“You fail to understand her nature if you believe that I could have forbidden it. She is Sen, Corallonne.”
“She is not,” Corallonne snapped. “She does not understand what it means.”
“No more, in the end, do we,” the Oracle replied. “We have the powers of our parents to some degree; we have the power of creation—or destruction. But we are not Sen and cannot be. She has begun; this is the path she must walk. There is no other.
“But you labor under a misapprehension, sister. You believe—you must, given your reaction now—that the Cities of Man were built with will, thought, intent; that they were planned by people who had all the knowledge of architects, magi, and seers. You think that there was deliberation, choice.”
“You do not.”
“No. I saw the Cities birthed, and if you desire it, I will show you their creation.”
Silence. A beat. Two. “It would tax you greatly.”
“Yes, it would. But your fear and your anger make your land too wild for mortals to cross; if it will calm them, I will pay that price.”
Silence again. “You frustrate me,” Corallonne finally said. “As you delight me, at times. No, sister, I will not ask that of you. Not yet, and perhaps not ever.”
“Do you understand the price I must pay?” the Oracle asked softly.
Jewel rose to her elbows; both women were watching her without apparent surprise. She shook her head, felt sleep recede as she joined them.
“You can look into the past.”
Jewel nodded, because she had done it, once, and understood only now the reason that Amarais had left her a ring, a sword. To show her that she could look back, look over her shoulder; to demonstrate that there was information in the past she could find, should she care enough to search.
Corallonne opened her mouth, but words did not leave it; Jewel had lifted a hand in quick den-sign. She was obviously still half-asleep, and flushed, but the women seemed to understand the gesture.
“Everything you see causes pain.”
Corallonne’s brows rose; she glanced, quickly, at her sister. The Oracle’s face was smooth as weathered stone. “Yes, child.”
“Everything.”
“Yes. Even hope is a type of pain, and it cuts bitterly when it dies. Better to dream of a future where pain might, at last, be laid permanently to rest; better to believe that that world exists, or might exist, around each and every corner.”
“You can’t.”
“No.”
Jewel had had days—weeks—of believing in nothing but loss and pain. She’d had weeks and months of knowing, knowing, that she should have been able to do something, anything, to prevent that loss. That she’d failed, as she always, always failed. The weight of that was something she could not completely shed.
“Yes, child. It is thus with our kind. But you fight on.”
Jewel nodded.
“So do I. Your greatest failure is part of your greatest success; it is continuous, this pattern.”
And Jewel understood. “The failures are permanent.”
The Oracle’s smile was slender, but present, as she nodded.
“They’re fixed, they’re set in stone, they can’t be changed. They’re forever. But the successes aren’t. Everything I’ve gained, I could lose tomorrow. Everything I’ve built could be destroyed. Everything I want, everything I’m willing to work and bleed for—everything.”
“Hope is dangerous,” the Oracle replied, “where vision is clouded. Yes, child. To look at the future, at the possibilities, is to have the hope that one can affect the outcomes; that one’s choices make a difference. But the past is, as you have said, fixed. It is a single thing; it cannot be moved or changed by such as we.”
And Jewel said, “Evayne.”
“What of her?”
“She walks through time. She’s never the same age when she appears.”
“She walks through time but experiences life as you would. She ages; she is weathered and worn by experience. She cannot change the past. Do you understand that?”
Jewel shook her head.
“She cannot change the past; she is part of it, wed to it. She is encased in the things that cannot be changed. You think she has choice in what she does—but Jewel, there are things that she must do, because they were done. She has less freedom than you, and less hope than I—but she endures. Of all my descendants, she is the one I wish—” The Oracle stopped. “Will you see the Cities of Man?”
Jewel swallowed. “Will it tell me anything I need to know?”
“What do you think?”
“It won’t.”
“I believe you are correct. The Cities of Man are perhaps not aptly named, and no two were the same. There is a reason for that. My sister is also correct; you do not understand what ownership means in the wild. The land on which you walk now is hers; it is of her. But it is kin to your dreams: your dreams are of you, but you do not dictate their growth or the direction they turn, and you cannot—yet—command what shape they will take; you cannot demand that they never transform into nightmare. Could you, you would.
“This is the high wilderness, Jewel. And Terafin is part of the high wilderness, now. It cannot be tamed; it can be survived and in places conquered—but it cannot ever be fully controlled.”
“But it can be owned?”
“Yes. In the same fashion that you own your nightmares—and your dreams.”
“In time,” Corallonne added, “you will know which parts of your own lands are dangerous, unsafe; you will be able to guide your guests so that they might avoid that danger. But the danger is part of you; it remains, always.” She hesitated, as if afraid to offer advice although she clearly wanted to do so. “The wilderness is not you. It is not all that you are—and it cannot become so, or you will cease to be Lord. But it is of you, regardless.”
“But there are people who live in my lands.”
“Yes? There were people who found shelter in the ancient cities, as well. And there were men and women of power who could coax and coerce those cities into shapes that more easily accommodated life—but never trivially. Come, Jewel,” she said, as if reaching a decision she had struggled to make. “I wish to show you my winter.”
• • •
Shadow woke then—if he had ever been sleeping. He yawned, exposing both his many, many fangs and his inexplicable boredom. “I don’t like winter,” he told Corallonne. Beside him, Snow and Night stirred as well.
“Yes, Eldest, I know. I will be guide and guardian; you need not accompany us.”
“But it is boring here.”
“I believe your Jewel craves boredom.”
“Because she is stupid.”
“Boredom has its place. You really should not let the cats speak to you like that,” Corallonne added.
“So I have told her, sister.” Calliastra stepped from the shadows. She had avoided the Oracle and the Oracle’s domain; Jewel had expected her to avoid Corallonne. “But she does not listen. And when the cats visited you, they were hardly better mannered.”
“They are not mine,” Corallonne pointed out.
“No. But I am not entirely certain they are hers, either.”
Shadow hissed; it was not the laughter hiss. He neither confirmed nor denied; he did complain about stupidity—with care not to include Corallonne overtly in his criticism.
Corallonne, however, frowned.
“What? She is stupid.”
“She is a guest, Eldest. She is a guest in my domain.”
“Sooooooo?”
“What happened the last time you mistreated my guests?”
Jewel dropped a hand onto Shadow’s head; the gray cat’s muttering grew far less distinct.
“What if she doesn’t care?” Snow asked.
“Are these her lands, or mine?”
“. . . Yours.”
“And she is my guest. I am certain you would not wish to embarrass me in front of my guests—and treating my guests with so little respect would be an em
barrassment.”
“But we’re bored.”
“And that,” Corallonne said firmly, “is neither her fault nor her problem while she is here.” She sounded like a severe Oma—one not yet angry but threatening storm. “If you wish, you may play at the edges of the tangle—but only at its edges. It is not notably safe for visitors; your master will not see it while I am with her.”
“The tangle?” Jewel asked.
“It is a snarl of wilderness and ancient rage,” Corallonne replied, as if she were describing a variety of plant. “We work around it. But it is not safe, even for one such as I. My sister,” she added, indicating Calliastra, “has traversed it and survived—but only once.”
“There wasn’t much to see,” Calliastra said, in the offhand way that meant she felt challenged or judged. “I’m sure your cats will find it boring. And who knows? It just might be able to kill them.”
Night yowled in outrage. “If it didn’t kill you, it can’t kill us!”
“You cannot possibly believe that your power is, in any way, equal to my own?”
Corallonne grimaced; she met Jewel’s gaze, and Jewel saw both resignation and weariness in the older woman’s expression.
Night opened his mouth on a literal growl. Jewel lifted her hand from Shadow’s head and murmured, “Stop your brother.”
“Why me?”
“Because you can.”
The black cat launched himself at Calliastra, who stood, arms folded, face hard and bright as a cut gem. He didn’t reach her; he was intercepted by a hurtling gray mass. Their combined weight and trajectory took down a young tree, and probably a lot of the foliage at its base.
“I’m really, really sorry,” Jewel began.
Corallonne’s smile was grim, resigned. “Were they any other creatures, I would hold you responsible for the damage they now do. But my sister is correct; they were welcome visitors, and they were not markedly better behaved, in the end. They were, however, far more careful with their words.” She offered Calliastra an arm, and to Jewel’s surprise, the prickly child of gods slid her own around it.
“Walk with me?”
“Who will watch your guests?”
Corallonne smiled. Jewel knew the answer: the forest would watch—and was watching; it reminded her of her own forests, although the trees were not so markedly magical and otherworldly. Thinking of them, she opened the satchel she had carried from Terafin; it clinked as the leaves of her unnatural trees rubbed against each other.
Corallonne turned almost instantly; her eyes were a peculiar shade of golden brown, because they were glowing. Jewel almost dropped her satchel, but instead drew it closer. She opened the flap to look at the contents, as if to assure herself that she had not left them behind in the Oracle’s halls.
Celleriant stepped into the space Shadow had vacated as branches—or whole trees—cracked and fell in the background. Cats. But it was not the sound of the two brothers sparring that drew either Corallonne’s attention or her ire; she was angry.
“What,” Corallonne demanded, “have you brought into my forest?”
And Jewel thought: Here? Is it here? Is this where these leaves were meant to go? The doubt and uncertainty were paralyzing enough that she had no ready answer. As she so often did, she settled for the truth.
“They’re leaves,” she told Corallonne “from the trees in my forest.”
Corallonne stepped forward, looking down at the contents of Jewel’s hand without extending her own. To Snow she asked, “Is it true? Do these trees grow in her forest?” There was an urgency to the question.
“Yessssss.” As Corallonne opened her mouth, no doubt to ask another question, Snow swatted air and added, “She planted them.” He glanced once over his shoulder, his tail twitching, but the sounds of Night and Shadow brawling had already started to fade.
“How?”
Jewel cleared her throat, and the older woman turned; the cat appeared to be inspecting his claws for signs of the wrong kind of dirt.
“I had a dream of the Winter King. The cats were his, but they were made of stone. To reach him, I had to pass through a forest of silver, a forest of gold, a forest of diamond. And when I woke, I had taken a leaf from each. Or . . . a leaf from each was with me.”
“Do not leave those leaves in my forest,” the woman who owned these lands replied; her expression was as grim as Jewel had ever seen it.
Not here, then. She hesitated. She slipped the three leaves back into her satchel and drew from it one other leaf: the Ellariannatte.
Corallonne’s expression changed instantly. “And that leaf?” she asked, her voice almost hushed.
“We call them the Kings’ trees,” Jewel replied, modulating her voice to match her host’s. “They grew in the Common, and only there, when I was a child. I used to gather the leaves that fell as if they were flowers.” They had been the only flowers she could gather in her childhood; any dirt given to growing things had been used to grow vegetables—and there was precious little of that.
“And that did not come to you from dreams of Winter and death.”
“No.”
“They grow in your lands, these trees?”
Jewel nodded. Her smile was layered, informed by memory and sentiment and something that could have been peace. She held out one leaf to her host, and Corallonne hesitated.
“I have no like gift to offer,” she said. “And I am not at all certain that these trees will take root in my own lands. The soil here may not suit them.”
“They will grow in your lands if you permit it,” Jewel replied, and knew it for truth the moment the words left her mouth.
Nor did Corallonne question her certainty. “Why are they called the Kings’ trees in mortal lands?” she asked; her hand shook as Jewel placed the leaf into her open palm.
“I really don’t know. I think it’s because they grow nowhere else in the Empire. Nowhere—until I became Terafin—but the Common, which is the capital of the Empire.”
“And they grew even after the sundering.”
“They grew like normal trees—they just couldn’t be planted anywhere else. I have a gardener who would love to meet you—I’m sure she could tell you in great detail all the places the trees couldn’t be planted.” Jewel hesitated and then continued. “You recognize the leaf.”
Corallonne nodded.
“Do you recognize the tree it comes from?”
“I did not realize they still grew at all. I will forgive you your trees of cold metal and cold stone if you also shelter these. Plant this one, Terafin, with my blessing and my gratitude.”
Jewel almost asked her why she didn’t care to plant it herself, but her mouth would not open to let the words out. And she felt comfort in that; the instinctive certainty that had guided the whole of her life until recently had all but vanished in the wake of the Oracle’s caves.
She took the leaf back from the firstborn. It was so light it should have been weightless; the breeze should have carried it aloft, borne it away. It was to that breeze that she had surrendered the leaves of silver, of gold, of diamond; she did not consciously remember planting Ellariannatte at all. She was not Birgide, not a botanist; trees and their study had not informed any part of her life.
These had come with the forest. These had grown in all their majesty when she had become the ruler of the Terafin lands. Not The Terafin—that had come later, and by surprising, if reluctant, acclaim—but the ruler of the lands in which silver and gold grew.
She closed her eyes. She heard a breeze. She heard the heavy rumble of cat complaint. She heard the voice of the butterfly—soft, high, inquisitive, and joyful in turn. She could not hear Shadow or Night; she could not hear Calliastra. She thought she could hear the full measure of Angel’s breath. Angel.
She let the leaf go.
Chapter Thirteen
EYES CLOSED, JEWEL COULD see the arc the leaf made in the wind. The white of its outer edges seemed to glow for a moment; eyelids did not diminish its
lazy but deliberate arc. Its flight was not the delicate meandering of butterflies, but neither was it the deliberate plunge of birds of prey.
She could not see the rest of Corallonne’s forest. She could not see her companions. She thought she caught a glimpse of Shadow—but only Shadow; Night and Snow were absent.
She could see Corallonne and almost stopped breathing for one long minute. The woman that she thought of as maternal was not, not here; she was gold and brown and green, and she radiated life, as if it were an elemental force. If nature had a face, if nature could be forced into an almost human form, it was her face, her form. She looked neither young nor old, and her body was all things at once: slender, youthful, thick, and strong; her hair was night and day as its strands interlocked and fell.
She was a god, a goddess, who did not live in the lands the gods now inhabited.
Her voice was thunder and velvet when she spoke. Jewel.
Jewel had no words to offer in reply; her mouth was dry. But she shook herself. If this wasn’t the Between, it wasn’t the first time Jewel had seen and heard gods. She turned away, but only to watch the leaf fall, to see it touch foreign soil, foreign earth.
It was part of the wilderness.
It had always been part of the wilderness. Even in the mundane Common, the roots of these trees touched other soil, drawing strength and sustenance from it.
She whispered.
Yes, Corallonne replied, her voice too strong to be gentle, although there was no anger in it. The Sleepers.
“My trees are no part of the Sleepers.”
No, Jewel, they are not. But they exist in the fashion they do in your world because of the Sleepers. And, now, because of you. She fell silent, and her silence was a hush, the space between lightning and answering thunder.
And the thunder did come, but it was not carried by Corallonne’s voice: it was carried by the swift breaking of earth as a single leaf melded with Corallonne’s forest, Corallonne’s home, Corallonne’s self—the three were not separate. As they had in the Terafin forest, this single tree bypassed the sapling stage, the fragility of youth; it gained width and height as it stretched up, and up again, as if seeking the distant sky.
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