The Hidden Icon (6 page)

Jurnus gaped, a confusion of fury and intrigue stirred in him and spilled too easily into me. I could not move or think for myself, consumed by the strength of my brother’s feelings, of his spirit. Gannet put a hand on my elbow, but two fingers, even, and urged my return to the fireside. I resisted him. In the touch I felt none of what I had seen a moment ago, and Morainn’s words sang in my blood a mystery. Would she spill it as easily, shared as it was with that of my brother? I did not think so.

Perhaps Antares and the others sensed that my brother had been undone, or they themselves suffered senselessness at Morainn’s vigor, but they stood away from us, and Jurnus seized the moment to speak hurriedly to me while he could still. His whisper was thin as paper.

“This is not well at all, Eiren,” he managed, as shaken by Morainn’s fervor as I was. Gannet could hear him as easily as I, but neither man seemed eager to engage the other. “You are a hare among vipers. It is not well.”

I held his eyes. Flaws or faults, I had been given a chance to see my brother again, and likely never again.

“It is the course of things, Jurn,” I said softly, laying a hand on his arm. I could feel the charge of his feeling, the heat of his heart, through the thin cloth of his shirt. The blood and breath we shared would divide us now. “Go home.”

Yet I had never known a home before and nor had Jurnus, not really. We were children of this war, and I was not surprised that he could not give it up. He didn’t know how to be a man, let alone a man of peace.

More time we were not given. Antares’ spear and those of his command lowered on Jurnus, indicating that he had better be on his way. He squeezed my hand and I felt the weight of his, sturdy and covered in a fine veil of sand. When he let go, it was with a reluctance I had not read in his words or face, and I wanted to cry for the mysteries of my family that I would never know.

Gannet acknowledged Jurnus’ departure only in removing himself to speak with Morainn, and I burned in renewed frustration with the thought that I knew what he intended to do only because he allowed me to, that he abandoned language so often for a particular suggestion of his choice. I could not speculate or assume, I was not given the privilege. I was maddened further when he returned to my side, when every angle of him convinced me that it was time for me to retire. I allowed myself to be led as a mule might, casting begrudging glances over my shoulder to the path my brother had taken out of the camp.

“It is fortunate that he interrupted your telling,” Gannet observed, though I had said nothing. If he meant to goad me, I would not give in.

“And why is that?” My tone was airy, though it was difficult to convince him of my ill concern, cramped as we were on the narrow planks of the barge as we moved toward my compartment. Gannet did not answer until we were within the little chamber, the full dark dominant over all but for a halo of weak light given off by a lamp that had been lit there. If my face was garish in the shadows, Gannet’s was an eyeless haunt.

“Our kind do not speak so idly of Theba,
Han’dra
Eiren.”

He wanted me to ask why, but I resisted. There was no privacy even in the dark, but I did not have to acknowledge him, and I sat down on my cot as though to signal he ought to leave, and I to bed.

“Salarahan is a symbol to your people, is he not?” Gannet continued, oblivious, a strange inflection in his voice when he spoke the name, as though I had heard it wrong all of my life and now knew better.

“His stories shape and change us, as do those of his father, Shran,” I replied, as near to an answer as I could offer.

“Stories have power,” Gannet agreed, which surprised me. With some hesitance overcome, he strode the length of my little chamber and stood beside my cot. I stood again, too, for the discomfort of having Gannet in my room was doubled by his proximity. That I should be dwarfed by him was unbearable.

He studied my face, and the direct questions I had wanted to ask, and what few I had managed to, burned up my throat like bile.

“You appear in our stories,
Han’dra
Eiren, and our futures, as well. As you have studied Salarahan, we have studied and waited for you.”

As he spoke I felt as though the moon beyond the canvas and cloud above us became as a great eye and focused upon me. My breath was drawn from my lungs and pinned there, neither exiting nor entering from my lips.

“You have been alone among your people. No one in Aleyn shares your gifts, and even those like me, who do, do not manifest them in the same way you do. In every life you have been as you are, but this is the last life, for you and for everyone.” His voice hummed with certainty and sadness, and I was afraid then, in the dark, next to this man who was not like any other I had met or would ever meet.

“Gannet,” I began slowly, as though addressing one of my sisters when we had exhausted discord and sought understanding. I did not want him to know my fear, if he did not already. And I was frightened: by his fervor, by my ignorance, by the little, ugly thrill that had seemed to stir in me when he spoke of my gifts. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

I was surprised by the patience in his voice and his face, his lips softened by the shadows the mask cast upon them.

“We are made in the guises of our makers and in rare cases, we are their full likenesses, the essence of what they are. These we call icons, and no icon leads a full and ignorant life. We are born to some purpose, and that purpose is the only reason we have been allowed to exist.”

Our kind. We. I wanted to snatch the words from his mouth, an impulse so violent it seemed an alien thing in my heart. I managed speech instead, my heart crowding my throat against eloquence.

“Tell me.”

“I call you
Han’dra
Eiren, but that is not your true name. You are an icon, as I am. You chose a cruel tale, but what is cruel is your ignorance. It is your tale. You are Theba.”

Behind my fluttering eyelids the moon flared and broke into pieces so many they could double the sands we skirted. Though I was standing still next to Gannet, I imagined my body breaking up in the same fashion. That he should tell me with her ugliness so near to me in story, as I so recently championed the son she scorned, I could not believe it. Not of him, and not of me.

I opened my eyes.

“How do you know?”

Though Gannet had not allowed me entrance into his mind, I was for the moment laid open as though I were a set table, a living feast. He knew these words were but a fraction of the tumult I felt.

“I knew as soon as I saw you brought into the city.
Dresha
Morainn has no cause to doubt me. I recognize my own kind.”

His kind. If they were like him, how could they be anything like me?

“And if I tell you that I am not Theba?” It was a question he expected and, even as I asked it, I searched myself for truth. Did the reading of dreams and hearts make me a creature of vanity and destruction? By what measure was I this icon and not another, if any at all?

“It doesn’t matter what you say. Believe or disbelieve, choose action or inaction, the world will change around you. You are Theba.”

It was no easier to hear his proclamation a second time than it was the first. Even knowing now what Gannet had kept from me brought me no closer to understanding why, or what was expected of me. I turned away from him, but there was nowhere that I could go. I felt as though I were unraveling. I had been so sure that what I had done to protect my family was right, but Theba had no understanding of what was right or wrong. She was a monster.

Gannet seemed to sense my distress, for he removed himself a pace or two, returning to the opening of my little chamber. I was not ready to let him go, though. Not yet.

“Why did you wait to tell me?”

I could not imagine that he had needed to confirm my identity if I was to claim it. There had been something between he and Morainn on the terrace, a strangeness I had felt and had been feeling since our departure. Things would continue to be strange; this secret had changed nothing.

For a moment Gannet seemed uncertain, as though his reasons were not part of the telling.

“I wanted you to know before we reached Re’Kether,” he admitted finally, catching my eyes. “You gave me more than reason enough to tell you tonight, with your story.”

“What is Re’Kether?”

“An ancient place. We will pass through its heart, where the ruins have… memories. Theba walked there once.”

I was chilled by his words, and by the numb look on his face as he spoke. It was too much, all of this at once, and I fought the urge to slump against my bed in exhaustion and fear. Theba had walked there once, he claimed. But what he didn’t say, he thought: she would walk there again. In me.

Curiosity was easier then, than the horrors that fought to overwhelm me. Though my voice was far from steady, it signaled that the last question would be mine, and his a willing answer.

“If I’m Theba, what does that make you?”

His face could betray far less than it had, it seemed, turning stony, almost inward. To what cold place did he go when he looked like that? Gannet’s answer came quick and quiet, his retreat after just the same.

“That is not my secret to give,
Han’dra
Eiren.”

Chapter 6

It was eight days more before we reached the first ruined village. I only knew it was a village by the foundations half buried in the sand, bricked in a pattern that revealed hearth and pit stones, the cellar lain in the east to cool during the hottest hours of the day. As the road we took narrowed between the growing density of ruins, we were forced to slow down. I could walk beside the barge in the sun, and sweat and breathe freely and feel human again. But I wasn’t free, not with a trio of guards near me at all times. And I wasn’t human, if I chose to believe what Gannet had told me.

Even though I didn’t believe him, I had begun to question every impulse, every thought, wondering if the things that I felt and wanted and willed weren’t actually mine. Gannet had said that for his kind, there was no distinction between icon and deity. Eiren was Theba. Theba was me. But I couldn’t accept it.

“There’s nothing in your heart that isn’t hers,” Gannet insisted after one particularly heated argument.

“The dread goddess doesn’t have a heart.”

His look had been cold, unknowable.

“Then neither do you.”

There was more he wasn’t telling me, like who he was, and what he and his sister wanted with Theba. But like his first secret, these were guarded as closely as his masked features. I turned a grim eye on the outlying buildings that grew more numerous and nearer together until they were clearly recognizable as the little sprawl that tumbled naturally outside of a city. The soldiers whose job it was to clear a path for the barge grew anxious, as though some gloom hung over them, as well. They gathered gingerly, almost with fear, those stones that threatened our path. As I peered down what I could only imagine as alleys and wasteways, scrubbed by sand and the hard glare of the sun over many hundreds of years, I felt a darkness touch me, too. Had it spilled over from the soldiers, or as we approached the decadent center of these ruins did I simply begin to feel it as well? I did not need to know what they knew about this place. Shadows sprang from where there were no stones to cast them, and when I looked again they were gone.

At twilight Gannet descended from the barge in search of me.

“We won’t be able to navigate a safe course by night,” he explained, and as he spoke the barge slowed.

“We’ll have to stay?” We had moved sluggish as candle fat rolling down a taper in the ruins, and though I wanted to be away, I was as drawn to the ruins as I was inexplicably repulsed by them.

Gannet’s eyes were hooded in the growing dark and the thin shadows created by his mask.

“Just one night. You’ll need to remain with
Dresha
Morainn. Re’Kether breeds foul dreams by night and I won’t leave you alone.”

Though he had shared with me far stranger things, I sensed that Gannet spoke from his own discomfort, and that he valued solitude as highly as I did. I had the feeling, too, that he would consider a bad dream here a far greater threat to me than the scorpion had been.

I followed him aboard the barge without being beckoned, but goaded him with my words.

“Are they foul because they’re true?” For all the ugliness I felt in this place, I knew there were secrets I would fare better knowing than not knowing. Gannet didn’t even look at me before speaking again.

“Why are you interested in the truth now? You’ve denied it at every offering.”

I scowled, rubbing dry hands together between sleeves that were growing tattered from being worried between my fingers. Would I dream of Theba if I slept, rending the world, her spittle a lava flow down shattering mountains, her voice like a thunderclap? That was not truth, only madness.

In the front of the barge, Morainn reclined among cushions and oil lamps, numbered more than they had been on evening visits I had made before.

“I am sure Gannet doesn’t need to tell you that I hate this place,” Morainn said, lips quirked almost in a smile. She had been far more candid with me of late. I wondered if perhaps Gannet had spoken with her, if there were greater secrets between brother and sister than they kept even from everyone else. I knew she knew who he believed me to be, though I did not see how that could be cause for friendly overtures.