Firstborn

by Michelle West

  He rose, the fire at his back. “Why have you come?”

  “I hardly know,” Evayne replied. “But I can guess. Tell me, what is the date?”

  “I think it is either the fourth or fifth of Lattan, in Weston reckoning. The year,” he added, before she could ask, “is 428.”

  “So soon,” Evayne whispered. “You have not yet found what she seeks.”

  Adam shook his head. This was the business of Matriarchs, yes—but he felt no hesitation; he answered.

  “Why are you here?”

  “This is where my path leads,” Evayne replied. “I must go deeper into the Terafin manse.”

  Adam waited. Evayne, however, fell silent. “Do you require a guide?” he finally asked.

  “Yes, perhaps. Will you guide me, then?”

  Adam nodded.

  • • •

  They traversed the halls that led to the stairs, but the guards did not stop them; they did not appear to see them at all.

  “It was more difficult when I was younger,” Evayne said, although Adam had not asked. “But I find it expedient to avoid unwanted questions. I have been given permission to traverse these lands; not even the Warden will stop me, although she will, no doubt, be aware of my presence. Shadow is watching,” she added.

  “He does not trust you?”

  “No, nor should he. I am not his enemy, but our goals are not the same, and he knows it. No, he watches me tonight because I am with you. Adam, what have you done?”

  The question made no sense to Adam, although he considered it from many angles before he finally replied. “I brought the Matriarch home.”

  Evayne smiled. “Yes. Yes, you did.” She looked over the top of his head. “I never thanked you, did I?”

  “Thank me?”

  “For the time you spent with me in the Oracle’s land. I was . . . not at my best that day.”

  “No one would be!” Adam replied, with genuine indignation.

  “No, I don’t imagine they would.” Her smile was slight, but rueful. Adam did not understand why she felt regret over what was completely understandable. But he did not see that young girl and this older woman as the same person, and perhaps, in some fashion, she did. The one had come from the other, planted and rooted there.

  “You were there,” Evayne continued, surprising Adam, “with Jewel, the Terafin Matriarch.”

  Adam nodded.

  “And you have only just returned.”

  He nodded again, with more hesitance.

  “Do you know I resented her? I met her once when I was younger, some handful of years away from Callenton and my birthday. I resented her,” she repeated. “I saw her with her den. They were young—maybe your age, maybe a few years older—and the Terafin manse was under attack. I was to lose someone I valued there. He was very like you. I could see the loss—the inevitable, constant loss—much more clearly than I could see anything else that night.

  “But I saw Jewel. And I understood who she was. Who she must be. Do you know that there were two seers born to the Empire in this time? I was one. She was the other.”

  Adam simply nodded.

  “She had her den, her kin, surrounding her. Yes, she had lost her first family, and yes, the life that led her to Terafin was shadowed and darkened by demons and death. But . . . her fate was not my fate. She had kin. She had a life that was in some ways like the life I had been forced to abandon.”

  He did not tell her that she had made that choice because he didn’t believe it was a true choice. The Oracle probably would, but Adam was not the scion of Northern gods.

  “You think she is too weak to be Matriarch.”

  There was a question in the statement. Adam winced but nodded, thinking of his sister.

  “Do you think that I was stronger?”

  “I . . . can’t tell. You are much stronger now than she is.”

  “Diplomatic. I was angry.”

  She had the right to be angry.

  “It took me many years to let go of that anger. And perhaps it is not truly dead. Jewel was allowed the kin, the friends, that I was denied. The closest to friend I have is Kallandras, and for a decade, perhaps more, he hated me. And he had that right; I had destroyed the only life he wanted—just as my life had been destroyed. I gave him the same choice I was given. Of course he resented me.

  “But Jewel was never given that choice. Not truly. She was free to make her attachments, to make her commitments, to love. The love I have? It is theory, now, it is so many years in the past. The reason I made my choice?” she shook her head. “Those people—even my own mother—won’t recognize me when, and if, that final promise is kept.

  “All of the love I was allowed, I was allowed at a distance: it is a story that I have told myself so often it has the strength of myth. But . . . it is not real. Jewel’s family is real. You’ve been part of it. You understand that.”

  Adam nodded.

  “Do you know what she did? No, perhaps you don’t. And perhaps it is not in your nature to question. But you were there on the day she woke the dreamers. She did, permanently, what you could only do in passing. Do you remember?”

  He did.

  “She is not what you are. You’ve been told she is Sen. You’ve been told you are healer-born.”

  This caused a flinch, but it was mild.

  “You understand neither of those words. But, on that day, she created something that she must have. Where is it now?”

  Adam found the question confusing.

  “Never mind, then. My anger tonight is an ember; it is not a flame. I know the answer to that question, and I do not understand how it was even allowed. And yet I do understand. Jewel could not stop herself. She made a choice—the barest echo of choices I have been forced to make, time and again—and it almost broke her. She understood the choice itself but did not understand the consequence of what she did next. In order to assuage guilt, she—” Evayne stopped.

  “Do you understand, Adam? Everything that she has, I was denied. And in order that she continue to have it, I find myself in this manse, on this road. Whatever she left behind in hope or despair, I must take back. Were it not for me, she would have doomed you all without a second thought. Without a first thought.”

  “That’s not true.” Adam’s voice was low.

  “Is it not?”

  “Evayne, you—” he shook his head. “On the day you left Callenton, you left because if you did, you could save the people you loved, yes?”

  She nodded.

  “When the Matriarch of Terafin came to this place, she was the age you were then. And she had already lost her kin. She came because she hoped to save the rest and she had nowhere else to go. She had lost her mother, her father, her Oma; she had lost her brothers and one sister. You had not—not yet.”

  “I lost them in every way but death.”

  “I know. But what if you had had to make that choice then? To abandon them to certain death and tell them that? What would you have done?”

  “I was sixteen. She is twice that, and Terafin.”

  “Pain is pain,” Adam said quietly. “Loss is loss. When we get older, we get better at hiding it. We learn to protect the children from our pain. It’s what we do as—as adults. But pain is pain. And no one surrenders family without pain. I know I have not had your life. I haven’t had to make your choices. I haven’t had to accept that the pain is something I have no choice but to bear. I’m not Matriarch. I will never be Matriarch. I can’t.

  “But I know that my mother suffered. I know that my sister suffered. I know that she’s too weak to become my mother—but if she were strong, the way my mother was, I couldn’t love her the way I love her. I could support her, but I couldn’t love her. I understand that I will never know your pain. And that Jewel might never know it.

  “But—I don’t understand why you want others to feel what you feel when it has been so hard for you?”

  Silence. A beat in which Adam wondered if he had pushed this too far. Th
is Evayne and the one to whom he had talked for hours were not the same woman; he knew this. And yet. The silence extended until Evayne came to a stop before a closed door. She looked at him then. And smiled.

  It was an odd smile, something that implied tears, not amusement. “No,” she said softly, “You don’t understand it, do you? I am grateful that I met you. I am grateful that the Oracle sent you to me. You are part of Jewel’s den, no? I brought you here to be part of that den.”

  Adam nodded. “Jewel wasn’t here.” He seldom used the Matriarch’s name, but he used it now. “Finch came. Finch brought me here. She was like a sister, not an Ona. But all of them—all of them, even Ellerson—made me feel welcome here. They tried to teach me how to live in the manse. I understood who they were to her by the time the Matriarch came home. I understood what the former Terafin’s loss would mean to her. I understood that she was like—very like—Margret, my sister. She’s not strong enough to be Matriarch. She hasn’t been forced to make a Matriarch’s choices. Until now.

  “She’s learned to hide pain, mostly. But . . . not among kin. Here, she’s where she wants to be. This is what she wants. I think this is what we all want, at least to start.

  “And in the end, she can’t have it, either. She’s Matriarch. She’s more. I want—” he shook his head. “I want someone to be beside Margret as Margret learns what she must do and be if Arkosa is to be safe. And I can’t be there, not yet. But I can be here. So . . . I am here.”

  “I can’t save him,” Evayne said.

  Adam lifted his hands in den-sign. Carver.

  “It’s almost never to save someone that I’m sent. A path opens, and I walk it. I’ve done things that would horrify you. I imagine I will do things in future that will horrify you as well.” She inhaled. Exhaled. “I wish I could take you with me. I think you might be able to walk as I walk, with the right permission. You are what you are. No,” she added, seeing the shift in his expression, “I would not ask it. It’s funny. I resent—have resented—many people in my life, but you were never one of them.

  “But . . . it’s often of you that I think, and here you are, Adam, looking not a day older than the Adam of my memories. Not a day older, not a day wiser, not a day harsher. I will see you again,” she added softly. “And perhaps on that day, I can return to you some of the peace you left, and leave, with me. It’s people like you that I think of when it is absolutely the hardest to make the choices I must make if we are to have any hope at all.”

  “But I have not suffered—”

  “No. And maybe you are what you are because you haven’t suffered what I—what we—must suffer. But I don’t think that’s it. I don’t think that’s all of the truth. I want you to survive. I want the world to somehow survive, even broken—but that’s theoretical. You are not.” She reached then, for the door, and it opened.

  It did not open into the room that Adam knew should have been on the other side. “Go, now. The House Mage will come, or Jewel will. They will know that this way exists, and they must close it, or others will suffer the fate of your Carver and Ellerson.”

  The Hidden Wilderness

  Carver had always associated buildings—with intact roofs and walls—with, if not warmth, then shelter. The blankets with which he had been gifted—by ancient craftsmen who had either abandoned their homes or perished in them—were not buildings. But they were warmer, by far, than the buildings which he had called home in his youth. He remembered the bitter, bitter winter, and the lack of heat. The wind had howled on the other side of slightly warped shutters, and he had huddled into the nearest warm bodies to take the edge off the cold.

  Here, without roof or wall, the wind did howl. It howled as if it had a voice that was demonic. Ah, he was tired. He was tired now. The demon was somewhere in the forest beyond this warmth, this tree.

  Demonic magic was simple: you paid for it with your soul. Since Carver could not see souls—in any way—and could not eat them, could not stave off hunger or starvation, it had seemed a reasonable deal. But the eternity-of-hell part, less so. If he was to be given useful magic for only a handful of years, being in agony forever seemed unfair.

  How had he ended up in this place?

  Ah.

  Memory. There had been a reason he had followed Jay home on the first night he met her; a reason he had gone into Taverson’s with her: she could not hurt him.

  • • •

  That’s how it had started. He had looked at her in the alley, her eyes narrowed, her breath shallow. He had approached her because she could not hurt him. Had he loved her then? No, of course not. Had he admired her? No. Had he wanted anything from her? No. What had she to offer him, when she herself seemed so helpless?

  He could see her now, in his mind’s eye: twelve, straggly hair in her eyes—clean hair; clothing in decent shape, threadbare, but only a little, no torn seams. Shoes that fit. That wouldn’t fit him. Brown eyes, even in the darkness of alley. He had nowhere to go.

  It’s not that he thought she’d keep him safe; it was that she couldn’t hurt him. He’d had nothing else to do, and she couldn’t hurt him.

  She was stupid, really. She was alone. She could hold a knife, but he didn’t think she could use it. Duster? He’d known. They’d all known. But Jay? She was barely armed, but she’d come to save a friend. That’s what she’d said.

  A friend she’d never seen. A friend who wouldn’t know her.

  It was crazy, it was stupid. She was afraid. He remembered that. But it was the wrong fear. She was afraid of failing. As if someone her age, her build, could do anything else. So: she couldn’t hurt him.

  He wasn’t certain she could hurt anyone.

  He didn’t know about her gift, her curse, that night, that first night. He knew that she was willing to risk what little she had for a stranger. He believed her when she said it. And he followed her. He followed her into Taverson’s. He burned his mouth on the first solid meal he’d seen in days.

  And he’d helped.

  He’d helped save Finch. Finch, who couldn’t hurt him, either.

  • • •

  He’d seen magic for most of his life: streetlights, even in the poorest of holdings. He knew that magic existed on the Isle, where he couldn’t even afford to walk, given the tolls required to cross the bridge that separated the Kings and their small part of the city from the rest of the hundred holdings. He had dreamed that magic existed like gold did, there; that no one was hungry or afraid.

  He laughed at his own naïveté.

  Magic existed, yes. Gods existed. Demons existed. And there was no one, anywhere, who lived without fear. Not in the highest position in the Empire, and not in the lowest. The fear in the lowest was worse, to Carver, but that’s where he’d lived at his most helpless. Where they’d all been at their most helpless. Starvation had been a real concern. Cold. Dens.

  But in the poorer holdings, he’d had no responsibilities to anyone, nothing to struggle for except his own survival.

  That changed, permanently, the night he’d met Jay. She wasn’t the first den leader he’d met. She wasn’t the first person with whom he’d formed an alliance of convenience, and he had more to offer her because she was so physically weak.

  Had he known?

  Had he known, then, that by following her on that one night he would never be free again? Had he known that responsibility would weigh down that child, the gravity of its burden shaping the whole of who she would become? No. Of course not. They were urchins in the hundred holdings. They would amount to nothing, be swept away by adulthood in a realm without power. They would join the Kings’ army, if there was need for soldiers. They might drift, as many did, to the churches, where shelter and knowledge were exchanged for service.

  But on that night, exhilarated by their success and terrified by their enemies, Carver had returned with Jay and Finch to their first home. She had welcomed him in, and he’d decided to stay, just to see if she was real.

  She was real. She had a
temper. She had decent aim when angry. But she asked no questions about the past, and she accepted people as they were. No other den he could think of would have taken Teller or Finch. Or Lefty.

  Lefty, the first to die.

  He shook his head.

  Jay was kin. Finch. Teller. Jester. Arann. He had—mostly—let go of the others; they were not the first deaths he’d experienced. Not the last. But they haunted Jay. And he thought she welcomed the haunting. Her memories made them real. Her memories made them important. Gods knew they would never be important to anyone else.

  She’d guided them. Guarded them. Provided for them, as she could. She hit it big with the Terafin manse. Her visions were enough to guarantee that the House Name would be offered to anyone she wanted in the house. And . . . she’d wanted them. She’d wanted Carver.

  By that point? He’d’ve died for her.

  What he’d been drawn to, all those years ago, was the fire of Jewel, the need for family, the ability to build it, without the constraints of blood. What he’d wanted for himself, even if he hadn’t the words for it, was someone who was loyal not because it was expedient, but because he was kin. No, it was more than that. Jay took commitment, and the responsibility that came with it, seriously. She always had. He had been one of those responsibilities, and he accepted that now.

  He had seen her; she had come to this place while he was being hunted by the memory of the Wild Hunt. In this winter place that spoke of the ancient and the lost, a younger Carver would have assumed that hunger and cold and fever had created delusions; that his own desire for safety had produced the worst kind of torment: a glimpse of what was lost, would forever be lost.

  But she had given him something, and he held it against his skin, beneath his shirt. When he doubted, he could touch it, could take it out furtively, examine it. A leaf. A blue leaf, in kind similar to the leaves that fell from the trees of silver and gold. In her forest—and he wandered there seldom because it was somehow oppressive—he had never seen a tree of blue metal; he wouldn’t even know what to call it.