Skirmish: The House War: Book Four

by Michelle West

  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 demon
s?”

  “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.”

  “Or you’ll miss out on all the fun?”

  “Yessss.”

  Cats. Jewel looked at the leaves. They seemed to be, to her touch, the exact same leaves she had carried with her from the forests that had surrounded a castle made of glass—or ice; it belonged to the Winter King, after all. The Winter King and his only companions: these cats, winged so they might escape gravity; stone so they might escape harm.

  They were not stone now. They were not, she thought, cats. It made her wonder about the man the Winter King had once been before he had become Ariane’s. A lesson, if ever one was needed, about the nature of immortals and what they did to the mortals who weren’t even allowed to die without their intervention.

  She leaned into the fur of the gray cat, catching the thought before it unspooled. It was part of what she wanted, wasn’t it? To hold what she held; to keep it safe from harm for as long as she lived. To keep her den alive—always alive—no matter who might wish otherwise. Why? Because she loved them. Because they were hers. So, too, was the Winter King claimed, but Jewel was not Ariane. Not the Queen of Winter; not the leader of the Wild Hunt. Had he loved her?

  He must have. He must have, even if to Jewel love had seemed irrelevant to Ariane. It didn’t touch her; it didn’t change her; it didn’t show her the way.

  She held this thought as well. She had come, terrified, to the Terafin manse in the grip of Avandar’s power, on the back of the Winter King. A different King, of course, and yet he, too, lived and died at the whim of the Winter Queen. Jewel shook her head to clear it, and some thoughts made way, but others clung, just as the vines of the tree had.

  She loved her den. She loved her House. She loved the ghost of the city she had once grown up in. All of her ghosts, she thought bitterly. The ghosts of her childhood; the ghosts of her parents; the ghost—the voluble ghost—of her Oma. She had never had the power to hold them by her side; she’d had the ability to weep or plead, no more—and weeping or pleading seldom turned hearts. But they’d lived—and died—as men and women; no forest had surrounded them; no Winter Queen had loved them and frozen them, fixing them in place until the last possible moment.

  And if you could? She whispered something to Arann as the sound of cracking wood grew louder. Would you have loved them? Or would they have become as animate as any chunk of ice, any frozen thing?

  You can’t save it all. You can’t. You can’t hold on to anything forever because people change. They grow. So did she, but she didn’t fear her own growth. They’re yours because you love them. You’re theirs, because you love them. But they are what they are.

  And Jewel? She was what she was, as well. She would let them fight this war; she would keep them by her side for as long as she could. But not longer, even had she the power. She had seen the shadow of eternity in Avandar’s dreams; if she looked now, she could see its edges in his eyes. And she never wanted that for her den. Or herself.

  But she would do everything she could to protect them. Maybe this was the sole advantage mortals had: everything she could do was not everything, in the end, that the Winter Queen could. She held out the leaf of silver and it shone in the darkness as the cats somewhere at her back began to growl.

  Chapter Nine

  TREES OF SILVER. Trees with leaves that were forever suspended in moonlight. Trees ancient, profound, rooted in mystery. Jewel had touched them. Had she changed them? No, not more than this: she had taken a leaf, one of thousands. Not more, not less. But she had returned to her home bearing its strangeness and its mystery, as if by so doing she could capture some tiny part of its essence. It had been real.

  It was real now.

  As real as the cat who padded across ground breaking nothing beneath its huge paws. She touched the space between his ears; his head was still warm. Not soft, not really—his fur was a little too rough for that. “We are,” the cat said gravely, “what we are.”

  She turned in the direction of the only source of light and said, “And they’re angry.”

  “Only a little. We were very bored.”

  “Where did the Winter King go?”

  “Oh, away. Away.”

  “And shouldn’t it be Summer?”

  “Summer, hmph. We are Winter cats.”

  Jewel stopped. She could see the trunks of the trees that comprised this forest, but never clearly; she could sense their height by the absence of sky. But there was space here, for her leaf; space for her and her cat. She knelt and the cat hissed. “What, this time?”

  “You cannot kneel here.”

  “Oh, but you can lie down on your belly and roll around the undergrowth.”

  “That’s different.”<
br />
  “How?”

  “We’re not asking for anything.”

  The men and women who’d frequented Gabriel ATerafin’s office over the decades would probably have claimed the same, and with as much truth. “I need to clear some space.”

  The cat hissed.

  Jewel stood. She stood because a new voice had entered the nearby sounds of annoyed cat, and she recognized it. Or part of it. It was cold, certain, and as eternal as the Winter seemed to be.

  She said, softly, “Demon.”

  The cat nodded and hissed. “Kneel if you must. It looks untidy, but it won’t kill you. Probably.”

  “It is not the path she must fear.”

  Jewel stiffened; the leaves were now trembling in her hands.

  “If she must kneel—and it is inevitable—she will kneel to me.”

  Turning, hair on the back of her neck rising in a way that reminded her suspiciously of the cats, she stepped onto the road. And it was a road, even if it looked like a slender footpath. She felt its shape against the soles of her feet, as if, for a moment, she’d left her shoes behind. As a child, she’d done it often, much to the consternation of her Oma, who’d considered shoelessness a crime against familial pride.

  Arann stepped in front of her; she put a hand on his shoulder and gently drew him to her side. Not behind; she wanted to, even if on the face of it it was stupid—but she didn’t. The white cat and black cat took to the air, circling the demon who stood on the path yards away from the single tree with its multiple mismatched leaves.

  He was not the first demon she’d seen, and she knew, meeting his gaze, that he wouldn’t be the last unless she died here. But the demons she had seen were not this man. He looked human.

  No, no that was wrong. He looked immortal, the way Celleriant did. The way the Winter Queen herself did; he was beautiful. It was the beauty of distant mountains; the beauty of the azure sky on a perfect, clear day; it was the beauty of things untouchable by those bound to ground—and life. His lips, in the darkness, were almost red, his eyes so dark they were black. He carried no weapons—but then again, on most days neither did Celleriant.