The Hidden Icon by Jillian Kuhlmann

Author:Jillian Kuhlmann [Kuhlmann, Jillian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epic
ISBN: 9781939897084
Amazon: 1939897084
Barnesnoble: 1939897084
Publisher: Fable Press
Published: 2013-09-16T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

The waypoint was a village with children at play, roaming dogs, folk returning from fields or woods or mines. I felt more apprehensive even than I had when we first arrived in Cascar. The sun was setting behind us, and I imagined we entered the village as shadows, figures thrown black and menacingly thin before us. Two weedy boys hovered uncertainly on the path, which had grown wide and beaten enough to be called a road. They held their hands above their eyes as though in a salute, but they were only attempting to make out our faces.

Recognizing no one, they scampered into a modest but well-built wooden building on the side of the road. We slowed, and a moment later a man appeared in the doorway, whiskered and bewildered. Antares dismounted once more and approached him, the colors he wore announcing him as a military man and eliciting a slight incline of the man’s head. Behind him strode the scouts, and I was glad their attentions were for the moment diverted from me. Though I had traveled as usual ensconced between guards and servants and Gannet, they had been irritatingly preoccupied with me, where I was, the pace I drove Circa, which direction I looked. Ambar did not take many prisoners of war, it seemed.

“Is your lord in residence?”

I watched their exchange carefully, how the scouts seemed to assert themselves at either side, an unnecessary show of strength.

“He is,” the bearded man answered, the children visible now on either side of him in the doorway, their eyes in shadow. He coughed nervously. “But if I may, does your return mean the war is over? It’s ended?”

My attention was fixed. Though I didn’t move lest I draw more attention to myself, I gave over my sense of things utterly to the speaking pair, silencing the vibrations and subtle sounds of the minds around me. Antares didn’t seem to want to draw any attention to me, either, for though what he said next no doubt referred to me, he was careful not to gesture.

“Our victory was complete.”

The man grinned widely and I was overwhelmed by the relief in him, washing out like a water tub overturned, or the whole of the sea itself. I couldn’t see but could feel the happy hum of the children’s backs underneath of his two hands. I reached out to him tentatively and could see a woman of middle age but strong, hair coiled thick on her head in the style of the women who served in the Ambarian military. Antares didn’t need my gifts to deduce the same.

“Your wife will be returned to you in time, by the southern pass,” he offered, eyes falling carefully on the children who were beginning to smile, too, slowly aware of what was transpiring. “By midwinter she will come home to find you as tall as her shoulders.”

There was such warmth in the words that I forgot for a moment that I was the enemy, the viper darting among the sheep, that it was my people who had been numberlessly slain and we who had lost.

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