The Hidden Icon (26 page)

Alone with Morainn, I felt immediately that some explanation, some apology, must be made, but she held up her hand, crossing to the last bundle and unrolling a pair of tall, soft boots.

“The less that I know the better,” she insisted, and though I was confused by her words, I didn’t continue. If there were some rule I had broken, I figured it was better not to know if I ever wanted to break it again.

Because I really wanted to.

“They’ve embroidered this dress in haste,” Morainn observed, gathering a fold of cowl and allowing it to fall again. She smiled. “I hope it fits. I think they expected you to be taller.”

I blushed at this, my heart reeling still but my head settling easier to this task than it might have another. Lista had dressed me for many occasions when I had let her, when we had lived in the capitol still and had cause for fancy dressing.

“They made clothes for me?” I asked, approaching Morainn and the gown shyly, as though it represented someone I had yet to be acquainted with. Morainn nodded.

“The seamstresses did what they could, in the little time they were given. I wish I knew how they knew. Father was furious that I didn’t notify him immediately, though it was safer that I didn’t. But the icons… have means we don’t. He resents it.”

“Gannet doesn’t know how my identity was known, either,” I said quietly, fingering the fabric. I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t as safe as she imagined me, hadn’t been, but that would mean telling her the truth of what had happened in the Rogue’s Ear.

And I wasn’t sure I ever could.

“Gannet doesn’t know everything, though I suspect he’d like us to think he did,” she mused, again with the little smile. I let out a little breath of relief, grateful for some levity when my mind and body both seemed so tangled up. I lifted the heavy hem of the gown, and thought I’d get quite literally tangled in such a garment.

“I hope my test won’t require running,” I observed. “I’ll trip.”

Her eyes flickered at my comment.

“I don’t know anything about it. We aren’t permitted to know such things.”

“Don’t you govern the icons? You must know some of their business.”

Morainn, however, shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that. The icons are keepers of our history, and many secrets besides. The wars my father has begun… he’s had encouragement.”

This surprised me, but it shouldn’t have.

“It’s not over,” I whispered, thinking of what the howling man had said. If the icons had a hand in Ambar’s conquests, what would they plan now that they me?

Morainn misinterpreted my shuddering as a signal that I was cold, and helped me to shuffle into the unfamiliar gown. Though cumbersome and weighty as one tried to get into it, it moved comfortably on the body. The cowl, especially, I appreciated for the warmth it provided, and the embroidery on the inside, above my brow, attracted my attention. The characters reminded me of something from my book, if not lifted from it directly.

“What does it say?” I asked Morainn, pulling it back off of my head and holding the hood open for her to see. She turned her head, the angle an awkward one.

“It doesn’t say anything,” Morainn said, her voice a little like that used when one talks to a child who has limited means to communicate. “These aren’t words, they’re pictures. Symbols.”

My brow furrowed, and Morainn held open her hands in a moment’s frustration over how to illustrate what she meant before she crossed to the wash basin and dipped a finger in, tracing one of what I had assumed were characters on the stone.

“See, this is a house, and this, a carrion bird,” she explained, then dipped her finger again, drawing the two together in one of the designs on my cowl. The images were not as clear when joined, though now that I knew what they were separately, it seemed obvious. She grimaced.

“It’s not nice, what they’re saying. Houses are traditionally seen as wombs, and well, it’s like saying your belly is full of death.”

Whatever Morainn expected it was not that I should laugh, but I did, wildly and full, scooping the hood back over my head.

“How fitting,” I answered after a breath, thinking of the son Theba had torn from her own belly and planted in that of a mortal. I didn’t know if she could bear life, but it didn’t matter. What was important was that she chose not to. I laughed because they had branded the clothes I should wear with her spirit, as though I needed reminding. I had to laugh for fear of crying.

Morainn looked at me, eyes wavering in the fading light. The fire made us both seem haunted, and would more as night grew. With each moment I had the feeling that I knew just where to go, and I suspected it was because it was being shared with me, somewhere, by Paivi. He felt differently than Gannet did, enough that I had to dwell on the thought before I realized it wasn’t my own.

Morainn touched a hand to her lips as though to stifle a question, but it followed the gesture anyway.

“Will you tell me one thing,” she asked, each word weighted with her power, a life’s privilege of simply getting to know and have what you wanted when you wanted it. “You’re more like her every day, whether you want to be or not. Do you know, now, who he is?”

Pained by her pronouncement and the necessary distance it created between us, I shook my head. She pursed her lips.

“Then you should love him while you can.”

Chapter 20

Morainn had gone and the hour grew late. I’d been feeling more and more alone with every moment, beginning with the one that followed Gannet’s hasty departure.

Avery had left a tray for me beside the fire. I was reminded of other evenings I had spent in company, but this drink I would take alone. I set myself beside the cooling hearth, sipping carefully the bittersweet brew.

As I drank I hoped for someone to come for me. I wasn’t meant to follow Morainn or Gannet, but my path began there, in the door. I drained my cup. Hugging the folds of the hood against my cheeks and grateful for the warmth if not the message embroidered within, I exited the chamber and pulled the door closed behind me.

The palace was opulent, but the design was not a complicated one. Paivi didn’t wait for me here, but I could sense him, was allowed to sense him, far above where I now stood. There were stairs winding at either end of the corridor in which I stood, and I chose to go up. I was surprised to find no one as I passed, crossing several floors and many stairs, higher each time. There were furnishings rich and clustered together, the many generations of wealth and rule in this place witness to my trial. I sensed that this was part of it, the need that I should lead myself to judgment. I had grown exceptionally skillful at acting on instinct since I’d met my first Ambarian, even better, begrudgingly, at doing what I was told. Why should I expect any differently here? Even when I wasn’t told. Even when I was telling myself.

I knew I wouldn’t have the comfort of Gannet waiting with Paivi, or if I could look to Gannet for comfort of any kind again. Had he meant to reach out to me, or had I imagined the gesture as something other than what it had seemed, taken advantage? Perhaps he had only put his hands on me because to resist would have been to rouse my temper, Theba’s temper. In the dream only moments before he had arrived, though, Shran had been eager. But he’d clutched Theba unwittingly. Gannet knew. Could our ancient king have known, too? Would it have changed him or his fate if he had? How much longer would I have to be Eiren, then, and worthy of such tenderness?

I faced a silvered mirror at the base of yet another stair landing, cleverly lit from an angled shaft that gathered and filtered the moonlight from well above. I didn’t see a vengeful goddess in its depths but only a young woman, who looked more frightened even than she felt. There was nothing about this mirror to suggest the one I had seen in the prayer garden with Gannet, but it felt kindred to that object all the same.

I took a step forward, bolstered, but started when I didn’t approach myself any nearer in the mirror. My reflection stood perfectly still and after a moment moved entirely out of the mirror’s frame. A chill swept through me like the one that I had felt in Re’Kether. I looked quickly to the right and the left, sure that I couldn’t be alone for all I appeared to be. I continued forward carefully, sure that at any moment I would see myself again, dark eyes and brow trembling within the mirror’s confines. As I drew closer to the mirror, however, my surety faltered and escaped altogether, until I was flush with the mirror. I saw nothing there but the empty corridor, empty of me. A shadow darted across where my face would have been, and I looked about wildly. The shadow would have been on my face just like a mask, if my face had been where it was supposed to be.

The thought of Gannet, however fleeting or phantom his presence, was a little flame in my breast that threatened to devour my heart, lungs, and head entirely, and with hands as daring as those that had gone to him, my fingers grazed the mirror’s edge. They dipped like water, like liquid and light, into the rippling surface of the mirror absent an occupant. For a moment I panicked at the uncanny nature of what I did. Though I had endured many strange things, there’d been nothing as physically and immediately impossible as the mirror’s surface yielding to me as it did now. Where my fingers touched the reflection rippled, and when I withdrew them in alarm, the image of the corridor behind me didn’t seem quite to settle. This was my path, however, and I had to take it. I didn’t wait for someone to stop me. I braced my hands against the mirror’s frame and plunged within.

It was not the soft pad of the carpet I felt against my palms when they hit against whatever ground lay beyond the mirror, but the cold damp of interior stone. I glanced up as soon as I regained my bearings, struggling first to my knees and then to my feet. I was in a cavern illuminated by a ghostly light filtered from above, a distant cousin of the kind I had known in the Rogue’s Ear. There was no mirror behind me, nothing whatever to suggest that I had passed through anything but solid, unyielding stone. I pressed my hands against it as though to convince myself, but it was hard and real. Just like a story: the way in is never the way out.

A way out, however, wasn’t of immediate importance. If Paivi hadn’t compelled me here, something else had. I wasn’t meant to leave, and didn’t want to. Not yet, anyway.

I didn’t know if it was the gown or some other force that affected me, but I wasn’t cold, nor did my breath appear before my lips as I walked forward into the ample cavern. The shapes of the stone seemed common enough, but this was no natural place. Though lit, there were no visible openings for the light to pass through. The walls of the cavern were colored first like sand, then blood, before deepening to a bruise no stone could wear. As though wary that I would feel flesh instead, my touch was gentle, a guiding glance of fingertips across the rock.

There was a pool of water at the center of the cavern where it was deepest, though the slope wasn’t treacherous. I knelt at the water’s edge. Unlike the mirror, which had seemed solid, the little pool was as liquid as it appeared to be. No other feature in the cavern stood out to me but this, and as far as I could see, there was neither exit nor entrance to be had in this place. So I settled down, if not to wait, then to think. Because my thoughts turned often to him now, it was Gannet that came first and most eagerly to mind.

Could Morainn have read what I wasn’t sure was love, in him or in me? I’d never been in love, though I’d witnessed it many times in my sisters, and even in the boyish attentions my brother had once shown to a family scribe. There was little between Gannet and I that mirrored their enthusiasm, none of the careless tenderness, none of the little smiles and colorings that convinced me that my eldest sister had taken ill. As I dug my heels into the stone, my mouth filled with a taste as bitter as juice sucked from an unripe fruit. Wasn’t I just like? Theba wouldn’t abide flirtation, and Gannet was no ordinary, unburdened youth. It didn’t matter what Morainn perceived or even what was there to be seen. Nothing like love could exist between us, and certainly not in me.

The pool opened up in waves, like a stone had disturbed the surface, though there were none for my feet to disturb. I looked quickly up and around. Though the light had faded a little, creating shadows where before there had been none, nothing in the cavern seemed to have changed. I could have been nervous, I supposed, to be trapped here with no means of coming and going, but I remembered the way I had shifted the stones in the tunnel in the Rogue’s Ear, and I wasn’t afraid. Though he’d been with me then, had made me act when inaction might have crippled us both, and he wasn’t here now. I laced my arms together over my chest, feeling sore and sorry.

“It was your own heart you never knew.”

The voice I recognized instantly, the sound as much a shock as looking up and seeing her there across the pool, slight and elegant as she had been in the last moment I had seen her.

“Mother,” I started, but she raised her hand and I could see in the fractured light that it was not as whole as mine. Should I rush to embrace her, I would gather nothing but air to me. I panicked, thinking perhaps the Ambarians had broken their word to me. “Are you a spirit?”

My mother, whatever she was, shook her head in the dismissive way she had used when one of her children came to her with some mild complaint. It was a gesture familiar enough to seize my throat, keep me from speaking again too soon.