Firstborn

by Michelle West

  Meralonne.

  She felt a breeze then; winter breeze. The butterflies seemed to shudder with it all at once, as if they were a single individual. They did not, however, freeze or shatter.

  “I once opened this window.” He turned, again, to the stained-glass image of a young woman, his face hardening. “I have never been able to open it again. The mage believed that I could not—but he counseled against its destruction, as if that were necessary.

  “He said, Terafin, that he thought it would be open again—but once—and not by me. Do you understand?”

  “When it does open, what will happen?”

  “I will find her.” He bowed his head. “You are not required to do anything else, anything other. I believe it is your hand that will open this window—if any now can; the mage could not. He said it was a making, and it was peculiar and specific in nature. Nothing immortal and nothing dead might pass through this portal.

  “One cannot trust the magi, of course. I did try. The butterflies,” he added, “come. But I believe you might open it. I do not know if the window itself will survive the opening.” Even as he said it, she saw the way his pallor shifted, pink giving way to something far more ashen. “I do not know. It is my greatest work—but I will accept its loss if it serves this one purpose.

  “Perhaps you will find another road. And perhaps, if you do, you will resent me. But if need drives you here, I will not allow you into these rooms again without your word.”

  Student, Jewel thought. She had been his student. And she understood that for Cessaly, Gilafas had been a different version of Rath: a man who had, against his own wishes, come to care. He was old. As old as Rath would have been. For the first time—perhaps for the only time—Jewel was grateful that Rath had predeceased her; he would never know the pain of her loss or death.

  “Where is Cessaly?”

  “She is with the Winter Queen.”

  • • •

  “Yes, I will take you with me,” she told the Artisan. “But, Gilafas, no threats are necessary. I would counsel against your company, given what I have seen and what I am becoming, but were I in your position, I would do what you desire to do. But I do not know if I will find my way back to Fabril’s reach in time.”

  Gilafas closed his eyes. Opened them. “I have said I have something for you, have I not?”

  “Yes.”

  “I did not intend to give it to you if you would not agree—and that would have pained me greatly. It is a work, Terafin.” His voice held no pride at all. “It is a working. Had Cessaly made it, it would have been wondrous, powerful, a thing outside of time and place; it would have been art. That was what she was. I am not Cessaly. Nothing I craft will ever be as flawless, as perfect. But: it is a work.

  “It is not here. You must follow.” He held out a hand. She took it with vastly less discomfort than she had the first time; it was warm. It was callused.

  • • •

  The workrooms which contained the mirror and the butterflies—but not the birds, apparently—were warm and bright in comparison to the inner corridors of Fabril’s reach. She thought it interesting that Cessaly, in stained glass, was the icon of Summer—golden, glowing, warm.

  The rest of the halls were not. Where she had been gold and light, they were gray and dark. They were not lit by the magestones used as a matter of course by the wealthy; they were barely lit at all. Gilafas opened one door—one heavy, scored door that was wider than the door to his own rooms had been—and the temperature plunged.

  It was not a short journey, and it made clear to Jewel that Fabril’s reach was very like a dream itself. Its halls were dark and secret, the hush in them hovering over that moment when dream walks, suddenly, into nightmare.

  No maps could be made of these halls. No maps would remain relevant; the halls were very like the halls in the Oracle’s domain. They changed between one hour and the next.

  Jewel watching the play of shadows cast by torchlight, flickering as if moving with independent life. She was not surprised when those shadows did, indeed, lift themselves from the walls, retaining only an echo of the shapes that had originally cast them. One of them was her own.

  Gilafas was watching her. “I see I am meant to let you lead,” he said. “But do not let go of my hand.”

  “Lead?” she repeated, as if she were once again the child that Rath had first found beneath the bridge of the river that cut through her city.

  “Yes. You know where we must go. Or part of you does.”

  • • •

  She followed her shadow. She lost it several times in the darkness ahead, and it did not return—but the torch was bright enough, once her eyes had acclimated to the darkness, that another shadow was cast, and another shadow came to an odd sort of life. In fits and starts, she followed where it led.

  Master Gilafas had fallen almost as silent as her cat; gone was the oddity, the scattered attention, the flow of words that touched on personal history. He waited so patiently Jewel could imagine him as someone’s keeper or caretaker. She could imagine that he could hunt through these halls—for these were the halls, she was certain of it—in which his apprentice had wandered to work.

  She did not wander into the wrong room by mistake; there were doors, but the doors would not open for her. Shadow lifted his forepaw but did not speak; Jewel shook her head. She glanced at Gilafas, but he did not seem unduly perturbed, and she continued to walk.

  The absence of snow did not distract her; she felt the winter in the air.

  She had considered the transformation to The Terafin’s personal rooms—rooms that she had never truly considered her own—to be unsettling, and even upsetting. But once they had undergone that transformation, they had become a place of light, of air, of breeze and the hush of distant forest. The skies were amethyst, clear, the trees grew bookshelves; the floors were pale wood and went on in any direction for as far as the eye could see.

  This felt like a dungeon, a crypt; the open skies did not touch it, and the wind that did was not gentle. She could hear its howl, as if the stone of these walls was so thin it could keep nothing out.

  “Are the halls always like this?”

  “Like what?”

  “Dark. Stone. Cold.”

  “Ah. No, Terafin.”

  “So . . . it’s just for me.”

  He chuckled, which surprised her; his hand tightened briefly around hers. “The reach has a will of its own. It cannot communicate as we do. It is given no voice, no way of making its desire known. Confound that unknown desire, and you will never leave this place—even the maker-born have difficulty navigating its endless corridors.”

  “And you?”

  “I have no desire to force structure or meaning on it. When I leave my own rooms, I do not know what to expect. I try to see it as it is; I accept that it will differ each time. There is no part of my will I attempt to force upon it. I choose to walk; it chooses where my walk will lead me.”

  “How did you search for Cessaly, then?”

  “The same way—but with greater fear and desperation.”

  • • •

  When she heard the horns, she froze. Gilafas’ hand tightened, and he stopped as she came to a stop. Shadow was silent, but his wings, tense, had risen; his fur was like a second skin. She gave him no commands. Here, in the wilderness, he was wild, and she was content to allow him to be so.

  She was content, she thought, to allow her forests to be so. To allow her personal rooms—and they were hers, even if they didn’t inhabit her inner heart the way the rooms in the twenty-fifth holding, or even the West Wing, had—to be wild. She could at times find herself robbed of breath when she stopped to notice—but as with all things, familiarity often bred a comfortable disregard.

  She could not see the halls as she saw any of the other things—but she knew, by Shadow’s countenance, his fur, and his sharp silence, that he could and did. He expected trouble. He expected martial trouble. But he was still at home in this d
arkness, this place. And, she thought, she must learn to be at home in it as well.

  Her legs ached. She had no idea how long they’d been walking and searching for the one room that would allow her entry, but her body told her it had been a while.

  Throughout it all, the guildmaster held her hand. In the dim light, she was reminded of walking through the city streets, her hand in her father’s or, more often, her Oma’s. They wanted to protect her; to keep her safe. She’d felt, at the time, that they could.

  But she was Terafin now. She was seer-born. She was on a path that would either elevate her or break her. She saw the whole of the city as one fragile being and knew that there was no safety. And yet that safety had not been a lie.

  Or perhaps it had. But it felt like truth.

  She stopped walking. Gilafas stopped as well.

  “There is no door here,” he pointed out, voice mild, the final word rising slightly, as if in question.

  Jewel smiled up at him; he was taller than she by a good head, but she had not really noted the physical difference so distinctly before. “Not yet.” She lifted their interlocked hands. “You don’t want me to become as lost as some poor thief—and I am grateful for that, Master Gilafas. Of all the gifts offered me, it is the one I should value most.”

  It was his turn to look confused, and confusion suited the odd lines of his face. “But I have not yet given you what I made.”

  “No, you haven’t. But you have given me your confidences. You have shared both joy and sorrow. You have tried—as you can—to protect me from the dangers you perceive.”

  He shook his head. “It is far too late for that.”

  “Yes. Yes, it is. But you have tried anyway. I will remember it.”

  “Promise?” Shadow asked, uttering the first word since the halls had enveloped them.

  Jewel Markess ATerafin lifted her chin. “I promise it. I will remember.”

  And lightning struck the hall.

  Chapter Ten

  JEWEL HEARD IT THE way one heard thunder in the stormy port skies in the rainy season. She felt it; had her hair not been pulled back and bound against the vagaries of wind, it would have been standing on end. Shadow’s certainly was. The great cat yowled in outrage.

  Only Gilafas seemed unfazed by the lightning. But his eyes held it; they were pale, almost white as he turned to look at her—as if the lightning that had struck now resided within him. As if he had absorbed it before it damaged Fabril’s reach.

  Fabril’s reach was his home. In that peculiar moment after the lightning, before the cat’s screech, she understood that, knew it. He did not order his home; he did not restructure it; he did not demand that it be. But it was his place. He would leave it upon his death, or not at all, even if he traveled with her, as she knew, now, he must.

  If the lightning had not killed her or harmed her, it had changed, in one swift stroke of light and wild grace, the halls in which she had wandered. Large cracks appeared in the stone, stretching from the floor where the great flash of moving light had landed and spreading in all directions, as if floor, wall, ceiling were made of thick glass, and the glass had been broken.

  It was a swift process; the cracks expanded.

  Gilafas was watching. He did not seem panicked by what he had seen, but perhaps he saw things she didn’t or couldn’t. That was the gift familiarity gave, when one had surrendered the ability to feel awe or surprise.

  The walls fell away in chunks—but they did not fall inward. Jewel closed her eyes. She couldn’t cover them while carrying the torch, and her other hand was still ensconced in the guildmaster’s. The halls to either side were now short outcroppings of newly jagged stone.

  Beyond them, as far as the eye could see, was snow.

  “It is going to be a bit noisier,” Gilafas told her, almost apologetically.

  She nodded as the sound of horns drowned out thought. “This is where you left whatever it was you made?”

  “It must be,” he replied. “Lead, and I will follow.”

  “Will you be able to return?”

  “Yes, Terafin.”

  “Call me Jewel,” she said softly. “I did not come to you as Terafin.”

  “And I did not come to you or the young woman who tends your gardens as guildmaster. It is, however, what I am.”

  “It’s not all you are.”

  “I cannot untangle it from every other thing. Can you?”

  Could she? She considered the winter to either side of this broken hall. She had come to Terafin with her den—those who’d survived. She had been desperate for shelter, for safety, for someone powerful to hide her den behind. She had worked, at the command of The Terafin. She had traveled to the West and even the South. She had learned merchanting and better math.

  None of those things were part of who she had been upon her arrival at the gatehouse half a lifetime ago. That had changed. Slowly—so slowly she could not pinpoint the moment—she had come to think of Terafin as home, as hers.

  But she had taken the seat only because she had promised Amarais Handernesse ATerafin, the woman who had saved all their lives and preserved them in the face of demons, that she would. That she would take the seat, and that she would protect what Amarais had spent a lifetime building.

  Mortals could not, she had been told, make binding oaths.

  The only binding was, therefore, their conscience.

  “. . . No,” she said.

  He nodded, as if he had expected her to arrive at no other answer. “Terafin.”

  She did not ask him to use her given name again.

  • • •

  The hunting horns grew distant as she stood; the wind howled. She looked—was looking for—Carver and caught herself. She knew, as she did, that he was not here. Everything she had said to him the last time they had spoken—in a dream, like this one—was true. He was one life against which the lives of every person in this city must be weighed and measured.

  But truth was not a shield, not a comfort, because it was never singular. There were other lurking truths, each as strong, each as rooted. “Does it get any easier?” she asked, mostly of herself; her breath adorned the sound with thin clouds.

  “No, Terafin. I have walked these halls in dream and nightmare, even if both were waking. I have searched, and the search has been fruitless, constant; the loss becomes so sharp, the pain so present, I might be living in the past. There are days when I hate the Kings. Days when I hate every other person who lives and breathes in the Empire.

  “Hatred does not dim the pain. It does not lessen it.”

  “What does?”

  “Nothing. I do not think it will truly end until I have found Cessaly again. But you are Terafin, not guildmaster. Where will you go?”

  “What did you make, Gilafas?” She saw snow and cold and heard the Wild Hunt. Celleriant was not here. Avandar was not here. She had Shadow—and perhaps Night and Snow were hovering near him somehow. Neither the black nor the white cat had ever entered her dreams the way the gray one had. She did not like her chances for surviving a second encounter with the Wild Hunt.

  But she would not have given much for her chances to survive it a first time, either.

  “It is a crown,” he told her. “It is delicate; perhaps tiara would be the better word.”

  Jewel froze for reasons other than the plunging temperature and turned to stare at him. “I am Terafin, not monarch.”

  “I did not say that it was you who were meant to wear it,” was his mild reply. “But you are meant to have it. What you will do with it is no longer in my hands, if it ever was. It was made from the leaves of your many trees. I did not steal them,” he added, as if that were necessary—and perhaps it was. “They were freely given to me by your gardener. I gathered what I needed and returned to Fabril’s reach, and here, Terafin, I worked.

  “Had I first made crowns when Cessaly came to me, I would have been pleased. I would have considered them significant in a way I did not consider a portrait
of the most difficult student known to guildmaster in this or any other era to be significant. I was wrong. The only comfort, the only solace, I have been given is that portrait. It is the only hope.

  “So perhaps the crown will have no value, or much less value, than I might have assigned it; crowns are pretentious things. I did not know who it was for until I heard that you had come to our doors. I knew then. You hesitate.”

  She shrugged, uneasy. “I wouldn’t dare the Winter lands for something as simple as a crown. I won’t—I will never—wear it, and I can’t think of anyone who might who would require it. Had you said—”

  “Had I made something useful, you mean?” There was an edge to the question that had not been there before.

  She closed her eyes. Opened them. She handed Gilafas the torch, and after a moment, he lifted his free hand to take it; it was no longer necessary. Snow illuminated the darkness: snow reflecting the silver of moonlight and the hanging veil of stars.

  “You’re certain you can return?” she asked him.

  “I am. I never leave the reach, no matter where I wander. Only others can.”

  • • •

  She was dressed for cold; the older man was not. He did not, however, seem to feel it, and after fifteen minutes, Jewel asked.

  “Ah. I am wearing robes that Cessaly made,” he replied. “Because it was cold. She made two: one for me, one for her. She did that often, and without thought. She did not want me to be cold, and perhaps—just perhaps—I complained. Finding her in the warrens of the reach could be an endeavor of hours, or even days in the single worst case.”

  That, Jewel thought, would be useful. Practical. That, she would have dared the winter for. And had Gilafas not said the crown or tiara was made from the leaves of her living trees, she would have let the crown lie. She would not forget that she was Terafin, ruler of the most significant of The Ten. She could not. Nor would any of her traveling companions. Anyone she was likely to encounter would not be impressed—in any way—by a crown; it would be insignificant, as almost all things mortal were.