Avandar was not entirely pleased at the comparison.
The path is so narrow here, she finally said. It’s hard to find a place to step, let alone stand.
Wait, then.
We don’t have time, Avandar. His name, as all names were when used, was a type of punctuation, of emphasis. She had never been one of nature’s liars. Lies required subtlety, or a peculiar form of belief in the moment, that Jewel had only rarely achieved. That or desperation. Even as a merchant, she had not quibbled to lie. She had been told, time and time and time again, that she would fail the House if she did not learn.
And perhaps there was truth in that, for a different person. Jewel, however, had decided early that having the House on her side meant that she was not the person who had to learn. If people wanted to trade with Terafin, they accepted the odd, flat bluntness of the particular merchant to whom they spoke.
She did not lie to Avandar. They didn’t have time.
No, he said. That is not, however, what you fear.
It was the only thing she truly feared. She didn’t bother to tell him as much; she expected him to know it. Uneasiness was not fear. It was caution, and Jewel had always had need of it.
“Terafin,” Kallandras said.
She turned only her head to look at him.
“The forest is speaking.”
Her shoulders sagged. “Yes.”
Shianne said, “I do not hear the voice of trees.”
“Nor I,” Celleriant added. His sword came to hand then. Jewel could have told him to put it away. What she feared could not be faced by weapon, no matter how ancient or powerful.
“What do you hear?” the Senniel bard asked.
“Echoes,” she whispered.
“Echoes? Ah. That is not what I hear.”
“What do you hear?” She asked the question in the flattest of her many tones, as she looked at ground inches ahead of her immobile feet.
Shadow growled at the bard before he could answer. Jewel’s hand rested on the top of the gray’s head, but the cat ignored it. “It is not for you,” he told Kallandras.
“No,” the bard agreed, unruffled. “But neither it is for The Terafin.”
The growl intensified, and pale, long fangs seemed to sprout from the cat’s upper lip. Night, sleek and black, turned to the bard as well; he made certain to remain outside of Jewel’s reach.
They must never be outside of your reach, a new voice said: the Winter King. They must be yours, Jewel, and they have not been. It is why we traverse this cursed place at all. You do not understand the danger.
No more do you, Jewel snapped.
Silence. No, not silence; the Winter King ceased to speak, but in the background, words more felt than heard caused tremors in the forest floor. Without thought, she reached for the trunk of a tree to steady herself, standing in place, moving neither forward nor back, balancing between hope and fear, twin sides of a flipped coin.
Her hand shook. She was, she admitted in the interior of her thoughts, tired. It wasn’t the walking; it wasn’t even the journey or the things she had faced thus far. It was the certainty that her ignorance would—without intent—doom her people. She had never believed she was perfect; she had made far too many mistakes in the past. But those mistakes, she had paid for, had more-or-less survived. It was not Jewel—not Jewel alone—who would pay the cost for mistakes made here.
She took a breath; it barely seemed to fill her lungs. I’m sorry, she told the Winter King.
Do not be. She heard his amusement; it was dangerously like affection. No, Jewel, it is not. You desire affection; you therefore see it when you look. I am not yours. I will never be yours. There is no room in the life I have chosen for something as paltry, as slight, as affection. You are weak, but you have turned that weakness into a strength—and in the world you have inhabited, it did not destroy you. This world is not that world. What do you hear, Jewel?
I hear . . . the cats.
Your cats?
Not—not mine. Not my cats. But . . . the cats.
What do they say?
“We say,” Shadow replied, “that she is ours.”
Snow roared. Jewel heard words in it, and she recognized them, although she could not repeat the syllables.
• • •
She is ours.
• • •
“She cannot be yours,” Calliastra snarled. Her eyes were almost literally red, a color they did not often take—if ever.
“We found her,” Shadow snarled right back. “Us.”
“I was dreaming,” Jewel told the gray cat, in a much milder voice, “the first time I met you.”
“You are Sen.”
She thought of the three leaves: silver, gold, diamond. She could not, even now, remember picking them, but they had been with her when she woke. And from those leaves, she had built a forest, and in that forest, ancient voices rose from their long, long winter slumber.
“You were his. You were the Winter King’s.”
Night hissed.
Shadow, however, stared at her. “Is that what you thought?”
“Yes.”
“Stupid, stupid.” Night’s voice was far more his own, as was his shape, the sleek solidity of his fur. His wings settled lower upon his back as he stared at his brother’s moving tail. She wanted to weep in relief.
“He came for us,” Shadow said. “And we were bored.”
“Bored,” Night agreed. He sat, heavily, on his haunches and examined the underside of his paws. “We had never seen a human enter the tangle before.” His eyes were golden. “I thought it would eat him.”
Snow roared again.
She is ours.
Jewel did not disagree. She felt, in this story of the Winter King, there was the thread of an answer—and at that to a question she did not know how to ask.
“It didn’t.”
“Nooooo. And we didn’t either.” Night glared at Shadow, who shrugged.
“He was not boring,” he offered.
“Why were you stone?”
“Were we?”
“Yes. When we met, you were stone. You were all stone.”
Night hissed laughter.
Shadow, however, looked thoughtful. “You are very stupid,” he said at last. “Almost as stupid as Snow.”
The entire forest shook with Snow’s answer, although the white cat himself was nowhere in sight.
“Shadow, this is important. Did the Winter King make you his own?”
Night was instantly outraged. Shadow however, was not. Insulted, yes, but his long-suffering glare made it clear he expected no better. “We were never his. But we left the forest with him because we were bored.”
“Shadow, important, remember? Why were you stone?”
“I might be able to answer some part of that question,” a very familiar voice said. Jewel did not take a step because visceral instinct prevented that motion, but she spun in place to meet the gaze of Andrei, servant of House Araven.
• • •
He bowed.
He bowed to her as if she were in the Terafin manse.
“Where is Hectore?” she asked. It was, suddenly, the only important question.
“I am here,” Hectore replied. She heard only his voice; she could not see him at all. For a moment, the entire world seemed to center on Andrei; even her own companions were lost to the sight of him.
“What,” Andrei asked, voice soft, “do you see?” He might have been asking about the cut of a dress, or the length of its hem.
“I don’t see Hectore.”
He lifted a brow in a very characteristic way, although the expression was most often turned on the master she had just named. And that was more of a comfort to Jewel than she could have expected. She drew a breath, tightening her hold on Shadow, who—unlike Jewel’s companions—had freedom of movement, and had started to use it.
“Why are you here?” the gray demanded, his voice entirely free of the whine that Jewel hated on most days.
“To find your Lord,” Andrei replied, “before she is lost in the tangle. She should not be here—as you should well know.”
“She is safe here,” Shadow replied, his fur rising.
Andrei stared at the gray cat for one long beat. “Do you feel safe, Terafin?”
“No.”
“Andrei,” Hectore’s voice said, “has come to lead you out of the tangle.”
“I can’t leave without my cats.”
The air grew chillier as Andrei regarded the cat; to Jewel’s surprise, it was Shadow who looked away. “You led her into the tangle.”
“Not me,” Shadow said. He glared at Night. “They did it.” But his voice had once again fallen into his characteristic wheedle.
“You let them.”
Shadow hissed.
“What are you planning here, Eldest?”
Night growled; Andrei ignored him.
“We are not planning anything.” Shadow sniffed. “But she is stupid. She must be less stupid, or she will not survive.”
“She is lacking in wisdom to follow you here.” His tone implied anywhere, but he failed to use that word. “She is not yours.”
And Snow, at a great remove, said, She is ours, and the ground beneath their feet shook—and shattered.
• • •
When earth broke, it could kill. This was not, therefore, earth. The cracking that preceded the sudden breakage sounded far more like fallen glass—or pottery—than the movement of trees and roots, the fall of branches, the upheaval of buried stones, which would have been an earthquake in any other forest.
Andrei cursed; Jewel couldn’t catch all the words and didn’t try. She was shocked to hear them because they came from Andrei, and if they survived all of this, it would be some cause for humiliation on the part of the Araven servant. Survival, however, was not guaranteed.
The shards of what had once been forest floor—and trees—did not cut or tear as they traveled past Jewel. They seemed, instead, to fly—and they flew, all of them, toward Andrei.
No, she thought, as he lifted one slender arm. They flew into his shadow, and his shadow was vast and almost endless. In their absence, no other reality rushed in to assert itself. Jewel stood moored in fog; she lifted a foot but could find no place to put it.
“The path,” she said to Andrei, a question in the words.
“It is still here.”
She turned to her kin, her companions; she could see them clearly. She could also now see Hectore. Had he not been standing beside Jarven ATerafin, she might have wept with relief, but Jarven put her instantly on her guard; he always had. She froze when their eyes met. Not even the roaring of a distant, almost unrecognizable cat had chilled her so instantly.
His smile was familiar, his expression bright; of all the people here, he seemed the most solid, the most present. She had never trusted Jarven. Finch, within limits, had and did. But she wondered if Finch would trust this Jarven, because he was not the same. In looks, if one glanced past him, one wouldn’t notice the difference—but Jewel did not look away. The whole of his face, his form, seemed like a mask of flesh, something into which something different, something other, had been poured.
And yet he was Jarven ATerafin; he was just the essence of Jarven, laid bare.
He knew that she knew it. His smile sharpened, his posture shifting only slightly as he offered her the polite nod that passed between members of the House Council and their theoretical ruler.
“It was not,” Andrei said, “my choice to bring him.”
No, it wouldn’t be. Jewel’s smile was slight; it acknowledged the suspicion and hostility with which Andrei had famously viewed the Terafin merchant.
From out of the vast shadow of which Andrei seemed to be the point or pinnacle, Hectore of Araven stepped.
“Hectore.”
“It is, I think, safe to stand here.”
“It is not safe to stand anywhere in the tangle for long, as I believe I have made clear.”
Hectore rolled his eyes. “What,” he asked Jewel, “do you see here?”
“Fog,” she replied, understanding why he asked. “You?”
“Beach. It is a sandy beach; there is a distinct absence of rock or anything but a very unusual ocean.”
“Unusual?”
“The color. Can you hear the ocean?”
Jewel shook her head.
Kallandras, however, said, “I hear what you hear, Patris Araven. It is not the ocean.” He lifted a hand, and the butterfly that had taken up residence on his shoulder shifted position onto his finger, without once flapping its wings. Hectore blinked, twice, and stared hard at the bard’s lifted hand, and Jewel realized that he couldn’t see the butterfly, or at least not as she saw it.
She wondered, then, if this was how people were lost in the tangle; no two of them seeing the same thing, no two stepping into the same reality.
“They are all real,” Shadow said, in his grumbling voice. The presence of Andrei had dampened something about him. Or perhaps simply focusing on Andrei had; Shadow had never liked the Araven servant. And that, Jewel thought, was not her problem.
“It could be.”
“It had better not be. I mean it.”
“Yes, yessssssss.” Shadow glared at Andrei. “She doesn’t need you. She has us.”
“Eldest, she is mortal.”
“She is Sen.”
“She is mortal. Why did you enter the tangle?”
“The tangle,” Shadow replied, after a lengthy pause, “is moving. She wants to leave. She wants to go home.”
“You cannot expect that she could walk from the tangle to her own lands?” Andrei’s astonishment overrode the respect with which he generally treated the great, winged cats.
“Why not? You did.”
Andrei’s mouth was half open as he stared at the two cats. His expression rippled—literally rippled. Jewel had seldom watched the Araven servant with as much care as she did now, but she knew that she did not see what the ancient saw when they looked at him. He made even Calliastra uncomfortable, uneasy.
She had claimed, boldly and definitively, that she knew who he was, and she’d meant it. But who, and what, were not the same. He was not, as the demons were, dead; he was not a mockery of life, not proof of the end of it—the eternal emptiness that followed when death took the living.
She had known on some level that he was not mortal, not human. She had not seen it so clearly at any other time.
“Terafin.”
She swallowed.
“What,” he asked, as he had asked at the beginning, “do you see?”
Her throat was dry, her mouth dry; for a long moment she couldn’t force words out. “I’m—I’m not sure,” she finally managed.
He had stiffened, but the shadows that were now everywhere behind him undulated, moved, lengthened, rising in place as they did, as if they were a tidal wave in the making.
“You are not going about this the right way,” Hectore said, his voice mild with the type of disapproval he offered only to Andrei. “If it is your intent to frighten the wits out of The Terafin, you have severely misjudged her mettle.”
“Or her wisdom,” another voice muttered. Jewel thought it was Calliastra’s.
Jewel closed her eyes. It was easier to speak. “I don’t know what I see, I’m sorry.”
“Does it change anything?” Hectore asked, his tone casual.
Jewel had no illusions. That type of casual had death standing to one side. But she understood it viscerally, because it was the same reaction she would have had had someone threatened any of her den. She exhaled. “I sheltered the daughter of the god no one is stupid enough to name in the wilderness.” She increased the pressure on Shadow’s head as she spoke. “I knew who she was. I knew what she was. But I offered her a home and as much family as she could stand. What she was wasn’t who she was. And that matters, to me.
“People assume that because I’m seer-born, I see what Andrei is. But
to me you’ve always been Andrei, the man who came to rescue Rath on the same night I did, so many years ago. You serve Hectore the way my den serves me—you’re not shy with criticism, and you have your own mind. You make your own decisions. But I trust your decisions. I trust your intent.”
“Even now?” Andrei asked, and she heard layers in the syllables; he spoke almost with the voice of a god in the Between.
“Especially now,” she replied. She opened her eyes. She looked at a man who was not, in any way, a man. She saw that the shadows he cast were all his shadows; they were representations of the layers of physicality that Andrei of Araven possessed. She saw feathers, she saw scales, she saw eyes and an absence of eyes; she saw limbs, legs that ended in the shape of paws and in the shape of feet and in the shape of claws. “You came to find me.”
All of Andrei nodded. She heard whispers, as if the varying parts of the whole were arguing among themselves. But there was a strange familiarity in this, because she did it to herself all the time. No decision that was not visceral, instinctive, immediate, didn’t cause second thoughts, third thoughts, fourth thoughts. She could act as if free of those doubts, but it was an act, an illusion she wanted to sell to observers.
“You came to find me,” she continued more deliberately, “because of Hectore.”
Hectore coughed politely.
Jewel ignored him. So did his servant.
“If you are lost, I believe we will lose the Empire,” Andrei replied. “And the Empire is Hectore’s home.”
“And yours?”
“Home is where Hectore is. I will not lie; he can be difficult.”
Hectore coughed less politely.
“But he is utterly himself.”
Jewel nodded, understanding intuitively why Andrei needed that. “Can you lead us out of the tangle?”
“I can.”
“Can you help me find my missing cat first?”
“He is not missing,” Andrei replied. “Hectore.”
Hectore, not apparently bothered by his servant’s shadows—or perhaps not aware of them at all—had taken a step toward Jewel, frowning. “Terafin, what do you see when you look at something other than my servant?”
Firstborn Page 50