The Hidden Icon Read online

  The Hidden Icon

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  The Hidden Icon

  by

  Jillian Kuhlmann

  This book is available in print at Amazon.com.

  Digital Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any character resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The Hidden Icon

  The Book of Icons #1

  Copyright © 2013 by Jillian Kuhlmann

  Published by Fable Press

  FablePress.com

  Cover by Steven Novak

  For Kelsi.

  Chapter 1

  When I was nervous, I cycled through the seven histories of Shran in my head. And when I was very, very nervous, they tripped their way off of my tongue like tumbled stones, growing brighter with every telling.

  My favorite is the story of Shran’s youngest son, Salarahan, who was interred alive without his heart. The organ was held instead for many blood-won years by brother after brother as a powerful totem. Salarahan rose from his living grave after his brothers had slain each other and all but destroyed their father’s kingdom, reclaiming his heart and the hearts of his people.

  As Salarahan did, I preferred the keeping of stories and animals and children reared not to fight but to tend to children and animals and stories after them. It was in my blood, his gentleness, though my brother and sisters were more like bulls than the tiny, cautious bird I was named after, Eiren. It fled my mother’s lips no sooner than she’d kissed my birth-slicked head, her last daughter, and the last in a long diluted line beginning with that gentle prince.

  But even as I opened my mouth to begin his story, a look from my mother silenced me, her dark eyes full of meaning. They were outside the bolted door listening, our captors. And they were no more worthy of a tale from me than they were the kingdom they had snatched from us.

  It was not the work of war time to prefer words to action, but I was no warrior, for all we’d been at war most of my life. My father liked to say that the conflict began when my finger nails needed their first clippings, and after fifteen bloody years, I had bitten mine to the quick as we waited to surrender, prisoners in the palace that had once been our home. Ours was a story I didn’t want to tell, but even as I sweated and shook with worry over our fate, already the details of the narrative collected in my mind. I looked at my mother, her heart breaking over and over again on her face and bleeding deep in the lines newly etched there, at my father and brother, my sisters, and knew they were no more ready to hear it than I was to tell it. But some stories are like hearts falling heavily into love: they cannot be stopped once they have been started.

  Bolted or not, I felt sure the reliquary door would buckle in the oppressive humidity of sorrow. We were all hot and nervous and trying to hide it, my mother and father from each other, my brother from my sisters, my sisters from each other. Nobody bothered trying to hide anything from me. I stirred a thick layer of sand with my bare feet, evidence of the years of neglect since we had been forced to abandon our capitol for the deep deserts.

  “It hardly feels like home.”

  My middle sister’s voice was as plain as her face. Her paints and perfumed oils were with everything else we had been forced to abandon when we were captured, her gilded bracelets exchanged for bangles of red flesh, rubbed and raw. It had been a long ride.

  “That’s because we kept our beasts out of doors, where they belonged.”

  My brother, Jurnus, glowered at the closed door. He wrinkled his nose as though he could smell the men, the livestock stink that clung to their skin and too-thick beards, some of them with hands furry as mitts on the spears they bore. My brother’s swords had been taken, too, for all the steel had never tasted blood, cast into the sand like discarded toys. A drift had kicked up and over them within minutes, burying them along with his hopes of someday wielding them. Lashed already to horses, our skin crisping after so many months in hiding underground, his had not been the only dreams to die.

  No one answered Jurnus’ insult. My father’s gaze was inscrutable, but it was my mother’s attention I sought again, following her sable eyes as they swept over her children and into the corners of the empty reliquary. Where green and yellow glass had hung in the stone worked windows there was nothing now but the relentless indifference of the sun that passed over and over, day after day, thoughtless, as one would look upon a room too often frequented. We had taken this place for granted. There were shadows in the room the light could not touch, and in them I saw the ghosts of the treasures we had once kept here, treasured memories of my girlhood. What I remembered about being a child in the palace was a latticework of shadow and light, my bare feet padding from study desk to prayer bench, practice room to bed and over again. It had been a pleasant life, for a little while.

  But my mother’s expression haunted me more than my memories. I studied the vault of bones beneath her skin, like mine the color of the honeyed beer she and my father enjoyed, the taste of which had always paled considerably when compared to the thrill of pilfering some from their reserve. Like my face, hers too bore the ugly stain of resignation. Our captors might not have had the power to change our eyes and lips, but they had all the rest and gave us both the expressions of helplessness that we wore.

  “Do you remember the story of the world’s edge?”

  My mother’s voice broke my gloomy reverie. I looked at her, into eyes pitted with weariness. Hardship made many women lean and ugly but my mother had been made more beautiful, thin with struggle but shining with a will to best it.

  “I remember that sacrificial maidens were thrown into its boiling abyss,” I answered roughly, which wasn’t, I knew, the answer she was looking for. This was the oldest of games that I had played with my mother, trading bits of story back and forth between us. She’d told me many times how she had whispered stories to me when I had been in her womb, how I had beat back my answers against her belly and breast. This game had always cheered me, but not now. I didn’t want to be drawn out of my sadness. What was the point?

  She wasn’t giving up.

  “But if they had opened their arms and eyes they would not have sunk, but flown to another world.” My mother held my gaze, and I couldn’t have looked away even if I’d wanted to. She often knew just the right story to tell, but I wasn’t willing to listen.

  “You want me to open my arms to them?” I bristled, waving at the door. “They’re more likely to cut them off than return the gesture.”

  “We can’t know what they intend to do now,” she insisted. If my mother had addressed an
y of my other siblings I might’ve believed her. But me?

  “I can.”

  If the reliquary was full to bursting with our regret, a greater force of bald aggression waited just outside. It was as tangible to me as the sand in my teeth, the press of stone against my skin where my skirts had torn.

  “Eiren,” my father began, a cautionary note in his voice, but Jurnus raised his own in my defense.

  “This isn’t the time for stories. It isn’t over yet; there must still be some who are loyal to us in the city, or - ”

  “There’s no one left I’ll allow to give their lives for us.”

  There was nothing gentle in my father’s voice now. We had lost countless thousands in the years we had been at war, the bravest among them at our last stand in the desert. My eyes slid from my father’s face to the stains on his pale tunic: soil, sweat, the rust-dark smudges of blood. The contingent of the guard who had been with us in exile had served him the whole of his life. I did not need to look at his face again to know that it was as hard for him to have lost these friends as it was the entirety of our kingdom. My temper cooled, but my dark thoughts could not be curbed. Were we waiting here to die, or worse?

  My mother bowed her head in prayer. There were no benches here, no idols, but hers was a faith that did not demand such things. My sisters joined her, whispering, clutching at tangles in their hair. I made no utterances myself, listening only to my mother’s fevered words when her low voice joined theirs. The meaning was unimportant to me. I was interested most in their steadiness, the current that ran beneath my mother’s tongue as she spoke, the moisture pearling on her lips. Sweat and spittle were her offerings, her devotion a shore against which I could anchor myself. It had always been this way, but how much longer would we be allowed to worship as we wished, to grieve together? I thought of the dogs Jurnus had kept when we were children, how he had to foster the pups apart once they’d weaned from the bitch, how the sire had wandered once he’d bred. We would not remain a pack. It didn’t matter what father said. If we were together, we were a heart around which the blood of our people would pool and flow.

  And the monsters beyond the reliquary door knew it as well as I did.

  As if on cue, the bolts creaked, the door tugged open by several of the soldiers who had waited without. My feet whipped under my skirt, shoulders shrinking. I was slight enough as it was and didn’t need to try to hide, but when my father turned and stood I found myself peering around his legs like a child.

  A lone guard strode into the reliquary, planting his feet in the mosaic mouth of a serpent that coiled in once-glittering blue; I noted his height, his heavy dress, the beard he no doubt cursed in the arid heat. His gloved hand clutched a spear, and there would be a whole host of others at his back if our postures proved anything more than defensive.

  “Which one of you is Eiren?”

  If I’d held a spear I would’ve snapped the shaft in surprise. My mother rose, too, blocking me completely from the guard’s view. I could see him still between them, a sliver of nose, mouth, and armored muscle.

  “Why do you want my daughter?”

  The indomitable will conveyed in my father’s stance was echoed in her tone, and the guard’s face hardened. I was proud of my mother, of her strength. Even if I didn’t feel like I had any of it.

  “Your daughter,” he began, a pause as cold as the words that followed as he counted us, even me, little more than a scrap of cloth and skin between my parents, “is one of only six people left in this gods-forsaken land who will do as you tell them. I encourage you to insist she do as I tell her to.”

  My mother and father were joined by my sisters and Jurnus, who leapt to his feet with such vigor he might have had in his hands again the weapons that had been taken from him. I swallowed, hard. The guard did not need the soldiers waiting in the corridor to cut my family down. I could no longer see his face through the living barrier of their bodies, but I wouldn’t feed his thirsty spear.

  I rose, ankles weak as water, and touched my mother on the shoulder, and then my father.

  “I’ll go,” I said, whisper-stiff. Their looks were as knife-edged as their parting bodies as I passed between them, hips and elbows thin from many hungry months in the desert. My sisters’ expressions were curious and Jurnus’ nostrils flared in indignation when I ignored the short, sharp shake of his head. They were all wondering the same thing and I was, too: Why did he want me when he could’ve had one of them?

  I crossed the stone serpent’s belly, following the design with my eyes to keep from looking at the guard. The serpent was fat with swallowed prey, a warning to intruders that crossing the royal family would cost them their lives. But not anymore. Our resistance might cost us ours, and it appeared I would be the first to go.

  Before they bolted the door again behind me I caught my mother’s eyes, saw in their depths a prescient gloom. She raised a hand as though to shield tears, but I knew better. I knew her thoughts, that she believed she would never see me again. She didn’t want to remember me this way, the defeated sink of my shoulders, the shallow, surrendering scrape of my sandal.

  But it was too late. For all of us.

  Chapter 2

  The guard didn’t look at me as we passed through the corridor from the reliquary, didn’t speak. The soldiers barred and locked the door again behind us, but I heard instead the sounds of shattering wood and the terrible scream of steel against stone. In the caves where we had been captured we had waited hours in the dark, tasked to hear the death of each man and woman who had sworn to preserve our lives at the cost of their own. I saw again the first soldier I had seen up close, her grim lips and bared teeth in the torchlight, bloodied spear brandished as one of my servants twitched his last on the cave floor between us. I’d been so afraid I could have trembled out of the ropes she’d used to bind me. I felt the ghosts of those ropes tighten around my wrist and ankles now, fighting to follow the man who stalked before me.

  I feared him, too, giving him no reason to touch me, no reason to raise his voice in anger. We took a winding stair that opened onto a wide, brushed stone landing: a bright place where we had played as children. I didn’t recognize the broad leafed, flowering plants growing there now or the imported heavy wooden furniture. The somber faces carved into the arms of chairs told me all that I needed to know: you are not welcome to sit here, you do not belong.

  The guard took a position at the top of the stair, like a block of stone or wood himself barring the exit. Two figures stood opposite me behind a narrow table, a woman and a man standing nearly the same height. They regarded me with a grave curiosity that chilled me more than the guard’s callus attentions. I couldn’t help but stare, my lips parting in the witless expression one of my sisters was like to take with a handsome man. These two were not soldiers. The man wore a half-mask roughed of some metal fitted to his features, riding the bridge of his nose and curving back to his ears. It was the mask I saw and little else, registering but barely the sandy hair, the thin, blank line of his lips. His eyes were fixed on me, and I fought the urge to squirm under the cool, measured notice I received.

  The woman’s expression was intelligent, stirring uncommon beauty in an otherwise common face. She drew her dark curls severely back from her face, and a sliver of glinting metal marked her brow above soft, too-kind eyes. I didn’t want them to be kind. It had taken all my nerve to follow the guard this far, and now I felt even more alone, more vulnerable. I opened and closed my mouth once, twice, dumb as a grazing animal when there is nothing left to eat. Their unwavering attention could have galvanized even the slowest of beasts, however, and I found words where there had been none.

  “I don’t know what you hope to gain from me.”

  The woman’s expression was shrewd, but not cruel. She looked away from me for a moment, catching the man’s eyes. I sensed the stir of something between them, the unspoken understanding that can pass between two people who know each other well. After a moment, he turned and
walked out onto the high walled balcony that circled much of the room. His dark clothing seemed to gather and repel light in the same instant, and I didn’t like not having them both in the room where I could see them. But when he was gone she spoke, her voice husky like that of a much older woman, pleasant and deep, and I had to look at her.

  “Don’t be alarmed. We wanted to meet with you alone. I am Dresha Morainn, daughter of-”

  “I know whose daughter you are.”

  She didn’t need to wear the circlet for me to know. Morainn was their princess, soon to succeed her father, no doubt. Of course we were meeting alone. If she hoped to negotiate, she was wise to keep her distance from my brother and sisters.

  “Eiren,” I answered, though I knew she didn’t need my name. I was stalling, unsure of what to say to her, to this kind-eyed princess of monsters. “Are you going to interrogate my brother and sisters, too?”

  “No.”

  She moved around the table, hands skirting papers, implements for writing and measuring distance, inks in tinted glass bottles. This was a familiar place for her but not for me, not anymore. I bristled, and as she drew nearer her full frame and considerable height made me feel weak as a foundling child. Morainn had eaten well and stretched her legs in the flower of her youth, and I’d spent the last five years living like a rodent in a cave.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” she continued, casting her eyes out to the veranda where the man stood, his head tilted slightly, listening. Morainn’s voice was calm, cool, as though she were attempting to subdue me. “So you needn’t act like I’m going to.”

  Had she spoken with my sisters in this fashion, they would have been at her throat already, if not with a knife then with words. One of them would at least have insulted her height.