The Hidden Rooms
There were hidden rooms high up in Chernak New Palace.
Queen Tanit Am Zor, she whose heart was called cold, spent much time there in secret, when she was believed to be asleep, at prayer, having fittings for her clothes, or visiting some other great house. The young queen had never enjoyed reading, but now, at last, she read hungrily in books of history and magic. No other person had been told of the rooms, but she thought it likely that some of her closest attendants knew of them and guessed where she kept hidden. She kept watch stones all about the entrance to the rooms, ready to flash a warning and to show who was approaching.
Once Tanit saw a young page, a handsome boy called Dene, wandering about in the chapel outside the rooms. How would it be if she let him in—swore him to secrecy—teased him. Or better still, she thought harshly, when Dene, all innocent, had simply gone away through the corridors, she could have used a spell to strike him dumb.
Then there came a dream. At night in her sumptuous bedchamber, she dreamed that she stood in the largest of the hidden rooms, excited, half clothed. Dene the page was dead. He lay on a carpet and shriveled and divided until he was no more than a basketful of dead leaves, which she scattered from the mouth of a gargoyle onto the gardens below.
Of course the queen was well guarded; there was a palace guard of tall foot soldiers, the Tall Oaks, and two companies of kedran, who ran the palace and its stables. Besides this, there was the queen’s personal bodyguard, the Companions. Ten chosen soldiers, five kerns, five kedran, who lurked about discreetly in dark clothes. They knew the location of the Hidden Rooms but did not come too close. Tanit did not like being guarded: the Companions were not her friends.
She commanded many persons, but there was no one she loved and trusted. Ishbel Seyl, daughter of her Chancellor, had been a kind of ‘best friend.’ Ishbel was a beauty, a simple girl, lost without her domineering mother. Now she was married to young Lord Barr and lived in a great mansion by the Danmar, the inland sea.
Tanit was full of an angry guilt because of her own mother, whom she could see as the best, most kind and worthy person in the world. Yet she could not love her mother as she should. The young queen’s heart was a hidden room, a cold room, full of old tales, of voices, even, which told of treachery and death.
On an old hanging shelf near one slitted window she had set up two portraits, larger than miniatures, but coming from the school of the great portrait painter Emyas Bill, famed for the delicacy of his small work. There was a young woman with dark hair and blue eyes, wearing a simple blue and white gown and a single great yellow jewel at her throat, on silver chains. She was not too much taken with the portrait and had been pleased when Lord Seyl looked quizzical and said perhaps it was too bland.
The other portrait showed a young man—another young man, one of Emyas Bill’s trusted pupils, had traveled to Eildon to do this work. Prince Liam Greddaer of Greddach had rich brown black hair and taut, aquiline features. Yet his expression was sweet and pleasant; he wore a half smile, and it was for a
spaniel, black and white, which sat on a hassock before his tall chair.
She had found a way to exchange informal letters with the prince. His formal letters, including the announcement of his suit and the declaration of his Troth Gift, were written in a fine, straight letter, by a secretary. The informal letters, which were carried by the wife of an envoy, Lady Fayne, were in a fluent Merchant’s Script, which she judged to be more childish than her own:
I hope you will not blame me if I say that I have read every word I could find about your late father, King Sharn Am Zor and his time in Eildon and all of his life and his most tragic and noble death. I have a few works by me of the great poet Robillan Hazard, your father’s friend, and I have my factors searching for more of his work. Perhaps these are to be found in Chameln Achamar, where the poet died, at a good age, not many years past.
Tanit herself was not sure if she cared for Hazard. They had met a few times; he had dedicated several of his last works to her. Perhaps she envied all those who had known her father, the king. She had done her best for years at the classes on history and government that Lord Seyl tried to arrange, with and without fellow schoolmates. The most agreeable and sensible schoolfellow was Hal of Denwick, son of old Zilly, another of her father’s friends.
There was a dreadful suitability about him as a prospective suitor. She was absolutely cold and cruel to him from the time she was twelve years old, and tormented him in the classes with her waywardness. But even with her growing beauty as a lure, he was too sensible to persevere—to her surprise, he left the Chameln lands and traveled into the Kingdom of Lien, to his family holdings at Denwicktown and elsewhere. Then he was off to Eildon, had purchased new estates, and was studying with a tutor from the household of Prince Ross Tramarn, soon to become Eildon’s new Priest-King.
Then there were two outlandish suitors, one a King of the
Milgo who lived beyond the mountains in the southeast. He pointed out that Queen Tanit would be permitted to spend half a year in her own lands and that she would be his number one wife. The other was a distant cousin, a connection of her paternal grandmother’s father’s family, the Pendarks of Eildon—the great-grandfather who had been married to Guenna of Lien. Tanit’s suitor, Eorl Kimber, was one of the seven eorls of Eildon, and he held estates of moderate size in the northernmost reaches of the Pendark lands, almost touching the lands of Paldo, in the center of Eildon. His Troth Gift, a present, an earnest to prove a suitor’s worth, had to equal or exceed in value, tradition, beauty, and so forth a named piece of the bride’s own lands. In this case, she and Lord Seyl and her mother had settled upon the Royal Memorial Park by the river Chind. It contained the hunting lodge called Greybear, where King Sharn in past days had gone in summer, all the wide acres surrounding the lodge, and the Valley of the Stones, a sacred place, a place of pilgrimage for Queen Tanit.
Kimber was ill-advised: he offered a hunting revier in the north famed not for anything sacred but for a country fair. The queen and her court were insulted, even those who held Tanit Am Zor for cold and half-mad. She knew they were right; since the day of her father’s foul murder they had been right; secretly she prayed to the Goddess that if she was granted a true love, she would be healed, that the hidden rooms of her soul would be filled with peace and soft light.
In this hidden correspondence with Liam of Greddaer of Greddach, she had been relieved to perceive in herself a sort of lightening—she could only pray this was an omen of better things to follow.
Count Liam’s Troth Gift was in perfect taste: it was a sacred island in a lake in the northwest of Eildon, the lake isle of Elsmere, on which there was an ancient shrine to a pair of lovers, Mavair and Aengus, from the times before the Holy College and the Priest-Kings.
She made sure that all of Hazard’s works were sent at once to Count Liam. They wrote, through Lady Fayne. His distrust of those about him echoed her own—perhaps it was at the very
heart of their connection.
My half-brother is in the Sacred College of the Druda, but like many priests, he has worldly ambitions. I think we must let him perform the ceremony, together with your good cousin Gradja. O, when we are together in Chernak, in your Kingdom, how great my happiness will be. Are you certain of the spells that protect our letters?
And she was able to reply
: Yes, I am sure, my dear. The letters are safe even from Fayne herself.
Tanit very nearly confided something else. Her paraphernalia of watch-stones and protective spells told her that
someone
was trying to get through, to communicate with her, in her secret retreat. A boy—no a man—with dark eyes and a ragged brown robe, though the rings on his fingers were fine and golden. She could not tell what he wanted; she began to spend less time in the hidden rooms—it went about that the queen’s cold heart was warmed by her handsome Eildon count.
Seyl spoke frankly about the groom’s terrible old great-uncle, the Duke of Greddach, who had once exhibited captured folk of the Tulgai, the small race who inhabited the Chameln’s great border forest, in his park at Boskage in the south of Eildon. Now the present duke was renowned a collector as bad or worse—he kept the notorious Museum in the extended park. Rumor had it he’d displayed a sacred Chyrian treasure, the Star Kelch of the Nymph Taran. Now it had been stolen—taken back by some loyal Chyrian. But then, the duke treated all around him like toys for his collection. Her betrothed, who had lost both his parents as a child, confided he had felt himself part of that collection, a bartered toy, until the day—upwards of five years past now—he had gained his own inheritance.
Tanit Am Zor still slipped away to the hidden rooms, but she allowed them to become lighter, more comfortable; she had daydreams of bringing Liam to her secret places. But as the guests from Eildon began their progress into the Chameln lands, she had one last dream that threw again a shadow on her thoughts. She saw a portrait upon the wall of her throne room, and it was veiled. As she watched, filled with a strange lassitude she knew to associate with magic, a hand lifted aside the veil. The boy she had seen sometimes before was seated under
an oak tree. He had straight features and long, dark blond curls: now he had shed his ragged robe for rich, almost kingly dress. He was frowning, holding in his lap a richly bound book. When it seemed he knew she was watching, he opened the book to her. There on the first leaf was a picture of three silver swans upon azure water, a black swan watching from the land. She was intrigued. In her dream the boy turned the page, and there was yet another picture, this time a more formal portrait, of an older man. He might have been forty, but it was hard to tell his age. He was handsome, if a little aged, with thick, ash-colored hair: he wore a clipped brown beard. This man, the picture within the picture, was shown smiling; he held in his hand two oak twigs crossed, sign of the Daindru thrones, complete with spring-budded leaves. The boy closed the book on this portrait and frowned; Tanit thought he gave her warning.
As this picture faded, she thought the portrait of the man within the book had a look of King Sharn Am Zor, her beloved father, the last person on earth for whom she had felt the true warmth of love …
Aidris Am Firn
Aidris Am Firn was glad that her health remained good. She had been blessed with her heir, Sasko, serious minded and certain to make a good king. Now he was wed to his wild northern girl from the Nureshen, and Micha, her elder daughter, had married a man from the central highlands, Rigan of Nevgrod Heights. The queen had been gifted with six grandchildren—two from Sasko, boy and girl, and four—count them—three girls and a boy, from Micha. Maren, the youngest, had always confided in her mother; she did not marry and at the age of sixteen was professed as a Moon Sister, in the service of the Goddess, with the sisterhood who had formerly lived in Benna, near the pass that led into Athron. Aidris had since given the Sisters
a country estate nearer the city of Achamar—Benna was too close to the Kingdom of Lien, governed in part by the Brotherhood of Lame Inokoi.
Aidris was praised as a wise woman and a good mother, but she took little heed of the praise directed at a queen. She knew that she had failed in the matter of Tanit Am Zor, her co-ruler; she was stricken with grief and pain by this failure, as if she had failed Sham himself, a man so golden and beloved all had called him Summer’s King.
It was simply too easy to date this failure. Aidris had always been close to Lorn, the bereaved wife of Sham Am Zor—in fact the quiet kedran girl, sent into her service by Old Gilyan, one of her Torch Bearers, had been her choice as a possible bride for Sham. But Tanit—her beautiful niece had much in her blood that had come from her glorious, passionately headstrong father. The Heir of the Zor had never been close to anyone since the day of her father’s death.
Aidris prayed to the Goddess that her niece’s coming marriage might finally bring a healing; she recognized in Tanit’s demeanor a wild, almost desperate eagerness that this should take place. Yet this very wildness concerned the old queen, made her wonder again what lay at the rooted heart of Tanit’s chill. Was there some hidden magic here? Aidris might have suspected the Brown Brotherhood, but for the fact that these folk eschewed the magic arts, punished those who were thought to use them. If Rosmer had been alive, she would have known her answer—Rosmer, the fearful sorcerer, the eater of souls, had hounded every descendant of Guenna of Lien, wracked by greedy hunger to maintain his power over Lien’s throne.
Though of course, if her best guess was right, Rosmer in truth was in some way at the problem’s root …
In her deepest heart, Aidris feared Tanit’s coldness was a mark of King Sharn Am Zor’s last, his only, spell, the
Hunting of the Dark,
the
Harkmor
, the ox-felling. If so—nothing so simple as a marriage would heal it, all hope must be lost. Yet this marriage might at least bring another generation, a renewal …
Tanit had been nine years old when her father was murdered—just two years younger than Aidris had been on the day
she witnessed her own father’s assassination, back in the days when the Melniros had seized control of the Chameln. But there were differences, important differences. Racha Am Firn’s death had come from a clean killing blow, however deeply steeped in betrayal and Old King Ghanor’s martial ambitions. Sham Am Zor’s death had been surrounded by magic and familial betrayals that, even now, Aidris was loath to remember.
And of course it had been Rosmer of Lien, hounding the Swans of Lien and their heirs, who had orchestrated Sham’s death. He had cast his web of magic over Sham’s disaffected and willing cousins, the Inchevins, along with the king’s boon companion Tazlo Am Ahrosh. Some even went so far as to say that Carel Am Zor, Sham’s younger brother, now called “the Lost Prince,” had fallen under Rosmer’s influence, though others, including Merilla Am Chiel, Sham and Carel’s sister, swore this could not be so.
But whatsoever the case, whoever it was in the circle around him who had made the betrayals, Sham had been lured to his death on the Chameln’s eastern border, and in his last hours, he had known—he had cursed—the spider hand that had brought him there. He was a true King, and the power in him, going willing to his death, was strong. Dying, he called down the
Harkmor,
the spell of vengeance, and his strength was such indeed that he carried Rosmer with him through death’s portal. The day Sham Am Zor fell was the day his uncle Kelen was crowned Lien’s king; but the spider Vizier who had raised Kelen to this height had not lived to enjoy his liege lord’s victory.
No. That had been left to the Brown Brotherhood. Those carrion had swooped to fill the vacuum left by Rosmer’s death, and those men—to Lien, they had proved worse tyrants than Rosmer. For the folk who were not of Guenna of Lien’s blood, those who were not potential heirs of Lien, living—oh, unbearable! —outside of his control … despite all her family’s suffering, Aidris recognized that the misery Rosmer spread had been contained. But the Brown men—with the Brown men in power, the suffering in Lien had spread to the land’s every corner.
The old queen sighed. A sad fate indeed had fallen on her
mother’s country. But it was the Chameln, not Lien, that must be Aidris’s concern.
This
Harkmor
Sham had called … in her deepest heart, Aidris knew it had left its dark mark also on Tanit.
Tanit’s upcoming marriage—the old queen had done her best for her young co-ruler. Liam Greddaer was young and handsome, an Eildon marriage would bring Tanit much prestige … and perhaps the new Zor consort would bring a smoothening of the Chameln’s relations with Lien, in the last years grown so rancorous. It was hard for Aidris to hold onto the hope, though as queen, it was a hope she
must
hold on to. The Brotherhood of the Lame God were unreasoning fanatics, but with Kelen of Lien aging and disabled, Aidris had come to understand that among Inokoi’s cult there were extreme and even more dangerous factions, wrestling for power as the king reluctantly loosened life’s hold.
In her scrying stones, she had seen her young cousin Matten, Kelen’s heir, and she could see that he was not all his mother’s son, dedicated to sackcloth and scouring. There were days when he slipped over the palace walls, broke free, if only for a short hours’ grace. Would this be enough? What would happen, in just one year, when Matten reached his majority? She thought of the boy, with his dark eyes and the ragged brown robe his mother and her counselors so often forced upon him—a drab shell in a land where the nobles still jaunted free, still wore their garb of silk and velvet. Would Matten revolt against his mother and her counselors, or would he turn his spleen against the nobles of Lien, those shining folk who had brought him so much humiliation in his youth, even as he shared his mother’s gowns?
Aidris sighed. She thought she knew at least the next intrigue that would be forced upon the Chameln—she had heard its stirrings. If she was right, Tanit’s marriage would flush it forth.
The queen-haters in Lien—perhaps in a conspiracy with some faction of those in treacherous, ever self-serving Eildon—would attempt to establish a rival to the throne of Zor, would attempt to upset the succession. Aidris had begun to hear murmurs of “the Lost Prince”—as if the Zor had
ever
been
without an heir. For a thousand years, the Daindru, the twin oaks, in lines unbroken, had ruled the Chameln. But now there were murmurs out of Lien: Tanit was not the true heir, her Uncle Carel, banished by those who would set Tanit up in his place, should be called home. Tanit must be taken down—her marriage to Liam Greddaer of Greddach must not take place, or perhaps it could be voided, if only she could be proved a pretender to the Zor throne.
These thoughts made Aidris gnash her teeth. Tanit was indeed the first ruling Zor queen in seven generations, but that was a chance of birth, no ordered exclusion of women from the line of rule. And if not Tanit—Merilla, the child between Sham and Carel, would have held the throne. But not for the Brown Brotherhood was this reasoning. They followed their own logic, not caring of the pain they brought to families, their desecrations against the bonds of love.
Her real sadness—whatever man was brought forth in Carel’s name would prove a pretender. For Carel had certainly not been banished—in the chaos following Sham’s death, he had simply disappeared. His role in Sham’s death, his own fate—whether dead at Skivari hands, in treasonous retreat among their company, or taken as a hostage—had never been determined.
Like Merilla, Aidris was inclined to a trusting view of Carel. She knew the prince, since the day of his arrival in the Chameln Lands with his sister Merilla, a pair of runaways from the court of Lien, where they had been held as gilded-cage captives.
Prince Carel? He was eager and innocent and a little too young to easily make a place for himself in his homeland, a country estranged to him by seven years of exile at Lien’s courts. Carel was anxious to have a brother again, to please his brother, to join in his life; but Sham, busy learning to be a king and a man, could not become close to Carel—certainly, Carel had felt swept aside. Soon it was too late—though Aidris preferred to believe “too late” meant their separation by Sham’s death, not Carel’s proving traitor.
Reason said Carel had simply died in the battles that followed the king’s capture. It was well-known that Derda Am
Inchevin, daughter of the mad old traitor who had led the uprising, had ridden off with Rugal of the Skivari, the Terror of the North. She had become one of his lesser wives and died in childbirth.
Ah, but this “Lost Prince” nonsense. Lost princes were a threat. Even Merilla, who had spent much time trying to find the truth, by magic and with the help of trusted searchers, now hoped for proof of death. Aidris knew this would not satisfy those who longed for wonders and the return of the long lost. There would be pretenders as there had been for hundreds of years, set up, usually, to benefit noble families politically. There had been pretenders when the Chameln Lands were in the grip of Ghanor of Mel’Nir. A poor young actress, befuddled by spells, had been given a false life, the imagined life of Aidris the Queen. Even now, through the years, Aidris could still feel the shock of confronting that benighted creature face to face.
Another pretender, the False Sharn, had acted more deliberately—he had rallied the southern lords and helped drive out the Melniros. Aidris was able to smile now, remembering. She had once, before she wed Bajan, given her heart to another, then taken it back again. Now, widowed for years, she walked in her gardens with a seafaring man, a merchant, with long grey moustachios, who went on trading ventures to the Lands Below the World. A man much given to role-playing, even, an
actor
…
“Do not fret, my brave Queen,” said Raff Masura, as the spring came closer. “Poor Tanit Am Zor surely loves this Eildon boy, Count Greddach. All the reports, from the people and from your own watchers, say that she is happier …”
“You mean less mad,” sighed Aidris.
“There is madness in all of us,” he replied seriously. “She is less cold. The ice is melting in her heart. Speak to her a year after she has wed.”
“Mark my words,” she said, smiling a little. “If she and Liam prove too warm, there will be a pretender or two.”
“Some have their reasons.” He pressed her hand, and she could not help but feel a pang at all the sacrifices this man—lover, pretender, the first rolling stone on the slope that had
made the Chameln lands free from Mel’Nir—all the sacrifices this man had made for her.
“There is someone else, in the scrying stones,” she said. “A woman, a kedran. From the past or the future or one foretold. Have you heard of a battlemaid who rides on errands for the Shee, the last remnants of the poor souls, in mighty Tulach Hall … ?”
“No, by all the Gods, I have not,” said Raff Masura. “You can find her out!”
“Grandmother Guenna has passed into the sunset herself,” said Aidris. She made a small gesture with her hand, negating him. “She had a much stronger power than I do. Everyone has passed on … Lingrit has gone and Sabeth and your father, Jalmar … Poor Iliane Seyl and old Zilly of Denwick.”
“Here comes one who is still going strong!” he said, to cheer her.
And there, striding down the archery lawn from the mighty wooden palace of the Firn, was a tall, sturdy old woman in kedran dress.
“My Queen,” cried Ortwen Cash, who had ridden in Athron with the queen. “Have you ever heard of a town on the Chyrian coast called Coombe?”
“I don’t think so,” said Aidris. “But wait—yes, I have it …”
They sat at the round table under a spreading ash, and the servants nearby came at once to serve the queen and her friends.
“Yorath Duaring was in Coombe during the civil wars in Mel’Nir,” said Aidris, “fighting for Krail. He raised a horde of Chyrians to relieve the besieged garrison at Hackestell Fortress. They became the Wesdings—part of the army of the Westmark.”
“There is a Holy Spring in Coombe,” said Ortwen. “I have this from your own friend, Mistress Vanna, in Hagnild’s house by Nightwood. The
Wanderer,
this maid of destiny, comes from Coombe. She is of Chyrian blood, yet she is also almost one of the ‘great warriors’ of Mel’Nir, a tall lusty lass capped with tresses of red; they say she has visited the Shee in Tulach Hall.”
“They are lost,” said Aidris sadly. “A lost race, fading one by one: aged ladies, the Fionnar, fading into the sunset.”
“Will you find the battlemaid?” asked Raff Masura, with a grin. “I do not think anyone can hide from the pair of you!”