“Too long. Come back.”
Adam swallowed. Nodded. To the Lady’s shoulder, he said, “Did you choose to become . . . as you now are?”
“Yes. If you mean the child.”
He shook his head. “You are—not here, but where I first touched you—made of stone.”
“Is that how you see me?”
“Yes. It’s how we all saw you, even—even Lord Celleriant.”
She frowned. Even her frown was compelling; he wanted to reach up and smooth it away.
“You didn’t feel like stone to the touch—not to me. But to the others . . . you did. You do. Your White Lady made statues of you. You don’t even stand on the ground.”
She glanced at Shadow. “Is this true?”
Not even Shadow could call this woman stupid. “Yesssss.”
“Can you move?” Adam asked her.
“As you can see, yes.”
“I mean—can you—” the words drifted away before he could harness them and drive them out of his mouth. There was nothing about this woman that was stone; nothing about her that was fixed and motionless. She was warm, she spoke; he could feel—and see—her breath. “You can’t hear your sisters.”
She shook her head.
“Would you speak with them, if you could?”
“It is not what the White Lady desired for us,” she said. But the answer was long in coming, and thoughtful. She placed her free hand, once again, upon the curve of her belly. “I did not tell her what I intended. This life that I bear—you have seen others like it?”
Adam nodded. It was not entirely true.
“And could you care for him, Adam of Arkosa? Could you protect him and see him, in safety, to the White Lady’s court?”
He froze. He did not want to deny this woman anything. “I do not think anyone can reach that court.”
Something in his tone made her tighten her arm. “What do you mean?”
He said, “This is the business of Matriarchs, Lady. I do not understand it myself; I am not considered wise by my kin. I am considered too young.”
She turned, then, to Shadow. The great gray cat’s low growl was accompaniment to the howl of icy wind. “Of what does he speak? If he could find us, why would the Court of the Queen be impassible? Has he offended her? Has she reason to forbid his presence?”
The gray cat flicked his wings before folding them and muttering imprecations against the criminally stupid.
“Eldest, please.”
The single second syllable struck Adam as a blow. There was nothing—literally nothing—he would not have done to ease the fear and pain in her voice. But he could not answer her question. He understood it only superficially. He turned to look at Shadow, not to glare, but to join his wordless plea to her voiced one.
Shadow understood; a volley of opinion about Adam’s usefulness and intelligence were the whole of his reply for what felt like minutes. His paws were, apparently, far more interesting than either the Lady or Adam for the next five. His subsequent sigh was almost thunderous.
“You have been sleeping for too long.” He flexed his claws as he spoke, apparently to them.
The Lady nodded. Her arm rested around Adam’s shoulders as if it were made of stone.
“While you slept, she changed the world.”
The arm tightened.
“While you slept,” he continued, finally lifting his head to meet her gaze, “She met Allasakar.”
“Shadow!” Adam didn’t even try to contain his shock.
“What? He won’t hear us.”
“She met him long before we slept,” the Lady said.
“Not in battle. She was angry. She meant to destroy him.”
“What—what happened? What had he done?”
Shadow sniffed. “He called them. They followed him.”
It was Adam who asked who.
“Her people. Her people.”
“Eldest, you must be mistaken.” Her voice had fallen to a whisper. Cold once again stung Adam’s exposed face.
“I am never wrong,” Shadow replied. “They called themselves Allasiani. They fought for him.”
Silence.
“She couldn’t kill him. Not then.” He glanced at Adam. “She spoke to the wilderness. She was loud. And boring. She was so boring that the earth answered just to make her stop. The earth is even more boring,” he added, with disgust.
“Shadow,” Adam began.
“Yesssss?”
“If the Matriarch is waiting—”
“Yes, yes, yes.” He flexed his claws again. “She made the seasons. She bound the world.”
“I do not understand what you mean. The seasons—”
“Becoming mortal has made you stupid.”
“No, Eldest. It has merely made me weaker. Weakness makes me more . . . tolerant.”
“You chose weakness.”
“I chose the White Lady.”
“Because she wants weaklings?”
“Shadow,” Adam said. “Please.”
“She made the seasons hers. She is Winter. She is Summer.” His gaze slid off the Lady’s. “Winter was long. But Summer has not come. If there is no Summer, the White Lady will never leave her court—and you will never find it.”
• • •
She closed her eyes. “Is this why you’ve come?” Her voice was a whisper.
Shadow did not reply.
“We have come,” Adam replied, “seeking the Oracle. We did not know you were here at all.” He swallowed and added, “We do not know where we are.”
She opened her eyes, then, but they were narrowed, glinting slivers that reminded Adam of blade’s edge. “The Oracle.” Although she did not raise her voice, the two words resonated with bitter anger. “You do not wish to travel the Oracle’s path.” It was almost a command.
Adam said, “Not I, but the Matriarch. Her world depends upon it.”
“Then I pity her world.” The Lady frowned. “My pardon, Adam of Arkosa.” Warmth once again seeped into him, especially his shoulders, where her arm still rested. “It has been long since I have had guests, and I forget my hospitality.” Her fingers brushed through his hair, and he winced. His hair was not clean enough for her hand. It would never be clean enough.
The woman closed her eyes and stood a moment in the howl of wind that seemed to speak for her in the silence. “I spoke in anger. The Oracle did not mislead me.”
Shadow growled. He did not speak.
“You have never cared for the firstborn,” the woman said quietly. “And they have never cared for you.” She turned, loosening her hold on Adam’s shoulders. He wanted to cling. “I saw Winter,” she whispered. Lifting a hand, she gestured, and the mountains began to sink. If Adam had witnessed it at a proper distance, he would have been awed. He was standing on them. Were he not standing in the Lady’s shadow, he would have been terrified. As it was, he was merely apprehensive.
“I saw the Winter. I heard the silence of the forest. I saw the beauty of the ice. I heard the calling of the horns.” As she spoke, Winter passed. Winter, and the mountain upon which Adam had first seen her. “It was beautiful and terrifying. I saw the hunters. I saw her people. I saw the Winter Queen.
“The Oracle did not show me the . . . Allasiani. Perhaps I judge the firstborn too harshly. I think knowledge of it would have broken me, then.” She whispered a word. A name. “Winter passed. Summer arrived.” She gestured again, and on the flats of stone that had once been mountainous peaks, grass grew. Grass, wildflowers, and trees. The trees were like—very like—the trees that graced the Terafin manse.
“I saw the Summer.” For the first time, she smiled. But there was pain in the smile. Loss. Adam held breath until she spoke again. “I saw it pass. I saw Winter and Summer. You like the Summer, Adam?”
He was
silent.
“Each time, I saw the Queen of the Hidden Court, it hurt me. You have seen her?”
Adam shook his head.
“Then you will not understand why. Eldest?”
Shadow hissed. “She was always ugly.”
“You have grown bold indeed.” Her voice cooled. Adam thought—for just a moment—that had Shadow spoken like this to her at the height of her power, the great winged cat would be dead. “Not dead,” the Lady said. “But it would prove costly for him. He is bold; he is not foolish.” At Adam’s silent disagreement, she smiled again.
“I saw the last Winter. And I understood why the Oracle had approached me. She offered me truth—as the Oracle does. She offered me a choice. A chance to save what the White Lady had become. And even lessened as she was by the choices she had made, she was my world.”
“But she imprisoned you here!”
“Imprisoned?”
Adam was confused. But the Lady’s voice was warm now. “Did you—did you choose to become a—as you are now?”
“No,” she told Adam. “This is not what we chose. We would never have chosen to be separated from the White Lady. We could hear her voice—but we could not see her, could not touch her, could not comfort her or defend her.” She bowed her head; platinum fell across her shoulders like a liquid. “It is because of my choice that we are here.”
“The child.”
“Yes. She understood what my fate would be. My sisters . . . did not. Not immediately.”
“Your sisters did not make the choice you did.”
“No. It was not required.”
“And your choice was necessary?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did she imprison all of you?”
“Because she did not agree,” was the quiet reply. “But we knew she would not. We chose among ourselves; it was not a decision made lightly.”
“She imprisoned you—”
“It was not imprisonment.”
“You can’t tell me this wasn’t meant to be a punishment!”
“No, and I will not try. But had she been willing to sacrifice us completely to her rage, we could not be here, you and I. Her anger, when it takes root, is vast and almost endless—but it is not, it is never, all that she is.” She turned to Shadow. “Could you carry me from this place if you were willing?”
He sniffed.
Adam understood that this meant no; none of the cats were good at owning any form of incompetence. The Lady apparently understood this as well; she did not press him. His fur, however, remained ruffled.
She turned to Adam. “Can you, Adam?”
He could have pretended to misunderstand her; for the few seconds after she asked, he did. The shade of vast branches darkened his vision as he looked up to the skies. If he did not meet her eyes, it was easier to speak. “What will happen if I do?”
“Nothing will happen to you,” she said. She might have said more, but he shook his head forcefully.
“Not to me, Lady. What will happen to you?”
“Nothing that does not also threaten you. I will die. I will die; time will kill me, if something else does not do so first. My sisters did not understand this, not immediately.”
“You didn’t tell them.”
Her brows rose. “You are not as ignorant as you first appear. No. I told them only of the necessity. I did not tell them of the price.
“But I perceive that Shadow is correct; you cannot remain here. I do not understand how so slight a life, so slight a force, could be here at all, but I am grateful. I ask you again, Adam, could you carry me from this place if I asked it?”
• • •
Help us.
He looked at the Lady’s face. Her lips had not moved; she was not speaking. He closed his eyes as an unexpected dizziness, a shortness of breath, robbed him of useful vision.
Help us.
Eyes closed, the growling of angry, fussy cat drew closer.
His hands felt warm. His hands, palms against flesh, fingers spread wide. Standing on air that was somehow solid beneath his feet, he had touched the statue that was not, to his horror, a statue—and he had come to the mountain. Shadow had followed him.
Adam knew he had never left Jewel’s side. He knew that his hands had never left the curve of pregnant belly, the skin pulled taut by the demands of the growing life held within it. He knew that were it not for the contact between them—initiated by Adam—he would not now be here.
But he knew that, on the night Shadow had almost killed them both, he had never physically left Jewel’s chambers.
Shadow growled.
Adam growled back. Surprise seemed to silence the cat, and Adam was certain he would pay for it later—but he needed to think.
Help us.
He needed to remember, as he had done when he had first approached a statue that he knew was alive, Levec’s voice. Levec’s words. All of Levec’s many words. He was healer-born. He was, according to Levec, a healer with unparalleled power. It was not within this Lady’s power to bring him to the cold, high peaks of a mountain; it was within Adam’s. Adam’s power had taken him to the dreaming in which Jewel had been trapped. Not hers.
It was the touch of the healer-born that had reached this stranger’s thoughts. It touched what lay within living flesh. A corpse did not have thoughts, desires, or fears.
And a corpse did not carry—or nourish—a living child.
It was the child who spoke, now. And that, Adam knew, was impossible. Yet he understood the simple plea. He understood the words. He could repeat them.
The Lady, seen only with the power of the healer-born, felt like a young, expectant woman. He had no experience at all with the immortal; he had tried, only once, to touch one of the cats—and Shadow still hated and feared him because of it. Even when he had walked in the dreaming, he had touched nothing but mortals, or the essence of the mortals trapped there.
And she felt both unique and of them. Had he not seen her, had he come blindfolded into her presence, he would never have known otherwise. Her body had shifted and changed to accommodate new life, just as Bernice’s had; he was certain that she could feed the child, when the child was born, because of those changes. If it was born, and if it lived.
Help us.
It.
No. He. If he was born. If he lived.
“If you can save this child,” the Lady said, her voice distant but distinct, “and only this child, save him.”
How could the child speak? How could he know words? He had not been born. He had not lived. He had not learned—as children do—the language of his parents.
I have learned the language of mine, the child replied. His voice was not a child’s voice; nor was it adult; Adam could find nothing in it that was either male or female. It was both disembodied and wed to its physicality. Yet for all that, the child was a boy.
“How?” he asked, lips trembling with the effort to say even this much.
He sensed confusion. He could not see the child; the child made no attempt to look at him. And why would he? The child had not yet opened his eyes for the first time. He had not yet drawn his first breath, or uttered his first cry.
But he had listened to his mother’s voice. He had heard her speak. Perhaps he had heard more.
I listen, the child replied, to the White Lady. My mother listens. She cries. I will take my mother to the White Lady.
And this, too, was wrong—but it was less wrong. Four-year-old children could speak with this guileless determination, this single-minded devotion.
Help us, the child said again. My mother will never see the White Lady again, and she is sad.
“I do not know if I can,” Adam confessed. His voice was gentle, now. There was no hesitation in it. If it was wrong that this unborn child had voice, if it was wrong that he co
uld speak, he was nonetheless a child. “I can try. How long have you listened to your mother?”
Again, he felt confusion. Time was not a concept the child understood. And perhaps, he thought, that made sense. The Lady had not been born mortal. If it was true that she had become mortal, her knowledge of that condition was not yet intimate; it was entirely theoretical.
“Did you speak to your son?” he asked her, without opening his eyes.
“Always.”
“Did he always understand you?”
She was silent. To his surprise, he recognized the texture of the silence; it reminded him of Shadow’s. He looked up, then, opening the eyes he had struggled to keep shut.
He said, in the softest of voices, as if she were mortal and frightened, “He understands you. He hears your voice; I think he has always heard it. How long have you been imprisoned here?”
“I do not know how you measure time,” she replied—after far too long a pause. To his great surprise, she then said, “My child does not speak to me. I speak to him. I have told him, over and over, of all my hopes and fears and desires. I have told him what he must become, when he is finally born into this world. I have told him why he exists at all—and I have told him of the cost, to me.” She hesitated, and then caught his hand; hers were now cold. “Is he mortal?”
Adam blinked. “Yes.”
“You are certain?”
“Yes.”
Her eyelashes formed a perfect fan of white; they were the color of Snow’s fur. Her skin was almost as pale, now. “If it is true that you cannot touch the Immortal without changing some part of their essential nature, I ask that you do not disturb my sisters’ rest.
“But as you have discerned, I am mortal. Free me, so that I may—at last—give birth to this child.”
The child who could hear her voice. The child who had, in utero, come to understand enough of what he had heard over the long, endless period of his incubation. Centuries, Adam thought. Millennia.
Shadow hissed. “Do not do it,” he told the boy. “The Winter Queen will know.”
“I don’t care if the Winter Queen knows.”
“You will not speak of the White Lady in that tone.”
“My actions,” he replied, “will speak more loudly than simple words. If this is what she wanted for you—” he stopped. He looked toward a bristling, great gray cat. “She will never die, if she remains here.”
Oracle: The House War: Book Six Page 29