Firstborn

by Michelle West

  And they had paid.

  She had paid.

  Adam did not see the power the Matriarch wielded; he saw the costs of that power. The burden. The loss. They were never so high as when the Matriarchs dreamed.

  Not all dreams, he chided himself. Not all sleep.

  It was true, but he could not make himself believe it of this sleep. He understood that the Terafin Matriarch had come to this place to find the Oracle; that she had come to take the Oracle’s test. To pass it was to gain a type of power that no Matriarch before her had wielded in the history of the Voyanne. But Shadow had made clear—with cold corrections from Avandar—that those who undertook the Oracle’s test very seldom passed it. They were broken by it, instead.

  Avandar said Jewel had passed.

  Shadow, however, had said, “Not yet. She has survived so far. But she has not yet reached the place of choice.”

  It was Shadow Adam believed correct, and he wished it were not. He made his way to the bedside, knelt on the stone floor; the pallet was barely held above the ground. He took her hand in his; no one stopped him. Angel was here, and Angel was den; he considered Adam kin.

  Or he considered Adam harmless. Perhaps both.

  The Oracle came to stand beside him. The Matriarch was pale, her eyes ringed with dark half circles that implied too much drink or too little sleep, or both.

  But sleep, she had had.

  “When she spoke, what did she say?” the Oracle asked.

  Silence.

  It was Shianne who answered. Of the people in this room, she feared the Oracle least. “We do not know, Eldest.”

  The Oracle’s brows rose, the shape of her eyes widening and narrowing in succession as she absorbed this information and its implications, very few of which were clear to Adam.

  “Shadow,” Adam said.

  “I wasn’t listening,” the cat replied, adding a sniff at the end of the sentence.

  “I wasn’t either,” Snow added. “It was too boring.”

  Avandar spoke a single word. Celleriant spoke a different one. A brief flash of light filled the room and the cats mewled in outrage.

  “You are very like her, you know,” the Oracle said, as she studied Jewel’s sleeping face.

  Adam blinked, and this time he did look up. The light in the Oracle’s cupped hand was . . . her heart. He could see the gaping void in her chest where the heart naturally resided—if natural was a word for such a thing.

  “I am nothing like her,” he replied. “I do not have her strength. I do not have her burdens. I could not carry them.”

  “My child,” she said, in a voice that was so familiar, “you will have to carry very similar burdens in the end. I am sorry.”

  “I cannot,” he said, with complete conviction. “I cannot be Matriarch. I am male.”

  “I know,” the Oracle replied. “Do you understand why the clans are matrilineal?”

  He nodded gravely. “The mother is always known. The father may not be.”

  “Indeed. And upon the open road it was necessary. But Arkosa has left the Voyanne, and you are of Arkosa. Your sister now rules the ancient, empty city in the Sea of Sorrows. It is there,” she added, “that Jewel Markess now walks.” She gestured, and Adam rose, hovering, anxious.

  “Do you wish to see what she sees in her long dream? Do you wish to know what she does there?”

  “He does not.”

  To Adam’s surprise, it was Shianne who spoke. She had come to stand on the other side of the Oracle, and in the light of the Oracle’s heart, Shianne’s eyes were glinting silver: hard, cold.

  The Oracle said, without turning to face her, “It is not of you that the question was asked. It is not for you to answer it.”

  Adam exhaled. He understood that Shianne did not wish him to look, and he did not wish to see what Jewel saw; it was not truth, but possibility. Yet possibility had created a burden of fear that had destroyed greater men than Adam. He did not decline, not yet; there was one question he had to ask.

  “Will it help to wake her?”

  The Oracle did not reply.

  Shianne stepped forward, and the illumination in the Oracle’s hand was eclipsed, for a moment, by the light that surrounded her. She was mortal, yes. Pregnant. But she was filled with a strange brightness and power that implied—to Adam, from the Dominion—that she was Sword’s Edge. Magi.

  “You will answer his question, Eldest.”

  He was afraid for her then. “Lady—”

  “Nothing the Oracle does is an act of kindness. Nothing. Even stray comments have an edge and a weight—and a cost—that is only apparent when it has become far too late to avoid the debt.” She spoke with certainty, and with anger.

  Adam did not understand it. Almost gently, he stepped between this pale, Winter woman and the bent and wizened Oracle. “I know that,” he told Shianne, his voice as gentle as it ever was when he spoke with adults, not those reckoned children.

  “He does,” Shadow said, growling. Shadow had never liked Adam. “He knows her. He sees her. And she sees him.”

  “He is naive,” Shianne told Shadow, the edge off the chill of her voice. “He is young. In my youth, a being such as he would not yet be complete; his creator would not allow him the freedom of choices such as these.”

  “You are wrong,” the gray cat replied. “But even if he were old, he would still be stupid. You are mortal, Shianne. You chose mortality. How could you choose it when you do not understand it at all?”

  Throughout their discussion, the Oracle waited with outward calm. Adam turned to her and bowed. “I am sorry,” he said, in Weston.

  “Sorry?”

  “We often can’t see the burdens we haven’t yet carried ourselves,” was his grave reply. He studied her expression.

  “You are wondering if perhaps there is any point in speaking to me at all,” the Oracle said. It was not a question.

  “I am wondering, rather, if there is anything I might say or do that you have not already seen.”

  “No. No, Adam of Arkosa, there is not.” The Oracle’s smile was an odd, broken thing. “But it is, perhaps, like mortal love before it has been uttered, offered.”

  Adam was confused.

  “That I know does not change the comfort—and even the occasional joy—I derive from hearing the words. Mortals are fixed in time.”

  Adam glanced at Avandar.

  “Even he. There is only forward, for mortals, no matter when they are. I knew that Jewel would not wake. But I knew also,” she added, at Shadow’s growl, “that she would. Or that she would not dream. Or that she would not survive. All of these variants are true, in a fashion; they all have the potential to be real.”

  “You chose the now to be the one in which she does not wake.”

  “No, Adam. Jewel chose that now. She has the ability to control the gift she has cursed so often since her childhood—but it is not perfect. The seer-born cannot see too much. What they take from me is the ability to see—for a time—almost as I do. It is akin to a second, an eyeblink, no more, but mortals were not created to contain and sustain such an endless, eternal second.”

  “And me?”

  The Oracle waited, the light in her hands pulsing faintly.

  “What do you want of me, then? How can I wake her if she can’t wake herself? I have tried to heal—to use my power as I have used it in the past.”

  “Have you?”

  “When she was dreaming, yes.” He stopped, his brows raised as he considered the Oracle. Finally, he said, “Oh.”

  “Even so. This is not the first time The Terafin has lain abed in sleep.”

  “But you’re the Oracle. The Wardens aren’t here.”

  “No. But, perhaps, Adam, neither is Jewel.”

  • • •

  “What does she speak of?” Shianne now demanded. Shadow sniffed and stalked to the farthest edge of the room, in a definitive bad mood. A very declarative one.

  “You’re always in a bad mood,” Sn
ow told him. But Snow was likewise disgruntled.

  “Why are they annoyed?” Shianne asked again.

  “The Oracle reminds me—or allows me to remind myself—that I’ve met the Matriarch in her own dreams before.”

  “You have already tried to wake her.”

  Adam nodded. “I was not the only one to walk in her dreams that night.”

  Shadow growled. Shianne’s perfect brow rippled once in understanding. She fell silent, and when the silence broke, she said “I have need of you, Adam of Arkosa. If I understand what you are, and what must come to pass, the life for which I have sacrificed eternity may well require your aid. Having surrendered so much to the Oracle, I wish to lose nothing else.”

  He bowed, his cheeks warm, as if her declaration of his usefulness was akin to a declaration of love. He was momentarily giddy because she had said she had a use for him.

  “The Oracle doesn’t want me dead,” he told Shianne. “Whatever role she sees for me, it can’t end here.”

  “You do not understand the nature of time,” the Oracle told him quietly. “It can end here. But it could have ended in the forest, as well. It could end on the Winter road—and that is the most likely outcome of your journey, by far. I think the likelihood that you will die here is small.

  “It is not nearly so small as the possibility that your Jewel will succeed in the task she has undertaken. She is not what the Sen once were. She is too much like you.” A ripple of expression passed; it left her face serene and untouched. “Decide, Adam of Arkosa.”

  He had already decided. He lifted his head and looked into the heart in her hands.

  “No,” she told him.

  He looked up from the clouds that roiled, trapped between her palms and walls of what seemed to be glowing crystal. He saw the heart of the storm there—the Southern Winds in which all history, all death, were trapped. He could almost hear their howl.

  She waited until he looked up to meet her eyes before she spoke again. “It is not enough for you to look.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Place your hands upon the crystal,” were the words her mouth formed. But what he heard, what he felt, were different words. You must touch my heart.

  And how, he thought, did one touch the heart of a god? He knew, of course. On one level there was only one answer. And perhaps on all levels, for Adam, there was only one answer. She was Matriarch of Matriarchs; she carried the burdens his mother, and her mother, and her mother’s mother, stretching back to the first step Arkosa had taken upon the Voyanne, had carried. But she carried them all simultaneously.

  It was death to know too much about the business of Matriarchs.

  But they had always been people. They had never been gods. Adam thought that he could never know too much of the Oracle’s business. His life—his entire life—would not be enough time to even attempt to learn that much. He exhaled. Nodded.

  He heard two voices shrieking in unison as he set his hands to either side of the crystal before slowly forcing his palms to touch the crystal’s sides.

  Stupid, stupid boy!

  • • •

  The wind howled, its voice piercing. It was not a winter wind; it was not cold. There was no snow beneath his feet, and he saw that his feet were neatly gloved in familiar shoes.

  There was sand here. It stretched for as far as most eyes could see. Adam had always had exceptional vision. He started to walk toward the small shape that broke the line of a horizon of azure and gold when a second howling joined the first.

  “Why are you so stupid?” To his right stalked the great, gray cat.

  “How are you here?” Adam whispered.

  The cat’s expression made clear that Adam had descended to even lower depths of stupidity, which should have been impossible while he still breathed. Adam, however, had discovered that there was no lower limit beyond which the cat’s respect could not plummet.

  “Why do I have to save you?”

  “Shadow, I’m not actually here.”

  Shadow’s roar broke the wind’s voice. His expression teetered between complete disgust and astonishment and, because it was Shadow, fell into disgust. This disgust was not, of course, silent.

  • • •

  The Terafin Matriarch was not Voyani. She did not, therefore, have Adam’s experience of the desert; she had crossed it only once in her life, and there had been no ceremony in it, no glimpse of the wastes beneath which lay her ancient home.

  Adam did not, therefore, understand why Jewel dreamed of desert. This was the Sea of Sorrows; he was certain of it. Shadow padded in voluble disgust by his side, and the cat could, without effort, remain disgusted for a very long time. The only cure for it was distraction.

  “What are you looking at, stupid boy?”

  Adam had been wondering that himself. The shape on the horizon had not fully resolved itself, but it was not human. Nor was it large. He understood that the logic of dreaming was not reality; it could warp and twist between one step and the next. Things gifted by dreams—flight, strength—could be lost in an instant, and dreams also deprived him of simple things: the ability to run, for instance. Or to speak.

  He was not afraid of the dream itself. The Warden of Dreams was imprisoned in the heart of the Matriarch’s hidden lands. Such imprisonment could not last forever, but it would be some time yet before the Warden visited those who slept again. He thought they might never visit Jewel and stopped to examine that thought.

  He wasn’t certain where the thought had come from. He glanced at the great, gray cat. “Can you fly?”

  Shadow hissed, flexing his wings.

  “I mean here and now,” Adam added hastily.

  Shadow was sulking. He sent dry, arid sand into the air in a fine mist. “It’s not safe,” he muttered. “It’s your fault.”

  “I am preventing you from flying?”

  The great, gray cat rolled eyes that were predominantly gold—the color, oddly, of the sand itself. “She should have come instead.”

  “She?”

  He hissed.

  “You refer to Shianne?”

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

  Adam sighed. “Why would Shianne be a better choice?”

  “She would know.”

  Adam had no desire to force a pregnant woman into the Sea of Sorrows. But he kept this thought to himself. He knew that Shianne, her body so visibly sheltering an infant, was, and would remain, far more dangerous than he.

  • • •

  When he was halfway to the shape he had first spotted, he stopped in surprise. He had spent so much time in Averalaan, he thought with guilt, that he could not even recognize a wagon. In his own defense, it was not quite like the wagons that had been home to his family’s supplies for his entire living memory—but it was not so very different. Not as different, certainly, as the vast, forbidding interiors of the Terafin manse; not as different as the more modest and yet equally forbidding Houses of Healing.

  It was not moving. His first thought, seeing it, was that it had been abandoned. He saw no horses, no mules, no oxen, nothing that might pull the wagon; nor did he see the carved symbols with which the Matriarchs gifted their wagons with flight in the seas.

  But perhaps, he thought, he was not yet close enough. He quickened his pace and noted only as he drew close to the wagon that Shadow had fallen silent. When he glanced at the cat, he noted the difference in his wings, his fur, his narrowed eyes.

  Twenty yards became ten; ten became five. The wagon was much larger than the wagons from which Arkosa’s Matriarch ruled. The whole of the clan did not travel together; they dispersed throughout the Terreans. Adam had distant cousins he had met no more than a handful of times. None, however, traveled in wagons like this.

  “Is it safe?” Adam asked the cat.

  “Nothing is safe,” the cat replied. There had been no mention of stupidity.

  Adam kept five yards distance between himself and the exterior of the wagon. He had initially
approached the wagon’s back and moved now to view its front.

  There, he stopped. Across the front of the wagon, there were marks, written in red. They were symbols he recognized immediately, although he’d never seen them on a Voyani wagon before.

  “It’s—it’s Weston.” Ellerson had insisted that Adam be educated.

  Ellerson. Adam winced. He had not spent his life in the care of the old man, but it was impossible not to admire someone who was so quietly, so completely, dedicated to service. Worse, it had been impossible not to come to depend on him. His absence made the whole of the West Wing seem funereal.

  “What is Weston?” Shadow asked, a growl at the back of his throat, his eyes facing forward.

  “The language of The Terafin’s people,” Adam replied. “This is Weston. You can’t read it?”

  Shadow didn’t respond in outrage at what would normally have been perceived as a terrible insult. “I can.”

  Adam said, “What does it say?”

  This did get an annoyed hiss from the cat. “You can’t read it?”

  “I’ve been trying to learn to read it. I’m not very good at it yet. Only the trade words.” Which these were definitely not.

  “It is her name,” Shadow told Adam. “Her name and her many vows.”

  “Vows?”

  “The things she has promised,” the cat continued, once again taking no time to insult Adam’s ignorance.

  “To who?”

  This, on the other hand, caused the cat’s brows to rise, changing the shape of his eyes. “To the only person that matters, you foolish, foolish child. To herself.”

  • • •

  Adam did not explain vows or oaths to Shadow. Nor did he quibble with the cat’s astonished, disgusted statement, although he could have. He had known the Terafin Matriarch for long enough to know that it was the vows she had sworn to every other person that would matter.

  Shadow hissed anyway. “Are you listening?” he demanded, pawing sand. “If you do not, I will fly away and leave you here forever.” As if he were, in truth, a very annoyed Ono or Ona.

  “I always listen to you,” Adam said, completely truthfully.