Skirmish: A House War Novel

by West, Michelle

  “One more,” Jewel whispered, as she lifted the leaf of ruby. It was a deep, dark red, and in the dim light, it seemed more liquid than gem, but calling it the leaf of blood was disturbing. She hesitated. As she did, the tree rustled, touched by a breeze that touched nothing else, as if it were attempting to converse.

  This tree had once been a normal tree. It had had no voice, no shadows, no leaves other than the ones that budded in spring and fell in a farewell display of color in the autumn. It had been the oldest and the largest of the trees in The Terafin’s estates, and it had been respected for its age and its size, inasmuch as trees were ever granted respect.

  But this, this last leaf, had come from this tree. She was certain it was the same tree, although it looked younger and slimmer, dwarfed by the old forest in which it had taken root. Celleriant had said it was somehow rooted in a dream world—not a daydream world, that would be too comfortable, too safe.

  She turned the leaf over in her palm. Not all dreams were ugly. Not all dreams were bitter. Not all dreams of death led to death—not Jewel’s dreams. Her eyes widened. She turned to Arann, who stood in silence, waiting for her to take one action or the other: lift the leaf and return it to the tree, or discard it.

  “I dream,” she told him softly because he was there and she wanted the kitchen.

  Arann nodded, aware of the nature of some of her dreams—and aware, as well, that she woke from them screaming and terrified, and found her way back only in the steady presence of her watchful den-kin.

  “I dream,” she repeated. “Sometimes I dream of death. I can’t control them. The dreams.”

  He nodded again.

  “Can you remember what I tell you now?” she asked, aware that he wasn’t Teller, and aware, sharply, that Teller wasn’t here.

  “Yes.”

  It was her turn to nod, to draw breath. “I can’t control the dreams, but sometimes I can control the deaths that occur in them. They come with me—the dreams—and they drive me in the waking world. It’s not perfect,” she added, thinking, with sharp pain, of The Terafin, “but sometimes it works.

  “The dreams come to me. I don’t control them. I don’t know where they come from or why. But they’re my dreams, Arann. Mine.” She lifted her face to the leaves that rustled above them both, as if they were her audience. Their voices were tinkling, metallic, like oddly shaped chimes. “Sometimes I dream of gods.”

  She lifted the last leaf, the red leaf, and the whole of the tree trunk shivered. Bark grew around it, hardening, darkening; this time when it reached for the leaf, it didn’t reach with one branch, but with many—and they were tree branches, and familiar ones at that.

  “What do you dream of?” she asked the tree softly.

  Trees didn’t talk. Not even here. But the branches lifted this single leaf, and instead of raising it to join the others, it drew the leaf in, toward its trunk. A small gap opened in the bark; the leaf vanished as if swallowed. As if, Jewel thought, she had returned its heart.

  She waited, breath held; the leaves she had taken from the forest that had surrounded the glass castle in the Stone Deepings did not vanish; nor did their branches become the living branches of a tree of bark. They remained as they had grown, and as she watched, they grew larger, higher, smaller shoots unfurling and adding new leaves that were kin to the ones she had offered.

  Silver. Gold. Diamond.

  She wasn’t surprised when one of each of these new leaves fell toward her upturned face. She caught them, gathering them as they hardened. But the ruby leaf did not return; nor did ruby leaves grow again from branches that had shed them once before. Instead, above, leaves grew.

  These leaves, she recognized with a shock: they were the leaves of the trees that girded the Common, and those trees and this one were in no way the same. Large, green, almost the shape of giant’s hands, they budded and unfurled, and they rose as the tree gained in height and width, until the roots reached above the dark earth and surrounded their feet.

  Arann stared in wonder, a half smile on his face.

  One of these leaves also dropped; it was Arann who caught it; Arann who turned it over and over in his hand, the smile deepening. Jewel’s answering smile came from a place as hidden as the tree’s heart; she reached out, touched the leaf that rested in Arann’s hand; it was soft, supple, its edges ivory, its heart green. As a child, she’d gathered the leaves when they’d fallen in the Common; it was forbidden by law to “interfere” with the trees in the Common, but it wasn’t illegal to gather what they shed. And, to be fair, it was also almost impossible to interfere with those ancient trees—you could carve your initials in the bark if you were patient and strong, but that would take more than enough time for the magisterians to arrive on patrol, and then you’d suffer—the branches for the most part were too high.

  The gathered, fallen leaves had graced her home; they’d graced her Oma’s window ledge when her Oma had been sick enough to stay abed for hours at a time; only death had stopped her from entering her kitchen. Jewel had carried them, sometimes in handfuls, as if they were flowers, and her Oma had smiled, smoking her pipe, and twirling the stems reflexively between her fingers before she set them aside.

  Those trees were the forest of her childhood, the forest of her youth.

  She left the leaf in Arann’s hands and walked to the girth of the trunk; there, she spread her arms, as she might have done as a small child in the Common—her father still alive and shadowing her steps—and wrapped them around the tree. They didn’t extend far enough, of course.

  The tree grew small branches in a place where branches generally didn’t grow, and she recognized these as well, but they weren’t as comforting a memory: they were like vines or tendrils, and they had thorns for teeth. One curled around her left wrist, its movement slow and almost gentle; thorns pressed against her skin lightly.

  Arann drew his sword. “Jay?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “…maybe.” She clenched teeth and nodded, her chin scraping bark. The vines tightened suddenly; the thorns broke skin in a rush. She swore in rough Torra, but kept it as quiet as she could. “Don’t,” she told Arann, although he hadn’t moved. “It’s—I’m fine. I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to chop anything off this tree.” The pain, in any case, had stopped; it was already on its way to memory, except for the dull pulsing throb.

  The vine loosened, withdrew, and Jewel slowly stepped away from the trunk. As she did, she saw that the thorns were now dark with her blood. She watched as her blood brightened, reddened, and spread. The thorns burst open in a rush, as if they were, and had always been, buds, and the leaves that grew from them were red, red leaves.

  Hers. Of her.

  But their shape—oh, their shape. Edged in ivory, heart of crimson, they were the leaves of autumn in the Common, the leaves that she had laid on her Oma’s blanket while she slept.

  “Oh, look, look! There she is!”

  Jewel froze. “Arann, please tell me you didn’t hear that.”

  Arann, however, was now squinting into the darkness that surrounded them. Jewel cringed.

  “Where have you been, stuuupid girl?”

  She heard the flapping of wings above the newly grown branches, and the cringe deepened.

  “Stupid girl?” Arann shook his head.

  “What is this? Who is this? Where is the ugly one?”

  “Jay—”

  “The leaves weren’t the only things I saw in that forest,” she muttered. “Maybe if we leave quickly, we can lose them.”

  “I heard that.” Jewel, in turn, heard the thump of something heavy landing. To Arann she said, “They’re mostly harmless.”

  “Harmless? Harmlesssss?”

  Above the branches of the renewed tree, in the light the tree itself shed, there appeared three very large, winged cats. Even in the dim glow, they were instantly familiar: one was white, one was gray, and one was black. The white cat and the black one had
their mouths open, and words were spilling out.

  “This is just what I need.”

  Arann gestured in den-sign with the hand that wasn’t on the hilt of the sword.

  “No. What are you three doing here?”

  The white cat hissed in a gurgling way; it was the winged cat version of laughter. “We were bored.”

  “Believe that there’s nothing interesting here. At all.”

  “I don’t think she missed us,” it said, speaking to the gray cat. The gray cat was the cat Jewel disliked the least, mostly because it spoke less often.

  “I couldn’t. I couldn’t see you to aim.”

  Another hiss, this from the black cat. He rolled over in midair, and began to rub his left shoulder against the underside of a diamond branch. Even to Jewel, not known for her ability to express appropriate respect, this seemed beyond rude.

  The gray cat hissed. It was a very different sound. Jewel stiffened. “Don’t you know why we’re here, little human?”

  “No.” She gestured to Arann and started to back away from the tree. He retreated as well—but kept himself between her and the cats. “Did the Winter King send you?”

  “Who?” The white cat demanded.

  “The Winter King. The man who—”

  “Oh, him.” In the darkness it was hard to see the cats’ eyes—but it didn’t matter in this case; Jewel could practically hear them rolling.

  She caught Arann’s hand and pulled him farther back, wondering when the distance between the tree and, oh, everyone else in the garden had grown so large. She spared a glance over her shoulder and didn’t much care for what she saw: very dark forest in a very dark night. She stopped even trying to walk backward. “Stay near the tree,” she told Arann.

  “And the…cats?”

  “And the cats. We seem to have a minor problem.”

  Arann, being Arann, said, “You don’t know the way back?”

  “Not as such.”

  Fifteen minutes passed. They weren’t quiet minutes, either; the white cat and the black cat had decided, for reasons only cats could understand, that they wanted to scratch their backs on the exact same branch, and were busy trying to reduce each other to patches of fur in order to do so. The gray cat didn’t appear to have an itchy back. He did seem to have some interest in watching his companions fight, but apparently that kind of fight was only interesting for a handful of minutes. He made his way down to the ground a few feet from where Jewel stood.

  Which put him only a few inches away from Arann.

  Arann held his sword, but didn’t point or raise it. He was tense, though. No reason he shouldn’t be. Although Jewel called them cats, there were distinct differences between, say, Teller’s cats and these ones, the most significant at the moment not being their wings. No, it was their size. They were as big as smart horses, although they had shorter, thicker legs and a distinct lack of hooves. They also had much larger mouths, in all senses of the word. The gray cat chose this moment to expose his fangs—by yawning.

  He then lifted his paws and regarded his unsheathed claws with casual disinterest, flexing them in turn.

  Jewel frowned. “Please don’t eat him,” she said, more curtly than she intended.

  “Eat him? Eat him?” The gray cat followed the words with a brief hiss. “I’m not hungry, and it’s not fun to kill mortals. It makes almost no difference; they die anyway.” He sniffed air and added, “He doesn’t seem interesting.”

  No, Arann wouldn’t. It was part of the reason Jewel loved him. “He’s not the Winter King, no.”

  The gray cat hissed again. “Why do you keep saying that?”

  “Because you should be with him.” The Winter King of the great, glass castle had had an enviable effect on the cats; they shut up in his presence.

  But…he should be dead. Dead or transformed into something that might be of service in the long nights of the Wild Hunt. Ariane had called the Wild Hunt and she had ridden the hidden ways to find—at last—the reigning Winter King.

  The cat scratched the ground, lifted his paw, and looked at his claws. “It’s dirt,” he said.

  “Well, yes. We’re in a forest.”

  “Not all forests have dirt.” He sniffed the air a moment, and then roared. She’d never heard the cats roar before. They clearly didn’t do it often, because the screaming hiss and spit in the air above suddenly stopped. Two cats who looked distinctly larger because of the way their fur was bunched and standing on end came to land on either side of the gray one.

  The white cat tilted its head and looked at Arann, who happened to be very close. “Are we going to play with him?”

  “No,” Jewel snapped.

  “But we’re bored.”

  “Go play with demons instead.”

  White ears twitched. In fact, so did gray ears and black ones.

  “Really?” the white cat finally said, his voice the definition of suspicious. “You let demons play in your lands?”

  “We don’t exactly let them play in our lands, no.”

  The cat hissed. “That would be more fun,” he muttered, sinking down into the earth and resting his chin on his forepaws. “We’re bored. Why are you talking about demons?”

  “We’re pretty sure we have some.” As if they were vermin.

  Once again, ears lifted. “We could find them for you.”

  “We couldn’t,” the black cat snarled. He was sulking as well. “Where would she hide demons here? She only has one tree.” He walked over to the tree’s trunk and began to scratch his back across bark.

  “But it’s an interesting tree, isn’t it?” Jewel said. They all stared at her.

  “It’s too crowded,” the black cat replied, sibilance stretching the first short word into the space of the rest. “We don’t think it should look like that.”

  She hated to agree, but felt compelled to be honest: they were right. While the silver, gold, and diamond hinted at the children’s stories that never died—no matter how old the child listening eventually became—the combination looked wrong.

  “I want my own tree,” the white cat added archly. He stood, having decided that sulking on his belly no longer suited him.

  “I’m not a gardener,” was her terse reply.

  They all broke into the gurgling hiss that Jewel identified as laughter. She wouldn’t have minded it as much if it weren’t always at her expense.

  “Plant them. Plant them, watch them grow.” The gray cat moved around Arann so quickly her den-kin had time to spin; he had the very good sense not to attempt to stab the passing cat. He even had to swivel to avoid its wings.

  “Plant what?”

  The cat hissed. “The leaves, stupid girl.” He bumped her hand with his head, and she froze; his head was both soft and warm. Her brows rose, her eyes widening. “You’re not—you’re not stone anymore.”

  “No,” he said, his voice unexpectedly serious. “We are not stone. We are not ice.”

  “But—”

  “You are neither stone nor ice.”

  She stared at him.

  “You are stupid, though. Come, come. The leaves.”

  “But—”

  The cat growled. It was not a friendly sound. “Plant your forest, stupid girl. Plant it quickly. They know you now. They know.”

  “What? Who are you talking about?”

  “You have one tree. It is too small.”

  It wasn’t small, now.

  “And we each want our own tree.”

  This was the problem with cats. Or at least with talking to cats. She lifted the three leaves that had fallen into her hands. “I was going to keep them.”

  “Well of course you’re going to keep them,” he hissed, managing to suggest by posture alone that it was with great will and effort that he hadn’t appended the words stupid girl. He nudged her again, but harder, and this time, his head remained plastered against the underside of her hand. It was so warm. “Hurry, hurry, hurry. I hear the ugly man.”

  Jewel,
however, heard something else, and she turned at the sound of breaking branches and heavy feet. She no longer knew which direction the sounds were coming from; she only knew they were getting closer. That, and for some reason, they didn’t sound particularly friendly.

  The white cat and the black cat began to bristle, but at the same time, began to bounce. The gray cat nudged her so hard she almost fell over. When she looked at him, he looked very put out; it was amazing what could be accomplished with fur, fangs, and the shape of ears. “Hurry, stupid girl, hurry.”