The Hidden Queen by Alma Alexander Page B

nevertheless the eyes of a stranger. Something had vanished for good, a link, a nexus that was there before, binding the two of them into family. The disorientation lasted only for a moment, and then the world changed again, returning to something Brynna knew and recognized. She found herself looking down into painfully familiar eyes once again—and realized it was now Chella’s eyes that were familiar and reminded her of Rima, not the other way round. It was as though she had never seen Rima’s eyes, except in a distant dream…And then, just like that, she knew. “Mama…She’s dead, isn’t she?”
    Chella reached out to gather her in a wordless embrace and Brynna stared over her aunt’s shoulder into the leaping flames. She felt curiously empty, as though there were no more tears, as though she had cried them all, shed over nothing more than the pain which had wracked her so a moment before. The memory of Miranei, the perfect memory she still cherished and her last thought before she fell asleep every night, was intact. But in this instant it seemed to Brynna that the city and the keep were starkly empty of people and a woman named Rima had never walked its corridors or shared the Throne Under the Mountain with a king they called Red Dynan. There was nothing there, no memory of a face, of a form—nothing except a pair of beautiful and intense eyes which now existed only as remembrances, pale copies in the face of Rima’s sister, and that of her daughter.
    Chella drew away to look at her. “When it came to me I knew you must have felt it too,” she said, “and you had no means of knowing…it was a good thing Feor was with you. Come, Catlin is waiting for you upstairs. I thought…”
    But the thought of seeing Catlin was suddenly unbearable. Catlin was a potent reminder of Rima and the world that had been torn from Brynna, the latest in a series of deep wounds and gashes oozing not life-blood but an even more agonizing and incessant trickle of loneliness, heart-sickness, and a hopeless longing for what was irretrievably lost. Brynna dropped her eyes. “I don’t want to go to my room,” she said, and there was an echo in her voice of the girl who had known the power of command. “May I go for a walk out in the garden?”
    Chella glanced at the window. “But it’s raining,” she said.
    “I know,” said Brynna, her voice ringing with equal measures of obstinate need and dull resignation.
    Chella reached out to stroke her hair. “You’ll get soaked,” she said gently. “If you’d like to be alone, that’s all right. Only come up to your room. Nobody will disturb you there until you call, I promise you.”
    It was too much effort to argue. Chella took the now silent child upstairs and left her alone in her room. But it wasn’t solitude Brynna craved so much as air; caged, the four walls began to bear in on her. It was open sky Brynna wanted; the manor was too small to contain her pain. In the end she succumbed to this urge, stronger than herself, stronger than the years of obedience instilled deep within her. Leaving her room unobserved, she made her way down the back stairs and let herself out through the scullery door, taking the path through the kitchen courtyard and stable yard and making for the woods. It was a measure of her state of mind that she had not even taken a cloak.
    Something took her back to the willows, the place where she had planted her little Standing Stone only days before. The stone was where she had left it and it looked as though nobody had disturbed this place since Brynna had last been here. But the grotto was wet, dripping, uncomfortable; the willows’ leaves still only a promise on the graceful branches, far from sufficient to hold off the rain.
    Brynna was unused to this soaking Cascin rain—back at Miranei, weather came in a louder, rougher, but shorter guise. The mountain thunderstorms there could be vicious, the winds sometimes strong enough to make burly soldiers