But she glanced at Gilafas; some of the butterflies still clung to his robe at the shoulders; one was perched in his receding hair. Two looked to be of spun glass, but one looked other. They had remained with him.
And if he had made butterflies, she thought. If he had made butterflies such as these, would she risk the howl of wind and the distant hooves that implied a host of riders?
She lifted her free hand, as if in question.
One butterfly—the one perched on the top of Gilafas’ head, as if it were the only crown he was to be allowed—rose, its movement erratic as butterfly motions always were: fluttering and inexact. It flew lazily toward the hand she had lifted, landing in the cup of her palm.
Master Gilafas had been nearly casual about anything that had not involved his lost apprentice; he looked almost comically shocked now.
When the butterfly landed, however, she could hear what she had not heard before: its voice.
• • •
It was a soft voice—so soft it was a whisper in the wind’s howl. Jewel shouldn’t have been able to hear it at all; were it uttered by a person, she would have missed it entirely.
“Shadow can you hear—”
“Yessssssss.” His eyes were focused on the butterfly, his tail twitching.
She listened. The voice did not have anything important to say, which was a terrible thing to think, but true. It was, on the other hand, light and joyful; it appeared to say, look, look as children do when they discover something for the first time. There was wonder, not in the butterfly’s existence, but in the voice it now spoke with: wonder and awe.
Joy.
She was moved almost to tears, which surprised her. “These were made for you,” she said softly to Gilafas, who had recovered some of his composure.
“Yes.”
“She wanted you to know—she wants you to know—that she is alive, that she is happy.”
“Yes. But, Terafin, I do not believe it. In public, I am successful, confident, powerful. That is one truth. I speak with the voice of a patrician. I interact with Kings when the mood strikes me. It is one part of my life—and I would not say it is the most significant although, to outsiders, it is. So, too, the butterflies. She is allowed to make. And she makes. This is the heart of it, her making: the wonder, the joy, the curiosity, the drive. This is what she tells me.
“But I do not know if she is allowed to make or she is forced to it. I do not know what she makes for the Winter Queen, if she makes for her at all; I do not know what the Winter Queen demands of her. I do not know if immortals understand that mortals must eat and sleep. I do not know if they understand that mortals seek—and require—understanding and affection.”
Thinking of the Winter Queen, Jewel hesitated. “Affection? No,” she finally said. “But she understands love. It is a Winter love; harsh and absolute. I think only the immortal could survive it.” Thinking of Shianne, she added, voice softer, “and perhaps not even them. You’ve seen the Winter Queen.”
Gilafas stiffened.
“I have,” Jewel said, voice softer than even the butterfly’s.
“And you survived.”
“Yes. But . . . the memory of her, astride her mount, her gaze across the landscape as if it were an insignificant field of mortal battle—it’s burned into my thoughts. I can see her, now, if I close my eyes. I can hear her voice. I think—” She hesitated. So much hesitation now. “I think it would be almost impossible not to love her. Not to want her. But . . .” she smiled down at the butterly. “But I don’t think Cessaly sees her the way I did.”
“Is this relevant?”
“Yes. I think if we found Cessaly and persuaded the Winter Queen of the necessity, she could come home.”
“You are not saying all of what you think or know.”
“I ride a great stag,” Jewel replied. “I call him the Winter King. Once, when the gods walked the world, he used to be human. Mortal. He can speak—but only to his rider, and at the moment, his rider is me. I have, in my service, a man who once rode with the Wild Hunt. He failed his Lady, and he was—was given to me. Both the stag and the warrior serve me. They serve me because that was her command.
“And they live, regardless, for the moment they might set eyes on her again. They serve willingly because it was the only thing that she demanded, in her anger.
“I don’t know if Cessaly will want to leave the White Lady’s side.”
“They are—the stag, obviously, but the man—enchanted. Enspelled.”
“Yes. But I do not think anyone—god or man—could now remove that enchantment. It is what they want. It is almost all they want. You could have dragged them away from the Winter Queen’s side only by death—unless she ordered it. Nothing else would have moved them.”
“You fear that Cessaly will be the same.”
“I assumed she would,” Jewel replied. She lifted her hand. “Now? I am uncertain. What she sees is what she makes, what she desires to make—and she could not ever create the Winter Queen.”
“Who did?”
“Gods, probably. I don’t know.”
Gilafas inhaled sharply. Jewel looked up.
The maker was staring at the wrist she had exposed by lifting her hand to raise the butterfly. His eyes were wide, almost glassy; his mouth hung open, as if he had been in the process of speaking and had momentarily lost the ability or desire to form actual words.
He reached out almost involuntarily, and Jewel was once again reminded of children: he had that utter intensity of focus, as if nothing else existed or mattered.
She had never seen one of the maker-born at work before. The maker-born did not have public galleries in which the idle and the curious might watch them, as if watching an opera, a play. But she knew, she knew, that this was about to change, if she allowed it.
She did not withdraw her wrist, did not offer him warning.
He moved toward her, stood, his face inches from what was twined around her wrist in a near-invisible braiding: the three strands of the Winter Queen’s hair. She had called them a gift and felt in truth that they must have been—but they had not been offered. She had, mouth dry, reached almost blindly for Ariane—as if she were a child—and her hand had brushed the Winter Queen’s hair.
These three strands had remained in her otherwise empty palm.
He did not ask her where she had come by them. He did not ask her why she carried them. He did not ask anything at all for another long moment.
“Terafin. Give them to me.” It was a demand. It was a plea.
“They are mine,” she replied, with neither force nor heat.
“Yes, of course. But they are not what they must be. Can you not see it? Can you not understand?”
Jewel did not see what Gilafas saw. Would not see it, she thought, until he was finished. But she did not want to part from these strands. Had been told that she must never do so.
And yet, she thought, this was a dream, a half-dream.
“I cannot leave without them,” she said. “I need them to find—”
“Cessaly, yes. You will need them. But they will not serve your purpose yet.”
She hesitated, and the hesitation was bone-deep, visceral. These were the only things of Ariane, beyond memory, she had. The only proof.
No stunning insight returned to her. No certainty that this was what she must do. She was left adrift, her desire to keep these strands of hair at odds with every other thought that clamored for attention. She did not know that she must part with them.
She did not want to let them go.
“I can’t untwine the braiding,” she finally said, her voice thick.
Gilafas frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean what I said.”
“With your permission, Terafin?”
It was like a question, but his hands—larger, callused, older—had already begun the work she had said she could not do. As if in speaking, in commenting at all, she had given him the answer he desired.
<
br /> Shadow hissed but did not harm Gilafas—and Jewel wasn’t certain at the moment that the guildmaster even noticed the presence of the great, gray cat.
“I could make him notice me.”
“Please,” she said, and her voice trembled, “don’t.”
“Why do you care? It is only hair, and it is ugly hair.”
Jewel, accustomed to the cats, said, “Yes. That is true. I’m certain I would value your feathers far more highly.”
Shadow hissed. Hissing, he raised his wings as if he intended to swat her—or worse, the guildmaster—with them. And from the shadows of those great wings, which seemed—for a moment—to be larger and more complete than even those of the Warden of Dreams in nightmare, she heard the rumbling roar of things so ancient and wild she was frozen in place.
And yet, even so, she heard Cessaly’s tiny, soft voice of delight, and she held her ground. Gilafas had not heard the roaring, but he had seen the raised wings; he turned toward them, and toward Shadow, and Jewel realized that he was done. He had extracted his three strands, and they lay against his palm as they had once lain against her own.
His eyes were narrow now, as if he could almost see the shape of something in the shadows but could not quite make out what it was.
And then he bent knees and reached out; Jewel couldn’t see what he was reaching for until he held it in his hands.
It was a feather.
It was a gray feather.
• • •
She was not surprised—and should have been—when the next feather he gathered was white, and the one after, black. She was slightly surprised when he bowed—to Shadow—and asked his permission to take what he had just picked up. And maybe it was required.
Shadow sniffed, however, as if listening to the guildmaster was tedious beyond endurance and shooed him away with his wing; the guildmaster bowed again and retreated, carrying all three feathers. He then turned and left Jewel; he had retrieved the hand he had offered her so that she might not be lost.
He was lost, she realized, in a fashion; she followed instantly, remembering what he had said of Cessaly and her making—her work—in this place. She did not want to lose Gilafas.
“You can’t,” Shadow said.
“I can,” Jewel said grimly. “But I don’t intend to.”
• • •
He did not walk into the snow. For that, she was grateful. Although she appeared to carry her pack, she did not have the wide net for boots that made snow such as this passable—but neither did Gilafas. He seemed to forget that she was with him or had been with him; he moved—he strode—with purpose, his hands close to his chest, cupping the materials that he had gathered.
She reminded herself to breathe; she was uneasy, and not because the halls suddenly shifted, the prior architecture, which evoked crypts—and, at that, old, disused ones—vanishing almost between one step and the next. But unlike the snows of winter, into which the first halls had been nestled, this new stretch was almost like a public gallery, an open thoroughfare through which even the most monied or pompous might feel at home.
Light fell from high windows; the day could enter, but the eye—at Jewel’s height, and even Gilafas’—could not gaze out.
Gilafas did not seem to notice.
Shadow, however, did.
“Do you recognize these halls?” she asked.
He sniffed, which probably meant no. “Fabril was dangerous,” he said. “It is a good thing he is dead.”
She stiffened, but the guildmaster did not appear to have heard the cat. It was a small mercy, but Jewel had learned to be grateful for them. “Was Fabril more dangerous than I am?” she asked. It took her mind off the constant itch in her hands; she wanted Ariane’s gift back and had to fight the impulse to grab Gilafas and extract it. Since her return from the distant south, she had carried those three strands of hair with her everywhere.
She did not want them in Gilafas’ hands.
But she also thought that this was where they must be. It was like, and unlike, crossing a very dark room in order to pick up a dagger and stab herself in, or around, the heart. Every instinct in her—all the instincts she had always obeyed without thought—had screamed against it, until she was all but paralyzed. She knew, at that time, that she had to force herself to walk, to work against those visceral instincts.
It was simpler here. She did not feel that those strands of hair, in Gilafas’ hands, were an immediate threat to her life or her sanity. But their absence invoked the specter of both loss and its attendant grief.
Perhaps because she was seer-born, had always been seer-born, it had never been her own death that she’d feared. It had always been the deaths of others, the sense of abandonment that came in the wake of those deaths.
• • •
She almost walked into Gilafas’ back; he had stopped moving abruptly. She stopped; Shadow collided with her—probably on purpose. When he did not feel endangered, he was sulky. No, that wasn’t fair. When he did not feel that she was endangered, he was sulky.
“Why did you let him take the feathers?” she whispered. Gilafas appeared to be staring intently into the empty air directly in front of him. “This won’t do,” the older man finally said.
He turned. There were no other doors and no other halls that Jewel could see. She wondered if he meant to take them back to the crypts, as she now thought of the winter halls.
“They are not crypts,” Gilafas said, as if Jewel had spoken the words out loud. She reddened; she probably had. “They are winter halls. But, Terafin, there is life that remains in the winter. There is life that the trees hold, the ground hides; it is merely waiting for summer. The winter is deep in this place; not for the promise of false summer will such life stir.”
“But—where are we going? Why have you stopped?”
“It is never wise, in Fabril’s reach, to step outside. I have seen the truth of that myself. It is why—it is how—Cessaly was lost. I am willing to be lost,” he added softly, “but not yet. And I do not think I wish to lose you the same way.”
She shook her head. “I’m already lost, Gilafas. To me, this is a dream.”
He nodded absently.
“When I wake, I will be where I was when I went to sleep. Will you get lost?”
“No. It is not yet my time.”
She frowned. “Your time?”
“Artisans—unlike the maker-born—do not die. They simply vanish one day. The pages cannot find them—no one can.” He shook himself. “Come. This is not the place for us; I am not quite sure why we are here.” This last was said apologetically.
Shadow hissed in annoyance; his body practically quivered in outrage. He stalked across the very fine floor, leaving marks in the stained wood and worse in the carpet runners that protected most of it.
“It is here,” he said, adding a growl to the end of the sentence as he lifted a wing. “Here.”
Gilafas followed the direction of the cat’s wing, and his expression lightened instantly. “My apologies,” he told the cat. “I had all but forgotten. Yes. It is here.”
Jewel was staring at a pedestal in a carefully placed alcove that had been built across from one of the high windows through which light streamed. That light now fell on something that had not, until Shadow’s interruption, caught her attention, so intent had she been on what Gilafas was carrying in his hands.
Atop the pedestal, on a small ivory cushion, sat a gleaming piece of jewelry. It was, or appeared to be, all of gold until Jewel approached more closely; there was gem-work here, but the gems were small and subtly placed; they were not meant to be the centerpiece of the work but, rather, simple adornment.
It wasn’t a crown.
It was a tiara.
She wondered how different they were, to the wilderness and the ancient and wild creatures who occupied those hidden lands. She was silent, still, considering the crown, the guildmaster, the great gray cat, the nature of dreams. Anything but fear.
Fear
was there. Fear had become a constant companion, although perhaps that wasn’t true. Fear had always been a constant companion, but as a child, as a much younger woman, she had believed that with enough power, she could know a life free from that fear.
“Yes,” Gilafas said. “It was made for you.”
She did not move.
“Terafin, I cannot touch it now.” Hearing her sudden intake of breath, he added, “My hands are occupied. I do not wish to drop anything.”
“What—what does it do?”
He shook his head. “It is like—it is a little like—my stained glass. I do not fully know what it will do, what it might do. I do not know if you will wear it, or if you are intended to convey it to someone else who might. But it was made of the leaves of your forest. It is either yours or no one’s.”
Shadow growled. “Take it, or I will eat it. You are wasting time.”
She took the tiara. To her surprise, the light that had illuminated it had also warmed it; it was not cool to the touch.
Gilafas nodded. He then began to walk forward again. She didn’t understand why he no longer feared to reach an exit, for he approached the same door that had been the terminal point of the gallery. He nodded to Jewel, and she opened it with her free hand. It led into a room.
It led into a workroom, the interior of which reminded Jewel instantly of Haval’s workroom. She could not tell, for a moment, what the floor was made of because she couldn’t see it. There were, however, two long benches against the wall farthest from the door, and these at least were of wood and had space for one tired seer.
“I will ask you to wait,” Gilafas said, without pausing for an acknowledgment.
• • •
And so, she waited. She sat on one bench, and Shadow sat on the floor beside her legs. The gray cat cleared space for himself with a petulant litany of complaints, tossing the bits and pieces of paper and wire and beads to the side. Gilafas was not Haval. He didn’t appear to notice or care. He cleared space at his own workbench; he threw paper to the left of what was a large, flat tabletop. Some of it fluttered to the ground, to be instantly forgotten.
He laid the feathers with care to the left, in the space he had just cleared. The strands of hair—which should have been invisible at this distance—he placed directly before him. He then reached beneath the table and opened a drawer Jewel hadn’t been aware existed until that moment. Surprised, she did acknowledge that this was a maker’s guild, and the things the maker-born made didn’t have to conform to expectation, or even reality.
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