Firstborn

by Michelle West

  “Neither would I.”

  He nodded. “But you do not have her gifts; you have—as Jarven and I—learned other ways. Jewel trusts instinct, and her instincts are good. You have learned to question yours. You look at what is in front of you, Finch. You understand your own goals, your own desires—but you work with what is there. You privilege planning over dreaming, and it is impossible to plan with any intelligence if what you view is the daydream, not the reality.

  “You are regent. It is my belief that Terafin will prosper under your regency in a way it would not prosper under Jewel’s in more mundane circumstances. You look ill-pleased.”

  “Do I?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m probably being overprotective. Jay saved us all. If it weren’t for her—”

  “Yes, but that is irrelevant, as you should know. I will not press you on this; I am fatigued, and I have much to do in the foreseeable future.”

  Finch turned toward the door, reached it, turned back. She rested her shoulders and the back of her head against the wooden panels as she regarded Haval. “You believe the regency will not be short.”

  Haval nodded.

  “Jay will come back.”

  “Yes. I did not say that she would not return.” There was a hint of something in him, then, something that felt real. “You will have a very, very short regency if she does not.”

  “But if she’s back—” She cut off the rest of the thought, the sentence, unwilling to expose it.

  He heard it anyway. “I believe your regency and her return are fast becoming entirely unrelated. I am sorry.” He looked at the scattering of tailoring supplies that carpeted the floor around his feet. “Hannerle is quite angry about it. She has demanded—and begged—that I ‘do something.’ And so, I am here.”

  “And Jarven?”

  “Is here, as well. Understand what we will build, here. It has already begun.”

  • • •

  The tree of fire was not the heart of The Terafin’s domain; it was, however, her stronghold. The Terafin did not understand why, and Meralonne was content to leave her ignorant. She would learn, if she survived. Her survival was not in his hands.

  It was, he thought, in the hands of those who lived at the forest heart. Chief among them was the being Birgide had called a tree. And perhaps that was not inaccurate; the Warden saw much, saw clearly. But it was, to trees, what the Twin Kings were to short-lived, starving street urchins.

  “Illaraphaniel.”

  Meralonne, who knew what to expect, felt a moment of pale wonder at the man who swept him a wild, chaotic bow. It was not a mortal motion, but it mimicked the Weston gesture of respect.

  He knew, had known, that the forest whispered—and shouted—The Terafin’s name, but nothing, save the tree of fire, had made so clear how deeply rooted she was in these lands, how clearly they heard her. This man was arborii. His hair was, at base, the platinum of the Arianni, and his form, like theirs: he was taller than Meralonne by perhaps six inches, but slender in a way that evoked saplings, young trees. His eyes were the color of the Weston sky.

  As he rose—and if the bow was fluid and graceful, it was not precise—Meralonne offered a shallower bow, in kind.

  “You are surprised.”

  “I am. I have not seen your kin thus for a very long time.”

  “And if I stand here,” the servant replied, with a broad smile, “you will be able to tell me the exact count of days in your reckoning.”

  “I have spent much time in mortal lands; the days and hours of that reckoning are hopelessly tangled.”

  “Ah, perhaps, perhaps. You are expected, and I must not let you tarry. But it has been long, as well, since we have spoken with your kin; we are shaking out our branches and growing our finery and waiting.”

  “They will not pass this way,” Meralonne said softly.

  “Oh?” For a moment the arborii looked confused. The moment passed. “They will have to pass this way,” he said gently. “Or so the ancients say. Do you think they will fight?”

  “They will most certainly fight if you mean to hinder their passage. But they will not ride without The Terafin’s permission; not through these lands.”

  “Oh, but they must. Is that not why The Terafin has left us?”

  “Brother, you speak and speak and speak,” another voice joined them. Another of the arborii. Unlike the first, this one was brown-haired and, instead of streaks of green and red, had actual leaves growing from her braided hair.

  “I am not offended, if that is your concern,” Meralonne told her. “I am . . . grateful.”

  “Yes, but if you are grateful to listen, he will plant himself here and take root. We have been rooted for so long, he will waste the spring babbling. And your time, no doubt. Have you eaten?”

  “I have.”

  “I am bid to inform you that you will not light your bowl of fire here. It is tolerated, but it is not welcome; the only fire that should burn in this forest is hers.”

  “It was not originally hers.”

  “What it was does not matter. What it is does. And it only burns the rootless.”

  The young man tilted his head to the side. “Will it burn you, do you think?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you tried to touch it?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you should?”

  The arborii who had chosen to appear female laughed. “Did I not warn you, Illaraphaniel?”

  “Yes.” He had been reluctant to come here; he could not remember why. “Have many awakened?”

  “Many? By whose reckoning?”

  “Yours, perhaps.”

  “No. By our reckoning, few—but perhaps by yours, many. I do not know if you will recognize them all—I think most were barely planted when you went into exile.”

  The branches above their heads creaked ominously.

  Barely, in this context, was ancient, immortal. “This is not where I should be,” Meralonne said softly. “The season is Winter, and I am a Winter Lord.”

  “The world is in Winter, yes,” the arborii said, speaking in unison, although their inflections and tones were different. “But you feel it, too: this world is Jewel’s, and she has come to it new. It is spring, Illaraphaniel. It is not yet Summer, but the Winter holds no sway here.”

  “Not none.”

  “Almost none. Look!” And speaking thus, they led him into a clearing of sorts. It was almost a small field, irregular in shape; trees girded it, but had been pulled back to allow sunlight in. The heart of ancient forests could be dark places if the trees were not mindful.

  This was not dark. He had seen places such as this in his youth, before wars had destroyed them, and he remembered the screams of burning trees, their voices stilled, their bodies gutted. The warring gods knew no pity when bent upon revenge or conquest.

  The forests, however, were not helpless. Not all of them.

  They were awake, these trees. Not just the two who had come to escort him—as if he were a child, who might not hear the ancients, or a mortal, too easily lost. He was not inclined to feel insult when moments of wonder were so rare.

  The arborii numbered in the dozens. They plaited each other’s hair, or lay aground, turned upward to face the sun, to absorb it across the entirety of their bodies. Some wore vines and leaves as clothing—the two who met him first had—but others did not. They wanted sun and wind and perhaps even rain.

  He could not remember a gathering such as this.

  Or perhaps he had never been considered an appropriate guest. What response would he have given before his fall?

  He did not know. He was lost, a moment, in the return to a living, breathing forest. When The Terafin had granted him permission to both wander and protect her lands, he had not seen arborii, but he had heard their whispers in the rustling of leaves, the shift of their branches. He had been aware, as none but the Warden could be, that the wilderness was waking.

  Had he considered it spring? Sprin
g was not one of the true seasons; it was a mortal word, a mortal contrivance, a wish for the end of winter. And yet, the arborii spoke of spring, and he could see summer in their awakening and in their youthful joy. Years, centuries, they had slumbered and perhaps dreamed.

  Now, they spoke.

  Hands were raised in greeting; he was surprised until he realized they were not raised for his benefit, but for the benefit of his escorts. There was no formality in their address or their approach, nor could he tell which of these trees were truly ancient and which, like Celleriant, were merely old in mortal terms.

  But he knew that they would not speak thus to the White Lady. The Summer Queen. Even at the height of Summer, she was not given to familiarity; she might hear their voices, and they might know it, but their voices would fall into the hush of awe.

  And fear.

  “You are thinking of Ariane, yes?” the woman said.

  Meralonne did not reply.

  “These forests are not hers,” the man said gently. “Our Lord is not given to the formality that power often demands; nor does he define dignity in such strict terms.”

  He glanced at the three who lay flat out on wild grass.

  The woman laughed. “Or in any terms, really. The sun is lovely, Illaraphaniel. Perhaps you will join us?”

  “It is not for me,” he replied. But he replied in the tongue of trees and living things, not his own, and certainly not the Weston beloved of The Terafin.

  “It is a pity. Once, we are told, it was. But not all of your kin are so stiff and severe—at least, we hope not. It will be such a disappointment.”

  “If they ride to war—and it is The Terafin’s hope that they will—they will be as much a disappointment as I.”

  The man shook his head. “They will have time, here, if they choose to spend it. Time, we can give.”

  They spoke truth. He shook his head in wonder at The Terafin, at her Warden, at the ignorance that was their birthright, and quite probably their doom.

  • • •

  He expected to find the eldest in the center of this clearing; he did not. The eldest stood as part of the periphery. But his roots could be seen and felt long before one could touch the girth of his trunk, and his branches cast long and darkening shadows.

  “Thus it is,” a new voice said.

  Meralonne stilled instantly; without thought, his hand fell to his sword, and his sword came.

  At his back, silence fell in a widening circle. Only the woman who had walked by his side—and who had stepped back—spoke. “It is not an ax,” she chided, as if speaking to young children. “And he is not our enemy. His was one of the First Voices. He means no harm here.”

  “Yet harm can be done, regardless,” the eldest said, as he stepped out of the shadows his great trunk cast.

  Chapter Five

  HE WAS TALL. TALLER than Meralonne and taller than any of the arborii who had chosen to step away from their literal roots to bask in sunlight and freedom of movement. His hair was not a single color, but all of those found in the nature of the wilderness; dusk, dawn, day, midnight, touched by green and gold and orange. Leaves he wore, but leaves of silver, of gold, of diamond, as if each were individual scales, the whole of which became armor.

  And he wore a crown.

  Meralonne did not set his sword aside. He lowered it, but it would not leave his hand.

  “Illaraphaniel.” The eldest nodded, the movement light; he did not bow.

  “Eldest.”

  “Do you not recognize me?”

  “I recognize your voice,” was the soft reply. It was true.

  “You did not think to hear it again, ere the end?”

  “No, Eldest.”

  “You did not visit.”

  “No.”

  “You will not tell me that you were much occupied?”

  “I would not tell you anything you already know.”

  “Your heart is a Winter heart.”

  “Yes, Eldest. And it will be a Winter heart until the coming of Summer. I know no other way.”

  At some unspoken signal, speech in the clearing resumed; speech, laughter, something that sounded like mortal friendship in both its heat and warmth.

  “We used to envy you,” the eldest said softly. Given the rising volume, it was a wonder he could be heard at all. “You could travel. We could not. Oh, we could leave our trees—but never for long, and never safely. And yet, we are here, and you, who can travel, cannot ever leave yourself.”

  “Had I known that you were awake, I would have left the mortal realm.”

  “Ah. I was not, as you must suspect, awake. You might have spoken; I would not have heard your words, except perhaps in dream. Perhaps your sword would have caused enough pain to break my slumber—but perhaps not. We have been preserved from the malice of man and the malice of other predators, but we lay in Winter as you still do.”

  “You wished to speak with me?”

  “I did. I have desired it since I first became aware of your presence. I forgive the sword; it has long been the first element of greeting between our kin, even if it was not always so. You ride to war.”

  “I do not ride,” Meralonne replied. “But I wait, yes. I will be summoned. I can almost hear the horns.”

  “It was boon to you, then, that your ancient enemy once again strides these lands?”

  “No.”

  “No? How odd. It is only in his presence that you might redeem yourself.”

  “It is not redemption,” Meralonne replied, his grip on the sword tightening. “We were given a task and we will complete it.”

  “And when it is complete?”

  But he could not speak the words that were the whole of his hope, the whole of his desire. He could not expose them, could not see them shattered. He had waited. He had waited, beyond hope, bereft of the White Lady’s voice and favor. He had not died; he could not, not yet. There was only one death that he would pursue, one death that would be worthy of her. There was only one thing that he would allow to kill him.

  And that being lay in the Northern Wastes, surrounded by Kialli, surrounded by the anima of the dead, his sundered kin, those who had betrayed their only true parent in their desperate search for the love of a god.

  “You are unkind, Eldest,” he finally said.

  “Yes, of course. And kind in equal measure. But you serve the will of the White Lady, in your own fashion; I serve The Terafin, in mine.”

  “She is not the White Lady’s equal.”

  “No. In these lands, she is her superior. The White Lady will not visit these lands without The Terafin’s permission. Yet you are here. I find it perplexing. At first, I thought The Terafin did not know. Her connection to us was tenuous; we were only barely awake.

  “But we heard her, in our slumber, and we lifted our collective branches to better catch the sound of her voice. We heard Ishavriel. We could not move as we now move, but we did what we could. And, Meralonne, she did what she could. Had she consulted us, we would have been horrified, terrified, for she took the fire of the dead, the pyre upon which they lay, but which cannot consume them, and she made it her own.

  “And it is here: fire as warmth. Fire as succor. It is a thing that mortals speak of, but until The Terafin, we could not understand why or how. It is her fire that is our spring. And were she stronger or more certain, it is that fire that would become our sun, our summer. It would consume nothing. It is miraculous.

  “It is as miraculous, to me, as the first time I heard my own voice. It was a gift I could not even think to ask for, who lived rooted and mute.”

  “That was not a gift I gave,” he whispered.

  “No. But you were present when your sister woke me.” He looked over Meralonne’s head, which required no effort on his part at all, as if aware that this truth was the one that would wound.

  Shianne.

  “Yes,” the eldest said, as if the single word in all its complexity had escaped him. “We thought her dead,” he continued
softly, “and, in truth, she will be soon. She will live less than a full mortal span of years; she is mortal now, and mortality is part of her essential nature. I do not understand how this came to pass; I see the hand of a god in it, and I will not hazard a guess as to which.

  “We have long avoided gods, where it was possible to do so. But, Illaraphaniel, we can still hear her voice when she speaks. She walked in these woods. She spoke. We hear no other voice so clearly as hers, excepting only our lord’s. And perhaps not even that. Shianne was once of us in a way that The Terafin cannot be.”

  He said nothing in reply, listening instead to the distant, playful voices of the arborii; feeling, as he did, the absence of warmth and youth. Failure—even if it had not been, in the end, his own—had marked and changed him.

  “What do you intend, Illaraphaniel?”

  “Was it not you, Eldest, who extended an invitation to me? Should it not be me who therefore asks that question?”

  “Perhaps.” The eldest lifted his head and gazed to the west. “You have heard the distant horns.”

  “Yes, Eldest.”

  “You do not search for them.”

  “I have been content to wait.”

  “Why? Beneath the streets of your mortal city, your kin lie sleeping—but they will not sleep much longer. I hear the horns winded that will wake them, although those horns are not yet sounded from my lands.”

  Meralonne bowed head. “Even from here.”

  “Yes. I ask again, what will you do? Their heralds cannot reach them, not yet. It is my Lord’s desire that the Sleepers not wake. She understands what you are. She understands where your loyalty and duty lie. She understands that your service to Terafin, and to the magi, has been a way to while away your long exile. But you are not yet what you were; you were lessened in every way.

  “She knows you will leave—must leave—when you are finally summoned. When you are, Illaraphaniel, these borders will no longer open in welcome to you. There will be no safe place in The Terafin’s lands for you or your kin without her permission. But she does not fully understand what that means. She knows only that if the three awaken, she will lose the city.