Skirmish: A House War Novel

by West, Michelle

  It wasn’t cold. It was hand-warm, as if it had just been released. She lifted it, and it gained weight and substance as she did, the light that surrounded the whole of its blade dimming as she watched. She saw that a necklace had indeed been wrapped around the sword’s hilt, and that something hung from it, clinking against the sheath. But she waited for the light to dim. Only when it was done did she turn to Avandar, her arms wrapped around the sword as if it were a slender, heavy child.

  “Get us out of here.”

  He nodded.

  She did not examine the sword until she was once again in her rooms; instead she covered it awkwardly with the folds of her cloak as she made her way through the night halls of the Terafin manse. Magelights and oil lamps could be seen no matter where she looked, and everywhere light gathered, so too the servants, a small army of determined men and women. The Master of the Household Staff was in evidence; in the gentle ambient light, the iron gray of her hair looked as if it had finally surrendered to white. This did not, however, make her appear to be in any way fragile, and it certainly didn’t soften her voice.

  Jewel’s walk slowed as she watched the Terafin servants at work. No speck of dust or dirt would dare show itself, when the guests were welcomed into the foyer; no button on uniform would be left unpolished, no hair would be out of place.

  They did this, Jewel thought, for Amarais Handernesse ATerafin. She was dead, but dead, she commanded this last, singular gesture of respect. If she was gone, the House she had built remained, and the House would not expose her reign to ridicule or question. Jewel wanted, for one ridiculous moment, to pick up a cloth and join them as they worked—it was work that had to be done, and it was simple, if hard.

  But the Master of the Household Staff took a very, very dim view of such interference, and in truth, Jewel would not do nearly as good a job, because it wasn’t hers. She therefore picked up speed again, and reached the relative safety of her wing. At the outer doors, two of the four guards once again took up their positions. Ellerson was awake and waiting when she cleared those doors; he offered her, of all things, warm milk and silence.

  She accepted both with gratitude and entered her rooms. Shadow stepped on her cloak. She kicked him, and he hissed—mostly in amusement. “It’s not a very good sword,” he said, as she set it on the bed. Avandar gestured and the room was lit, harshly and brightly, by his magic.

  “It’s what passes for a good sword among the patriciate,” Jewel told him, “and if you use it as a chew toy, I will—”

  “Yesss?”

  “Think of something horrible to do. Make you eat Carver’s cooking.”

  Shadow hissed again, and bounded onto the bed, where he deposited himself more or less dead center and began to clean his wings.

  Jewel lifted the chain that was wrapped around the sword’s pommel; it had, in the way of slender gold chains everywhere, tangled into small, linked knots and she had to work to disentangle them. But she did the work, because she could clearly see what lay at its end: a ring. A large ring, she thought; a Lord’s ring. It was heavy, solid gold, into which an H had been deeply, and elegantly, engraved. At the end points of each of the vertical bars that comprised the letter was a ruby of moderate size. One of the four was cracked or chipped. She opened the chain’s clasp and slid the ring off it, where it sat with authority in the palm of her hand.

  “It’s the Handernesse family crest,” she finally said, her voice tailing up at the end.

  Avandar examined it—without touching it or taking it from her—and nodded. “It is.”

  “And Rath’s sword. The sword his grandfather gave him when he was younger and still a member of the House.” She closed her eyes and leaned against the bed’s edge, lowering her head. “She left them for me.”

  “It appears that way, yes. I am uncertain as to why she felt it necessary to go to such extremes to see the items in your hand; were I The Terafin, I would have simply given them into Gabriel’s keeping.”

  Jewel opened her eyes. “I know why.”

  “Ah.”

  She lifted the sword from the bed and handed it to Avandar; she slid the chain around her own neck. The ring, however, she slid over her thumb. It was a tight fit—but at least it didn’t fall off the way it had when she’d tried it on any of the fingers.

  “Let me adjust it, ATerafin,” Avandar offered.

  “I don’t think we have time—oh. You mean magically.”

  “I do.”

  She shook her head. “Maybe later.”

  “You don’t intend to wear it for the funeral rites?”

  She turned toward the bed, and lifted the scabbard of Rath’s sword. After a moment’s hesitation, she knelt by her bedside and very carefully placed the sword beneath it. It was what Rath had done with it, after all—for decades.

  “Jewel.”

  She rose, shedding cloak and clothing with care. “I’m wearing it.”

  “The Terafin did not.”

  “Not where everyone could see it, no.”

  “Then may I suggest that you follow her example? She left you the necklace.”

  “I’ll keep it for later,” she replied. She set the clothing in a clump on the nearest chair. “Tomorrow, I want to wear it.”

  His voice softened. “Jewel, she can’t see it.”

  “We don’t know what the dead can—or can’t—see. Tomorrow, if she’s somehow watching, I want her to see the ring.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” she said, grunting as she attempted to push Shadow to the left side of the bed, “She left it. For me. I can’t wear the sword—I would, if I could think of a way to do it that didn’t cause Gabriel headaches—but I can wear the ring.”

  “Jewel—”

  “I dreamed of her.” She slid beneath the counterpane and the heavy down comforter; Shadow condescended to lift his bulk for as long as it took her to pull both out from under his weight. Her head sank into her pillows; her hair drifted into her eyes.

  “A true dream?”

  “I dreamed,” she continued, staring open eyed at the darkened ceiling above her, “that she took this sword and this ring to that fountain. She and Morretz. Not even the Chosen were there.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know, Avandar. After my departure, but before her death. More than that, I can’t say. She meant them for me,” she added, her voice finally beginning to crack. “She meant me to find them. I saw her.”

  “Did she speak at all?”

  “Yes—but not to me. I wasn’t with her, in my dream; I was observing her. I couldn’t touch her. I couldn’t say any of the things I wanted to say.” He was kind enough not to ask her what those were. Her hand closed in a fist around the ring—a fist that would have annoyed Rath endlessly because thumbs-on-the-inside were just asking for broken thumbs in a fight.

  “You saw the past,” he finally said.

  “I saw the past. Before you ask, no, I didn’t get to choose what I saw. It was a dream—I’m used to just following those to their end. But I knew what I saw was real. I knew it had happened.” She closed her eyes, and then opened them again, turning her head to see Shadow’s, unblinking, in the darkness. She reached out to touch his fur, felt it, solid and warm, beneath her hand, and closed her eyes again.

  “I was there,” Shadow said. She opened her eyes; he was looking at Avandar, his wings folded, his tail twitching.

  “Pardon?”

  “I was there with her. I saw what she saw.”

  Avandar was silent for a long moment. “Jewel—”

  “I know. But he’s a cat. They go where they want. I couldn’t keep him out of my dreams if I tried.”

  “You need to learn,” Shadow told her. “Your dreams will not be safe until you do.”

  “You could just stay out of them.”

  He hissed. “If I stay out, stupid girl, who will protect you from the others? Who will stop you from getting lost? Your dreams are real, now. They can kill you.”

 
; “Why do you care?”

  “It’s less boring,” he replied. “Now go to sleep.”

  “Will I dream again?”

  He opened one eye. “I will eat your dreams. But only for tonight. I don’t like the way they taste.”

  “ATerafin,” Avandar said softly, “you must speak with the Oracle, soon.”

  She knew it was true. “Speak to me in four days,” she told him. “In four days, I’ll be ready to think about anything.”

  He fell silent.

  “Tonight,” she told him, surprising them both, “I only want to think about her. She left me Rath’s sword. She left me the ring. They weren’t for the House—they were for me. I’ll never be able to talk to her again, and I want to, Avandar. I want to ask her all the questions I should have asked and didn’t, because I was afraid to take the House. I want to ask her about Gabriel, about the Chosen, about the shrine; I want to ask her about Rymark.

  “I want to tell her—” She stopped for a moment, took control of her voice, and spoke again. “I want to tell her that she was my family and I was her den-kin.”

  “She knew.”

  But Jewel had seen The Terafin’s face on that moonlit eve in which she had given over the last of Rath’s items—the last things that bound her, as sister, to the man who had found, and saved, Jewel. There was no one, now, who loved Rath the way Jewel had, and Amarais had hesitated until the last moment, as if in surrendering these private, apolitical items, she was at last surrendering to the inevitability of her own death.

  And that was unfair: The Terafin had never surrendered. She had always planned for both failure and success, had always balanced the well-being of her House between the two. She had fought, playing every variant of the game she could see; she couldn’t see the demon that had killed her in the end. No one had; had they, there would be no funeral.

  She closed her eyes.

  “Sleep, Jewel,” Avandar said. “I will watch.”

  “No, don’t. Shadow doesn’t need sleep; you do. I don’t know what you and Celleriant have been doing—and I should, and you’ll tell me—but you need sleep at least as much as I do.”

  “My dreams will not kill me.”

  “Avandar, I’ve seen your dreams. If I die in mine, I’d still consider myself better off.” She heard his steps, tensed as he approached the bedside. But he stopped there, gazing down at her.

  Will you end it? he asked.

  She couldn’t answer. She knew what he wanted. She even understood why. But she also understood that if he succeeded, he would be gone. She had lived with his arrogance, his irritation, his anger, and his very occasional approval for half her life; she would have sworn, had anyone asked, that she’d be happy to be rid of him. And she would.

  But not that way. She was so tired of death and loss.

  Chapter Nineteen

  4th of Henden, 427 A.A.

  Terafin Manse, Averalaan Aramarelas

  THE WEST WING was a hive of activity beyond Jewel’s closed doors; she could hear moving discussions, shouting—that would be Carver—and the frantic knocking at her door. She ignored it for as long as she could, because she’d slept, and it had been so mercifully dreamless, she didn’t want to wake.

  When the knocking transformed itself into a snarling roar, however, she rolled bleary-eyed out of bed.

  “It’s just Snow,” Shadow said with a sniff.

  Avandar was sleeping in a chair. Guilt therefore made getting out of bed a necessity, and it all but demanded best behavior. She walked quietly past him, slightly alarmed that the noise hadn’t jarred him out of sleep.

  Shadow had been entirely correct; Snow was bristling in the doorway by the time she had it open. Two of the Chosen were on guard, but it was a different two; they looked distinctly uncomfortable about Snow’s presence. Their hands were on the hilts of their swords, but as no one else in the wing—and at the moment, that included Angel and Teller—were reacting much, they hadn’t drawn them.

  “You two,” she said, probably breaking half a dozen etiquette rules, “don’t you need to dress?”

  They were demonstrably dressed, but they exchanged a brief glance. “We’ll have the chance when the captains relieve us,” Gordon told her. “Don’t worry.”

  “Oh, it’s not worry,” she replied. “Misery loves company, and I have to dress for the occasion.”

  “She does,” Teller said gravely. “Haval’s waiting.”

  “Haval didn’t even make my dress—” she shut up as Snow hissed. “I’ll be there after I’ve—”

  “Eaten?”

  She nodded.

  Ellerson had arranged for breakfast in the breakfast nook; the den were seated in various states of wakefulness around the long, narrow table. Teller, accustomed to the early morning frenzy of Barston post-regency, was wide awake. Finch was wide awake as well; the rest of the den fell into the cracks somewhere between those two and Jewel. Gabriel’s office was, of course, closed for the three days of the rites; the Merchant Authority offices had likewise been shut down for the duration. The House was to assemble in three waves. The first wave contained every nonessential person on staff or Council: Jewel, Finch, Teller, Barston, the people who in theory were Important. The second wave would join the ensemble only after the guests had arrived: the guards, the Chosen—or former Chosen. The third and final wave would be the servants, saving only those few who were utterly necessary for the preparations of the offerings after the rites had begun.

  All of this had been drilled into Jewel’s head by Teller, who, of the den, was most familiar with just how many things had to be arranged. What she’d known before his careful, if weary, reporting was that the Kings, the Queens, and The Ten were, upon death, accorded the full funereal rites and blessings of the Triumvirate, and obviously, gods couldn’t be expected to share a day, or anything.

  Avandar raised a brow when she ventured this opinion.

  “You are tired,” Carver added.

  “The fact of the three-day rite has very little to do with the Triumvirate,” the domicis now said, in his clipped voice. “No matter how conveniently the numbers work out in this case, it is not fact.”

  Jewel grimaced as Carver kicked her—gently—under the table. “Everyone,” she said, rising from a half-eaten dish of something with too few potatoes and too much cheese for a morning as early as this one, “Get dressed. We’ll meet in the great room. Shadow, would you stay with Ariel and Adam today?”

  The cat hissed. “Make Night stay.”

  “Night is with Gabriel. Snow was supposed to be with Gabriel as well,” she added.

  “Dress,” Snow said, sounding about as outraged as he did when Shadow stepped on his tail.

  “Don’t look at me,” Shadow replied. “You know she’s not very smart.”

  “Obviously not,” Jewel snapped, “since I apparently agreed to let him make it.” She headed toward Haval’s room, fortified now by Finch, Teller, breakfast and some decent, if scant, sleep.

  “Snow’s not as scary as Haval,” Finch offered.

  “I should hope not; I chose Haval.”

  If Haval ever forgave her, it would—judging by the pallor of his skin, the circles beneath his eyes, and his very unamused expression—be a miracle. A rather large one.

  “I’m please to see you could make it,” he told them all, gesturing now at the featureless mannequins around which were the clothes several consecutive days’ worth of increasingly cranky labor had produced.

  “Mine is better,” Snow told him; he was practically bouncing. Jewel considered—briefly—telling him he looked far more like a puppy than a cat.

  “It is, indeed,” Haval told him. When Haval spoke to the cat, he spoke gravely and with great respect—which at least showed he was capable of it. To be fair, Jewel didn’t doubt that he was; she’d just seen so little of it aimed at her. “Jewel, please—you do not have all day, and I’m unable to rest for even an hour if you dawdle here.”

  “Pardon?”

&n
bsp; He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I will, of course, be in attendance. I have less need for obvious finery, and I believe the clothing I transported here will serve my purposes.”

  “Is Hannerle—”

  “No. She finds the presence of the Kings and the Exalted intimidating.”

  “Who doesn’t?” Jewel muttered.

  “Hopefully, ATerafin, you.” He gestured again, and this time she approached the mannequin that was wearing the garment Snow had somehow created. It was still predominantly white, with edges of black and gold, and it had a train that would sweep floors clean if it were allowed to touch the ground. She grimaced. “Is the long bit at the back necessary? I’m not getting married—”