The Hidden Icon (10 page)

“There were traps and snares, too, that he could not have anticipated, set cleverly in the stones of the floor and into the walls. With keen eyes and quick feet, Charrum avoided them all. Because he knew where he would keep so great a treasure if it were his, Charrum stole quietly into Felea’s father’s chamber, grateful for the man’s bear-loud snore while he searched. The bandit king had not even told Charrum what to expect, only that he would know the treasure when he saw it. He picked the locks on several chests before finding the one that he wanted, empty but for a plain, ornate key. Taking it without thinking, for he did indeed know without knowing, Charrum left Felea’s father’s room.”

“Charrum decided to risk looking in upon Felea as she slept,”Gannet interrupted, not looking at me as he made for a more commanding telling. I closed my mouth against the tale that he now picked up, heart tangled up with my breath now, too.

“The lock on Felea’s door was no barrier to him, though he was challenged by her curtained bed. He could make out only a little the figure that slumbered within, but he knew it was his love. With hands more deft even than those that could make a man sleep without killing him, that could bind a woman to him with only a promise, he parted the curtain.”

I found that I was as still as the stones that Charrum had slept among, for in Gannet’s telling I heard things that I had never told. He seemed at once to feel envy and disdain for Charrum, for Gannet was not like a man from a tale whose purpose was clear.

“Where there had been no moonlight, now moonlight fell upon her cheek, her gold-lashed eyes, lips parted in dreaming. Charrum made to brush his fingers across her cheek, but in that moment shouts were heard, and Charrum knew he had been found out. In the same instant Felea woke and began to shriek, her cries fading to puzzlement when she recognized Charrum. There was no time to explain or to touch, for in an instant there were guards upon him, and Felea’s father himself to confront.”

Gannet caught my eyes again, but his was not the look of a teller who wishes to pass a tale, but something else. Was it regret? He knew the ending to this story, and I understood his hesitation. Morainn waited, more ignorant of what passed between us than I was. I looked away, but listened hard.

“Despite the guards that restrained him, Charrum thrust the key forward. ‘I have stolen this, and you shall not have it back again unless you promise me your daughter.’ Before the guards could act, he put the key in his mouth and swallowed it. At this, Felea’s father fell to his knees, but it was gratitude that he expressed, not anger or shock.

‘You have taken a great burden from me, and for this I will allow you to choose. I think you will find you no longer want my daughter, if indeed you ever did.’

“For when Charrum had swallowed the key, he had relieved Felea’s father of wanting for anything, because the key itself was a thing of want. It drove men and women to desire what they could not have, what could not be, what had never been and would never be. Felea’s father had acquired great riches while driven by the key, but he had never been satisfied. It was he who had lain the task before Charrum, had pretended to be the bandit king. The key was a powerful object and could not be given away, only taken. And now Charrum had taken it.

“As the young thief looked upon his would-be bride, he was consumed with desire, though not for her. He would have to be a man as wealthy as her father, wealthier, before he could deserve such a woman.”

Morainn’s little gasp was just what a story teller wants at such a moment, and when Gannet allowed an appreciative silence to stretch to an invitation, I laid my hands together in my lap and finished the story.

“In Felea’s room that night Charrum might have joined her in her bed, but now he could only say goodbye. The key had seen into his heart, and showed him for what he was,” I concluded, looking at Gannet. His eyes were on the floor.

“A selfish man,” Morainn said, her judgment plain. She was hurt by the story’s end. I had been, too, years ago. Now I shrugged, neither in Charrum’s defense nor against him.

“A man, only. Did Felea deserve him?”

“What is deserved doesn’t seem the object of this tale,” Gannet spoke coolly, but there was no time for a rebuttal. Bells sounded, faint and distant as a thunderclap. I thought maybe I imagined them. My gaze narrowed in question on Gannet.

“The bells of Cascar,” he announced, straightening from where he had relaxed slightly against a supporting beam. “We will be there in the morning.”

Morainn seemed more stirred by his pronouncement than I was, though I thrilled at this news.

“We won’t linger. A day at most,” she said. The woman who had reveled in a tale was a leader again. She surprised me with a light hand on mine, her look unreadable but calm and contentedness there for me to see with other senses.

Gannet lingered a moment after his sister, and when I thought to ask him to go so I might rest, he spoke.

“There was more to your choice of that story than your confidence that I would know it,” he insisted, causing my mouth to drop open slightly at this sentiment, undoing all of his earlier assurances that I was not as easy for him to see as the naked sky.

“If you’re so sure,” I dodged, not certain that even I could articulate my reasons. Charrum was not a sympathetic character, but there was a comfort in his flaws that I was beginning to realize our lives would not allow for.

Something darkened Gannet’s expression, and it could have as easily been a true shadow as one sprung from a sour thought.

“When we are done with traveling, I will tell you of Karatan,” he said quietly, his words stiff. “He sought treasures of the spirit, not of the material or the flesh, and found them better.”

I shifted uncomfortably, not in the least displeased with the tale I had chosen, but feeling a faint sting at Gannet’s words. I couldn’t help but rebuke him.

“One must be undone by want to understand it, spiritual or otherwise.” All of the strange heat I had felt while he told Charrum’s tale was gone, forgotten in my irritation.

Instead of giving me the argument I wanted, Gannet said nothing, parting the curtain and leaving me. I’d never felt more alone. I deflated into myself, head and shoulders rolling forward in defeat. How was it that I had lost, or felt that I had, when he refused to engage me? There was a desire in me to make some impact on him, on everyone.

In Cascar, I would have my opportunity.

Chapter 9

Not more than a wheel of the great barge rolled into Cascar before I could feel that these people weren’t anything like me, or anything like Morainn’s people, either. In the streets men and women mixed paints that changed color with the heat and temperament of the person upon whom they were applied, children bore torches as spindly as their forearms that gave off a green and gold light courtesy of the oils they burned, and strange fruits and spiced meats piled carts on every corner. I was hungry for things I had never known existed.

They extended nothing more than the resigned welcome of the conquered when Morainn’s force entered their city, and it was Antares who negotiated our passage on two vessels. As it had happened in my home, so would a contingent of the guard remain here, as well. But I knew they weren’t needed. I did not sense the murderous drive for revenge among them, nothing like the high heat of the recently subdued, like my brother. Even if they had known, there was no spirit of rebellion here.

I could not see the open water, not yet, for all I could hear it, a great humming, churning thing that nearly caused me to lose my feet for trembling. We walked to the harbor now, Gannet and a veiled Morainn and her handmaids, a number of soldiers enough to guard me and the others, too. In the faces of the Cascari I saw now a wary curiosity. Even in the children I saw it, an uncanny criticism that was not cold, but steady. They had the feeling there was need of it.

A high wall surrounded the harbor, and here was for me the first of many miracles. Visitors who traveled by sea were welcomed by a lush garden, flowering trees and plants of such broad, waxy leaves I felt sure they must be something mocked from cloth. As we walked I brushed against them, and they felt as solid as if I had met with a body in passing. I shied from touching them directly, however, as though their spell might be broken.

Look up, Han’dra Eiren
.

I stiffened at the increasingly familiar and yet still so unnatural feeling of being not quite alone in my own mind. Gannet’s presence, however slight, was like a shadow cast, but a shadow with such depth and dimension that it seemed a hole I might fall into.

But I did as he asked, and was rewarded for it.

I did not at first realize what it was that I was looking at. Here was an expanse that seemed at first glance to be like the sands at deep dusk, still and tinged with blue, but this color was so deep. As I looked it seemed to shift in depth and in shade. Such a vastness of water I had never before seen, not even when I had visited one of the great well caches beneath our capitol. It was as boundless as the sky, and I approached gravely, as though before me were some altar at which I was meant to pray.

I let out a breath. I hadn’t even realized I was holding it.

Some authority must have emptied the harbor, for when I tore my eyes away from the sea I didn’t note anyone at work or commerce but a few folks near two stout vessels where a man waited for us. His face split in a suspicious smile.

“We expected you two days ago.” His measured gaze passed between us, narrowing further. “And I see the rumors are true. Is the princess your prisoner or should I treat her as a guest?”

It did not surprise me that news of my curious departure from our capitol had reached this place, but I wasn’t sure how to manage this man’s candor. There was a pause so potent it almost stilled the splash of the waves against the dock, and Morainn was quick to fill the space given for someone to speak.

“We won’t be needing chains, if that’s what you’re asking.”

I couldn’t see her face behind the veil, but I felt her agitation.

“Of course,
dresha
,” the man insinuated, but there was nothing deferential about his address. Perhaps these people were not as resigned as I had thought.

As he turned to ready what I now took to be the vessels that would carry us, I edged toward Gannet, hesitant.

“It’s not what I expected,” I said. Gannet followed my gaze and we stood together, both looking out as though this edge of the world was beyond our scope of understanding. What Gannet’s life had been like, where he had traveled, and the idea that anything was as much a mystery to him as he was to me was an amusing one.

“It wasn’t enough for my father,” he said quietly, eyes behind the mask darting from the view to my face. The others had drifted away, leaving the pair of us relatively alone on the pier. “Nor will Aleyn be. Though I can’t fault his nature, not when it brought us to you.”

The way he said it sounded almost as though he meant to say brought
me
to you, which surprised and alarmed me in the same instant.

“I find it hard to believe that anyone could be so ready to welcome Theba into their home.”

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘welcome,’ exactly,” Gannet mused. If he had been any other man, I would not have been surprised by the slight tugging of his lips into a smile. But with Gannet, I was sure I imagined it. “For your protection, it is best if you’re known only as
Han’dra
Eiren until we reach Jhosch.”

He named their capitol and deflated my spirit in one breath. I looked down and could see the water churning underneath the warped planks.

“Should I worry?” I was sure that if I could see them, Gannet would have quirked a brow.

“You should exercise caution. If you must make yourself anxious to do so, then by all means, worry.”

The response I felt his was owed died in my throat when Antares came striding down the dock, behind him the last of the soldiers who would be accompanying us and several Cascari servants. I couldn’t brood over Gannet’s words for they began to load our provisions onto the ship, and the soldiers urged us to follow. Nor could I keep my eyes on their spears when the blue unfolding before me demanded two, and both of them wide open. In the waters that lapped at the boat’s sides there was a delicacy and a play of light and foam that belied the great expanse beyond the capability of my eye to focus. I thought of the stories of sirens who lived in the deep, whose eyes bounded upon the waves to the shore and bewitched those foolish enough to gaze too longingly out to sea.

“I should go with
Han’dra
Eiren.”

“I won’t have an icon on my vessel.”

“You won’t have a choice.”

Gannet was arguing with the man who had greeted us, his passage to the deck where I now stood with Morainn and Triss blocked by the man’s bulk. The heat wavered over his dark clothing, but Gannet would not be dissuaded. Neither, it seemed, would the man be. If I’d felt Gannet’s will even moderately oppressive, it was nothing compared to the battle that was brewing before me.

“I will go with
Han’dra
Eiren, if you are concerned for her safety.” Antares strode forward, dodging expertly between the two without seeming to slight either of them. An impressive feat, for an armored man. I could see in Gannet’s face that this would not satisfy him, but now it was Morainn who interceded.