closest upright. “I walked, of course,” she said matter-of-factly, as though the very question was absurd; Anghara thought she might even have smiled beneath the white mask. The mask was turned in Anghara’s direction, and she was uncomfortably aware of a piercing scrutiny which should have been entirely impossible. “I watched you, and over you, last night, this morning,” the beggar said, her voice oddly foreign in its accent and cadences, in the choice and order of words. “There are few in this land who would willingly spend a night in this place.”

  This was true. The builders of the Dances were long forgotten in Roisinan, as were the original purposes of their handiwork—what was left were the dregs of power, strong enough to touch someone far less sensitive than Anghara, and the rumors of old magic, blood magic, practiced upon these ancient stones after nightfall by those who invoked the dark and hungry aspects of the Elder Gods. While many Roisinani would come to see a Dance in the bright light of day, none walked willingly under the shadows of the Stones after sunset—some of those who had tried had been found dead or mad with unspeakable fear.

  If she had not been in the grip of something far stronger than herself, it was doubtful if even Anghara, doubly armed with Sight and the ancient royal blood which bound her to her land, would have considered spending the night here alone. By her own admission, the blind woman had not only done so as well, keeping the same vigil as Anghara, but she had also had the presence of mind to “watch over” Roisinan’s lost princess as she wrestled with her visions.

  Anghara felt for a brief moment like a vessel filling with light, on the verge of understanding—the Gods who had driven her here last night…was it for this? Then it faded, leaving her empty and frightened and very much aware of every one of her fourteen years—too short a lifetime for all that had befallen her. If she’d had the life she should have had, if the arrow hadn’t taken her father and her father’s son had not slain Rima of the Wells on his road to power, Anghara would have been waking this morning in her own bed in Miranei to light and laughter, a few more years of unclouded and sheltered childhood behind the impregnable battlements of her father’s castle…but Sif walked those battlements now, death in his eyes, and the beautiful fantasy shattered even as her thought lingered lovingly on it. That was all gone, vanished, torn from her. Her childhood was here and now, facing the unknown in a ring of power raised by hands which had been dust and ashes for a thousand years.

  This land. The slender form, the foreign voice. This land.

  Once, a long time ago, a man from the desert country of Kheldrin had come to Miranei, bringing four matched dun’en to the king—worth a king’s ransom, the dark, glossy horses of the desert, with their grace and power and the spirit of the open desert in their eyes. Anghara had been barely five years old—old enough to feel the electric excitement the arrival of the animals and their handler had produced in Miranei’s halls. She had wheedled, cajoled, and finally commanded her nurse from the full height of her rank to take her to the stables.

  She would never forget the first sight of them, their gleaming coats and slender legs which looked infinitely fragile, as though made of glass. Beside a desert dun, all other horses were heavy, awkward and clumsy. Dynan’s great stallion, his head poked out of his stall, was snorting furiously as though in derision at these new inhabitants of the stables he ruled. But he was vanquished at the start, nothing but a great lumbering brute next to creatures who looked as though they had been dreamed up in a bard’s vision.

  Now, on a hilltop above the River Tanassa, the memory came flooding back to Dynan’s daughter. Not because of the horses, although it lingered on them with a delight undimmed by the years, but because of the man who had been standing at the head of one of the beasts—the man who had brought them all the way from their desert home. He had been small-boned, slender, his head barely reaching Dynan’s shoulder. His skin was a deep bronze and his hair, straight and worn long, sprang from high on his forehead and was the color of beaten copper. There was nothing on his face that was not found on the face of any man—but every feature was achingly different. His chin was too pointed, his mouth thin-lipped, narrow, folded into itself; his nose impossibly narrow and sharp, nostrils mere slits, and his profile was almost a straight line down from his prominent forehead. His eyes were a dull gold, with black pupils huge in what must have been dim mountain light after his desert sun.

  This land.

  The rest could all mean nothing—there were wasted old women enough in Roisinan who would have looked no different from the beggar woman who stood before Anghara if wrapped into the beggar’s shapeless cloak and muffled into anonymity behind the white mask. But the voice was not of Roisinan, had never been, and neither was the courage to brave a nightfall in the presence of Standing Stones. Anghara suddenly knew beyond any doubt that what lay behind the concealing mask was the bronze skin and cat-like eyes of a woman of the desert country.

  “Kheldrin,” she said, out loud.

  For a moment the woman—whatever she was, she was almost certainly no beggar—seemed startled by the name, blurted so abruptly; then she bowed her head slightly in acknowledgment. Anghara once again heard a hidden smile in her voice as she spoke.

  “Yes. I am of Kheldrin.”

  “Here?”

  It was a thoroughly incoherent way to ask a dozen questions which milled in Anghara’s head.

  “You are surprised?”

  “Yes!” That was torn from her. “I have lived all my life in this country, and ha
ve only ever seen one…and that was with the horses…”

  “Dun’en. Yes. Sometimes we travel with them. But I am no horse trader.”

  Anghara felt oddly chastened. She fought to collect her thoughts. When she spoke again, it was as a Kir Hama princess. “Your kind…are not common in this land.” This land. Now the phrase had popped naturally into her own mouth. And then the child which that princess still was, the impatient child who had too many questions and too few words to ask them, spoke again. “I know that people don’t…I mean, that Khelsies…”

  The moment the word slipped out she would have given worlds to unsay it. That was what the frightened and the prejudiced called the people out of the desert, odd and shocking in their differences. She had heard it a hundred times, always denigratory, slighting, insulting—Khelsie, Khelsie abomination. And now she had flung it, without meaning to, without thinking…

  But the Kheldrini woman merely gave a small nod. “Yes. I know. You do not expect to find one of us this deep in your land, alone. But this is not the first time I have been deep in Sheriha’drin.”

  “Sheriha’drin?” echoed Anghara, distracted by the name.

  “That is what we name your country in our tongue, Sheriha’drin, River Land, Land of Running Water. There are things here which are meaningful for us; and many things that are holy.”

  “Holy? To you?”

  “If nothing else, then the water alone,” said the Kheldrini woman softly. “There is no water that is not holy to us; every one of your rivers and lakes is a place of worship. Your people have never understood us—and never trusted us, unless for simple trade. We have many things they covet, and they are happy to give us grain in exchange for our horses, or jin’aaz silk. But often there are times when some of us must come—call it a pilgrimage—and when we do we come as shadows, and you never know. But I have been as far as the river you call the Rada, and never has a Sheriha’drini eye seen me pass.” She reached up to the mask and took it down, very slowly, with the measured and deliberate dignity of a queen. “Until now.”

  She was old; that was the first thing to strike Anghara as she gazed at the face thus revealed. The bronze skin had darkened to chestnut, a deep golden brown, and her hair was no longer copper but a palely gleaming silvery-white. Her eyes were filmed over with white, with no iris and no pupil, and yet they were resting on Anghara with sight which was all the more compelling because it was so patently not of the physical world.

  “My name is ai’Jihaar ma’Hariff,” the unmasked woman said. Her words were simple, but her tone was high pride, and Anghara had no doubt that in Kheldrin the name meant something. Here, in the land she had named Sheriha’drin, the words were just words—except that a great trust had been shown by the very fact that ai’Jihaar had chosen to unveil both her nature and her name to one who had still not returned the honor. And there would be no half-truths here, no Brynna Kelen could stand before this scrutiny. Anghara drew a deep breath.

  “I am Anghara Kir Hama of Miranei,” she said, taking her name back for the first time in years. Her heart leapt to hear it.

  “Kir Hama is a royal name,” said ai’Jihaar. “And you are very far from Miranei.”

  “My mother was Rima of the Wells; my father Dynan, King Under the Mountain,” said Anghara, in response to the questions which had been so skillfully disguised as simple statements. “He fell in battle, and the son he begot in his youth seized the throne. He reigns now in Miranei.” It was bitter, this confession, her vulnerability and helplessness exposed for all eyes to see—especially these eyes, so penetrating, so swift to understand.

  “Against your law.”

  “Sif is king. He is the law.”

  “And you are the terror that stands between him and true kingship, the thorn of unease lying deep in the heart of his reign.”

  The words had the lilt and the cadence of a bard’s chant, hard truths wrapped in the velvet of metaphor and poetry. Anghara shivered at them, but stood silent.

  “How is it that you live, and are free?” asked ai’Jihaar unexpectedly.

  That lanced at pitiless memories, and drew blood. It was a moment before she could speak. “They hid me from him. And every place that hid me has had to pay for that sin.”

  “Where are you headed now?” asked the Kheldrini woman, unexpectedly gently. The tone of her voice made the question one of concern, not mere prying.

  “Calabra,” said Anghara, “and Sanctuary, with Nual.” She turned her head almost instinctively to peer again at the visible snatch of river, still golden in the sun.

  “They have gone, your companions,” said ai’Jihaar with a precision that was eerie—it was as though she saw Anghara’s gesture and responded to it, as any ordinary person would do, despite her handicap. “They came here to look for you, but it was as if they were unable to see where you lay.”

  Anghara’s head whipped around again. “You were here?”

  “Yes.”

  “You could have shown them, then…”

  “No,” said ai’Jihaar regretfully, shaking her head. “Not without revealing myself. And let them see me here I could not.” Again, the oddness of her speech, the strange order of her words, the inescapable sense that this creature had come from elsewhere…

  “But you showed yourself to me,” said Anghara slowly.

  “I,” said ai’Jihaar enigmatically, “have my own Gods. And, if you will recall, I had little choice at the last. To reveal my presence to one who obviously already knew I was there would be breaking no rules.” She paused to fit the white mask back on her face. “I am bound for Calabra,” she said, once again in that matter-of-fact voice with which she had answered Anghara’s first question. “If you would come with me, you are welcome.”

  Anghara spared another brief cheerless glance for the river, blazing more golden than ever. “I cannot take another boat,” she murmured, “all I owned in the world was on that one, and I do not know what became of it. I will walk with you.”

  It was rather a graceless acceptance, but ai’Jihaar merely nodded with a degree of rather unsettling complacency, as though this had all been meticulously planned months ago, and the meeting in the Tanassa Dance preordained. “Come, then.”

  She moved with an uncanny skill and speed, so much so that Anghara, taken a little by surprise at the suddenness of her departure, had to scramble to catch up to her. The woman’s outward frailty was deceptive; she was built for stamina and endurance—much like the fragile steeds which hailed from her homeland. She found paths where Anghara could see only trackless waste—for the back slopes of the Tanassa Hills were different from those which faced the river. No smooth meadowland here, it was all tussocks of wiry grass rooted in long expanses of naked stone, soft and crumbling, and loose rocks, which rolled treacherously beneath a foot and could turn an ankle with effortless malice. Anghara followed where ai’Jihaar led, but even so she was breathless with exertion when they finally reached the grassy plains. Looking around, ai’Jihaar paused, waiting for her. “It becomes easier from here.”

  “You climbed that? Alone in the dark?” panted Anghara, coming abreast of her companion.

  “There are far worse things in Khar’i’id, where I have walked at night,” said ai’Jihaar softly.

  “What is Khar’i’id?”

  “The Stone Desert of Kheldrin,” said ai’Jihaar, “where nothing thrives except se’i’din and diamondskins, and both of these are death.”

  Anghara was suddenly overwhelmingly curious about the strange land of which she had heard little that was not legend, fable, or simply malicious fabrication of small and frightened minds. “Tell me of your country,” she said, and she was quite unaware of a tone of ringing command which had crept back into her voice as she had taken on again the mantle of the Kir Hama name.

  While ai’Jihaar did not miss it, neither did she bow under it. “In time,” she said. A light breeze swirled around the walkers, twitching the ends of their cloaks, tousling Anghara’s hair—a
i’Jihaar lifted her masked face into it, as though listening to tidings, or asking for them. And so she was, in a way. Oh, ai’Shahn al’Sheriha, bright messenger of my people’s Gods, was it for this that you sent me to seek when you sent me into holy Sheriha’drin? The wind was silent, but the quiet excitement that coursed through ai’Jihaar’s blood at the bright aura of the girl who walked beside her was answer enough to her prayer. And yet…it had been many ages since one of the sheriha’drini was taken into the heartland of Kheldrin. Many ages; the world had been broken and remade at least once since that time. There was pity in the old woman—for the child who was running, for royal blood cast adrift to survive on the wind, sustained only by the hope that one day she would reclaim what had been taken from her. But pity must not sway her decisions. She was sen’thar, chosen of her Gods, and it was their voices she must heed. She walked in silence, listening to the whisper of foreign winds in the grass of Roisinan’s plains.

  It took them many days to reach Calabra, days in which Anghara learned to respect ai’Jihaar’s silences. She learned much more, as well, for there were times when ai’Jihaar was quite ready to talk, and the strange, enigmatic land of Kheldrin began to take shape before Anghara’s eyes. A shape more real than her own country, for all that they moved beneath familiar skies—for ai’Jihaar had a mesmeric power with words and Anghara had no other companion to dilute their impact on her mind.

  Just how strange and alien her own land could become in a short space of time was borne in upon her only when, after avoiding every habitation in their path, they finally plunged into the outskirts of Calabra and Anghara saw for the first time the consequences of Bresse.

  Because ai’Jihaar seemed to know where she was going, Anghara, who had never been alone in a big city before, was content to let her lead the way. She had taken Anghara’s arm, and although it looked like an able-bodied girl was helping a blind woman cope with the crowds, it was in fact very much the other way around, with ai’Jihaar leading and hanging on to Anghara lest they be swept apart by the jostling people in the broad main street.