“That is not effort, on my part. In this place, it is what occurs naturally. Thought, however, requires me to be fully awake. I dislike the cold. I dislike the Winter. I have always thought it best to sleep through it.” The bear yawned. “And I have been sleeping. I would remain asleep were it not for the damnable noise.”
Carver could hear nothing.
“Sleep,” the bear added, “can be boring.” The creature’s eyes narrowed as his massive head swiveled in Carver’s direction.
Carver had the grace to flush. “Apologies,” he said, tendering the bear a half bow.
“Did I say something that offends?”
“No.”
“Did I say something that reminded you of something else?”
“Yes, I’m sorry.”
“Ah.” The bear sat on its haunches. “And that would be? It can’t be sleep. Hmmm. Boring?”
“I’ve spent time with winged cats,” Carver explained. “Their most common word is boring.” He stretched the two syllables out in a passably catlike whine.
The bear’s eyes rounded. “Are they here?”
“No. They followed their master.”
“Master? Master? Mortal boy, you had best have a care when using that word around the creatures you do not name. They take very poorly to it, and there is nothing about you that implies you could survive their great petulance.” He frowned again, his upper lip moving in such a way that it exposed fangs. “No,” he said at last, “there is something. And you have made me think . . . and also wasted time.”
He turned and once again began to tunnel through the ice and snow.
Ellerson cleared his throat. “Eldest,” he said. He had not moved to follow.
“Ye-es?”
Carver wondered then why so many of the ancient creatures took the form and shape of animals.
“What do you seek to gain from us?”
This time, the bear smiled. “Very good.” He turned to face them and once again sat. This time, however, the earth trembled at his weight.
“I heard three things,” he said, and his voice, like his weight, assumed a rumble that implied thunder, storm. “Three things, I heard, while I slept. The first was the name of the Winter Queen. The second was the voice of the dead. And the third was the voices of those who are trapped. As I am trapped. I did not come to these lands when their Lords slumbered; I came at the height of their power. It was not Winter then, but Summer at its height, and you will not know beauty or power who cannot see these lands in Summer.
“And they will never be seen in Summer again, mark my words.”
Ellerson waited. If the words of the bear—if the voice of the bear, which caused tremors in the snow—held any fear for him, he kept it from his face, from the line of his shoulders and neck. Carver wasn’t certain he had done the same.
“Her name, you bear. It is an echo of what she once was, an echo of those who called her. I was not one of them,” he added, in case that were necessary. “But it was her name that drew me to you, here, in a world that cannot speak it. It has been forbidden the Lord of these lands, even in dream. Do you understand?”
Ellerson nodded as if he did.
Carver signed truly? Ellerson did not reply.
“The puzzle, of course, is how you are here at all, but you have no answers. No,” he said, before Ellerson could speak, “I have not finished yet. The second thing I heard, the earth will hear; it rumbles in its sleep, even now. These lands are waking, and that means their Lords are also waking. But it is early yet; the earth would not rise had it not been for the second thing: the voice of the dead.
“In truth, I am curious, and I would wait. I thought that the voices of the trapped accompanied the dead, as they often do, poor, lost souls—but that is not the case.”
Ellerson waited.
“You drive a harsh bargain, mortal. For your scant years, you accrue wisdom at an astonishing rate. Very well. I seek to leave these lands.”
“So do we.”
“Yes, I imagine you do. The Lord will wake, and you will not survive the waking. There is some small chance that I will not survive the waking; one wakes from the deepest of slumbers in a state of confusion. But if you are here, there is, somewhere, a there, for these are not lands in which you belong. Not bearing those rings that speak the Winter’s name for all who have ears to hear.
“They will not protect you from the dead who come seeking you.”
“These dead of whom you speak were not called thus by mortals.”
“Ah, no. I forget myself, I have had so little company for so long. No. Mortals called them demons in their many tongues. When they made their long choice, when they chose to forsake all kin, all alliances, save one, they lost their names. I cannot tell you which of the demons have come unless I see his ghost. And I do not counsel that we wait; I am likely to survive, being somewhat good at that; you are not.”
“You offer us aid in return for aid? We cannot guarantee that we will find what we seek.”
“Wise, but tiresome. Yes. You will do me the favor of alleviating boredom, and if you are very lucky, more besides. And I will not allow the demon to harvest your souls—if I cannot somehow save your lives.”
“Very well. That is the sum of our responsibilities to you?”
The bear nodded impatiently.
In the distance, Carver could hear the winding of horns.
“The land remembers the Hunt tonight,” the bear said. “They will not harm you.”
Carver said, “They already have.”
The creature spoke a word that Carver didn’t understand, but the tone made its meaning clear. “Did you wear that ring when you first encountered them?”
“No.”
“They will not harm you now. They are memories, dreams, things of power only here. But to them, the ring you wear supersedes all hunts, all pleasure.” He exhaled as the horns sounded again. “If we are lucky, they will stumble across your pursuer. He will note them, and perhaps he will be delayed. But come, come. We must leave the trapped behind, or we will not escape.”
Corallonne’s Land
Jewel did not dream in Corallonne’s forest.
She woke three times: once to the ancient that was, in some fashion she didn’t understand, the spirit of the Ellariannatte she had planted, once to the pale luminosity of Calliastra’s eyes, and once to the furious howl of outraged cat.
The third waking was the final one; she was on her feet, blankets thrown haphazardly to one side, before she realized where she was. She had attempted to leap out of bed.
Shadow was staring intently into her sleep-blurred eyes. His mouth was closed.
“Where are your brothers?” she asked, shaking herself free of that dreamless, peaceful sleep.
“They are not here,” he replied, his voice a low rumble.
Corallonne stepped out from behind a tree. “They woke in their usual state. They were bored. Shadow chose to remain while you slept, but his brothers did not; they went to find something to fight. They have not returned.” Her face gave expression to the uneasiness that had driven Jewel from sleep.
Jewel turned to Shadow. “Where are they?”
“Not here.” He failed to meet her eyes.
“Shadow.”
“They might have chased something into the tangle.”
“. . . where they’re not supposed to be.” Of course.
Corallonne spoke, her voice the kind of soft that had steel underneath. “Understand, Jewel, that the tangle is not unlike your cats.”
Shadow hissed in outrage but did not otherwise disagree.
“How? It moves, destroys things at random, and makes a lot of noise?”
Hiss.
“Yes.” The older woman smiled. “And no. It is, in its entirety, what it is. It can be—carefully—confined; it cannot be remade or otherwise controlled. It resists all such interference. The greater the power one attempts to exert over its shape and its existence, the greater the danger of its response.�
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“Is it sentient?”
“Not in a fashion that you would recognize.”
“In a fashion,” Jewel demanded, dressing, “that you would?”
“Yes. It speaks with a voice that I can sometimes hear—but only with effort, and it is costly. Its voice is slow; slower than the voices of the ancient trees; slower than the voices of the stone or the mountains built of it. Mortals could not speak with it—but I have never had Sen as guests before; I do not know what it might make of you.”
“I’d like it not to make anything of me, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Of course.”
She hesitated. This wasn’t the first time the cats had disappeared, and when they did, they could be gone for long stretches. Long, peaceful stretches.
“We don’t have time to look for them,” Jewel told Shadow, who watched her. He said nothing. The height of his fur didn’t change; his posture remained stiff and feline. Even his whiskers, which twitched constantly, were still.
But she hadn’t been thrown out of sleep without reason. This was not the first night that her talent-born gift had roused her. On those other nights, she woke from dreams that would not release her until she had spoken of them. On those nights, she had had her den.
Only one of the den was with her now, and she turned to him. He was packing.
What are you doing? she signed. Her hands were trembling.
“You need Shadow,” he replied, an indication that the answer was too complicated to sign. “And Shadow needs them.”
Shadow glanced at Angel, his wide, round eyes narrowing. To Jewel’s surprise, he didn’t contradict Angel.
“They can take care of themselves,” she said. “They always have before. When they vanished into the darkness—”
“It’s not the same.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because you do, Jay.”
She stiffened.
• • •
“There is a way to approach the tangle safely,” Corallonne said. “You might be able to call the cats back to your side from its edge. There is no safe way to enter the tangle, but it might not be necessary for you.”
Calliastra said, “No.” The word was snapped out, harsh; she was pacing, her hands in fists.
“Did she not come from our sister’s domain to learn what she must learn? Has she not succeeded at least well enough that she can continue her journey?”
This was not the first time Calliastra had had this argument. Jewel could feel the weight of history in her denial, see it in her posture.
“Our sister did not tell her everything she needs to know.”
“She could not; Jewel is mortal, and time is pressing for her kind.”
“What,” Shianne said, her voice as hard as Calliastra’s, her eyes colder, “do you feel she must know?” She spoke to the firstborn daughter of darkness, command in her voice, in her words.
It seemed to calm Calliastra, but it would; it was something to stand against. Corallonne provided no counterbalance to her growing anger. Her fear.
“You know nothing about the Sen. Nothing about mortality—which is ironic, considering your state. You’ll learn. It will kill you, but you’ll learn because you have no choice.”
“And you know the Sen?”
“No. I know insanity. I know how to break a mind. I know how to break a man, a boy, a woman, a girl. I know when hope is a gift and when it is a curse. The strongest of people can be broken by the smallest of things—if you understand them.”
Jewel cleared her throat.
Both women turned toward her—as did Corallonne. Shadow came to sit by her side, his tail twitching.
“The reason I came to the Oracle was to learn the use of my gift. The full use. To be able to command it, rather than drifting in its currents to be tossed up on some random shore.”
“Do you honestly feel that you will be in command should you choose to expose your heart here?” Calliastra’s voice was almost the definition of scorn. Jewel took comfort from it, which she knew was perverse. Maybe scorn was one of the capstones of her early life; it reminded her so much of her Oma.
“The location won’t make much difference,” Jewel replied. Her voice had a bit more edge in it, but it had a bit more color as well. If she didn’t know what to fight for, she knew what to fight against.
“I do not speak of location. Honestly,” she added, speaking to Shadow, “I do not know how she has survived to reach her present age. It must be very difficult for you.”
“It is,” Shadow replied.
“The Oracle understands tragedy. She understands fear. She understands the weight of hope. But she does not understand people.”
“And you do?”
“Of course I do,” she snapped. “I had to snare them to hunt them. I had to learn everything about them in order to live.” She glared at Jewel; Jewel’s gaze didn’t falter. “You cannot act in fear.”
Jewel was silent.
“Do you understand? There are those who can. Their lives revolve around their fears; their dreams revolve around their fears. Their hopes, as well.”
“I’d say that about covers me.”
“Then your cats are right. You are stupid.”
Corallonne’s brows had risen, her lips had thinned. She said nothing, however. Jewel recognized the quality of that nothing—there were a lot of words jostling for position behind it. Some of them might even manage to break the wall that kept them hidden.
“You are right. It is why you came. But understand that how you approach the question will define what you see. You will look into your heart, but your heart is not a perfect, pristine place; it is not a place where fear or anger or hatred is absent. It is a place in which you have sheltered those things, hidden those things, imprisoned those things—do you understand? Your heart is not separate from you; it is you. But it is you without bounds.
“Did you honestly think that you could just rip out some essential part of yourself and suddenly have perfect clarity of vision?”
“I didn’t rip it out,” Jewel replied, but she flushed.
“I’d let you discover this on your own—you’re not a complete fool, you’d learn—but you constantly whine about time. If you do this now, in this frame of mind, you will lose time. You may lose more than time. My sisters—the ones you’ve met—don’t understand your kind. It’s probably the reason the Sen who approached the Oracle went insane.”
“You never spoke with them.”
“Not directly, no. I was just one element of their personal nightmare. I was part of the reason they built their very specific walls.” The words were both bitter and proud. “But I saw enough.”
She was lying, Jewel realized. She was lying about something. But the quality of her voice, the rawness of it, made the lie seem almost like truth—and it probably felt like truth to Calliastra. Whatever that truth was, Jewel left it alone.
“How am I to make use of the gift?”
“Control it.”
Jewel exhaled slowly. “That’s the reason for the crystal: control.”
“You misunderstand me. In theory, you have control over your powers; in theory, you have made the choice to take that control, to make it conscious.”
Jewel thought she understood, suddenly, what the lie was.
“But in practice the control is required most when you choose to look into your own heart. A mortal heart is an incredibly ugly place. And at the same time, it is incredibly beautiful and illuminating. There is no heart anywhere that is not both of these things. Control, Terafin, is choosing which of these places you will dwell in. But you will see both, in yourself. You have no choice.
“And if you ask the questions in fear, or with fear, you change the nature of what you see. Is your fear real? Of course it is. It is real, and it is true because it exists, always, at the heart of you.
“But so, too, the strength, the purpose, the focus. The hardest thing you must learn is to see the truth past
the veil of fear, because some of those fears are truth. But not all.”
Calliastra had clearly spent some time in the company of the Sen—at least one. Jewel wanted to ask; didn’t. The past was the past. That had always been her rule.
Corallonne, however, stared at the woman she had called sister.
“Mortals,” Calliastra continued, knowing that she had her sister’s full attention, “hide what they are. They call it adulthood. They call it self-control. They learn, in time, to present only what must be seen. Sometimes, that is anger. Sometimes it’s fear. Sometimes it’s kindness—less often, but not always. With time, the heart grows to encompass many things, it moves and changes, but the process is slow, and it is invisible. What they develop as they age is the ability to choose what others see—but they are always choosing among a plethora of emotions, of states of being.”
This did not change Corallonne’s expression.
“If a mortal woman asks, what will become of my child, and she is seer-born, she will receive not one answer, but many. If she asks in fear, all that she sees will be the culmination of that fear. She will think that his life, from infancy on, is lived only in that state of privation. She will search in desperation for an avenue that does not end in starvation and death.”
“We all do that. We don’t need to be seer-born,” Jewel said, with more heat than she’d intended.
“No, little seer, you do not. You might fear it. Fear might shadow you and dog your steps. But you will also see your son walk, and speak his first word, and smile at the leaf of a tree. He will be himself, and he will grow. In your own heart, he will not—he will be the sum of your question, and in the example I have given, he will be the sum of his mother’s fears. Not more than that. And those fears will define how she moves forward; it will guide all the choices she makes, for good or ill; she will not see her child; she will only see her fear.”
Jewel stared at the daughter of darkness, then, and understood.
“You are Sen. The tangle is far less dangerous to you personally than you yourself have become.” Calliastra waited; Jewel did not reply, not in words. But something in her expression must have changed, for the daughter of darkness fell silent.
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