Battle: The House War: Book Five

by Michelle West

  The cats, bickering and whining about how unfair Jewel was, fell instantly silent; they turned—as one, which was always disturbing—toward Evayne. Evayne, however, did not effect to notice their presence. Had she been anyone else, this would have been a poor choice—but there was something about this woman, with her raven hair and its one shock of white, her strong chin, her piercing gaze, that kept even the cats at bay.

  Evayne rose. “My apologies,” she said. “It has been some time since I have seen this place.”

  “It’s new, to me. New, now,” she added.

  “And The Terafin’s death is also still fresh.”

  Jewel swallowed and nodded. The desire to cry at the sight of the unexpected familiarity of a simple table and four chairs vanished; she could at least be grateful for that.

  “Why are you here?”

  Evayne frowned. “What is the date?”

  “It’s the—” she glanced back at Avandar.

  “It is the ninth day of Fabril, in the year four hundred and twenty-eight.”

  Two days had passed in a landscape that allowed for no natural passage of time. Evayne nodded. “Terafin.” She offered Jewel a very correct bow. It felt wrong; Evayne had always seemed above the strictly procedural forms of etiquette, to Jewel. “Your surroundings have changed.”

  “You noticed. Have you seen this room before?”

  “I have seen the manse, both before and after. I am here, I believe, to ask your permission to cross your borders.”

  Jewel blinked, and the older seer smiled.

  “Is it required?”

  “It will make my passage simpler, yes. At the moment, your borders are tenuous; they are ill-defined. It is not the gravest threat you will face—but the threat you will face is one I cannot clearly see.” As she spoke, she drew the orb from her robes. It rested in her hands like a luminous, crystal heart. “There are only two possible reasons that the path is so difficult to see or trace. The first is positive, the second, markedly less so.”

  “Tell me about the second.”

  Evayne lifted a brow. “That was—and is—your way; you dwell on the darkness.”

  “I don’t. But if those are the two outcomes you sense, it’s the bad one I have to worry about. Or avoid.”

  “Do you understand what has happened here?” She glanced at the distant shelves, made of living trees, as she spoke.

  “Yes and no. I understand that I’m connected to these lands; that they’re mine in some visceral way.” She fell silent for a moment, gazing at the surface of a sturdy, fine table that was nonetheless untouched in all ways by the magic of transformation. “I had to wake up—and there was only one way I could see to do that at the time.”

  “An interesting approach,” Evayne replied. “This table—”

  “Yes. It’s real. It’s solid. I’ve seen it used for over a decade—but it’s been in use for far longer. Whatever I build here requires the real at its heart; it’s what everything else is rooted in.”

  Evayne raised a brow. “You have been speaking,” she said, after a long pause, “with the Warden of Dreams.”

  “Both of them.”

  “He has told you more than he generally volunteers.”

  “He didn’t volunteer it in so many words; he relied on my intuition. I’m seer-born; intuition comes almost naturally.”

  Shadow coughed. Loudly.

  Evayne glanced at Shadow. She seemed entirely unaffected by the cats, and they seemed, in turn, entirely disinterested in her. Since they were only disinterested when they were trying to make a point, this implied that they, at least, had some inkling of who she was.

  “Do you know my cats?”

  Evayne did not reply, not directly. Instead, she said, “It is an unusual choice.”

  “Pardon?”

  “To allow them this freedom of form; they are almost entirely unbound, here. Do you understand how dangerous they are?”

  Jewel nodded, but felt compelled to add, “It’s hard to remember, when they’re talking. Shadow almost killed me—there’s no way to salvage what I was wearing, there’s so much damn blood—”

  “You are remarkably whole for someone who came close to death in that fashion.”

  “I had a healer.”

  “Adam.”

  Jewel nodded, stiffening.

  “He will not be with you for very long, unless there is a disaster.” Evayne closed her eyes. “And I have wandered. I did not speak of your manse and your city when I asked if you understood the significance. The path is breaking; what moored it in the hidden wilderness is, as the Oracle predicted, finally crumbling.

  “You have met the Warden, and you have met the cats—the cats, at least, I fear you could not avoid, given the nature of your forest—but they are the least of the difficulty that now comes.”

  Shadow hissed. No, they all hissed, but Shadow was faster off the mark.

  “And I become more limited in my travels as we approach the end of the time I have seen.” She closed her eyes for a long moment; the orb in her hand began to glow. At its center, clouds folded in on each other, looking a little like milk dropped into golden oil before it reaches the bottom of the glass. “You have gazed into this orb before—although both you and I have changed since then. Will you dare its depths again?”

  Jewel shook her head. “I know what I’ll see.”

  Evayne raised a brow. “What do you fear?”

  The younger seer laughed. It was a quiet sound, broken in parts by both bitterness and genuine amusement as she met the violet eyes of the elder. “I think I fear your life.”

  This caused the seer’s other brow to join the first one before both descended. She was not insulted, not offended. “There is perhaps much to fear in it, although by the time I had reached your age, I had fully accepted the choice I made as a youth.”

  “As how old a youth?”

  “I was, I think, a year older than you were when you first arrived at the gates of the Terafin manse.”

  “I was sixteen.”

  “Ah. Then perhaps I was your age. Exactly sixteen. I am not that girl now, but some part of her remains in me.”

  Jewel nodded. She placed a palm against the surface of the table; it was cool to the touch, the way shade was cool at the height of midday. “You want me to talk to the Oracle.”

  “I . . . have my disagreements with the Oracle, and no path that leads to the Oracle is pleasant; no path that leads to the Oracle is painless—if it can be survived at all. But I do not see how you will build what must be built and survive what must be survived unless you make that journey.”

  “You can’t see that future?”

  “Not easily, now. It is too close.”

  “But you . . .”

  “Yes.” Evayne smiled again. It was odd; Jewel found each smile surprising, as if the face it rested on seldom wore one. “Yes, I am sent from one century to another; I walk between your past, your present and your future as if time is a path on which I am trapped and forced to wander.

  “I see death—almost always—and I remember it, and I work to prevent what can be prevented. That’s simple. It’s clean. It’s the deaths that can’t be prevented, the deaths that must occur, that are harder. I confess that I do not understand why I am here today. You are not yet ready to walk the Oracle’s path; if I am not mistaken, you will not even be able to find it, yet.

  “You are not in danger, and were you, you have all of your escort.” She glanced at the table again, and this time, she paused. “Terafin.”

  “Call me Jewel.”

  “That is not what you have said in my past and your future.”

  Jewel folded her hands together to prevent them from trembling. “No, probably not. You don’t tend to appear when things are either peaceful or happy. The previous Terafin wasn’t easily angered. I am. What I say in anger—”

  “Or sorrow, or loss,” the seer said softly.

  Thinking of Arann and what Lefty’s loss had done to him, she s
aid, “Or sorrow, or loss.” Her fingers tightened in their loose clasp, as if she were praying. She suddenly knew that she could not be—or do—what Evayne a’Nolan had been and done. No flash of visceral insight followed; she didn’t know if Evayne’s choices were the right ones or the wrong ones. She only knew they were acts of desperation.

  Evayne once again turned her attention to the table—or rather, to the books stacked in a careful pile in front of The Terafin’s chair. “Jewel,” she said, although it was clear the name did not come easily, “these books—do you recognize them?”

  Jewel frowned. “I haven’t had a chance to inspect the library; both I and the library only just arrived here. But at least a shelf’s worth of books are the same.” A creeping anxiety made her turn to look over her shoulder at the shelves she had passed. “. . . I won’t know until I’m brave enough to summon the archivists. Why?”

  “At least three of these texts are forbidden works.”

  Jewel frowned. “Forbidden?” The frown opened into something rounder. “You mean, as in forbidden by the Order of Knowledge?”

  “Yes. I thought them all destroyed,” she added.

  “You’ve seen these books before.”

  “Yes—but not in the current incarnation of this city.” She reached out and touched one page of the open book. Violet light, sharp and sudden, struck both book and reader, encircling them. “I see.”

  “Evayne, are you—”

  “I am unharmed. The book is unharmed.”

  Jewel quickly approached Evayne’s side. This time, all three of the cats stayed put. They didn’t exactly move out of the way, but for the cats, they were positively well-behaved. Evayne withdrew her hand and the light faded—but it was slow to fade, and it left an afterimage, the way sun did if you looked at it for too long.

  “What is this book?” Jewel asked, without touching it. She felt—of all things—resentful. No part of her believed that these books had been any part of the Terafin collection. The library had already been so transformed, the sight of a familiar table had brought her to the brink of tears.

  Evayne didn’t reply; Jewel wasn’t certain that she had even heard the question. She was staring at a page that seemed to have been written by a man—or woman—in a hurry. The ink was faded but remained dark enough to read; the hand was a strong scrawl in places, but cramped, precise and tiny in others.

  “Evayne?” Jewel reached out to touch the older woman’s arm to catch her attention; her palm froze an inch from a swath of midnight blue. Evayne’s eyes widened as folds of cloth began to rustle at her feet. Jewel quickly withdrew her hand.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It is . . . not safe . . . to touch me if I am not prepared.”

  “The robes?”

  Evayne nodded.

  “I could have used those, once.”

  “In the streets of a different city,” was the quiet reply.

  “In the streets of this one.” It was a declaration they both understood. “Is it safe?”

  Evayne nodded and Jewel brushed past her, but only as far as the table’s edge. There, the book lay, two pages exposed, as if it were any other personal journal. There were dates, but she recognized neither the month nor the year; she knew them as dates because of the numbers and the placement—and the numbers, she did recognize.

  “This looks like Torra.”

  “Not to my eyes, although perhaps it is a variant of that tongue.”

  Jewel reached for the book, stopped, and took the chair that she had avoided when she’d first approached the table. There, she sat, and there, she lifted her chin to gaze at the books and the length of the otherwise pristine and unoccupied stretch of gleaming, dark wood. When she reached for the tome, Shadow growled. It was a thing more felt than heard—and everyone heard it.

  Remembering the flare of violet, she hesitated. Evayne, however, offered no warning.

  “It won’t hurt me,” she finally told the large gray cat.

  “Maybe it’s not you he’s worried about,” Snow suggested.

  She ignored the comment—not always wise when it came to the cats—and reached for the book again. Nothing happened. Her hands were on either side of the book, beneath its oddly textured front and back covers, and there was no resultant light, no flash of magic, nothing. “Maybe it’s the chair?”

  “Was the chair significant to you?”

  “To me? No. But it’s where The Terafin sat when she worked at this table. This is where she did most of the work that didn’t require constant interruption and visitors.”

  “That sounds like a yes, in this place.”

  Jewel set the book down and stood. She then picked it up again; it was, in her hands, a book, no more. “Not the chair.”

  “No. Can you read the book?”

  Jewel closed the book first. The odd texture of the covers against her two palms didn’t change in any way, but a cursory examination of the cover made her eyes water. “Do you see it?” She asked Evayne.

  “The book? Certainly.”

  “The light. The magic.”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?” She looked to Avandar for the first time since she’d laid eyes on the table in the center of this clearing.

  “I do not see as you see, Terafin. I consider it unwise in the extreme to examine that book with magic, but if you wish an attempt made—”

  “No,” Evayne said, before he could finish. “It is, as you say, unwise in the extreme.” But she looked at the cover of the book in silence for a long moment. “If you wish, Terafin, I can hold that book for you against future need.”

  “You can’t touch it without—”

  “I would not have to touch it again,” she replied. “My robes were made in the far, far past by an Artisan who . . . liked to travel, and was often forced to do so in less than ideal circumstances.”

  “Is the book dangerous to me?”

  “I cannot fully say. Will it harm you directly? No. I am almost certain it will not. But knowledge has oft been considered dangerous when it is unbalanced, and ancient knowledge is never balanced. The world that existed when you were born, and the world that existed thousands of years before it, are not the same.”

  “Birth and death are.”

  Evayne nodded. “And to those who lived thousands of years ago, their world was normal, and a room such as this might exist in manors and caves across the Isle.” She glanced at the amethyst sky. “Your permission, Terafin, to travel as I must through your lands?”

  Shadow hissed before Jewel could answer. “Tell her no.”

  Chapter Ten

  ‘‘HUSH, YOU.”

  He is not wrong, Jewel, the Winter King said. As he spoke, he appeared, walking in a measured, graceful way between two rows of distant shelving, as if emerging from a forest. Such permission should be granted only in emergency, and only at the direst of need even then.

  Notably, none of her currently human attendants said a word. Jewel’s hands fell to hips, which they did when she was getting frustrated; it was her Oma’s most frequently adopted posture. “And you don’t consider the Lord of the Hells to be a dire emergency?”

  I would consider him such were he to stand outside of your lands at the head of an army of Kialli.

  “We’d like to stop him from ever reaching that stage.”

  Yes, understood.

  “People are walking all over my lands as we speak; they’d certainly better be working in the manse in my absence.”

  Those people you cannot compel. They exist outside of your realm; you may draw them in and trap them there should you desire it; you might contain them permanently. But they are mortal, and the mortals do not bend easily to the subtle magics and rules that bind these lands. The rules are written in a tongue that they cannot read, cannot hear, and could never, therefore, bring themselves to speak.

  “Evayne is mortal.”

  The Winter King turned his gaze upon Evayne; his eyes were round, large, dark—and for a moment,
entirely unblinking. To her great surprise, she realized that the Winter King was angry. She glanced at Avandar, and found that he was staring at Evayne in a similar fashion.

  “Viandaran,” Evayne said softly.

  He said nothing.

  “Tor Amanion.”

  It was Jewel’s turn to stare, gaze riveted, at the Winter King. He raised his head, reminding everyone present of the tines that were now his only crown.

  “I did not lie to you, when we met,” Evayne told him softly. “But at least in your case, I do not have to wonder what atrocity I will commit in future to earn your present hatred. You will serve a Lord who will stand, in the end, against the Lord of the Hells, as promised.”

  “You knew him?” Jewel asked.

  “No; that is far too broad a statement. But we have spoken, in the past, and we speak, briefly, now.” She left the table’s side and walked toward the Winter King, pausing less than two feet from his lifted face. What she said to him, Jewel couldn’t hear, and if she received a reply at all, that, too, was lost. But she turned her back upon the Winter King. Given the Winter King’s anger, Jewel wouldn’t have.

  “Your permission, Terafin.”

  Shadow stepped on Jewel’s foot. Jewel ground her teeth.

  “She is dangerous,” the gray cat growled.

  “So are you and you come and go as you bloody well please.”

  “You could force them to leave,” Evayne said.

  “How? They’re cats.”

  “Yes, but they are your cats, at the moment—inasmuch as they are anyone’s. If you so chose, you could limit their movement in your lands; you could deny the Winter King; you could order Lord Celleriant into the heart of the wilderness. Without your permission, none could return.”

  “The god-born?”

  “No. And yes. You could force me from your roads if you so chose.”

  “Because you’re a seer?”