The Hidden Queen

by Alma Alexander

  Their eyes held, gold and gray, for a long moment—his challenging, intense, almost angry; hers a little frightened, but steady, and utterly innocent of arrogance or guile. And then, just as she became aware that ai’Jihaar was about to say something, Anghara’s dropped again to the burned hand which she held. “I will try.”

  In truth she had no idea what to do. She stared at the burned hand, feeling its tension through her own fingers; it was obvious al’Shehyr himself was not entirely happy with what was happening. But then she emptied her mind of everything except a vision of that hand, whole again. She closed his stiff fingers over his blistered palm, her own hand lingering gently for a moment over his as she did so. And even if she had not felt the sudden brief dislocation inside herself, as though a great wing had briefly cast its shadow over her spirit, al’Shehyr’s sharp gasp would have been enough to tell her.

  It was done.

  The young man almost jerked his hand from her own, opening his fingers to stare at the unmarked skin, as al’Tamar’s lips moved soundlessly. Anghara sat still with her head bowed, feeling utterly drained.

  “That was unworthy, al’Tamar.”

  The voice was al’Jezraal’s, a subtle weapon. Anghara lifted her head, in time to see the lord’s nephew hang his own in shame as al’Shehyr came to kneel at al’Jezraal’s feet, offering his hand.

  “Father…”

  “Yes. I know,” said al’Jezraal, as he closed his son’s fingers without looking down into his palm. His eyes were on Anghara. “All the same, you do not ask for proof of a miracle.” He rose to his feet in a single fluid motion, and made a deep desert bow to Anghara. She rose instinctively, and could only stare as the Lord of Al’haria removed a necklace of amber beads in delicate silver filigree from around his own neck and crossed with a light step to where she was standing.

  “I confirm,” he said, and his voice was commendably steady. “Had we been in my hall in Al’haria, you would have worn an’sen’thar gold, and this would have been your own say’yin. That will still come, Sen’en Dayr. But, until that day, I confirm you, here and now, to the place where ai’Jihaar has raised you. Will you, in pledge, accept this say’yin from the hands of the Lord of Al’haria?”

  She did not kneel, but bent her head to allow him to place the necklace on her neck and then stepped back—right hand touching heart, lips, brow, and then falling away into a graceful bow, an obeisance deep enough to set the necklace swinging. When she looked up again, al’Jezraal was smiling.

  “But lord,” she said in a low voice, “I still don’t know what I did…or how I did it…or if I will ever be able to do it again.”

  “But you have done it,” he said. “And I have seen it. The rest is with the Gods.”

  A moment later, when he came to offer Anghara her supper, al’Shehyr’s eyes were opaque, twin gold mirrors. But it was al’Tamar who approached her with a deep obeisance, and begged her pardon for what he had done. And it was al’Tamar who hovered at her side, bringing her things before she asked for them—even, at last, touching her sleeve and informing her that her bed was ready just as she was finally beginning to give way to the exhaustion that was the legacy of Khar’i’id. She left the fireside, and was asleep almost before her head touched the pillow al’Tamar had prepared.

  In the morning, the three men were gone; they left no trace of their passing, and if it weren’t for the say’yin which still hung around her neck Anghara would have been inclined to believe she had dreamt the entire encounter.

  Drawn by the change in Anghara’s breathing, ai’Jihaar was suddenly beside her.

  “It is late,” she said. “I did not have the heart to wake you, but it is time we were on our way.”

  “Where are we going?” Anghara sat up in her bed, stretching the stiff muscles of her back. This was a question she seemed to be asking constantly.

  “Home. My home. There is peace there, and quiet, and all the time you need before you face al’Jezraal again in the Great Hall at Al’haria. It is the last journey, for a while. A place to rest. None of this has been easy on you, Anghara.”

  “I dreamed of the Oracle last night,” said Anghara slowly.

  “And the dream?”

  “Only what was, nothing more.”

  There had been disappointment in her voice, but that soon quickened into something else as she saw ai’Jihaar’s expression. But all the sen’thar would say in response to her questions was as cryptic as anything the oracle itself might have uttered.

  “It might be a beginning,” ai’Jihaar said. “Remember these dreams.”

  The dream did not recur, at least not during the final lap of the journey to ai’Jihaar’s home. This proved uneventful, except for the scenery—Kadun Khajir’i’id showed itself to be infinitely versatile. The wind-shaped dunes would change form and color almost minute by minute, and as Anghara and ai’Jihaar moved north they were broken more and more often by jutting buttes and flat-topped mesas of reddish stone.

  It was tucked in the lee of one of these that they finally found ai’Jihaar’s home—a small hai’r, consisting of a tiny pool hedged with a thicket of lais thorn bushes. Beneath a trio of pahria palms, a large nomad tent, rose-red like the desert, stood pitched and anchored with an air of permanence at the water’s edge. An elderly ki’thar chewed lethargically on something in a small pen at the back; and an equally elderly woman was at the tent entrance to greet them, babbling away in a torrent of guttural Kheldrin which went over Anghara’s head. Anghara’s arrival into this simple household caused relatively less upheaval than the introduction of two new ki’thar’en into the pen. The sole occupant, obviously used to having the pen to himself, proved loath to surrender his absolute sovereignty without a fight, so that by the time the three animals had been persuaded into peaceful coexistence, Anghara’s presence in ai’Jihaar’s tent was largely a fact of life. A section of the tent was curtained off for her use with a minimum of fuss, and by the time Anghara first thought to tot up the days that had passed since she had arrived there she was astonished to discover it had been almost a month.

  And then the months themselves began to slip by. Riding roughshod over all the tenets of Bresse, ai’Jihaar taught Anghara how to become a part of her gift—not an empty vessel waiting to be filled, but a deep lake whose every drop was power. There was a much greater potential for disaster here than at Bresse, but together with the potential came the safeguard of total control. Never again could Sight lash from Anghara as it did in Cascin; but only here in Kheldrin did she truly receive that which Feor had hoped for from Bresse.

  So deeply was Anghara into her life and training in this place that even Khar’i’id faded from her memory—Khar’i’id, and that which lay hidden in the Empty Quarter. It was with a sense of shock that she woke one morning with a memory of a dream so vivid she could still see its shape on the folds of the rose-red tent which surrounded her. And smell, as once before…the sharp, salty, vivid, well-remembered tang of the sea.

  And remember something else.

  “I dreamed of Gul Qara,” she told ai’Jihaar when she found her, out by the pool. “The sea again. And this time…there were two words in the wind. It was still unclear, but the first one sounded as though it might be Gul. And…it was a year ago last night that we were in the Empty Quarter.”

  Nodding slowly, ai’Jihaar said. “The Oracle often worked in threes.”

  Anghara stared at her teacher in dismay, quick to comprehend. “Three years?” she asked.

  “Perhaps only two. This is the second dream.”

  And Anghara fingered thoughtfully the say’yin she had been given by the Lord of Al’haria on another desert night almost a year ago, and was silent.

  If she had to, she would wait.

  But, in the meantime, there was something she could do to try and hurry things along. The little Standing Stone she had raised in Cascin, the talisman which had chosen her at Bresse, had not been required in ai’Jihaar’s disciplines and Anghara had not
returned to it for a long time. Its chaos-raising potential was still fresh in her mind; but together with that memory came another—the visions of Bresse in flames, of Cascin spared Sif’s vengeance. True visions. The stone had shown a predilection for prophecy long before Anghara had heard of the Empty Quarter or the place called Gul Qara. Fully accepting the possible consequences, Anghara came back to her talisman and asked for another vision.

  The results of this exercise were strange. The chaotic edge of the stone seemed to be dulled—there was none of the explosive welter of images and revelation Anghara had come to associate with her talisman. Perhaps ai’Jihaar’s training had given her a measure of control—either that, or her gifts had grown mature enough to deal with it on her own. Or perhaps it was simply too far away from her, the essence of Roisinan weakened by the distance between the queen and her land. Whatever the case, the stone did not take her for its usual wild ride. Instead, it offered a single image—a single Standing Stone, raised in a dimly glimpsed desolation. It was high, for that which was below it was lost in an odd, coruscating mist. And the light around it was not the bluish-green aura that clung to the Cascin Stone, but gold—the bright gold of her own soul fire.

  It didn’t help. If anything, it was another mystery on top of those still-to-be-unravelled tangles which had already landed in Anghara’s lap.

  Several times during this first year the flames of ai’Jihaar’s hearth had given Anghara quick and scattered glimpses of Roisinan. Once it had been a vision of the arrival of a body of Sif’s soldiers into yet another village which had offended. Unable to break away, Anghara had been forced to watch, sickened, as they took their revenge on a Sighted woman and her husband, who had defied Sif’s edicts in order to protect and hide his wife and their child. A group of mounted men had come galloping into the village while the soldiers were still finishing the job—but they were too few, and too late. Seven rode in; three survived to be taken back to Miranei. The bodies of the dead were left unburied in the village square as the soldiers rode away. Anghara had come out of this one white and shaking, crying that it was time she returned—to which ai’Jihaar could only reply, “Your time is not yet.” This the sen’thar knew; there would be a time, and she would recognize it, but what the signal would be she still did not know, and it was hard to watch Anghara suffer over something she was powerless to change.

  On another occasion Anghara had floated unseen in Sif’s private quarters in Miranei—the same rooms that had once belonged to the king who had fathered them both. Sif was not alone; his mother, Clera, watched him from within a deep armchair by the hearth as he paced back and forth like a caged tiger.

  “I can wait no longer, Mother,” he was saying. “Tath is still a thorn in my side, and a problem it is imperative I solve quickly, before the whole thing festers on me—I am not sure it hasn’t already, for that matter. And then there’s…the other campaign. I need an heir, Mother, and if Colwen cannot give me a child I must find a queen who will. It’s been almost six years. It is too long.”

  “She is a loyal and loving queen, Sif. There is still no real hurry…”

  “There is,” he said violently. “Anghara is still out there.”

  “She is buried,” said Clera in a level voice, “in the family vault.”

  Sif shot his mother a glance that was a distillation of impatience and something like pity. “You and I know she is not,” he said, “and too many others do, as well. There is the document…”

  “…which you destroyed…”

  Sif chopped his hand downward like an axe. “A copy. An original exists. And there is the seal. We both know that, even now, if Anghara were to walk through the gates of Miranei there would be many who would flock to her. Too many.”

  “That is still no reason…”

  “Mother.” Sif’s voice was flat, royal; there was no query in it, no hesitation, merely command. “I need an heir. I am putting Colwen aside; the proclamation is already drawn up. And I need you to help me find my next queen.”

  Clera hesitated. “But who? There are one or two daughters of noble houses still unwed, but you passed most of them over when you chose Colwen.”

  Sif stopped pacing and stood staring into the leaping flames in the great hearth, his hands gripping the mantle so tightly his knuckles stood out white and sharp. “There is one whom I have not.”

  “Who?”

  “Senena. Senena Shailan.”

  And Anghara seemed to pass through the suddenly two-dimensional image as through a curtain even as she heard Clera’s shocked, fading voice: “But she is not fourteen yet! She is a child…”

  It was Senena herself who waited beyond the curtain, gowned lavishly for her wedding, her eyes luminous with tears of terror behind the diaphanous veil Clera was adjusting for her. Somewhere in the rows of waiting dignitaries Anghara could see the bitter, resentful eyes of the queen Sif had ruthlessly discarded; and Clera’s voice was a hiss in Senena’s ear as the child stood trembling and rooted to the spot.

  “Go; he waits. In a few minutes you shall be queen, child. Do not fail to remember your duty to your king and your country when the crown is put on your head.”

  And then, at the last, just before the vision faded into darkness, the sight of Sif’s brown, capable hands gripping the small childish ones laid quivering within them. Anghara heard Sif’s commanding, intense voice, “I want a son, Senena…” And then, fading, fading, the heart-rending scream of a terrified child who had been crowned queen only a few hours before but who did not rule even her own bedchamber.

  Another time the vision had been brief, but no less affecting. It came on the eve of Anghara’s fifteenth birthday: Kieran, sitting watchful by a campfire, surrounded by a small band of men who looked oddly similar to those who had ridden in against Sif’s cheta in the village she had seen before. He’d lifted his eyes to the stars, over the rim of the rough cup out of which he was drinking mulled wine, and for a heartstopping moment his eyes seemed to meet Anghara’s—but then she realized he could not see her as she saw him. There was a strange sadness in his eyes, a loss that tore at her because she knew…she felt…she was its cause.

  Kieran…Kieran, I am safe…

  His head turned a fraction, as though he had heard a step behind him…or a voice…and then he sighed, putting down his cup.

  “Happy birthday,” he murmured, soft enough that not even his closest neighbor heard. “Wherever you are.”

  20

  Anghara’s second year at ai’Jihaar’s hai’r was almost up when the sen’thar decided her pupil was at last ready to make an appearance at Al’haria. Anghara was now sixteen, and trained as far in the Way as ai’Jihaar could take her. She spoke the language as one Kheldrin-born, although with a stubborn and ineradicable accent; she knew her sacrifices, her invocations, her Gods…and her limitations. The blood sacrifices of Kheldrin sat ill with her. She had to be proficient in these, as an’sen’thar; she watched ai’Jihaar closely when her teacher performed them, but somehow, for a long time, she managed to avoid doing any herself. She had to, in the end—there was no escaping it. But she had wept for the thing she had slain. During her two years of training she performed the ritual of the sacrifice only twice; both times she did it flawlessly, but at a cost. This worried ai’Jihaar—but in all else her pupil was painfully ready. It was time to take her to al’Jezraal, to claim her own say’yin at last.

  Finally ai’Jihaar had Anghara ready the two ki’thar’en which had accompanied them through Khari’i’d almost two years before, leaving ai’Jihaar’s old servant in charge of the hai’r. The two animals had since become very attached to the reigning king of their pen, the elderly ki’thar which had been there when they had first arrived. Just as, then, there had been much uproar when they had been introduced into the pen, there was mayhem now when they were taken out. Riding away, ai’Jihaar and Anghara could still hear the faint trumpeting of the old ki’thar even after the hai’r itself had vanished out of sight behind red Kadun d
unes.

  Anghara’s brief sojourn in Sa’alah had done nothing to prepare her for her first sight of a true desert city. Al’haria lay against a massive red mesa; the red stone of which the city had been wrought made it look as if it had not been built by mortal hands but grew there in the desert, living rock shaped by wind and sand into the semblance of dwellings and spires. It was a walled city, roofed in obsidian and glass, its low silhouette broken every so often by soaring towers which spiralled toward the wide sky. These were pierced by tiny windows, built to limit the entrance of the desert sun but facing in the direction of the prevailing night winds, so that the coolness of the night could be gathered into the rooms beyond. It was breathtaking, even more so for one who had spent months in a simple tent in the desert…

  Not all of us choose to be solitary nomads, said ai’Jihaar rather whimsically into her mind. Remember, here we are an’sen’en’thari, chosen of the Gods.

  And ai’Jihaar had made sure they dressed for it. Beneath the black djellaba that was her travelling cloak, Anghara wore a robe of gold jin’aaz silk belted with one of ai’Jihaar’s own silver belts. Except for her bright hair, braided and coiled like a crown, al’Jezraal’s necklace was her only jewellery beneath the blue burnoose. Clad in a similar gold robe but with silver bracelets on her wrists, three amber and silver say’yin’en, and an elaborately worked amber bead belt underneath a white djellaba, ai’Jihaar was more impressive. Anghara cast a swift appraising glance over the two of them, and smiled.

  There were only five gold-robed an’sen’en’thari in the whole of Kheldrin, and only one of those had a fram’man for a pupil—they were recognized immediately. A deputation was there to meet them, bowing, almost before their ki’thar’en had passed through the city’s gate. People they passed in the street stopped to offer them obeisance as they were led at a stately, regal pace to one of the towers; at their destination, the soft voices of their guides urged the ki’thar’en to kneel. Anghara slipped off hers with what was now a practiced grace and stood waiting, staring at the huge red doors before her. She had been an’sen’thar, confirmed by al’Jezraal’s own hand, for almost two years, but claiming that title had been all too easy in the solitude of ai’Jihaar’s hai’r. Now, for the first time, she would meet others of ai’Jihaar’s ilk…and her own, she reminded herself forcefully. All the same, there was less of a Kheldrin God-spoken priestess in the high pride with which she held herself than a resurgence of the Kir Hama blood, quiescent for so long. She had been a gifted young student in the desert; here, within the walls of a city, she was a queen again.