It was not the question he expected to hear. He shook his head, waiting. She was staring at her hands, at the single ring that adorned them. Nor did she lift her head when she began to speak again.
She told him. Of her dream. Of the fact that it was a good dream. It was the best parts of the past, before the worst parts had started. She was in the apartment she had found for them. She was, once again, at home.
But, as her meeting with Carver had been, it was more than a dream. Real and not real. And her den—her living den—had walked into that dream as well. And when she woke, the apartment was empty. Whoever had lived in it before she had started to dream, before her subconscious had taken her to a place for which she yearned, had vanished. They were gone.
She’d done this.
As she’d left the leaf in Ellerson’s hands with Carver.
“I shouldn’t have left it,” she whispered. “I know I shouldn’t have left it.”
“Did you know then?”
She shook her head.
He approached her, as he seldom approached her these days. “Do not regret love. Do not think that it brings only pain. Your den is here. Carver is not dead.”
“I told him to use it.”
“Yes. But, Jewel, Carver understands that you are The Terafin. You are more than The Terafin. And he understands that you are kin. No decision such as the decision you reached in that dreaming could be made without pain.”
“What good is pain?” she said, lifting her head in a snap of motion. “What good is pain if it doesn’t change anything?” She rose then and began to pace. Or she would have had Shadow not materialized. He stepped on her foot. She looked down at the cat.
The cat looked at Ellerson, studiously ignoring the woman on whose feet he was standing.
“Do you think that Amarais did not know pain?” Ellerson asked.
She was silent, breathing, struggling with rage and, yes, pain. She shook her head mutely. No.
“Were she to be Haerrad, would that be better?”
“No!”
“No, indeed. It is always a difficult balance. It will never be easy. But, Jewel, I think, were it easy or simple to sacrifice others, you would not be what you now are.”
“And what is that?” was the bitter, quiet question. “I brought them here because I thought they’d be safe. And they were. They were. Until—until me.”
“You are not responsible for the Sleepers. Not even the gods could destroy them.”
“If I hadn’t planted those trees, that door would have never opened. You would never have been lost in a closet. Carver wouldn’t have been lost there, either.”
“Jewel—what you are becoming, I do not know. But I trust the heart of it. You will make mistakes. Mistakes are unavoidable. Learn from the ones you survive. It is all you can do. It is all anyone can do.
“But if you lose heart, if you inure yourself to guilt, you inure yourself also to responsibility. It is the flip side of the same coin. And I believe you are Sen, as the ancients call you, for a reason. Is it safe? No. It is not safe for you; it is not safe for us.” He exhaled. “But a god walks the world, and that is far, far less safe. Can you face that god as you are now?”
She shook her head.
Shadow nodded. He then shouldered her, and she stumbled back into the chair she had vacated in her agitation. Before she could rise again, the great gray cat dropped his head in her lap. He said nothing.
“What you become, what you are afraid to become, will in the end be better than that god. It will be better than the wilderness and the denizens of the forest that you now claim. It will not be free. It will not be without pain—because no life is lived without pain.”
“It’s not my pain that I’m worried about. Those people are gone. And Carver—” She stopped. She could not speak.
Ellerson handed the leaf to her and, hand trembling, she took it.
“Carver entrusts you with the people he cares most about in the world,” the domicis said. “And one of those people is you, yourself. He is not in pain, I promise you that. I would have stayed—”
Her head snapped up again.
“—but he reminded me: I am domicis, and the decision is and was his to make. And, Jewel, he has also entrusted me with the people he cares most about in the world. You are not yet finished what you must do.”
“Nooooooo,” Shadow said, “she is not. And what she must do right now is scratch behind my ears. They are itchy.”
She did.
Ellerson did not tell her about Stacy. He could not bring himself to do it. It was a weakness, but he was not Sen, not The Terafin, and he allowed himself this because the cost of it was not so high. The pain she felt now was human, and as long as she picked herself up and continued to move forward, it must be allowed; he did not wish to add to it. Not now. Not ever.
Shadow growled. “Sleep,” he said.
It took Ellerson a moment to understand that it was not to Jewel he spoke. But Jewel was now looking at the leaf and the great gray cat, as if they were all the world she could, at this very moment, contemplate.
And, in truth, Ellerson was weary. He, too, would retreat, with his pain, his sense of failure, his sense of loss. He was older and better by far at dividing it from the actions to which he must wake in the morning.
• • •
Ellerson did not go to his room immediately. He went, instead, to Angel’s room. He knocked on the door. Angel’s indistinct voice could be heard in reply. He entered.
The room was spare, clean and perfectly tidy, an indication that it had not been lived in recently. There were weapons on the floor, half under the bed, and a pack in the corner. Angel did not intend to stay long. His face was drawn; he was silent.
Ellerson cleared his throat. “Master Carver asked me to bring you this.” He held out the pack that contained the cloak, the blanket, the boots—salvation in the bitter winter of the dreaming wilderness. He held it out, and after a long silence, Angel rose from his position on the bed’s edge, and took the pack. He did not open it.
“What happened?”
“As I told you, Carver chose to remain. He opened a way for us to return to you, but he could only do that if he was in communication with the earth.”
“Why did he send this, then?”
“The contents are proof against winter, in some fashion, and he thought you—of all the den—might require them in future.”
“Why did he think that?”
“I do not know. We did not have time to converse; the demon was almost upon us. The earth will protect Carver—the demon cannot destroy the wild earth, and Carver will be part of it, inseparable from it—but it could not likewise protect us.” Ellerson cleared his throat. “Nevertheless, his meaning seems clear to me: he is leaving Jewel in your care. Of all the den, it is only you she will allow to accompany her.”
Angel closed his eyes. He said almost inaudible words and gave up halfway through. Instead, he signed thanks.
Ellerson did not sign in reply. Instead, he asked Angel one boon, should it ever be required. Angel nodded, and he bowed to Angel, and left the room.
• • •
The Master of the Household Staff was not happy. Jewel did not have Carver’s familiarity with the back halls—no one in the den did, with the possible exception of Jester. In order to speak with Merry, she must first petition the Master of the Household Staff, in the small, enclosed space that served as her office, her war room, and her interrogation chamber, all at once.
The Master of the Household Staff had long disapproved of the den’s inability to observe the starched lines that separated those that served from those that ruled. She did not seem to care for patricians at all, which was ironic, given that it was patricians who received the benefit of the staff’s labor.
Her opening salvo was a query about The Terafin’s personal chambers.
Jewel’s flinch was entirely internal; she met the autocratic stare of her chief servant with a neutrality that woul
d have made Haval proud, if Haval could be moved to feel pride at all. She also answered the question, her voice almost uninflected. Castles that were a mile or two from the doors that led to what had once been library might have been an everyday occurrence, a change of sheets or curtains.
It was clear from the Master of the Household Staff’s expression that she already knew of the changes. On any other day, Jewel might have let Barston inform her; Barston was fully capable of meeting disdain with disdain and displeasure with displeasure. Today, however, she did not wish to involve anyone else.
“The change in quarters is not, however, why I’ve come. I wish to speak to a member of the Household Staff in person.”
“Which member?”
“Merry ATerafin.”
The Master of the Household Staff’s expression, grim and forbidding, rippled ever so slightly.
The Master of the Household Staff was first to rise, her lips pinched, her eyes narrowed. “Will you meet her in my office,” she asked, “or do you insist on being led to her rooms as if you are part of my staff?”
Those rooms were shared. “I wish to speak to her alone.”
“Very well.” She did not ask Jewel why although she could have. Her job was to supervise the men and women under her command. And her job was, as well, to protect them. Jewel had no answer she wanted to give, but want, in this case, was almost irrelevant.
The Master of the Household Staff left Jewel alone in her office, departing by a smaller door.
When she returned, Merry ATerafin came with her. She led her into the office, to a chair next to The Terafin’s, and then retreated once again.
Merry was silent as she bowed; it was a perfect obeisance from a servant, and Jewel allowed it because she was The Terafin. She had always hated the formalities the servants were expected to observe; she had always hated the distance it implied.
But there had been no servants in her childhood home. The cooking, the cleaning, had been done for the family by the family. In places where cooking was done, there were no hierarchies that didn’t involve her Oma. Merry was a servant on the Isle. She was so far above the den in birth and training that it seemed ridiculous that she should now have to bow or scrape.
Yet here, there was a safety to be found in distance. Merry worked in the West Wing, but she was not of it. She was not mother, not Ona, not Oma. She was not kin, because being kin changed the nature of her duties, of her responsibilities.
Jewel bid Merry rise, and further, bid her be seated. Merry obeyed, her face pale, her hands, which rested in plain sight in her lap, twined together. Shaking. As if she already knew.
No, Jewel thought; as if she understood that this was the moment that the shape of all her fears, growing darker and heavier with the passage of time and the absence of Carver, finally had a name, cohering at once into what it must become. Grief. Loss.
Watching her, Jewel understood. It was the same for her.
Seeing Ellerson had lifted that shadow, that fear; seeing Ellerson alone had solidified it. Carver was not coming home. Carver’s voice would no longer be heard in the West Wing. Or in the back halls.
But he had given her the locket he wore. He had asked her to bring it to Merry.
In silence, she bowed her head and attempted to remove the locket she kept around her neck. It caught in her hair. Merry rose instantly to come to her aid, although Merry was not a servant trained to dress, to clothe, to tend to hair and powders and nails. Nor did Jewel forbid it; her hands were shaking.
Merry’s hands were shaking.
How much of a coward was she, Jewel wondered; it was far easier to speak—and it was not easy—when she could not see Merry’s face, was not required to meet her gaze.
“I met Carver in a dream.”
Merry said nothing; her hands had not yet managed to open the clasp of the necklace.
“I met him in a dream. It was a dream like the castle is a dream. He gave me this locket. He asked me to return it to you, and to tell you—”
“Don’t say it,” Merry whispered.
But Jewel shook her head. “He has us. We have him. But you’re the only person he thought of, when we met.”
“That’s not—”
“No.” Jewel inhaled. “No, it’s not true; he did think of all of us. He couldn’t help but think of me—I was standing in front of him. But the only thing he asked of me was that I return this to you. He loves you,” she said, before Merry could stop her.
Merry said nothing.
“He wanted you to have this,” Jewel said, after an awkward silence. Too much to say. Too little to offer. She lifted her hands and lowered them again.
The clasp finally came undone. The locket listed to the side, but one end of the clasp prevented it from falling off as the chain was pulled—gently—away from Jewel’s neck. She felt the absence of the locket, the absence of its warmth, and the absence of its weight; it had come home, as Carver had intended.
But Carver had not.
Hope was a knife. A simple knife, not a sword, not an ax. But its edges could cut and its point, kill. They were caught by that knife; the point was embedded in both of them, working its way with the passage of time toward the heart, toward the end. When did hope become a burden? When was its weight too costly to bear? When was a bad answer—the feared answer, the worst answer—less painful when it finally arrived, inevitable as nightfall, than the weight of the fear itself?
And when could she decide that for someone else?
She didn’t know Merry well. Carver spoke of her, but seldom, as if protecting either her privacy or the familial nature of the den itself, the lines of insider and outside so clearly drawn.
Merry made no sound. No movement. Jewel understood. The Terafin did not cry, but long before Jewel had become The Terafin, she had refused to cry in public—and public meant anywhere anyone could see. Even family. Perhaps, given the nature of her Oma’s anger at the sight of tears, especially family.
Jewel rose stiffly. She could not reach the door without turning; could not leave Merry without seeing her face, her expression. Could not, she found, leave without words.
Yes, hope was harsh. Where hope lay, pain was waiting; where hope died, there might be some chance of healing. But without hope, what did they have?
She drew breath, turned.
Merry had opened the locket. She was crying, yes, but the tears were not the tears of loss and pain—or not only those tears. Her face was lit by a gentle glow that seemed to soften its lines, to soften the signs of exhaustion and apprehension; she was, for a moment, radiance and warmth—approachable warmth. Comfort. Jewel understood in that moment why Carver had loved her.
Did love her.
The locket’s open face glowed. Jewel could not see what either side of the locket held. She’d assumed that it was meant to house a picture of each of them, but if this was a simple picture, its nature was not flat, not static; she could see the colors of the magic that radiated from it. She could hear nothing, could see nothing more than the trace of magic that her talent had always shown her.
Carver did not create this.
Nor did Carver pay for its creation. Had he, Jewel would have known. She would have seen the bill—and the resultant outrage from the collective House Council, foremost among them Iain.
“He’s not dead,” Merry whispered. “He’s not dead.”
Jewel swallowed. “No.” He couldn’t come home. But she could not bring herself to say this. Could not bring herself to tell Merry the rest of Ellerson’s story. Nor did she ask what Merry saw; it was an unbearably private moment, and she felt out of place, intrusive. Not unwelcome, but there was no place for her here.
Merry looked up as she moved. Yes, there were tears as reality reasserted itself. But Merry’s hands were shaking as she gently closed the locket. Greatly daring for a servant, she asked, “Can you help me put this on?”
Jewel did, her hands far less unsteady than they had been. She wanted to apologize. Carver had
asked her to apologize—she remembered that now. But the gift that she had given was a different kind of hope; it was a place of retreat, a place of comfort—the comfort she could no longer find in his presence.
“Thank you. Thank you for bringing me this. Thank you for letting me have it.”
About the Author
Michelle West is the author of three interconnected series: The Sacred Hunt duology, the six-volume Sun Sword series, and The House War novels. She has published numerous short stories, as well as fantasy novels, under her maiden name, Michelle Sagara. She was a two-time nominee for the Campbell Award. She works part-time at BAKKA Books, one of Toronto's larger bookstores, and writes a column for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She can contacted via her website, michellesagara.com.
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