Battle: The House War: Book Five

by Michelle West

  “Why did you call them tears?” she asked the Winter King, her gaze absorbed by the thin, living clouds.

  “It is a phrase, no more. If I understand what we see, they are your dreamers. Your sleepers. In the streets of Averalaan, they do not wake.”

  She tore her gaze away from the butterflies, as if finding them strangely beautiful and compelling now made her some sort of carrion creature. The Warden of Dreams was watching the skies as well, his wings spread high, as if he might at any moment join them in their flight. “They are beautiful, are they not?” He held out the palms of his hands, and the butterfly cloud moved toward him.

  But the winds buffeted them, pushing them back. She realized that even the edge of the cloud was confined by the shape of the bridge. “Let them go,” she told the dark angelae. “Let them go now.”

  “They do not wish to leave me,” he replied. “Will you force them? Will you break them?”

  “They don’t know what they want; they’re sleeping.”

  “As are you.” He leaped then, and his wings carried him immediately toward the cloud. He cast a shadow here that was much, much larger than his size. “You do not have to remain, bound to ground. But you do; you cling to what you know and you force the heart of these lands to obey you. Let them free, and you will see glory and wonder such as you have never seen in your waking life.” His voice was so clear it sounded as if he were standing just a little bit too close to her—but she could see him, in the air, at a much greater distance.

  “My waking life,” she replied tightly, “is also a refuge from nightmare.”

  “Nightmare has its grandeur, but it exacts its price, it is true. Your waking life—their waking life—girdles them, binds them—it hurts them.”

  “It’s because they’re alive that they can be here at all.”

  “Ah. Yes, that is true. It was not always true, and in the future, it will not be. But you have come to me, tonight.” He had reached the heart of the butterfly cloud, and in those heights, she could see that the butterflies—some of them—now flew to where he hovered; they lined his arms, his hands, his chest; they landed in the wild, black flow of his hair, tangling in the strands. Adorned by them, he was beautiful in a way that he had not been standing on the far side of this elongated bridge. She felt her mouth grow dry and her throat tighten; there were tears that wanted shedding.

  But she was Jewel Markess. She didn’t cry in public.

  “Not even in your dreams?”

  “Not,” she said tightly, because it was the only way she could speak, “in yours.”

  He laughed and swept his arms out to his sides, and she knew—just before it happened—what he intended to do. Knew it, but bound to ground in his shadow, could do nothing to prevent it. He grabbed a handful—a literal handful—of those pale white dreams, and he crushed them.

  She thought she heard screaming, but it was attenuated and distant.

  “Jewel,” the Winter King said, grabbing her arm. “It is time to retreat.”

  Eyes wide, she turned on the Winter King in sudden fury. His hand loosened; he paled, but he did not step back.

  She raised both of her arms, as she had seen Avandar do, and she shouted her fear and her fury into the skies above her. She called the wild wind, as she had never called—and could never call it, in life—and it came, yanking at her hair and the flimsy fabric of her shift. It carried her away from the bridge, the Winter King, and the water; it took her out of reach of the earth. Even in dreams, wilderness had its own rules.

  She had no wings; no feathers, no natural gift of flight; she had no weapons and no armor except her anger. The Warden of Dreams reached out again, and this time, the wind all but tore the butterflies out of his reach, scattering them to the far corners of the sky and destroying the cloud in which they’d congregated.

  But his hands were white with dust, and his eyes—his eyes were like every night sky she had ever seen: clear, indigo, star-strewn and cloudy; red-mooned and white-mooned and heavy with rain.

  “They desire this,” he said, holding out his pale, dusted palm. “And I require it to live. Go back, little mortal. Go back to your drab and confined life, and hide there while you can.”

  His wings snapped out, spreading again, filling the sky with what she had seen in his eyes. “These are my dreamers,” he said, and when he spoke his voice was the voice of thunder.

  But hers, when she replied, was lightning. “They are in my lands.”

  “They are yours only for as long as you can hold them.”

  “I can—”

  The wind dropped her.

  * * *

  “Stupid, stupid, stuuuuuupid girl!”

  Jewel failed to hit the ground or the Winter King below because Shadow inserted himself between her and the fast-approaching bridge. She had never been so grateful to see—or hear—the cat.

  “What were you thinking, stupid girl!”

  “He’s going to kill them—”

  “Yes, it’s what he does. But you? You should never fight in the air. You have no wings!” All of the sibilants in the outraged sentence were very loud and very long. If he’d caught her with his jaws instead of his back, he would have been shaking her.

  Snow and Night were in the air, circling the Warden of Dreams. Their coats gleamed in the amethyst sky, as if they, too, were gems.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, in a smaller voice. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Of course we’re here, stupid girl.” He alighted on the bridge; the bridge shook. Jewel climbed off his back, although she didn’t want to let him go.

  “You must. I cannot fight him on the ground, but you? You must stand here. He has devoured some of his dreamers, and he will be stronger, now.”

  She tensed as Shadow leaped into the sky, gray against purple, his wings not nearly so fine as the wings of the Warden of Dreams.

  “If he’s become stronger because of—” she could barely speak the words, and let them drop, knowing he would hear what she couldn’t bring herself to say, “what must I do to become strong?”

  “Take the land, Jewel.”

  “But it’s already mine.”

  “Ararath’s sword is yours,” the Winter King replied, “but you have never once attempted to wield it.” His voice was oddly gentle as he watched Shadow join Snow and Night. They had not yet attacked the Warden, but circled him instead; the circles were growing tighter. “You have begun to understand some of the more subtle weapons in your arsenal, but they are not part of these lands, they are part of you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No. But you have chosen to let your den bear some of the burden it must if you are to survive. They cannot do what you can do here. The Warden of Dreams is the only enemy you now have that might take the lands you rule, and if he does . . .” He didn’t finish.

  She didn’t ask him to finish; she could still see the crushed dust of butterfly wings on the Warden’s hands. Those butterflies had scattered when the cats appeared; she could see them in ones and twos, lingering at the edges of the putative storm. But this time, she noticed where, in the sky, they flew. Not a single one crossed the boundaries set by the bridge, even in the air.

  They were, each and every one of them, bound to the same lands on which she now stood.

  “Yes,” the Winter King said. “They are—they can be—yours. They are drawn to the Warden of Dreams because of his nature; he can gift them or curse them as they sleep. He is their only reality, now; they are not aware of the boundaries that contain them. They are mortal,” he added, as if it were necessary, “and mortals seldom exist in isolation—but even here, where they congregate, they are not able to touch each other; he is the only reality.”

  “Even if he destroys them.”

  “Even so; they are lost in dreams that almost never end; what is one more death in the dreaming?”

  She closed her eyes as the cats growled.

  The Warden of Dreams began to sing. His wings folde
d, flexed, and snapped outward again, catching Snow and Night; Shadow avoided them because he folded his own and dropped like a stone. Against Snow’s white coat she could see a sudden slash of red appear; she had never seen the cats bleed before.

  But this was a dream. A dream. She turned from the Winter King and sprinted toward her side of the bridge; he did not attempt to stop her. When she reached rock, she planted her feet firmly against its surface, feeling the whole of its texture and warmth against her bare soles. A dream, she thought, but she was awake here, and the cats, like the butterflies, were hers.

  Beneath her feet, the earth began its slow rumble; the ground shook.

  “Jewel—” the Winter King joined her.

  “It’s not me.”

  “I know. Remember what you need, here. Remember what defines you.”

  She didn’t have time to ask him what either of those were, because the ground’s shift and tremble grew worse; it was bad enough that her knees buckled; she kept her feet beneath them.

  What do you fear? the Warden asked, his voice, like a thought, emerging from within. What do you desire? In these lands, either are open to you. Come. Choose.

  She bit her lip, tasted blood, wondered if she was bleeding in her sleep. She couldn’t remember falling asleep at all.

  If you will not choose, I will choose for you.

  “No,” she told the Warden, “you won’t.”

  But she couldn’t remain on her feet, the tremors were so bad; she couldn’t hold onto the ground. She could see the Winter King’s shadow, but she could no longer see the Winter King, and as she squinted into sunlight and amethyst sky, the world tore, as if it were thin cloth or paper.

  * * *

  She could see shreds of that cloth, that paper; torn, ragged pieces—and each small surface showed her some part of the world that had existed moments before: purple sky, rock, moving river. The river still flowed, rushing and gurgling high in its bed—but only in fragments. Those fragments overlapped sky, shadow, grass, bridge rail, as they fell.

  She tried to catch them, aware as she did that the rock beneath her feet had been shredded as casually, as completely, as the rest of the known world; she stood—and braced herself to reach—on nothing. But the nothing supported her weight as her open hands caught the edges of one piece of amethyst sky and drew it in toward her chest. It was purple and dark, and within its now small and jagged canvas, three butterflies struggled. This wasn’t a window; they didn’t simply flutter out of view. But they tried; she could see them hit the boundary of the small scrap in her hand, and wondered if they were aware it was there at all, or if they perceived wind pushing them back in its stead.

  She spun on her heels; the Winter King was nowhere.

  She herself was nowhere; there was no landscape, no sky, no ground; there was no sound. The world was not dark, but it wasn’t bright; it wasn’t even gray, although gray was the color she would have used to describe the total absence of everything, if she’d had to pick one. She couldn’t hear the cats; she couldn’t hear the Warden of Dreams.

  But she could see three butterflies, and these butterflies couldn’t reach the Warden; they couldn’t be found and crushed in the palms of his hands. Somewhere in the city of Averalaan—either in the holdings or on the Isle, three people slept; they had not yet died. She wanted to catch all of the butterflies then, and cup them somehow in the curved palms of her hand, as if her hands could be the wall that protected them from his.

  No, no, that will not do. This is not a dream; this is the absence of dream. Come, if you will claim these lands. Dream them. Dream them into being. Create something vast and huge and impressive; make it, hold it. Nothing else will stand against me.

  What, exactly, was vast, huge, and impressive to the scion of gods?

  Certainly not the butterflies whose lives he had so deliberately cultivated and then extinguished.

  Yes, he said. Yes, and perhaps butterflies are the wrong seeming for them; they are like stalks of your wheat or corn; they grow, and they ripen, and in time, they are felled. They will fall anyway. I merely accept the gift of their harvest; it is that, or leave it to go to seed.

  Her hands stiffened; she couldn’t curl them into fists without partially crushing the small, small bit of sky within which these butterflies flew. Vast? Huge? Impressive?

  She thought of the palace of the Winter King—not hers, but the man who had reigned for centuries in the heart of his forest, with cats, stone cats, for companions during the long, long wait for his release. Had his storybook dwelling been impressive enough? It had impressed her—but it had impressed her the way the forests had: they were gold and silver and diamond, those trees, and the palace was all of glass. Or ice; it had been cold, she thought. She couldn’t feel the cold now; it didn’t touch her.

  But no, no that would not impress the Warden of Dreams; such a castle had stood for centuries, and if it changed at all, it was slight. She thought of the fallen buildings of the undercity—the great, stone bridges now shattered although their pieces were larger than any single member of the den. What had those bridges occupied when they stood? How high off the ground had they reached? And what—or who—had walked across their chiseled, cut splendor?

  Yet even that, she dismissed. City of gods, she thought—and knew it, the way one knows any facts in a dream, even a dream in which the only reality is six inches of amethyst sky and three white butterflies.

  You have nothing, the Warden said. And if you have nothing, nothing is all you can hold.

  “No,” she told the Warden softly. The ground no longer bucked at her weight, because it didn’t exist. Nothing did; there was no fall, no flight, no destination. The only voice she could hear was his, but without form, what threat could he be?

  He chuckled. You will see. These lands are mine now. You will have no dreams and no Companions, except those I allow—and I think I will allow you nothing for a very long time. It discomforts mortals, he added.

  Nothing, on the other hand, was better than some of the things she’d faced.

  Oh, indeed. If you prefer it, I can give you something; not dreams, but nightmare. Endless fear, endless flight.

  She shook her head. “No, you can’t.”

  Silence.

  In her hands, she held sky. It was a sky that no waking person would ever see. “I don’t know who you are,” Jewel said softly to the three butterflies, “but while you’re here, I will do what I can to protect you.”

  You can do nothing.

  She ignored the Warden of Dreams, and felt the wind blow cold from her right. It was her first sensation in the gray. She frowned. The gray was so much like the Between—a land where gods and mortals might meet, and where such meetings might have consequences.

  Dreams had driven her to the South. Dreams of Diora. Dreams of a massacre. Dreams had given her her brief glimpses of the Cities of Man—those powerful, ancient homes in which even the dead could be trapped, and against which gods might break themselves, rather than walls. Dreams, she thought, had driven her to House Terafin: dreams of gods.

  She heard the distant growl of a predator, although the landscape remained gray and lifeless. She heard the buzzing of insects—which she viscerally detested—and the sounds of swords leaving scabbards. Small noises, but significant. She heard a child screaming; that was worse.

  But it was the only truly human sound in this place.

  Frowning, she reached into the scrap of handheld sky. The small piece of dream in her hand had dimension, if approached from the front. She inserted her hand among the butterflies, and to her surprise, they immediately alighted, attaching themselves to her palm, her inner wrist, and her fingers.

  It wasn’t the Warden of Dreams, she thought. That wasn’t what they were seeking in their long sleep.

  Build, he told her.

  She nodded. “Tell me,” she said to the butterflies. “Tell me where you live.”

  * * *

  The butterflies had no mouths with which
to speak, but mouths weren’t necessary when reality was so profoundly subjective. This was the first lesson the dreamers taught Jewel. They answered her in a rush of tiny voices, and not a single voice was constrained by the need for words. They were so pale, she thought, so perfect in form—they were delicate but at this range she could see they were faintly luminescent.

  Dreams were subjective. She’d had so many of them, she’d fled so many. Most of them weren’t real unless she was in them. But when she was, they were the whole of the world. Conscious thought stopped; dream logic ensued instead, with its odd panoply of best friends she’d never seen or met in real life, relatives she’d lost, stations to which she had never aspired, familiar homes that she had never lived in. In dreams, it was not truth that mattered; truth couldn’t be measured.

  Yet, conversely, dreams worked because they felt true; there was no defense against them.

  What she could dream into being was a product of every dream she had ever had. Every dream and every experience that also walked to one side of the solidity of the real world. That wasn’t what she wanted now.

  What she wanted now, oddly enough, was Shadow. Even in her dreams, he was still an annoying, whiny, insulting cat. He was utterly himself; he was proof against her imagination, large and small. No, she thought, she wanted to be Shadow, or like him. Herself, in a place where there was no other anchor.

  She did not want the dreams of the butterflies; she wanted them to wake.

  There is power in dreaming, the Warden said, his voice colorless and uninflected. You dismiss it at your peril. You do not understand what you might build here.

  “No. I understand it. But it wouldn’t be real.”

  It would be real.

  She shook her head. “Why are you allied with the Shining Court?”

  It suits my purpose.

  “What do you want?”

  I want freedom, he replied. I want an end to cages and walls. I want your sunshine and your fields in which only plants grow. I want their dreams, at my leisure, and not in a hurried rush at the turn of seasons that do not turn.

  “You kill them.”