The Hidden Icon (25 page)

The royal family didn’t keep a fortress or castle, though their home, which spiraled incomprehensibly forward out of the stone, balconies like wings unfolding, dominated the grand lane that wound through the center of Jhosch. A great deal of light was let in here, which though beautiful, served only to deepen the shadows that weren’t touched by it. Once within, the walls were damp with secrets, like the deep places of the world. I touched them more than once, surprised that they felt dry as bone.

I was tucked away into a room to rest, too exhausted and overwhelmed to admire it. I lay on top of the rich blanket, shivering, so I might stay awake and think better on my situation. There was a fire, but my chill had as much to do with the temperature as other things. I was sure that I should have been prepared for this, whatever it was. If Gannet hadn’t seen fit to do so per his sense of duty, surely he might have done better by me as a friend?

He had shown me only one kindness since Paivi’s appearance, the slight brushing of his hand against my sleeve, a gesture that was not lost on the former and illuminated him greatly for me. Paivi was the icon of Erutal, who was mild enough in the stories that I could recall, or, at least mild when compared to Theba. His province was for music, dance, and song, and there were many tales of his being seduced by the charms of mortal women. When they were pleased with him he, too, was pleased. When they were not he was as careless with human life as any of the pantheon. That he was the icon of a fool god didn’t make him any less a threat to me.

I didn’t allow myself to grow too heated in thinking of him or of Gannet, fearful now of just how much I betrayed myself in the slightest rise or fall of my temper. Whatever his icon, Paivi was like the looking glass in one of my eldest sister’s favorite stories, a mirror that saw right through you when you thought to see through to yourself. If you had a pure heart you would see yourself as you were, but if you were wicked, each sinful thought and hateful deed would plump like a wart upon your cheek. While the depth of Paivi’s powers were unknown to me, I wasn’t willing to take any sort of chance.

Despite my efforts to the contrary, I did sleep, and as I slept, I dreamed. I was Theba, or perhaps Theba was me, leaning out of the window of my childhood room. It had the width and breadth I remembered and my body was a girl’s, hands gripping the stone sill and hair caught in a dance of wind. We laughed, Theba and me, and I could see her hanging in the air before me like a reflection just out of reach. We had the same eyes and crown of hair, but her mouth was cruel, teeth tearing a monstrous path in her lips. Our lips. I shrieked and the window closed around my growing form, woman again with the weight of me trusted too much on the sill. As I toppled forward Theba snaked her hands into my hair, and for a moment I felt the pain of being suspended by it.

She lowered me slowly onto the path below, a terrace walkway our guard had used and we, too, for pleasure. Theba passed into me again and we were the same. She propelled us forward.

The terrace was different, broad leaves like those of the plants I remembered in Cascar brushing against my calves, spilling and flowering out of contained spaces that bordered the path. It was a rooftop garden, but not one I recognized. I could see a figure ahead, cloaked. But it wasn’t a cloak, only a shadow cast by a tree, curved unnatural to hang over a stone bench.

The figure stood and we sat, the bench warm from where he had recently reclined.

“Shran,” we whispered, our breath hot as his body’s heat, tumbled like a wave over us, over everything.

And then he tumbled over us, too, and I felt a touch I’d never known but had heard enough from sisters and servants gossiping to guess what it was. Theba rocked back on her thighs and I opened my arms to him, the little sound that escaped unraveling from us both.

His face in the moonlight was Gannet’s.

I woke gasping, startling the servant that had slipped in while I was sleeping to rekindle the fire. I waved her away, knowing that even as she left she would return, and not alone. My hands covered my face as though what I’d dreamed was written upon it.

There was water in a shallow basin, resin-cracked, water so cold I wondered it had not yet turned to ice. I brushed a damp cloth over my eyes and hair. The color in my cheeks might be mistaken for illness, and why shouldn’t it? What I felt, what I was, had no other explanation.

When Gannet appeared in my door way a few moments later, I wasn’t sure which I felt in greater intensity: regret or relief. He closed the door right in the face of the servant at his heels, but I caught her brief, indignant look.

“You could’ve thanked her,” I said, not looking at him, preoccupied with containing the dream as a thief might bury treasure, or a guilty man a body.

“So could you,” he returned. Though he’d entered the room with purpose, the air about him now fairly vibrated with hesitation, and he hung back. Perhaps I hadn’t given myself away then, and breathing a little, though not too much, I stepped back from the water basin, between Gannet and the bed. This stirred the dream again, and I stamped upon it, hard.

“She said you woke screaming,” Gannet continued, stoking the fire himself with hardly a glance in the absence of the serving girl. “That you fell out of bed.”

I couldn’t lie to him, not completely. He could know that I dreamed without knowing the details of it.

“It was a nightmare. I was Theba,” I began to explain, but the eyes that cut at me, sharpened by the lines of the mask, said what I didn’t want to.
You are always Theba
.

“She had control, at first, but then what we wanted… was the same thing.”

It was difficult to say as much and refuse the colors of the dream, my mind like a sketch, only, of what I remembered so clearly. That what I had dreamt was a story didn’t calm me, but perverted what was dear to me. Shran and Jemae both had been used by Theba, and I wanted to believe that I was being used, too. How could that be true when she was me?

Flames licked softly at first at the logs in the hearth, and Gannet sat down in a chair before the fire. His posture welcomed me to join him and I did, caution like a brand on my face.

“Tonight they’ll test you. There’s no more time for uncertainty.”

He didn’t like what he had to say, but he knew that it needed to be said, and he wanted done with it. I closed up more tightly, not wanting this insight into his words, whether he meant for me to have it or not.

“Will Paivi conduct the test?” I asked, combing my fingers through the damp hair around my face. Paivi had said that Gannet did not like him, though Gannet’s expression grew no more or less dour in speaking of the man.

“It’s one of his duties,” he answered, “among others. Are you afraid of him?”

The question caught me off guard. “I trust him less than I did you, when we first met. That’s not insignificant.”

He smiled, and I felt something like threads pulled in my limbs and lungs at the turning up of the corners of his mouth.

“He doesn’t trust you, either. But he’s pleased to have you. More than pleased.”

“How did they know it was me? Did you send word ahead?”

“No,” he answered, tone wary. “But I’m not surprised. Someone must’ve sensed you, or dreamed you.”

Or tried to kill me.

Before he could elaborate, a knock sounded on the door. Either the servant was far more polite than I would have given her credit for after being shut out, or someone else waited outside. As though he were responsible for who should be admitted to see me, and perhaps he was, Gannet rose and returned to the door, opening it wide enough for him to see but not me from where I remained seated. He whispered, and his words were lost. Not wanting to seem a petulant child at his elbow, I stayed where I was, impatient.

When he closed the door again, he looked at me, something shifting deep in his eyes.

“What is it?” I asked, though the answer I wanted had little to do with what had passed just now at the door.

“They’re bringing you clothes and something to eat,” he said simply. “I’ll have to go.”

“Why? What’s wrong with this?” I lifted my arms, the traveling dress I wore wrinkled by my brief sleep but fine enough for anything, I felt. I realized at his expression – weariness and something else, too – that my first question was taken in regards to his leaving, and not my wardrobe. I blushed, crossing my arms over my stomach and taking an elbow in each hand.

“Eiren,” he said, and surprised me by crossing the carpet, footsteps muted against the rich weave, he placed a hand each over my hands. “I’ll be called away soon, to other duties. You will have to become used to them.”

He meant more than the attentions of the servants, of Paivi. He meant everyone, a life that would be different not only from the one I had known in Aleyn but the one that had, I realized, been a comfort to me on the road.

“What did you do before, that you return to now?” I whispered, thinking of the things he had yet to teach me, the stories I hadn’t told him yet. I thought of other things, like the color of his hair in sunlight and firelight, the way his mask might feel if I pressed my thumbs around its base and under – not as an enemy might, to crush his eyes, but to see them better.

He stood there, holding my hands over my elbows awkwardly, but neither of us moved to break the contact.

“We’re responsible for many things,” he explained, though I could tell he struggled, with what he said or something else I wasn’t sure. He had masterful control when he wanted to, when I was willing to show restraint. “We advise, we train others, we work to preserve our histories. The operas wouldn’t exist without the work of icons, though we aren’t suffered to participate.”

Confused by this, I looked up, catching his eyes where I had avoided them the moment before.

“Suffered?”

Gannet’s expression clouded. “Don’t you think we have part enough already?”

I knew better than to translate his statement as some admittance that we were but players. Gannet believed wholeheartedly that he was whoever it was he had been confined to as a boy, that each of the icons was bound to do what they had been given mortal body to do. I didn’t understand it, but I knew his life depended upon his belief. How else could one resign themselves to a life of service and sacrifice, disguise their face their whole lives and their own wants besides?

What Gannet meant was that any story worth telling would be about us, anyway.

I sighed and dropped my arms, feeling the warmth of his fingers against my elbows. He hadn’t stepped back, and neither had I. The space between us seemed less, somehow, without arms crossed against it. I was looking at him still and thinking hard on what it really meant for him to go away, how it made me heavy and aching as a sun-baked stone to imagine this place without him. Hadn’t we come this far together? Two days out of our capitol and I would have made twice the journey alone to be spared his company, everyone’s company. But his, especially.

Now he lifted his hands only slightly and I stepped into them, my arms circled like a ring about his back. I felt his hands, then, not linked as my hands were but pressed one each on my waist and mid-back. My face was turned away from his, but never had the space between his neck and shoulder seemed more intimate than it did then, my hot breath cupped in a hollow I thought I could occupy forever. With only cloth between our skin, Gannet couldn’t guard himself, or perhaps he wasn’t trying to. His heart was like a drum, each pump of blood as sure of the danger of what he did in holding me as it was in surrendering to wanting to.

It was as natural as breath, our bodies relaxed against each other. For the first time in months, I didn’t feel as though I were holding mine.

An excruciating space seemed to build between us when he stepped away from me, eyes hooded, holding me at arms length a moment before releasing me altogether. He opened his mouth to speak, but the voice that emerged then didn’t come from him, but from his sister in the doorway.

“
Han’dra
Eiren. I told Avery I would help you dress,” she said carefully. The servant Gannet had disappointed earlier appeared from behind Morainn, arms laden with several wooly bundles. I didn’t know how long Morainn had been there, and her manner betrayed little. She was looking at a space above us both, avoiding our faces, but there was an uncertain smile on her lips, tainted a little by the same fear her brother had shown when holding me. I could’ve fallen to the floor for want that he hold me again, and I made no mystery of my feelings. Gannet, however, had crossed the room to his sister, nodding at her before exiting without a word. My mouth opened and closed in protest or outrage or crippling desperation, but no words emerged.

The snap of heavy fabric shaken out behind me was an unwelcome distraction, but I turned despite myself. Avery was laying out a rich garment, plum colored and embroidered in great detail at the sleeves and hem. From the second bundle she produced what appeared to me at first to be a second gown, but when she unfolded it I realized the two were meant to be worn together, one over the other. The second was dark, too, blue-black and belted, sleeveless but with an ample cowl and hood. It was far finer, and would be far warmer, than the traveling dress I had insisted to Gannet would do for anything.

“I can manage, Avery.” Morainn interrupted the servant’s fussing, and I could tell by the expression on Avery’s face that she didn’t consider waiting on me to be among Morainn’s duties. She did not, however, attempt to dissuade her mistress, merely excused herself with a curt nod and closed the door behind her.