The Hidden Icon (7 page)

When her servants offered us food and wine, I accepted my share with a polite nod, hungry from my walk. Triss was in wild spirits over the evening we were to spend in Re’Kether, though not enough that she was distracted from her duties.

“I won’t shut but one eye,” she insisted, piling pillows stuffed with light, breathable fibers upon Morainn’s couch, too many, almost, for her to lay back without being toppled by their volume. Triss moved on to pour tea for the assembly, myself and Gannet included. I watched him carefully for some indication that Triss was overreacting, but he gave away nothing. Even if there was something truly to fear in the growing dark, I didn’t think he would seek his cues from such an empty-headed woman.

Imke remained silent, and I studied her, curious. Triss could not be anything but what her little rituals and services made her, but I was sure for Imke there was something more. She had a hand in every mundane chore and vain request just as Triss did, but her carriage and her little knife suggested to me that there was more to her duties than shaking out the bedding and serving meals.

“We will be gone from here in another day and you will tell stories of it for weeks and tire me brainless with them,” Morainn sighed, ignoring her tea in favor of rising and pulling aside the curtains Imke had only a moment ago closed. Morainn’s willfulness seemed born in part from her station, and she reminded me of my sisters at moments like this one, petulant because she could be. Still, I sensed that Morainn was not entirely happy with her lot, however many others might’ve traded her for it. She was as much a mystery as her brother.

“What do you see?” I asked, trying not to sound as desperately curious as I felt. Morainn cut her eyes to me, narrow but soft.

“I don’t see anything. The moon hides her face, and offers no light tonight.”

Triss brightened.

“They say the moon is always new here! There’s never any light to see by.”

“My father’s brother captained an infiltration force that came through and back through Re’Kether twelves times in all,” Imke offered in support, not caring how her words would sound to me, the infiltrated. “There was never any moonlight to guide or comfort them.”

Triss did not seem to take much notice of Imke’s words, but Morainn and Gannet attended to them, as did I. Morainn closed the curtain, but not completely. The shred of inky black that remained visible shivered and I shivered, too. Did something wait there for us, for me? Gannet looked at me sharply, and the look I gave him in that bold moment urged him to give me reason to stave my curiosity, or suffer it forever.

When we settled to a meal, our bodies were tense, our mouths opening more in half-formed fears than they were to talk or eat. We had hardly eaten a thing when Antares interrupted us, appearing at the curtained threshold with a curt incline of his head.

“Those who have not bedded down for the night patrol the perimeter,
Dresha
,” he reported. “Even those who presume to sleep will be on their guard.”

Morainn nodded, and she seemed about to invite him to sit and share our meal when our tenuous company was interrupted by a howling I could not describe. It sounded like neither man nor beast, and no sooner had we upset our rice and tea onto laps and sitting cushions Antares swept out, spear at the ready. Gannet was on his feet, as well, and I felt a startling openness in his mind, as though he were searching for something. There was fear there, but also a bold curiosity that feared nothing, not even for his own life.

And this, this frightened me.

The howl came again, sharp like the call before a murderous lunge. I backed away from the table, shaken, wary. Morainn did not cower, but looked from window to window, to the doorway for the return of Antares or worse. I felt the urge to break from them, all of them, when they had so much to occupy them that was not caging this particular bird. I knew in an instant that this howling was not a call for me, but for them, to distract them so I might escape.

The soles of my feet felt as though they were moving already, twitching and burning to go. As the howl rang out again and everyone remained distracted, I took the few, quiet steps backward that remained between me and the wide, curtained window, brushed the silk aside, and leapt to the sandy road below.

Fires had guttered low without their keepers, but there was light enough to see by. I wove quickly through abandoned kindling and packs tumbled over in their owner’s haste to assess the threat, rations heated and growing cold. I ran into the ruins. I didn’t feel the dread and darkness I had sensed before, growing more sure with every passing moment that what I had felt had been colored by the weakness of the company I had been forced to keep. Re’Kether would shelter me where they could not.

Though I passed out of the firelight, I could not mistake the low, crumbling foundations, the shattered artifices that littered sand-strewn paths. No doubt these had once been paved, the jeweled feet of some ancient people wearing memory into stone. I could almost see their fine sandals and trailing robes tracing patterns in the sand, characters I was sure I could recognize were they not shadow and distant history. My heart hammered at the thought and for a moment I was seized with the terror of losing myself in the darkness, that the howling was nothing more than a siren song. The fear passed as quickly as it had come, replaced with a renewed desire to escape. I had been in chains, and soon here I would be free.

By touch alone I was sure I traveled nearer the city proper, and with every absent stroke of my hand in the air I felt for the high wall I had seen as the caravan approached. Gannet had said the wall kept as much in as it did out, but like hands cupped with water, it was not as solid as it looked.

I felt something pass across my cheek, like a stray hair, but not mine. I faltered again, breath catching in my throat. Gannet had not wanted me to be alone in my chamber, and now I stood alone in the ruins. The caravan lights were distant, and I could hear nothing, not even the howling, not any more. Had they captured the creature, or had it followed my lone scent into the ruins? I shivered, and my hands brushed against the stone of the perimeter wall. What beast dared to hunt in so ancient and empty a place? What had it to feed on but spirits? I had more to fear from the folk of the caravan than here.

Taking another step forward, I opened both hands out in front of me as though I were reaching for a prayer statue. My mother’s idols were nearly always depicted in this way, all but one, who offered neither salvation nor steady confession. I did not want to think of her, not now, but her hard face had been behind my eyes since Gannet had given me her name: Theba.

The howling began again, or so it seemed at first. What I heard now was more like a chorus, individual pitches picked out of the dark. What could have been the wail of an infant, an old man, a nursing mother, all were strained together in a cry of centuries dormant misery suddenly and violently roused. With each footstep the voices in the choir grew more numerous, but I could not stop myself, kept moving, feeling, reaching into the dark. Tears sprang to my eyes but across my lips stole something like an expression of glee, a celebration of their pain. It wasn’t mine.

I gasped and stumbled backwards over a broken cobble. Strange energy shot from my skin like cracks of lighting, and for a moment the square where I stood was illuminated and the smell of something burning, like hair, filled my nose. I saw nothing in the brief light, and nothing moved in the darkness that dropped heavy as hands clapped over my eyes. The cries were silenced and suddenly I heard movement, like many pairs of feet moving swiftly towards me.

“Eiren!”

I heard Gannet’s voice and then recognized his form, outlined in my mind as though in a reverse silhouette: he was bright where all else was dark. He was open to me; I could sense his urgency and his need to find me, his fear that he might not. The cries and howling had stopped, and I heard nothing but the huff of his breath and my own, and I was aware of how far I had come, how dark it was. I scrambled to my feet in an instant, and he didn’t hesitate, taking my hands and racing the both of us from that place.

Chapter 7

Only the threat of being stranded in Re’Kether with a broken wheel or a lame beast kept the caravan from moving the instant Gannet had secured me aboard the barge. Delirious, bones chattering with fear, I couldn’t focus, didn’t recognize Morainn’s face hovering over mine. I had moved a sandaled foot in time with each of his booted ones, but now I stalled, my senses still not wholly mine.

“What happened?” Morainn hissed, looking between Gannet and I. “Was she taken?”

“She was tempted,” Gannet said, removing one of his hands from my shoulders to gesture that I have a seat. I felt as weak as I had during childhood fevers, but it was my spirit that was shaken, not my body. I sat down despite not wanting to.

“If she tries to run again I recommend we restrain her,
Dresha
.”

This was from Imke, who received sharp looks from Gannet and Morainn both for saying so. Words sprang to my lips: that I would run if I wished to, that I would go home to Re’Kether… but Re’Kether was not my home.

“Triss, food and drink,” Morainn ordered, the light colors of her skirts distracting as she settled beside me. My sisters had worn such things. I had, too, when we had been meant to rule. But not now. I picked at the stitches in the hem of my tunic, loose folds hanging unbelted, stray threads like the hair’s light touches I had felt in the ruins. Gannet had come for me, but I had not been alone.

“Eiren, will you eat?” Gannet’s eyes were the least guarded I had seen them, shades of the worry I had felt in him still visible in their depths. They were all sitting around me now as though it were I who held court here and not them, Gannet and Imke joining Morainn, Triss perching on a cushion only after she had brought warm tea and bread.

I lifted a cup, and it was filled for me.

“What happened?”

The answers I wanted were not the same as those Morainn sought. She wanted to know how I had come to leave the caravan and why. I wanted to know what I had met in the ruins, and how I had driven it off.

“There are unhappy spirits in Re’Kether, among other things.” Gannet’s tone was factual, as if we were discussing the weather or were bent together over a map, plotting an obvious course. “Re’Kether is in ruin because of Theba’s wrath, the dead buried without the comforts of visits from their descendents, without offerings. We shouldn’t have come this way.”

I laughed. Perhaps I was scared still or perhaps I had been driven mad, but Gannet’s words seemed to me a weak interpretation of what had happened at the wall. I wanted to believe that it had been my imagination, but just as I knew he was telling the truth as he saw it when he told me that I was Theba, I knew that he was just as adamant now.

“That you can laugh while a man is dying is the reason you are not welcome here,” Imke said, her words snatching the air from my lungs. Being a little less in control of my mind made it easier to pierce hers, like fingers of torchlight in the dark. The howling we had heard had come from a man, one of the guard, and he would be dead soon, if not already.

“I want to see him.”

Triss only just caught the cup of tea I discarded as I rose, Gannet and Morainn quick to follow even if their posture told me they meant to dissuade me. They shared a look whose depths I knew, that everything that had happened since we had been forced to camp in the ruins was exactly what Gannet had hoped to avoid.

“And why shouldn’t you?” Antares stood in the entrance to Morainn’s chamber, sweat and ash a grim veneer on his features. He strode forward, cutting through Gannet’s resistance like a sharpened stone through sand. Antares was a soldier, but not a fool, inclining his head in a gesture that encompassed Gannet and Morainn both. “You should see him, as well.”

We were not a merry party that descended from the barge. Though steadier than I had been a few moments before, my footing was lost as we approached a low fire where several armed guards stood watch over a prone figure, his own spear driven into the sand out of his reach. Triss had elected to remain on the barge, but Imke had walked with us, and was first into the circle of light to see the howling man. There was a flicker of something familiar in her, and I wondered if someone among her father’s father’s party had suffered a similar fate on their passage through Re’Kether. That would not have been worthy of boasting.

What thoughts I had for Imke were dismissed in confronting the sickness of the man on the ground. A blanket was tangled in his legs, though I suspected his shivering had nothing to do with the evening’s chill.

“He stopped screaming less than an hour ago,” Antares explained. It was as though he were giving her some tactical update, an appraisal on how we might proceed forward from such tragedy. “I found this among his things.”

Antares produced a cloth pouch, but when Morainn lifted it to peer inside, Antares lowered it gently away from her face. “Not too close. It’s poison.”

The word seemed to have as much power over the man as the substance, and he writhed in the sand, coiling like a snake that had gorged itself. Gannet knelt beside him and eased one of the man’s hands away from his chest. I could tell he did not want to be touched, but whether it was because of his sickness or because it was Gannet, I didn’t know.

“He administered it to himself,” Gannet observed, a note of grim surprise in his tone as he uncurled the man’s fingers, displaying an ochre stain on his fingertips.