Skirmish: The House War: Book Four

by Michelle West

  For what purpose?

  Rymark had, in front of the Twin Kings, claimed legitimate right to the Terafin Seat in the Hall of The Ten. He had implicated Gabriel, his father, in his lie; he had produced a forgery of a document that he claimed was signed by The Terafin and the right-kin. Gabriel had not spoken a word. Jewel wasn’t even certain what he would have said—he was rescued by Haerrad. Haerrad, clearly injured, had survived what was an obvious attempt on his life to contest Rymark’s claim.

  Jewel could no more declare herself the legitimate heir—the only one—than she could bring the dead back to life, not unless she wanted to join them. At this very moment, that didn’t seem like such a bad idea.

  The only reason she had been summoned back was to fulfill her promise to the woman she had served for all her adult life—and she couldn’t do it. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

  It was Angel who rose next. The movement was slow and deliberate; he abandoned his chair and then took the time to tuck it neatly under the table, a signal that for him, Kitchen council was over.

  “Jay,” he said quietly as he approached her, his hair in its familiar spire, his expression oddly gentle. “We don’t have to do this tonight.” He lifted his hands in clear den-sign, asking for a vote. One by one, her den nodded. Jester, utterly subdued and silent, Carver, grim and pale, Teller and Finch in silent concern. Only Arann hesitated; Arann, injured in the battle in the Council Hall. Daine’s consent was given quickly, perfunctorily; he rose—they all did—and headed straight for Arann, who was trying very, very hard to put him off without drawing Jewel’s attention.

  She didn’t speak—not aloud—but she gestured a short, curt command. Arann’s shoulders slumped as Daine took both of his hands and held them tightly. “Come to the healerie,” he said.

  “The healerie?” Jewel said sharply.

  Daine glanced at her. “I was in training with Alowan,” he said. “And I’m all there is for a successor.”

  She blanched. “Alowan—”

  “I’m not Alowan, Jay. Most of the House isn’t aware of what I can—and cannot—do. But the healerie was important to Alowan Rowanson. It’s the only thing he left behind. I want to keep it running. I want to keep it going. The House needs a healerie. And it’s the only thing I can do for him, now.”

  “Levec will have my head.”

  “Probably. He wasn’t happy when I told him.”

  “Daine—”

  But Daine smiled almost bitterly and shook his head. “It’s my risk to take.”

  She opened her mouth again, but this time no words came out.

  Daine didn’t have that problem. “Do you understand why Alowan served The Terafin?”

  She swallowed. Nodded.

  “I serve you in the same way, for the same reason. You can’t forbid it, if you’re smart. You need me here.” Pursing his lips in a way that was at odds with his age, he frowned at the much larger Arann. “So do the rest of you. You’re not dying, Arann. It won’t hurt.” He led Arann away, and Arann followed.

  Angel approached Jewel while the doors were still swinging behind their vanishing backs. “We can do this in the morning,” he told her.

  “But there’s so much—”

  “It’ll still be here in the morning.” He smiled; it was a brief, pained grin. “And gods help you, Jay, you’d better be here as well.”

  She heard what lay behind both the words and the smile, and flinched. “Angel, I didn’t mean to leave that way. I didn’t mean to—”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s done. But, Jay—never do it again. Don’t go where I can’t follow.”

  “Can I promise to try my best?”

  “No.”

  Avandar was already gathering the lamps. Around her, in silence, the den drifted through the doors, allowing Angel to speak for them. It was Angel who led her to her room, Angel who opened the door, and Angel who threatened to sleep on the floor in case she suddenly vanished again. It was Angel who drew the curtains, Angel who approached the magelight that sat cradled in its burnished stand. No lamps now. He whispered the stone to a warm glow; it made his hair look gold. Like a very odd crown, she thought.

  “They’ll call a Council meeting in the morning,” she told him, as if this had only just occurred to her.

  He shook his head. “Let them. At the moment, there’s no one in charge.”

  “They’ll have to call Council meeting, Angel. The Kings were there. They wouldn’t interfere if The Terafin had been poisoned or stabbed or shot—but she was killed by a very large, very deadly demon. House Terafin can’t claim this as an entirely internal affair anymore. Not after that Henden. We’ll need to come up with a plan to deflect Imperial control, or the House will be crippled.”

  “Not more than it already has been.”

  She couldn’t find words to answer him.

  Avandar waited by the door in silence. Only when Angel left did he move. His robes were familiar Terafin robes, and he lifted a familiar chair, dragging it across the thick, dark carpets until it rested within plain sight of the illuminated bed.

  “No,” she told him softly. “You’re exhausted. You need sleep more than I do.”

  He sat. That was all. It was his most effective way of disobeying an order that she only barely wanted to give.

  27th of Corvil, 427 A. A.

  Terafin Manse, Averalaan Aramarelas

  The night, not unexpectedly, was bad. Jewel woke several times, jerking upright and staring, in wild-eyed silence, into the pale glow of her room. Avandar did not sleep. His hands tensed around the armrests of a chair that couldn’t be comfortable for long hours at a stretch, no matter how careful its craftsman had been.

  “Jewel?”

  She rose. He remained in the chair, although she was aware of his gaze as she gathered up the very few things she had brought with her from the South.

  “What are you doing with those?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she dressed. The clothing she had worn for most of her sojourn in the South had been Voyani in make and style; practical, loose, comfortable. She therefore faced the contents of her closet as if they were a sentence for a particularly odious crime. She set her dusty boots aside in favor of shoes that were far cleaner and far more polished; she found a dress, drew it out of the closet, and paused. It was blue, yes—but today, blue was not the right color.

  Heading farther back, she found the dress that she had worn at Alea’s funeral. It was serviceable, and even if it wasn’t, it was the only official mourning dress she had.

  “I think that is not required for breakfast,” Avandar rose now. “Dress simply. You will not be allowed to hide in your wing for most of this day; take what freedom and ease you can.”

  Setting her jaw, she shook her head. “This is what I want.”

  Once dressed, with Avandar’s help—her hair did need work, but if she was allowed a little ease, this is where she chose to take it—she left her room. She hesitated to one side of the door—the wrong side. “Avandar, where is Ariel?”

  He led her further down the hall, pausing at the door that was next-to-last.

  Jewel knocked at it once. Then, shaking her head, she entered the room. The curtains were open. Moonlight silvered the window.

  Ariel was sleeping on the floor beside the bed. She had a pillow; she’d removed the counterpane. She was a slender child; she was almost lost in the folds of cloth and the darkness. But she sat up a little too quickly when Jewel entered the room. Jewel, in her strange Northern dress, approached with care, holding both of her hands palm out, to make clear they were empty.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, in soft, soft Torra. “This room must be confusing.” She knelt at Ariel’s side.

  Ariel said nothing. Her eyes were wide; in the darkness, Jewel couldn’t distinguish pupil from iris.

  “This is my home. The people here are my family. It’s colder in the North than it was in the South, so we wear different clothing. I’m sorry,” she said again. “You’re saf
e here. I—I’ll be busy, so you might not see as much of me, but I’ll come to see you when I can.”

  Ariel still said nothing, and after a long pause, Jewel rose and left the room. She shouldn’t have brought the child here, and knew it—but leaving her in the middle of an army hadn’t seemed like the better option. She stood outside of the closed door, head bowed against it for a full minute.

  The den habitually used the breakfast nook—and nook was a misused word for a room that size, in Jewel’s opinion—in part because their schedules differed so much, and they seldom ate together. The dining room seemed cavernous and empty when its long table was occupied by only two.

  On this morning, however, they drifted into the dining room by some sort of silent consensus. They didn’t go to the kitchen; neither Jewel nor Teller had called it.

  The Terafin offices in the Merchant Authority had understandably been closed; Finch was therefore at home. The office of the right-kin, however, was being besieged; Teller should have been absent. But Teller, dressed for work, and at odds with the more casual morning clothing of Carver, Jester, and Angel, came to the table anyway. Daine came to breakfast in the pale robes of the healerie, as well. Adam, however, did not. Nor did Celleriant. Arann was not yet on duty; he was seated at the foot of the table, as far from Daine as it was possible to sit, and still be in the same room.

  Jewel sat at the head of the table, watching as the den gathered. They noticed what she was wearing—how could they not? White, mourning white, edged in black and gold. She hated it now as much as she’d hated it the first time she’d worn it. It was a dress. A dress might indicate some small part of the loss she felt—but it offered none of the rage. She struggled to set it aside. If there was one small corner of the world that didn’t deserve it, it was this one.

  Instead, in silence, she pushed aside the breakfast dishes that had been laid in front of her. She wasn’t hungry. She knew she needed food—but apparently that information would not impart itself to her stomach. Ellerson attended and directed the servants who had come bearing their multiple trays in somber silence. Jewel tried very hard not to meet his gaze, or draw it.

  When she had cleared enough space, she set four things on the table in front of her hands: three leaves, and three strands of hair twined in a bracelet. The hair was fine enough that it should have been almost invisible; it wasn’t. It was Winter white against the gleaming wood grain.

  It was the leaves that drew all eyes first: one was silver, one was gold, and one was diamond.

  They stared for a moment. It was, predictably, Finch who spoke first, but she spoke with her hands, asking permission to take—to touch—what Jewel had placed on the table. Jewel answered the same way. Finch rose and lifted the leaf of gold—the warm color, not the cool ones—and raised it to the light.

  Heavy, Finch gestured.

  Yes. “It’s gold.”

  “The others are silver and diamond?”

  “Yes.”

  The leaves now drifted down the table, as if hands were wind; they settled for a moment and then passed on. No one, however, touched the hair that curled there in a very slender bracelet.

  When the leaves returned to her, she bracketed them with the palms she placed flat on the table. “I don’t know where to start. But those will give you some idea of just how strange the journey was.”

  “Did you save the Princess?” Carver asked.

  Jewel did not pretend to misunderstand. It was a vision of a lone woman that had driven her to the South—but she had expected, however reluctantly, to travel with the armies under the three Commanders. “I don’t know. The Princess—and that is not what she’s called in the Dominion—is with the army. One of the armies. Given what those armies now face, I think salvation is going to be in short supply.”

  They were silent for a long moment, waiting.

  “I didn’t mean to leave Averalaan the way I did.”

  “No kidding,” Jester said. His arms were folded across his chest, and he balanced his chair on its hind legs. She half expected him to extend his own legs and cross them on the table—but he glanced at Ellerson before he did, and kept them where they were. The dining room was not the kitchen. “Is it always going to come down to demons?”

  “No. There are gods and other people in the mix as well.” Her smile was a brief, bitter twist of lips. “It probably won’t make much difference to people like us, though. The mages will argue about their classifications, if any of them survive.”

  “Other people?”

  “My long-haired friend.” She hesitated again. “He was in the kitchen last night. His name’s Celleriant, although his own people call him Lord Celleriant.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “…No.”

  “Is he den, or isn’t he?”

  That was, of course, the question, wasn’t it? “He serves me.”

  Jester gestured, den-sign.

  “No. And he won’t learn to speak it, either. I’m surprised he condescends to speak Weston.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  “…No.” She grimaced. “And yes. I don’t like him. But…he’s one of mine.”

  Teller said, “He killed the demon that killed The Terafin.”

  Finch, at the same time, said, “He reminds me of Meralonne APhaniel.”

  “Meralonne?”

  “On the night the demons came to Terafin. The night the stranger died in the foyer.”

  Jewel stared at Finch for a long, thoughtful moment. “Sigurne trusts Meralonne,” she finally said.

  It was Angel who said, “We trust you. If you want him, that’s all that needs to be said. You’ve never been wrong before.”

  Against her will, Jewel said, “I didn’t choose Celleriant.”

  “Then how—”

  “When we escaped from the demons in the Common, we ended up on a hidden, ancient road.” She swallowed. “And we met the Wild Hunt there.”

  She could not bring herself to speak of everything she had seen while walking that road, but she spoke of the forest of trees, from which she’d taken the leaves. She spoke of the Winter King in his castle of glass and ice, and she spoke of the Winter Queen at the head of her host, riding the endless and hidden roads, searching for her King, that she might depose him at last. She spoke of the Winter King—her Winter King—the great, white stag who could find his footing in any terrain, even the air itself.

  “He was a man, once.”

  “When?”

  “When the gods walked, I think. Long before the founding of the Empire. And before the Blood Barons. The Winter Queen gave him to me. She was riding him,” Jewel added, her voice falling. “She ordered Celleriant to serve me as well. It was punishment for his failure.” She stopped the sentence, but not in time.

  “His failure to do what?” Angel asked sharply.

  Avandar raised a brow; his lips settled into a sardonic half smile.

  “His failure to kill me.”

  The silence deepened Avandar’s amusement. It predictably did nothing to endear Celleriant to the rest of the den. “He won’t try it again,” she said, when no one dared to put the question into words. “He was ordered—by the Winter Queen—to serve me. He’ll serve. He doesn’t have to like it.”

  “Do the rest of us?” Angel demanded.

  “Not more than he does.”

  She spoke of the Festival of the Moon in the Tor Leonne, of the Voyani Matriarchs, and of the masks. This was harder because if the story itself retained the same dreamlike quality of description, the events had occurred in what was theoretically the real world—if that had the same meaning, now. But she hesitated on the edge of the Sea of Sorrows. After the silence had grown awkward—beyond awkward, really—she took a deep breath and continued.

  She spoke of the desert crossing; she spoke of the wagons that had taken flight, like small ships in the air. She spoke, at length, about the storm in the desert, about its end, explaining more fully how Adam had almost died, where almost meant
could not be saved without a healer who could call him back from the bridge to the beyond, where Mandaros waited to offer judgment. Although the circumstances of that near death had not been entirely clear to the den when they had first met Adam, the reason he still lived was.

  The den, in turn, explained in more detail Adam’s role in The Terafin’s continued—and tenuous—survival. It was a very muted breakfast, with more words than food passing lips.

  When Jewel spoke of the rise of the City in the desert, she was once again in a land of dreams; the den couldn’t grasp it. It wasn’t that they didn’t believe her—they did, and would; it was that they couldn’t conceive of it. No more would Jewel have been able to do the same if she hadn’t witnessed it herself.

  But when she again fell silent, Teller nudged her—with den-sign, almost flailing to get her attention—and she continued with the trek out of the desert, at the side of the Serra Diora. She couldn’t help but describe the Serra; she was a woman whose beauty could leave poets tongue-tied and at the same time desperately in search of words, as if by words they might capture and hold, in eternity, the flowering of a beauty that could not otherwise defy time.

  She had found Ariel there, missing fingers, silent and terrified. After a long hesitation, she mentioned the demon who had brought—and abandoned her—to Jewel’s care. “She’s not a demon,” she added quietly, into the various textures of den silence. “She’s a child whose family died. I think it happened during the Festival of the Moon. She’s not—she’s not den, not exactly. She’s too young to make that choice. But I couldn’t just leave her there.”

  They accepted it without argument. Celleriant, no. Avandar had taken time. But Ariel was a child, and at that, an orphan—and that meant something here. Jewel was grateful