“You think of vows as words. You even call them that. You give your word.”
Adam nodded.
“But words are just moving air, dead air. They are sound. They mean as much as the breeze. There are no Oathbinders left,” he continued. “When they walked, words could be sealed and bound. They could be wed to life—and the breaking, to death. But now? Nothing.”
“My word is not worth nothing,” Adam said. Shadow seldom offended him, but this was important.
“Can you fly?” the cat asked.
Adam blinked. “. . . No.”
“Tell me you can.”
“Why? It would be—”
“A lie, perhaps. Yes. But you could tell me that lie. There are other lies. There are truths that become lies. There are lies that become truth. It is all just words.” He hissed, sent sand up in a spray, and padded toward the wagon.
“Shadow, wait—”
“For what?” the cat countered, flicking his wings as if to literally swat Adam’s concerns away. “You will tell me that your word has meaning, yes?”
Adam nodded. And then spoke, because the cat didn’t bother to look back. “Yes.”
“You will tell me that her word has meaning.”
“Yes, of course.”
“This is why, stupid boy. She has carved words of dead air and daydream here, at the heart of herself. These are her vows. She has made them all but unbreakable.”
Adam frowned. “Do I have words like this?”
“How should I know?”
“Can you tell me what they say? Can you read them out loud to me?”
Shadow snorted. “You should have studied harder,” he said, with a kind of bored condescension. He was not afraid of Jewel’s vows.
“Shadow . . .”
“What now?” The gray cat leaped lightly over the small railings that had been lifted; this was truly a Matriarch’s wagon.
“The forest—the forest beings—seem to understand what the Matriarch wants. They understood it before she’d ever spoken to them. She’s never given them orders—that I know of—and yet they obey what has never been spoken. I don’t think they care much for us,” he added, “but they care for the things she cares for.”
“Yessssss?”
“Is this why?”
“Yes. You are being less stupid today.”
“Have you always seen them?”
“. . . But not much less stupid.”
Adam, however, continued. The cat used the word stupid the way most people drew breath. “If these are her vows, and these are her words, why has she abandoned this wagon?”
• • •
The cat turned fully to face him and sat heavily in sun-hot sand. He was staring at Adam, something almost predatory in his face. Something beyond the prominent fangs.
“Why,” he asked, tail swishing, “do you think it is abandoned?”
“It does not fly,” Adam replied. “It does not hover. It does not move.”
“Perhaps she is inside.” But he looked to the sand that surrounded them, not to the wagon. “Perhaps she has gone to her city.”
Adam couldn’t leap the guardrail; he climbed over it instead while the cat snickered. The Weston words were written across the narrow door. Not all the wagons in the south were built this way; some created interior space with stretched, oiled cloth, and some were even more open. But this was very old in both style and substance.
“Are you sure you should touch that?” Shadow asked.
“I’m certain of nothing,” Adam replied, “except that you should stop scratching the floor.”
Shadow sniffed.
Adam opened the door. He half expected that it would be locked—or worse, guarded—but it wasn’t; the door slid easily into the small enclosure. Adam froze in the frame, while Shadow butted him in the small of the back with what was probably his head.
“What? What? What?”
Adam had spent his life in wagons and tents. He had been allowed free rein of his mother’s wagon—the Matriarch’s wagon—one of the few who was. Margret was allowed the same theoretical freedom, but his mother’s expectations, and frequently bitter disappointments, had made the wagon cage to his sister.
Cage, not home.
“Yes,” his mother had said, her voice so bitter there was almost nothing else in it. “It’s a cage. It’s her cage. If she can’t learn to live in it, you will all perish when I’m gone.” Adam’s hands had massaged her stiff neck as she spoke. “You think I’m harsh. You think I’m hard on her. No, don’t speak—you know how I feel about lying.” He had intended to say nothing, understanding that this—this listening to whatever she felt she could safely share—was the only gift he could offer his mother.
“I’m not nearly as hard on her as life will be. I’m not nearly as demanding. I get angry at her. But, Adam, if she cannot become stronger, life will break her. She carries the weight of Arkosa. You don’t understand what that means.”
“But I do,” he said, the words not protest, but quiet confirmation. “I’ve watched you all my life.”
“Aye, you have, little peacemaker,” his mother said fondly, some of the bitterness seeping out of her voice. She never, ever spoke this way to Margret. He wished, not for the first time, and certainly not the last, that she would. “But you’re a boy. You’re a son. You will never be called upon to bear the burden I bear. You will never be forced to be mother to Arkosa.”
“I would be father, if I could.”
“Yes, love, you would. But fathers cannot carry life. And if you were a daughter, you would not love me nearly so much, and you would not trust me.”
He remembered his outrage. “Margret trusts you—you are Arkosa!”
“Margret is a fool,” his mother replied. “She needs and wants too much. But she is not so much of a fool as that. You don’t understand. Affection is a luxury. It is an indulgence. To give it, to receive it—that is not the purpose of the Matriarch. She does not trust me, Adam, because she cannot trust me. I will hurt her more than any enemy she will ever face.”
Her neck was stiff again. Adam’s hands were trembling.
“It is what my mother did to me. I am stronger than your sister. Go. Talk to her. Comfort her if you can.”
He hesitated, torn between the two women to whom he was most closely related, each of them in pain.
• • •
He shook himself. This wagon was not that wagon, and his mother was dead. Even the memories she had left for his sister were like scars: faded with time, a reminder of the pain that had caused them. Jewel Markess ATerafin, The Terafin, had not grown up in this wagon. It had never been her cage.
It was empty. Of course it was empty. Light streamed in through the open, narrow windows, the shutters absent; it hit a threadbare rug, an empty chair. On the slender windowsill was a worn pipe, empty of leaf and ash. He did not recognize the pipe, nor did he recognize the rug or the chair. His gaze moved past them until he saw a door; it was not the one he had entered. Weston in style, it was not the more common Southern hangings found in the interiors of a building.
Shadow’s low growl—always more threatening than his complaints—brought Adam fully back to himself. “It’s a . . . door. Jewel’s not here.”
The cat’s hiss was a physical sensation; his mouth might have been near Adam’s ear. “Why are you standing there?”
Hand trembling, although he could not later say why, he reached for the door’s handle. It was worn, brass, but it was comfortingly solid, neither too warm nor too cold. Drawing breath, he opened the door and stood staring at the busy streets of Averalaan.
• • •
“I don’t understand.” Adam pivoted in the doorway to see the wagon abandoned in the golden sand of the Sea of Sorrows.
“No,” Shadow agreed, grooming his paw. “You don’t.”
“Is the Matriarch—was she—Voyani? Some make their way to your smelly, crowded city.”
“It is not my smelly, crowded city—
it is hers.”
“What are we doing here, Shadow?” Adam asked, almost bewildered.
“I am protecting you. You are being stupid.”
“Ah, apologies. I meant, what are we supposed to be doing here?”
“Oh, that.”
Adam had assumed that this was Jewel’s dream—or nightmare. Now, he wasn’t certain. He knew that he couldn’t wake her. He’d tried. He was here to wake her. He was here.
You are only a son.
“Yes, Matriarch.” He stepped through the door into familiar streets.
• • •
Although he seldom ventured into the hundred holdings, the Common wasn’t unfamiliar. He recognized it because merchants parked their wagon stalls beneath the bowers of Birgide’s trees. Had he not reached these streets through that open door, he would have assumed it was real.
He listened to passing conversations, some of them arguments, some gossip; he had learned early to weed out the constant barking of merchants. Everything about this place was as he remembered it. At no point did the dream shift to include him; at no point did it create improbability—if one did not consider a city of this size to be improbable—to terrify or lull him.
But as he knelt beside one of the great trees, Shadow hissed. Adam picked up a leaf, and then two.
“You are wasting time.”
Adam nodded, almost absently. “I am. But this is a dream, and time has different rules in dreams.”
Shadow shrieked. This caused ripples of panic to spread throughout the dense crowd. Adam placed the leaves against his chest, beneath the cloth of his shirt. He then frowned and, frowning, headed toward the Merchant Authority.
• • •
The guards were not polite—or they wouldn’t have been, had Adam been without Shadow. One of the two appeared to recognize the cat, or at least associate him with The Terafin. They didn’t like the look of Adam, but as Voyani he was accustomed to that. They really didn’t like the look of the gray cat, and a conference of whispers produced a third guard. He was obviously in charge, but he didn’t have the authority to allow Adam to enter with a dangerous animal.
Shadow was outraged.
Adam said, “Please—there are Terafin Chosen outside of the Terafin offices. One of them will vouch for me and my—my cat.”
One of the younger guards was sent up the stairs, and he returned with one of the Chosen. To Adam’s surprise, it was Captain Arrendas. He shook himself. Why would that be surprising? It was Jewel’s dream.
“Stupid boy.”
Arrendas was surprised, not at the insult—none of the Chosen could be surprised at what fell out of the mouths of these cats—but by Adam himself. He turned to the Merchant Authority guard and said, “Yes, he is one of the Terafin’s personal servants. He is not ATerafin, but he is much trusted.”
The guards, with some relief that the decision—and its resultant consequences—was not theirs, moved aside to let Adam and Shadow pass.
Arrendas marched in silence to the Terafin offices. He opened the door with a word, not a hand, and walked Adam—and Shadow, who was now looking dangerously interested—to the front desk.
The woman behind it stared at the gray cat. She then rose instantly and headed toward a door behind her and to the side; it opened, she spoke—he couldn’t catch the words—and returned to his side. “Captain,” she said, to Arrendas, “Finch bids you enter as well, if you wish.”
• • •
He wasn’t surprised that Finch was happy to see him—Finch had always been happy to see him. She was, Adam understood, like an Ona, a sister to The Terafin, and trusted as if she were kin.
She was already almost all the way across the room before the door had closed, and she enveloped him in a hug. He leaned into it, inhaling; everything about Finch was as he remembered it. Everything.
“Is Jay back, too?” she asked, when she was willing to let him go.
“She is not,” Shadow informed her, pouting.
Finch immediately dropped her hand to his head and began to scratch behind his ears. “You’re not to destroy anything here,” Finch told him gently. “Unless it’s to save a life.”
Adam, however, was staring. He held a hand out to Finch, and said, “May I—may I heal you?” It was awkwardly phrased, but it was an awkward question, which was why he had chosen to ask it in Weston.
“I’m not injured,” Finch said, obviously confused. “Why?”
“It’s like pinching yourself in a dream,” Adam told her.
Finch looked down at Shadow again, her expression changing as he watched it.
“It will only take a second.”
“Take as long as you think you need,” Finch said, offering her hand.
He hadn’t lied. He only needed a second. What he felt beneath his fingers was life; Finch’s life.
Adam was in Averalaan.
22nd day of Morel, 428 A.A.
Merchant Authority, Averalaan Aramarelas
“I don’t understand,” Adam whispered.
Finch, who had been overjoyed to see him, gently retrieved her hand. He barely noticed. He looked around the office in a state of utter confusion. For a moment, he reminded her of the lonely, frightened boy she had first met in the Houses of Healing. Without thought, she shifted into Torra.
He must have understood why; he flushed.
“Jay isn’t with you,” she said.
“She is. I mean—she was. I mean, I was with her.”
Shadow began to snicker, and Finch placed a firm hand on his head. “You are all so stupid.”
“Where were you? Let me get tea.”
Adam shook his head. Wanly, he added, “I have no appetite. At all.” He was staring at her, a mixture of longing and dread crowding his expression. “We were—we are—in a room in a cave. I—” He shook his head again. “The Matriarch met the Oracle. The Oracle’s with us. We’ve been with her for a few days; she’s been learning what the Oracle is willing to teach.
“But she didn’t wake up yesterday morning. She’s alive,” he added quickly. “She’s dreaming. But she won’t wake. Even the cats couldn’t wake her.”
Finch fixed Shadow with a questioning glance. She hoped it was suitably firm. The cats were almost physically incapable of admitting to limitations, and failure would be high on their list.
Shadow, however, flicked his tail rather than avoiding her gaze. In a voice shorn of his customary good temper—which is to say, whining—he said, “I could not find her.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know.”
And the odd thing was, she did. The cats were the definition of frivolity—murderous frivolity—most of the time. They squabbled like young siblings. They complained about boredom, which was apparently the besetting sin of the entirety of humanity. But they had come from the forest. “You guard her dreams.”
“Yesssss.”
“You tried to keep her safe from the Warden.”
“Yesssss.”
“You could do this because you can enter her dreams.”
He sniffed. “I know this already.”
“My apologies,” she told him, shifting her hand to scratch behind his ears. “I needed to make certain I knew it. You couldn’t enter this dream. Have the Wardens somehow escaped?”
The great cat snorted; warm air brushed past Finch’s face. “No.”
“Shadow, please—that carpet is worth more than my life!”
“It is ugly. It offends me.”
Finch sighed. To Adam she said, “Clearly, he’s bored. Have things stopped trying to kill you?”
“For four days, nothing has been able to find us—or so I’ve been told.”
“Is that why Shadow can’t reach Jay’s dreams?”
Adam frowned. “I don’t know. Shadow?”
Shadow flicked his wings dismissively.
“Never mind. Sit down, Adam. I need to cancel my next appointment.” Finch left him quickly, without pausing to see if he obeyed.
> • • •
“You touched the Oracle’s crystal.”
Adam nodded.
“You can’t feel it now.”
“How could I? My hands are here. With me. In your city.” He hesitated, and then said, “I started out in the desert. In the Sea of Sorrows. That means nothing to you—it was, and is, a place of sun and sand and wind. But when I opened the wagon door, it opened here. I thought it was like the Sea of Sorrows. I thought it was part of her dream.
“But you’re not a dream.”
“Possibly a nightmare, given current events. Ah, no—we’re fine. We’re all fine. When Jay wakes, if you’re with her, tell her that. Shadow, do you know what’s happening?”
“Yesssss. Nothing is happening.”
It was so easy to forget just how deadly the great cats were. Finch exhaled. “We’re not wise. We’re not ancient. We’re not—at least I’m not—magical. I’m sorry I don’t know these things. I probably should, but I’ve always relied on you and your brothers to tell me what I need to know, because you know everything.”
She felt Adam’s gaze drill the side of her face. He was earnest and honest both, and he found obvious lies uncomfortable. But these weren’t entirely falsehoods. The cats were everything she was not. The cats—especially Shadow—stood guard over and around Jay, and they did what they could to both infuriate her and keep her alive. They could do things Finch couldn’t do.
Shadow growled but was obviously pleased. The cats loved flattery.
“She is Sen,” Shadow told Finch, looking down his august nose although his head was at a lower level than hers. “This is the heart of her power.” That nose wrinkled. “It is smelly and ugly and crowded and stupid, but so is everything she loves. We are here because she is here.”
Adam shook his head. “She’s not. She can’t be.”
Shadow yowled in outrage.
Finch, however, closed her desk drawer. “I declare it a state of emergency,” she said, smiling. “Let’s go back to the manse.”
“But she can’t be here.”
“Neither can you.”
Chapter Seven
22nd day of Morel, 428 A.A.
Firstborn Page 18