The Hidden Icon by Jillian Kuhlmann

reason enough to tell you tonight, with your story.”
    “What is Re’Kether?”
    “An ancient place. We will pass through its heart, where the ruins have… memories. Theba walked there once.”
    I was chilled by his words, and by the numb look on his face as he spoke. It was too much, all of this at once, and I fought the urge to slump against my bed in exhaustion and fear. Theba had walked there once, he claimed. But what he didn’t say, he thought: she would walk there again. In me.
    Curiosity was easier then, than the horrors that fought to overwhelm me. Though my voice was far from steady, it signaled that the last question would be mine, and his a willing answer.
    “If I’m Theba, what does that make you?”
    His face could betray far less than it had, it seemed, turning stony, almost inward. To what cold place did he go when he looked like that? Gannet’s answer came quick and quiet, his retreat after just the same.
    “That is not my secret to give, Han’dra Eiren.”
     
     

Chapter 6
     
    It was eight days more before we reached the first ruined village. I only knew it was a village by the foundations half buried in the sand, bricked in a pattern that revealed hearth and pit stones, the cellar lain in the east to cool during the hottest hours of the day. As the road we took narrowed between the growing density of ruins, we were forced to slow down. I could walk beside the barge in the sun, and sweat and breathe freely and feel human again. But I wasn’t free, not with a trio of guards near me at all times. And I wasn’t human, if I chose to believe what Gannet had told me.
    Even though I didn’t believe him, I had begun to question every impulse, every thought, wondering if the things that I felt and wanted and willed weren’t actually mine. Gannet had said that for his kind, there was no distinction between icon and deity. Eiren was Theba. Theba was me. But I couldn’t accept it.
    “There’s nothing in your heart that isn’t hers,” Gannet insisted after one particularly heated argument.
    “The dread goddess doesn’t have a heart.”
    His look had been cold, unknowable.
    “Then neither do you.”
    There was more he wasn’t telling me, like who he was, and what he and his sister wanted with Theba. But like his first secret, these were guarded as closely as his masked features. I turned a grim eye on the outlying buildings that grew more numerous and nearer together until they were clearly recognizable as the little sprawl that tumbled naturally outside of a city. The soldiers whose job it was to clear a path for the barge grew anxious, as though some gloom hung over them, as well. They gathered gingerly, almost with fear, those stones that threatened our path. As I peered down what I could only imagine as alleys and wasteways, scrubbed by sand and the hard glare of the sun over many hundreds of years, I felt a darkness touch me, too. Had it spilled over from the soldiers, or as we approached the decadent center of these ruins did I simply begin to feel it as well? I did not need to know what they knew about this place. Shadows sprang from where there were no stones to cast them, and when I looked again they were gone.
    At twilight Gannet descended from the barge in search of me.
    “We won’t be able to navigate a safe course by night,” he explained, and as he spoke the barge slowed.
    “We’ll have to stay?” We had moved sluggish as candle fat rolling down a taper in the ruins, and though I wanted to be away, I was as drawn to the ruins as I was inexplicably repulsed by them.
    Gannet’s eyes were hooded in the growing dark and the thin shadows created by his mask.
    “Just one night. You’ll need to remain with Dresha Morainn. Re’Kether breeds foul dreams by night and I won’t leave you alone.”
    Though he had shared with me far stranger things, I sensed that Gannet spoke from his own discomfort, and that he valued solitude as highly as I did. I had the feeling, too, that he would