The Hidden Icon (18 page)

“Eiren.”

My sob gave me away, croaked into shadow and rock. Kurdan’s smell of smoke and charred flesh flooded my nose and mouth, and I gagged, wretching against the wall I had turned to for comfort. When I turned away, lips slicked with tears and the contents of my belly, Gannet put his arms around me. I didn’t struggle, relaxing against him as though I had lost control of my body with such horrible control of my mind so recently realized.

Any of my sister’s lovers might have whispered senseless things or stroked their olive cheeks, but I was filthy and had killed a man, and Gannet was neither lover nor a man inclined to whisper. Still, theirs were the only experiences I had to compare to the weight of his arms as he supported me a few steps back down the path the way we had come, the gentle pressure and the noted hesitance. If he treated me thus because I was a murderer, I wouldn’t blame him. I wanted to say his name as he had said mine, as though it would steady him as it had failed to steady me. Theba was a tempest. What manner of icon could he be, still as he was?

I allowed him to lower me to the ground, and I knew that he stood a moment before me in the dark for all I couldn’t see him. Behind my pinched eyes Kurdan’s blade arced through the air over and over again, his limbs danced forever in fire.

Sleep, Eiren.

His voice grew in my mind like a drop of oil in water. I could slip inside and ignore the rest, which was just what I did.

Chapter 15

In my dream, my mother knelt beside my bed, dipping a cloth in herb scented water and pressing it to my brow and neck. I could smell the braziers burning, the familiar, acrid scent of the oil she used when someone took sick. My light bedding stuck to me like a second skin, and I was sweating as though I were trying to shed them both.

“What were you dreaming about, Ren?” she asked, hands clasped patiently above the bowl as though in blessing.

My brow furrowed. I had been dreaming, hadn’t I? I couldn’t remember.

“I’m awake now,” I insisted, refusing her question in the same moment that I reached for her hand. I wanted to take it and be sure that it was real, to trace the calluses and lines of her fingers and her palm.

She moved just out of reach, and I whimpered. I felt so weak; I couldn’t touch her without great strain.

“What were you dreaming about, Ren?”

Her tone was the same and she fell upon each word like striking an instrument.

“I can’t remember,” I choked, hardly managing the words as my teeth began to chatter. I was cold, the sweat on my skin turned to a glimmer of ice. “May I have a fire in my room?”

Mother rose from my side, the damp cloth dropped from her hands like a hot stone, landing with a slop against the floor. Her face was hard and unfamiliar, and the eyes were empty, like blue stones in a human skull.

“Why don’t you dream one?”

As she spoke her mouth seemed to glow until I realized her lips were red as a coal, her tongue a licking fire that spread from her mouth to her cheekbones and eyes, shriveling them in their sockets and racing over her dark hair. I screamed as she raised her arms, a woman turned inferno, and where she stretched her fingers the ceiling caught fire and the flame rolled like a wave the whole room across. My bed burned but I didn’t, and when there was no more air to breathe I found enough to keep screaming.

Eiren.

Eiren.

“Wake up, Eiren.”

That Gannet managed to hold me down against the ground was no mean feat, for I writhed and clawed in protest, trapped in the dream before my eyes could open fully, could register him there in the glow of a low campfire. This flame was a tame one, and he wasn’t my mother, nor the creature in the dream that had seemed to be her.

Before I said anything I looked around, my gaze charged, but I didn’t see Kurdan’s body anywhere. I noticed, then, that while my face and hands were clean, Gannet’s bore traces of stone dust and earth, no doubt gathered during a hasty burial. I blanched, but I couldn’t be sick again. There was nothing in my stomach but air and swallowed screams.

Without speaking, Gannet observed me, my motives and thoughts as clear to him now as they must have been then. He offered me a skin of water with a gesture that demanded I drink. I obliged, watching as he returned to the fire and rolled in the embers what looked to be potatoes wrapped in damp cloth to keep from burning. The tool he used I recognized as Kurdan’s, and I was surprised first that it had survived, disgusted second that this was my first thought in reflecting upon the dead man’s possessions.

I shuffled over to the fire, muscles corded still from the stress of my dream and what had preceded it, saying nothing and hoping that Gannet could, for a little while, say nothing, too. I didn’t want to talk about what I had done nor that I had done it, not what had driven the man whose life I had taken. Despite these affirmations, when I accepted my meager dinner from Gannet my mind was racing already from memory to limited memory that I had of Kurdan, if I had noticed him even once before Antares had named him as our guard for the journey through the Rogue’s Ear. The hot mush in my mouth stilled my tongue, but I had no explanation to voice. I didn’t remember him before the Rogue’s Ear, he had been as peripheral to me as the howling man outside of Re’Kether. I knew them best because I had known them least, and they were both dead because of it.

“I don’t know why he wanted to kill you, either,” Gannet said after we had finished our potatoes, my brooding having given over entirely to hazardous musings. His words surprised me, for we had encountered nothing so far that Gannet had not been able to explain; better still, that he had not had some part and purpose in.

“I’m very dangerous. I’m responsible for the death of one of his friends,” I offered, unsure, as afraid of being without answers as I was of failing to hesitate again. “He must’ve known who I was, or guessed.”

“The man in Re’Kether killed himself.”

Gannet seemed certain of this if nothing else, cleaning his hands on his tunic, a futile effort after so many days underground. He clasped them under his chin, fingers hooked together like a series of keys to be played. I noted his shoulders rounded forward without the cloak to cover them, the cloak that likely served now as Kurdan’s burial shroud.

“Do you think they were working together?”

My question seemed paranoid, but it shouldn’t have. I trembled as I spoke, as though some presence in the Rogue’s Ear would judge me for what I had done.

“I don’t know,” Gannet said softly, burdening me a second time with his ignorance. I needed him to know. My way from home was laid down by him, and I couldn’t abide a faltering of course.

“The war’s end was only the beginning, like he said.” I remembered the man who had died outside of Re’Kether, what he’d said, the grim portent that made more sense to me every time I dared to act on my power. I waved my arms, needing little more to illustrate my meaning when Gannet could see every insinuation of my mind, bared in fear as it was.

Gannet shook his head, staring through the fire, but not to the cavern wall that lie beyond it.

“It was always going to be this way. Theba will be realized in you, and only through blood.”

“Whose blood? All those who died while I was raised a weapon in ignorance, all of the deaths that were indirectly mine? Kurdan’s?” I breathed heavily, meeting his eyes in the dark with a demand greater than any words could convey. “Who’s next, Gannet?”

And why can’t it be me?

I railed against the crushing desire to break down into tears again, the guilt hot as lead in my veins that I did not, would not, cry for a man that had wanted me dead. Until that moment I had done him no personal ill, and something in me was sure that what had happened with the man at Re’Kether had nothing whatever to do with Kurdan’s motives here.

“I don’t know that, either,” Gannet said. I was as sure as I was of the heat from the fire that he knew my thoughts, my will cast inevitable as a shadow across the cavern floor. “All will become clear when we arrive in Jhosch – ”

“Don’t make me promises you can’t keep,” I hissed. I could see his thoughts, too, the certainty of our parting when we arrived in the Ambarian capitol, the darkness that followed. Did he know to what destiny I went to there? And why I had to pursue it without him?

Gannet’s lips closed over whatever he had been about to say, and we returned a moment to silence, to the murmur of the fire. I was inconsolable, alone. Despite my anger, I wanted him to put his arms around me again, but this I didn’t let him know.

“Before Kurdan attacked you, what you saw and did after,” Gannet began, and though I was sure my desire was shielded, we had arrived at the same place. I should have forgotten in the glut of my foul feeling over Kurdan what Gannet and I had shared, but I returned to it now in desperation. I nodded dumbly, waiting for him to continue, wanting him to. “Your power didn’t surprise me, but it’s… not common for such clarity following so much force. That memory is an old one, and one I would not have readily shared.”

“I didn’t seek it,” I said hastily, though Gannet knew as well as I did that I had not sought anything. Had I coaxed that particular memory to the surface, or was it near enough then, or all of the time, for someone like me to see?

Though there wasn’t anyone quite like me.

“I won’t tell anyone,” I offered lamely, as though this were some consolation. I wondered if he brought this up because he expected that it would make me feel better. But I only felt worse.

Gannet hesitated. When I cut my eyes to him, I saw that he was gazing into the fire, his lips brooding so that I didn’t need to see his eyes to know it. His hands reached to either side of his head after a moment more, and he tugged at the straps there, far sturdier, more permanent, than the ones his mother had first fastened when he was a boy. I thought he might remove it and I swallowed my breath, but he didn’t. He never did.

“Do you know why you wear it?”

My question was spoken so soft it was almost as though I had not asked it, that it had come whispering instead from the dark of the Rogue’s Ear, one more secret for this place to keep.

Gannet’s fingers stilled upon the bindings, but did not drop, poised as though he might work them loose at any moment. My heart was pounding and I wanted to put my hands over his, create laces with our fingers that would rival any that had been created for him to wear. The thought overfilled me, and I promised myself that it was his secret I wanted. His secret only, if I could just touch his hand, his head.

“It’s a punishment.”

He spoke, too, in hushed tones, though we were more alone than we had been since we had first met. As alone as we could be, each of us someone else on the inside.

“No single lifetime contains suffering and time enough to repent for the crime, though I’ll be the last to wear it, now that you’re here.” He looked at me then, hands falling to his sides, draining the air from me at the bare depths in his eyes. Conflict and curiosity and want, pools of it I could have dropped bodily into below the curved, molten brow.

“Gannet…” I began, and no will could have contested mine as I reached for him, laying a hand on his arm, fingers touching lightly where I had made contact with him before, given him my memories in apology for taking his. He flinched, but did not withdraw his arm. I allowed my thumb to brush lightly against his skin, smooth, wiped free of the grit of his work while I had been asleep. When he spoke his voice was as raw as his eyes.

“I begin to understand how my punishment will be gravest of all.”

He did pull free of me then, and my hand hung in the air like a bird shot through with an arrow, a second frozen in flight before it plummeted down, dead. I clasped my hands together in my lap, heart grown sluggish. I couldn’t put a name to what it was I wanted, but it wasn’t this. I felt lamed, like Tara, the maid who was blinded and must find her way without this most fundamental sense. She didn’t even know where she was going, but because it was in her nature, and the nature of all women, she goes.

I felt Gannet gather himself together again beside me, the familiar severity, the certainty, what was steady and sure about his guise instead of whatever burdens he felt in it.

“It’s late,” Gannet said, though I was thinking of everything but the hour and he was, too. “You should sleep more.”

I obliged, but only because I couldn’t bear to sit beside him any longer before the fire as though it were natural, as though we could share anything without secrets and shames between us. If I’d found anything in him during our days within the Rogue’s Ear, it was overshadowed all by what I’d had to do to see the other side.

When we began walking the next morning, our way soon felt easy and light. But my heart was the heaviest it had been. Though Gannet had buried Kurdan well out of the way of any course we might take, the Rogue’s Ear wouldn’t let us go without passing the mounded earth, covered over with crumbled stones. No matter what he had intended for me, I was sure Kurdan had never meant to come to such an end, buried in obscurity, far from any lover or mother who might’ve visited his grave. I didn’t know the funereal practices of his people, didn’t know what would be appropriate to say, if anything, being the one who had put him there. In death, it didn’t matter that he’d meant to kill me, only that I’d killed him.