The Hidden Queen

by Alma Alexander

  She had been speaking her own language; its liquid syllables warm and familiar, but suddenly she heard them with the ears of the Kheldrini and realized how outlandish they sounded in this solitary oasis.

  When ai’Jihaar said something in the guttural accents of her native tongue, the three turned to listen. Then one, the leader, slipped gracefully from his ki’thar and, undoing the burnouse to give them sight of his face, offered formal greeting first to ai’Jihaar, and then, more slowly, to Anghara.

  Her heart lurched when he spoke—in accented but flawless Roisinani. The dialect was more Shaymir than Miranei, but the language was unmistakably her own.

  “Greetings,” he said. “Your paths, as usual, are unfathomable, ai’Jihaar. I did not look for you on this journey, and yet it is far from unexpected that I should find you standing on the threshold of Khar’i’id as I prepare to enter it. My companions and I would be honored if you will share our fire tonight.”

  “It will be welcome, after Khar’i’id,” said ai’Jihaar. “But first we ask, of your courtesy, that you withdraw and allow us our seclusion for a brief while longer. The salih’al’dayan has not been performed yet.”

  The man’s head came up with a movement that was too swift. He was obviously no stranger to ai’Jihaar; he may have taken her presence in this place serenely enough, but whatever she had conveyed in the Kheldrini phrase she had just uttered had startled him. He glanced at Anghara, his face impassive but his eyes oddly speculative. Then his lashes dropped, masking his surprise. He made an imperious sign, and his companions slid off their ki’thar’en and vanished into the desert at their backs with almost uncanny speed. The leader bowed again to both of the women and followed them without another word.

  Anghara turned to stare at ai’Jihaar, her mind seething with so many questions she was rendered completely mute, and ai’Jihaar answered the most pressing one.

  “Salih’al’dayan,” she said. “Thanksgiving. There are rites for setting out, and rites of thanksgiving when one arrives. I performed the former, both in Sa’alah and in the Arad Shod Hai’r. Now you are gold; now you must learn them also.”

  A fleeting memory of a vision flitted through Anghara’s mind—al’Khur’s great head bowing, the quiet thunder of his voice: She is yours then. Thanksgiving.

  She lifted her chin. “What must I do?”

  “Child,” said ai’Jihaar, very gently, “remember, these are the Elder Gods. Theirs is the blood magic. It is usual for an animal to be the sacrifice, but when sen’en’thari set out from desolate places, it is permitted to defer the proper rites. But only until you find yourself in a place where they may be performed—and you must give blood to the god in token of your willingness to offer them a more appropriate sacrifice thereafter.”

  “Kerun is content with gold and incense, Avanna with the fruits of the harvest…Nual with flowers in the water,” murmured Anghara thoughtfully.

  “And they are the Younger Gods, who rule a gentle land,” said ai’Jihaar succinctly, taking a thin dagger from the sheath at her waist. “This time, watch only, and learn. There may come a time when it will be up to you to offer salih’al’dayan to al’Zaan and al’Khur.”

  She bared a slender arm and placed the point of the dagger in the small valley where her wrist met her palm. And then she spoke, and her voice was suddenly the voice of power. She did not raise her voice in the slightest; she did not need to. She uttered her few lines of invocation almost like a lullaby, and yet the small hai’r was suddenly charged with something which raised the hackles on Anghara’s neck. There was a pervading sense of the unfriendly emptiness around them, and of a presence that was in it and of it, who watched over the travellers who moved across it: al’Zaan the One-Eyed, Lord of the Empty Places, come down to accept the promise that was this sacrifice. Anghara watched, both fascinated and repelled, as the dagger drew a small drop of blood from where it pressed into ai’Jihaar’s arm; ai’Jihaar allowed it to well up, and trickle into her palm. There was a long pause as the sen’thar’s voice faded into silence, and then the power faded also, the hai’r sinking back into sleepy tranquility. The an’sen’thar plunged her dagger into the sand at her feet, and drew it out clean, scoured by the desert, before restoring it to its sheath.

  The blood had already stopped, and when she had washed the traces of it from her palm by rinsing her hand into the beasts’ drinking trough Anghara could not even see where the cut had been made.

  “We heal,” said ai’Jihaar. “It is given to us to heal. This is not a wound, it is a god-gift, and there are no scars.”

  “I don’t know…if I could do that,” said Anghara, very slowly.

  “But you understand it,” said ai’Jihaar. “You felt what happened here tonight. When the time comes…it will be in you. You know these Gods; they are soul-deep within you.” She dried her hand against the skirt of her robe. “Now let us call back the others.”

  “Who are they? You seemed to know each other.”

  “Yes, we know one another,” ai’Jihaar laughed softly. “The man who spoke to us is al’Jezraal; he is Lord of Al’haria, where one day you will go, when you are ready, to stand amongst the an’sen’en’thari of Kheldrin…and he is my brother.”

  19

  At ai’Jihaar’s summons—a high, almost shrill ululation which sliced through the night air like a bright blade—al’Jezraal returned with his two young companions in his wake.

  “My son, al’Shehyr ma’Hariff; my nephew, al’Tamar, of clan Hariff also,” said al’Jezraal with economical gestures of his hand.

  “An’sen’thar Anghara of Sheriha’drin,” said ai’Jihaar in turn, with the utmost serenity.

  It was full dark now, except for the bright desert starlight and the remnants of the Gul Qara moon, but even in this dim light Anghara could see al’Jezraal’s head jerk up; his eyes fastened on her, very briefly, and then he had himself in hand again. He had filed the startling information away. Now was not the time.

  “By your leave, al’Shehyr and al’Tamar will make camp,” he murmured.

  Making camp had been, at least partly, Anghara’s responsibility for a long while—ai’Jihaar was not truly blind in so many important ways, but there were some physical things she simply could not do without someone lending a hand. Anghara stirred now, uneasily, but both a subtle gesture of ai’Jihaar’s hand and a soft mental word stayed her.

  It is not for you. Not in this company. You are an’sen’thar.

  The two young men built up a small fire from dried ki’thar dung, and then busied themselves with provisions. One of them—it had been dark when they had been introduced, and Anghara could not remember which was which—came to kneel by his lord in silence, offering a decorated leather flask.

  When al’Jezraal had unstoppered it, he presented it to ai’Jihaar with a sudden grin which, had he not been so conscious of his dignity as the Lord of Al’haria, could have been called mischievous. His sister sniffed delicately in its direction and rewarded him with an eloquent grimace.

  “Pa’ha,” she said, with almost comical distaste, obviously something of a family joke. “Water for me. For both of us, if that noxious pahria juice is all you have to offer.”

  Betraying his dignity so far as to permit a short, barking laugh, al’Jezraal revealed that his youth still lived in him. After taking a delicate sip from the offending flask, he stoppered it and put it away.

  The two members of his entourage prepared a modest supper, slipping in and out of the circle of firelight like two wraiths—pieces of silent shadow torn from the desert night. Neither could help casting sidelong glances at Anghara every now and again as they worked. There was a silence, also, upon the trio who sat waiting by the fire. It was al’Jezraal, at last, who broke it. “I would know, ai’Jihaar,” he said, his voice once again that of Al’haria’s lord, “how your companion came to the gold.”

  It was his prerogative; it was in Al’haria that an’sen’en’thari were confirmed, and by his hand. It was
to him that Anghara would have, eventually, come to have her own new status blessed and verified. But it was to have been later, much later; a shiver of fear brushed her, like spiders’ feet on bare skin.

  “For that,” said ai’Jihaar, whose own silence had been neither more nor less than a patient waiting for just this question to be asked, “we must go back to the time when she and I first met. I was on pilgrimage, to Sheriha’drin, to the river they call the Tanassa.”

  “This I know,” he said. “I had word from Sa’alah when you took your leave.”

  “But you do not know that this time it was not entirely the call of running water that drew me there. I was sent to Sheriha’drin, to find something. Someone. To bring that which I found back.”

  Very softly, al’Jezraal said something in his own tongue, his eyes glinting in the firelight. His sister was silent for a long time, turning away from him, and then stirred, lifting her head to flash a brief sad smile in Anghara’s direction.

  “Yes, it has been forbidden for a long time. I know it. But she is who she is, and I am what I am—there are times I obey higher laws than those of the People, my brother. I introduced her to you as an’sen’thar, but she is more than this—she is the rightful queen of the land they call Roisinan, al’Jezraal, and it was not I who sought her out but she who sensed me in the Great Dance in the hills. And then, later, there was death at our heels in the port of Calabra, and there was a Kheldrini ship waiting.”

  “Even so,” he murmured. “The desert has been shielded for so long…”

  “From enemies, brother. Not from one who is coming home.”

  He dropped his eyes. “Perhaps I judge too quickly. Proceed.”

  As ai’Jihaar described Anghara’s vision in the desert campfire and her raising to the white circle the old sen’thar’s voice was strong, measured, vivid, and al’Jezraal bowed his head in thought when she had finished. “That which they call Sight,” he said at last, “is that not common amongst Sheriha’drini?”

  It used to be, thought Anghara with a sharp stab of pain, remembering Sif and the cage which had been hung in the Calabra street.

  But ai’Jihaar was nodding. “More so than with us,” she agreed.

  “And this that she did…was this not Sight alone?”

  “Nothing she does is Sight alone,” said ai’Jihaar. “And what she did was leave her body by the fireside while her mind winged far away. This is not something that comes easily even to the Sighted in Roisinan, where visions, if they come, are too often cast as dreams. They are rarely, if ever, a true reflection of what is happening at the same instant many miles away. Besides…this is not something that is given to you to do, my brother, but had we been in Al’haria any of your sen’en’thari could have sensed and verified the power within her.”

  For another brief while al’Jezraal was silent, then he lifted his head to look at Anghara. “I confirm,” he said. This should have been done in the Great Hall of Al’haria, but his face and voice were just as proud and dignified here under the canopy of the desert stars. Anghara had not known how tense she was until she looked down at hands she had just relaxed out of a tight fist and saw the deep half-moons her nails had dug in her palms. And then, remembering what was still to come, she clenched her hands again, hiding them in her lap.

  “Even so,” said al’Jezaar after a pause, “I confirm the white. But to gray, to gold, in the space of only days?”

  When ai’Jihaar turned her blind eyes toward him, he subsided. She would not be hurried. “It was for the Kadun that we were bound,” she continued, unperturbed, from where she had left off in her narrative. “I would have gone across Kharg’in’dun’an, but there was something that told me to take her…to Beit el’Sihaya. And to take her now.”

  While al’Jezraal’s face was impassive, Anghara could see his shoulders tense. There could have been no real surprise here, not after this encounter in Shod Hai’r at the edge of the Stone Desert, but there was nonetheless bewilderment inherent in the fact that ai’Jihaar had chosen to take this route with a fram’man. A stranger.

  “You once said to me that you would never again brave Khar’i’id alone,” said al’Jezraal, and his words were oddly jarring, apparently irrelevant to what ai’Jihaar had just said; his voice too even. There was something here, then, deeper than even Anghara’s intrusion into the Empty Quarter.

  “Hama dan ar’i’id,” ai’Jihaar said softly. “You are never alone in the desert. Have you forgotten our oldest saying?” And then her hand rose in a graceful motion, indicated Anghara, who sat straight-backed and silent by the fire. “And I was not. I had an initiate of the white circle with me. One whom you yourself have just confirmed in her standing.”

  “You named her an’sen’thar,” al’Jezraal reminded his sister, his eyes on Anghara. Under this steady scrutiny, she lowered her gaze briefly in a token of respect, but then lifted her eyes again and met his, squarely—al’Jezraal looked away again, at his sister. “Proceed. Why, ai’Jihaar? Why the Empty Quarter?”

  “Gul Qara.”

  It was the obvious answer, and yet its effect was electric. Even al’Tamar, the nephew, younger than al’Jezraal’s own son, turned his head with a snap at the name.

  The Oracle was a holy place. To take a fram’man into the desert was bad enough. To take a stranger into hallowed ground…

  “My sister…”

  The sen’thar had no time for this. “It spoke to her, al’Jezraal! Let the councils debate this until their bones turn to sand, but I brought into Gul Qara a sen’thar who heard a voice stilled these thousand years!”

  It was clear that al’Jezraal was seriously shaken, enough for his disquiet to show through cracks in his composure. If it had not been ai’Jihaar who spoke, his own sister whom he knew and trusted and one his own hand had raised to the gold, he would have flung her words back into her face and called her a liar.

  “The Oracle is dead!” This from al’Shehyr, close enough to have heard, and under no constraints such as those that bound his father. Nonetheless, al’Jezraal shot him a swift glance of silent rebuke.

  “It is. Now.”

  They all turned to Anghara, the one who had spoken; ai’Jihaar wore an expression of what was almost apprehension for a moment, and then her face cleared, flowed into pride, love, compassion. “It is yours to tell, Anghara,” she said.

  And Anghara drew a deep breath, and told.

  She did not know she did it, but her voice was an instrument of the Gods that night—she wove a tale which rose as a vision under the desert skies. The two youngsters who had still been fussing with camp chores laid down whatever they happened to have in their hands and drew near, enthralled, while al’Jezraal sat still as a carved statue. He was not sen’thar himself, but the gift was in his blood—he was sensitive to nuances of speech and gesture enough to open himself to a charge of mind-reading when he chose. He could feel the wonder, ai’Jihaar’s pride and exaltation, Anghara’s own guilt, the pain and the sorrow.

  When Anghara was done, the tableau sat without moving for one brief moment, then al’Tamar sighed and al’Shehyr turned abruptly away—but not before Anghara saw his eyes gleam with what looked suspiciously like tears. While al’Jezraal looked at her steadily, when he spoke, it was to his sister.

  “For this, the gold?”

  “I refused it,” said Anghara in a low voice.

  “That is right,” said ai’Jihaar. “Not for death, she said.”

  Weaving his long fingers together, al’Jezraal brought his chin down to rest upon them. He said no word, waiting for ai’Jihaar to continue. His sister had turned her face toward Anghara, but she was also silent—ai’Jihaar sighed and bowed her head.

  “It was not for death that she accepted the gold. It was for life. Mine.” She shifted where she sat, stretching out one booted foot toward her brother. “Do you recognize these?” she asked, pointing with unerring accuracy to the twin holes the diamondskih’s dagger-like teeth had left in the chamois of her
boot.

  When he saw them, al’Jezraal sucked in his breath sharply, lifting his head. In the flickering light of the campfire Anghara thought she saw his face go pale. In answer to his sister’s question, it was obvious that he did, indeed, recognize what he saw.

  Clearly shocked, he breathed, “al’Khur! Did the fangs touch you…Are you truly all right, ai’Jihaar?”

  “They touched me,” said ai’Jihaar. “They pierced me. You are right to call upon al’Khur, for he came for me this day in Khar’i’id…and it was Anghara who denied him.”

  In the same moment ai’Jihaar said this, al’Shehyr, who had been kneeling by the embers and extracting the waybread which had been buried there to bake, uttered an inarticulate cry as his hand closed convulsively on a live ember.

  “Hama dan ar’i’id,” murmured al’Tamar, huge black pupils, dilated with shock, almost entirely swallowing the golden irises of his eyes.

  “How?” said al’Jezraal huskily.

  “One of Khar’i’id’s gifts?” ai’Jihaar said. “I do not know. It happened.”

  “How?” repeated al’Jezraal, turning to stare at Anghara.

  She gazed back helplessly. “He…was there. He gave me back the life. Or I took it. I don’t know. I remember that I did it, but I do not remember how.”

  As al’Jezraal raised a white face to the sky his hands were shaking. “Hai!” he whispered. “Hai Haddari!”

  In the meantime, al’Tamar was bent over al’Shehyr’s reddened, blistering palm; now he thrust al’Shehyr’s hand toward Anghara. “You resurrect; can you heal?” he said abruptly.

  Anghara had accepted the hand automatically, and now her eyes flicked down to it from al’Tamar’s face, and back again.

  “I have never healed,” she said simply, her heart pounding painfully.