Battle: The House War: Book Five

by Michelle West

  “She cannot, as you know, or you would not be here.” The silence that followed these words was thick and heavy, and it was the mage who broke it. “In your travels did you find one tree that might be saved?”

  “Not one, and I assume from your question that you were likewise unsuccessful.”

  Meralonne nodded; his hands clenched into brief fists, open and shut, the externalization of heartbeat or word.

  “You can go where I cannot,” Anduvin said.

  Silence.

  Kallandras, aware of the mood of the two, hesitated. “APhaniel, you speak of the Winter Queen?”

  “We speak,” the mage replied, his voice shuttered, “of the Summer Queen. The Wild Hunt rode.”

  “I know. I witnessed some part of its passing.”

  “The Winter King died.”

  “This, I did not see.”

  “No. No one of us did, who are not part of her host. But the horns were sounded, the Hunt called; the Winter Queen rode.”

  “And the Summer Queen?”

  “She is also Ariane. It has been Winter in the Hidden Court for many, many mortal lifetimes. There were those who felt that the old seasons would never turn again—but the Hunt was called. She rode. The horns were heard across the length and breadth of the hidden ways; they were heard above the howl of the Winter winds.”

  Anduvin lowered his head and turned away from them both.

  “There is no end to Winter while the Winter King lives,” the mage continued, his eyes shining silver as he lifted his face. “And the Winter King could not be found for centuries. But he was, Kallandras, and bards whose voices you will never hear if you are very, very fortunate will sing of that long wait, that long hunt, when you are dust and none remember your name.

  “But when the King is dead, the seedlings must be planted.”

  Kallandras’ eyes widened.

  “Yes,” Meralonne said. “These trees were rooted in the flesh of mortals, sacrificed for that purpose. But the Summer trees? They are planted in some part of the Winter King’s body. And it has not happened, not yet.”

  Kallandras did not ask him how he knew with such certainty. He heard it in the mage’s voice, and that was enough.

  “Ariane now requires two things: a Summer King and a seedling. One, even one, will suffice. But the Summer King is not chosen from her kindred. Without one tree to guard and open the way, she will have no King, Kallandras, and if she reigns, she does not reign alone. Not in Summer. Without one tree—and we have salvaged none—she will know neither Winter nor Summer, and until the paths are no longer sundered from the mortal realm, she will know little freedom.”

  Anduvin turned to the bard, although he addressed his comment to Meralonne. “You have chosen an odd companion for this task; he seems unaware of either the history of these trees or their significance.”

  “It is not for his knowledge of history that I chose him; he has traveled the hidden paths, and when he speaks, the wilderness listens.”

  Anduvin’s gaze narrowed as he continued to examine the bard. The bard waited. “He did not travel them of his own accord.”

  “It matters little. You are aware, as I am, that mortals may chance across the Lattan paths and the Scarran paths without knowing the ways; you cannot likewise travel. There is no longer a path that leads from the heartlands of the South to the North, and no path to be found outside of the Green Deepings that might wend its way to the Hidden Court, if then. What the Shining Court wrought here, they wrought well.”

  “Not so well as they hoped,” Anduvin replied.

  Meralonne’s hair began to move in a breeze that touched nothing else. His gaze narrowed as it traveled from Anduvin’s face to some point beyond his shoulder. Kallandras moved as well.

  “I did not expect to see you here in the end,” Meralonne spoke to the shadows, “when you did not arrive at the beginning.”

  Into the ruins of their hope, a figure in midnight robes now stepped; like the mage’s hair, the hem of her cloak billowed at the touch of a wind that disturbed nothing else. “Well met, Meralonne,” she said. She did not lift hands to hood; it was only by the timbre of her voice that Kallandras knew her. She was not young, but not yet at the peak of her power. “Well met, Kallandras.” Her eyes narrowed as she looked to Anduvin, but she offered him no similar word of greeting, and it was not clear from that lack whether she recognized him or not.

  Kallandras nodded to the woman he knew as Evayne a’Nolan.

  “This is the last of the corrupted trees,” she said; there was no question in the words.

  “And you failed to help us uproot them or lay them to rest.” The mage’s words were brittle.

  “Were it my choice, APhaniel, I would have happily done little else—”

  “But you would not have survived it. Not yet. In your prime, perhaps.” He grudged her the words and did not trouble to hide the anger he felt. She was not yet old enough not to flinch; although her expression remained hidden by folds of cloth, her mouth tightened briefly.

  “My arrival, at this or any age, is not of my choosing.”

  “So you say. And you have arrived now, at this moment, to accomplish what task?”

  “To learn,” she replied. So saying, she walked between Meralonne and Anduvin, to reach the ruined trunk of the tree they had between them destroyed. She lifted a hand, touched it; the robes at her feet shifted again, their movements stronger. The dead bark cracked beneath her palm. “To learn and to gather.”

  Meralonne spun, although Anduvin remained still.

  “You were not my only master,” she continued, as she lifted a section of wood. She took care, but it cut her palms anyway; even dead, that was the nature of this tree. “You were not even the first—but after I made the long choice to walk the hidden paths, Master APhaniel, you were the most constant of my . . . companions.” She rose, her hand bleeding. Her lips curved in what might have been a smile, if smiles could contain so much unshed pain. She lifted her palm. In the scant light, blood was the color of shadow.

  Meralonne was not a man to be moved by pain. He watched Evayne, his eyes unblinking, his hands taut by his sides. He was the taller of the two, his hair long and unfettered, his gray eyes shedding light. Her eyes were still concealed by the fall of her hood; she folded her arms around the wood she now carried.

  “What will you do with that?” Meralonne asked.

  She did not answer.

  “Evayne—”

  “In truth, I do not yet know. I haven’t seen what it becomes.”

  “And you will not look.”

  “No. Not here.” She glanced around what remained of dead foliage, her head stopping briefly in the direction of the Kialli lord. “What is the year?”

  “It is the year four hundred and twenty-seven,” Kallandras replied, for it was clear Meralonne would not. “I believe it is the evening of the twenty-fourth day of Henden.”

  She stilled. Even her robes lost their habitual, constant, rustle. “So late,” she finally said, in a whisper. “So close, now.” She turned in place, careful to take no step forward or back. It was to Kallandras she now spoke.

  He thought her all of thirty, although perhaps she was younger; her voice gave him much, but pain, loss, or fear was not a property of any specific year in a single person’s life, and Evayne was no exception. But he saw that she wore no rings, and had she, he would have seen them; he himself wore one.

  “If it is Henden of four hundred and twenty-seven, the first battle has come to pass; it is over. You have won.”

  “It is not,” he replied gravely, and without deliberation, “my war.”

  “It is, in the end, the only war; it will devour our lives, Kallandras, and we will give them—willing or no—to see it to its conclusion.” Her grip tightened, as if she now held a doll and not the detritus of a tree that would have blindly devoured the whole of her life had it been able to touch her. “But I will tell you what I know of the year and the time.” She swallowed; the line
of her shoulders shifted.

  “What the Lord of the Shining Court intended failed; the South is not yet under his dominion.”

  Anduvin stirred, turned; he lifted one hand. Kallandras bent knees, and they stood thus for a long breath—but neither man drew weapon.

  “What of it?” Meralonne asked. Of the three, he was the only one to draw something from his robes—but it was a pipe, not a sword. He then cursed—in Weston—and to Kallandras’ surprise, Evayne laughed. It was not unkind; it carried, rather, astonishment and rue.

  “You have no leaf?”

  A platinum brow rose. “I have, as you have surmised, no leaf.”

  “I—I have some.”

  He pursed lips, losing, for a moment, the perfect line of unassailable distance. “It is no doubt stale.”

  “It is.”

  “And you have taken to the pipe after subjecting me to all of your impertinent lectures about its dubious virtues?”

  “Ah, no, Master APhaniel. I have kept it because you never listened to any one of those pleas.”

  His eyes rounded; Kallandras thought it subterfuge until he heard the mage’s voice. “You have carried this leaf across unknown centuries for my use?” He was genuinely surprised. “You have wasted the considerable gift of your birth and your talent to comfort an old man in his dotage?”

  She snorted. “I had it because you were always so foul if you wanted your pipe and it was denied you. I have never been in one place long enough to set it aside.” She was lying. “And you will never, ever be in your dotage.”

  “Then it has not been many years since I last saw you in the Tower.”

  “No.”

  “Very well. I will take the stale leaf with as much gratitude as I can muster.” He held out a hand; she reached into the folds of her robe and removed a small pouch. “One cannot always see the ties that bind us,” he said, as he began to fill his pipe, “but even I would not have guessed at this one.”

  Smoke rose in the air like a slender thread.

  “There is no path between the Northern Wastes and the Terrean of Averda,” Evayne began. “But the trees planted here for just that purpose pulled the hidden paths and knit them together in such a way as to create one. It was meant,” she continued, “to last.”

  He glanced at the dead trunk. “And now?”

  “You have destroyed those unnatural moorings. If the demons travel from the Wastes to the Dominion of Annagar, they cannot travel in numbers; not even the Kialli are guaranteed to find their way through the paths that are hidden. They were not,” she added, “meant for the use of the dead. In the Winter, the Kialli can travel with impunity; the Winter was always the season of their Lord. But in the Summer? It will be much, much simpler to hold those roads against such a passage.”

  “And there will be no Summer?” was the soft, soft question that followed. It came from Anduvin, not Meralonne.

  She hesitated. “Understand that the roads were meant to contain and cage those who would not—or could not—leave these lands when the Covenant came into being; it is upon those roads, and no other, that the gods and their offspring might walk without losing their way.”

  “I understand the Covenant and its cost far better than one who is merely mortal,” Anduvin replied; his voice was Winter ice. The Kialli were famed for their pride—for those who knew of them at all—with reason.

  “And the hidden ways?” was her soft rejoinder. “Then I will not bore you.”

  “Bore me in his stead,” Meralonne told her; the words, however, were soft and shorn of impatience.

  “They have been broken in subtle ways. I am not immortal, but I have walked the roads—in both Winter and in the Summer that is long, long past.”

  “How subtle?” the mage said, when she fell silent. He gestured the embers of his pipe into a brighter orange and once again lifted stem to lips.

  As if his action was at once both comfort and irritation, she continued. “The containment is cracked. The mortal world seeps into the hidden and the wild; the hidden and the wild will seep, in return, into mortal lands.” One sharp breath left her lips, and when she spoke again, she spoke with urgency. “I have not seen it all, APhaniel. I have looked, and I have not seen it all—but the war you fought here was not the end; it was only barely the beginning.”

  “What have you seen?” His voice was the mage’s voice; the brief anger that had informed it was gone.

  She swallowed. “The firstborn,” she replied; the word barely carried. “In the North, in the Empire, in Averalaan Aramarelas, the oldest who have lived on those paths are . . . waking. If you cannot hear them now, you will hear them soon.”

  The mage’s eyes were like silver in sunlight. “Many, many things sleep beneath that city; the city itself is not unaware of the things that are buried.” His eyes narrowed; smoke drifted in rings from his lips.

  “One of the eldest has already begun to move, APhaniel.”

  “In Averalaan?” The question was sharper, harder.

  Cloth brushed cloth as she nodded.

  “It is hard to believe that the gods would allow it, if they were aware of it at all; there are ancient things the city protects, and we cannot afford to have them waken. I will speak with Sigurne.”

  “Meralonne—”

  “The worst of the battle here is at an end, tonight. We have had one victory and one defeat—and the defeat is subtle, Evayne; the Annagarians will barely countenance it as a loss.” He glanced at what remained of the last of the trees. “Indeed, for them it might be simple boon; they have never seen the Summer Queen, and their brief experience of the Winter was not to their liking.”

  “Return to the North,” she told him. To the bard’s surprise, he nodded gravely.

  She turned to Kallandras. He waited; he did not speak.

  After an awkward pause, she did. “How old will I become, while I walk this path?” She could not quite guard her voice; he heard the fear and the weariness that informed her words.

  “I do not know,” was his grave reply. He spoke softly and without anger because he now could; in his youth, he had not been capable of that much kindness. No one had injured him as gravely as Evayne a’Nolan in her youth. But he was farther from that youth than she herself, this eve; he could afford this small act of generosity.

  She lifted her hands and finally pulled her hood from its peak, exposing her face and the entirety of her expression. He studied her face, as she intended.

  “Twenty years.”

  “. . . Twenty more years.” The words were an echo of his, but they had a different texture, a different meaning. She closed her violet eyes, lifted one hand to briefly touch the pendant that hung around her neck.

  “It will not hurt you as much in two decades.”

  Her eyes opened, rounding. “Will I forget?” she asked. She made no attempt to hide what she felt; even the two silent witnesses could easily grasp her apprehension. “Will I forget what drove me to walk this path at the beginning?”

  “I do not know; you have not—yet—spoken to me of your motivations.” He lifted one hand. “I can only guess, Evayne, and it is a guess based in part on the woman you will become; she has seen much, perhaps more than even I.”

  “And that guess?”

  “No. You will not forget. But you will come to understand the broader imperative, and perhaps that imperative will weigh as much as your personal reasons in the end.”

  She lifted hood to face again. “I must leave,” she told them.

  Kallandras nodded, accustomed by now to the unpredictable nature of both her arrivals and her departures. She took one step forward and vanished.

  * * *

  Only when she was gone—and he was certain of her absence—did Anduvin turn to Meralonne. “Illaraphaniel, will you seek her?” He did not speak of Evayne.

  “Not yet,” was the mage’s quiet reply. Smoke, like small ghosts, wreathed his face. “If I find her Court, what have I to offer? She will not be moved by anything now.
Your Lord planned well, when he planned this.”

  “If he is to have purchase upon this plain, she numbers among the most dangerous of his foes.” The Kialli lifted his head, turning away. “You will be in want of a shield.”

  “I will.”

  “Take me with you.”

  “Your Lord will not be pleased if—”

  “You refer to my Queen?”

  “Your Queen, then. I do not think she will countenance such a journey.”

  “Oh? She is mortal yet, Illaraphaniel; I do not think she will care. She lives with the mortals, on the edges of their Court and not in its center; power is not her concern.” His tone made clear that he thought it should be. “The mortals are not so enamored of our kind that they seek us out; she does not—she has not—summoned me since the eve of battle.”

  “And you think she will not?”

  Anduvin nodded. “Take me with you,” he said again, and then added, “and if you can lead me to the Queen in the dawn of her Summer, I will make you a shield that even the gods themselves could not break.”

  “You might not survive the finding of that Court.”

  “I am aware of the risk.”

  “Even in Summer, the wrath of Ariane is unpredictable; it is wild, Anduvin. It knows no bounds. She will feel the death of each of the trees we could not save—”

  “And she will be grateful, Illaraphaniel.”

  “You are so certain?”

  “I play no games this eve; I am certain.”

  Meralonne smiled; it was a slender lift of lips, and it was cold. “Very well. I will consider your offer, Swordsmith.”

  Anduvin bowed. “Then I will take my leave.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “To the North, APhaniel. It is why the stranger appeared; she meant to give warning. I will go North.”

  “Then I will tell you one thing, and perhaps it will ease you. Evayne a’Nolan is mortal, as you surmised—but she is god-born.”

  “Her eyes—” Anduvin’s brows rose.

  “Yes. They are not golden. She was not born to a distant god; she is of this plain, as is her father.”

  “She is—”