Anghara Kir Hama #01 - The Hidden Queen by Alma Alexander

Author:Alma Alexander [Alexander, Alma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction, General, Fantasy Fiction, Queens
ISBN: 9780060765705
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2002-01-01T18:30:00+00:00

14

She opened her eyes to light. The sun was slanting oddly, too gold; this was not morning. Anghara sat up, jolted fully awake, and rubbed her eyes, looking around her.

The Dance of the Tanassa Hills rose up above and around her, the stones glowing in the sunlight with a pale, golden gleam. She was quite alone, and had been curled up, wrapped tightly in Kieran’s cloak, in a bracken-filled hollow by a fallen lintel, one of only two which had succumbed to the hollow tooth of time and toppled to mar the perfection of the Dance. She could pin down fleeting fragments of dreams, never enough to make an entire and coherent picture—but how could she have allowed herself to fall asleep? How long had she been here? Slowly, the memory of last night came trickling back, so tangled with dreams and visions that Anghara had to fight to separate truth from fantasy, if indeed the division existed. The memories were oddly fragile—brittle, delicate things with wings like butterflies, they fluttered in her mind, uneasy, yet with a sort of preternatural clarity of recall.

She had climbed steadily, smoothly, as though she had known this particular hill path all her life. There was nothing around her except the whisper of wild grasses in the breeze and soft white moonlight pouring over the hillside; in that silent night she was the only thing that moved. Her sense of time fell away from her, pulled back into the human world she left behind and of which it was such a fundamental part—but she had no need of it, not up here. She fell into the rhythm of her stride, and after a while could not have said if she had been climbing for minutes or for hours. And then, very suddenly, the hill flattened out into a level space, and the Dance was there, ghostly in the white light.

Anghara felt her hackles rise as she stepped into the circle, under a massive archway with the great lintel stone spanning the two uprights far above her head. There was an ancient power here, a power which sang to her—something achingly familiar in its sense of strength and of danger, a feeling she knew very well, having wrestled with it at Bresse for long months. She had never been this close to a true Standing Stone before, but she had known instinctively what they were like when she had plucked a pebble from Cascin’s well and named its nature. Her own little stone had defied her, giving visions where she had sought only inner peace—but there was something here in the Dance which she could learn, could master. It was far more ancient, perhaps, than the Sight which was in her blood but the old magic called to it in a language which she could almost—almost—understand…

Again, time slipped from her like a discarded cloak. She sat touching eternity, her back against the cool stone of one of the uprights and her knees drawn up into the circle of her arms, and simply stared wide-eyed into the empty circle flooded with light.

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