War

by Michelle West

  What was she like in the Summer, then?

  He did not answer.

  She had faced Ariane. She did not lie to herself; she could not have destroyed the Winter Queen. Victory was simply barring her path for as long as Scarran lasted, and that, Jewel could do.

  And how?

  She almost smiled. How, indeed.

  “Mortals are so boring,” Shadow growled. She could feel the rumble of his words where her thighs had tightened for purchase around his body.

  “Yes, we are. Have you considered finding a master who isn’t?”

  He sputtered in pure outrage. “Master? You?” He roared into the wilderness, and Jewel thought she could hear the echoes of similar outrage from the two cats she had left in the Terafin manse. The two failed to emerge, for which she was grateful, as Shadow’s outrage was only half-pretend.

  She had ridden on cat-back over her city before. Had anyone asked her, in her distant youth, if she loved her city, she would have stared at them as if they were trying to grow an extra head, the question would have seemed so irrelevant. The city simply was. It went on around her no matter what happened in her life; it had continued to move when her mother died, when her Oma had joined her, and when, at the very end, her father had failed to come home from the docks. It had continued its commerce, its noise, its religions, its festivals. The Common had not stopped at all. The city clearly hadn’t cared for her—how on earth could she love it?

  Half a lifetime later, the answer was different, and it was simple: Yes.

  Yes, she loved her city. Her city included Farmer Hanson. Her city included Helen. Her city included Hectore and Sigurne. She considered the den so much a part of her that she couldn’t separate them, but they lived with her, and she lived in the city.

  Some doubtful part of her said, You love the city now because you’re not starving and you’re no urchin. And maybe that was true. Maybe the distance from that poverty and desperation made everything easy enough that she no longer resented it. But if she could ask Helen the same question, Helen would say yes. Helen was not of The Ten, nor would she ever be.

  And it didn’t matter.

  Even when she had lived in the hundred, there were men and women who had tried—as they could—to help. Not all of them, no. But Jewel herself could not reach out a hand to every person she walked by. Building her den had been an act of instinct and need.

  Duster.

  And maybe a deliberate flouting of some of those instincts. She had stood on the road in the Stone Deepings, had held her ground against the Wild Hunt, because she had always had the city; it had always been part of her. Both the poverty and the wealth, the kind and the cruel, the powerful and the powerless. It was not a living entity, of course, but it was like one: it encompassed too many things to be all of only one of them.

  There were bridges, in her city.

  There were roads.

  There were great trees that were easily taller than all but a few of the buildings man had made beneath their branches.

  Here, Jewel thought, there should be trees. There should be paths that wound their way around them. There should be leaves—and she had leaves. Leaves of silver, of gold, of diamond. But leaves, as well, of the great trees, so like the ones she had gathered as a child, as if they were flowers or delicate toys. The joy had been in the gathering, not the possession.

  There was joy now, in letting them go.

  There was no ground beneath her feet; nothing into which the leaves might land and take root. Or so it appeared to Jewel as Shadow flew over the cliff at which Fabril’s meticulous road ended. But no leaf—no real leaf—was a seed. No real leaf could take root and emerge, in the blink of an eye, at its full growth, its full majesty. What these leaves needed, they would find anywhere. Anywhere at all.

  She did not hold her breath. She did not pray. For a moment, Angel at her back and Shadow beneath her, his voluble complaints far louder than something as simple as wind at a height, she knew. Those trees would grow. This land was not hers; she understood that. She couldn’t live here, couldn’t live in it, and couldn’t therefore be of it. But the trees and the forest? They could. And they were hers.

  Ownership of anything that lived and grew was complicated, complex.

  She saw the branches spread to cover the emptiness that existed at the cliff’s edge; saw the white-fringed green of familiar leaves bud and bloom in the winter air. She heard—what did she hear? Something like song, something that was almost familiar.

  A butterfly’s voice.

  A forest’s voice.

  “So boring,” Shadow said, but with less growl in the words.

  “Can we land yet?”

  Angel’s arms tightened.

  “. . . Or not.” To her den-kin, she lifted a hand. What do you see?

  He couldn’t sign back and didn’t try; his arms stayed put. But he said, “Trees.”

  “My trees?”

  “They must be. They look like the trees in the Common.” He hesitated. “They don’t seem to be . . . I mean, I can see their roots. The roots are as long as the trees are tall, but—I think the trees are growing in number.”

  “I think we could land.”

  “I think we wait. The roots might interlock to form some kind of a bridge, but, Jay—”

  “What?”

  “There’s nothing beneath it. I mean—I can’t see anything. It’s not that it’s dark—there’s nothing there. No water, no distant land—just more sky.”

  “And if the roots could form a bridge, where does the bridge lead?”

  “To the other side. There’s no road, on the opposite side,” he added. “No buildings I can see. There is a forest, and a break between the ranks of trees.” He hesitated again. “Or there was a break between them.”

  “It’s gone?”

  “Yes. I might have seen it wrong, though.” He spoke the words with more hope than conviction.

  More hope than conviction. That, she thought, was the truth of her den: there had always been more hope than conviction. Her convictions had guided them, when their options had been at their most dire. But there had been hope, in the life they had led in the hundred holdings. There had been hope before then, with Rath.

  There’d been hope on the day the life they had built together in the twenty-fifth had ended, although that hope had been swamped with fear and, later, with the shadow of loss. Grief defined part of their life, but only part. They had looked, as they could, toward the future they could imagine—and that imagination had gained breadth, width, depth, with the passage of time and the gaining of experience.

  The cost of failure had grown, just as experience had, and the fear of asking others to pay the price for her bad decisions had grown as well. But here, the trees rooted in what Angel saw as nothing, she felt a lightening of that fear, a lessening of it. She felt an odd, giddy hope at the sight of the branches, crowned, all, with the leaves of her childhood.

  She had not been awed by trees of silver or gold or diamond. Those things were the outward expression of wealth—but at heart, her feelings about them had not changed much since the days in the twenty-fifth. You couldn’t eat gold or silver or diamond. If you were starving in a strange land, unless you could sell them, you’d still be starving at the end of the long day.

  She wasn’t certain if the leaves of the Ellariannatte could be eaten, either. In that, perhaps, they weren’t different. But she felt, staring down at the growing expanse of trees, that she would never starve or freeze in a forest such as this. It didn’t matter if the trees couldn’t speak. It didn’t matter if they couldn’t serve, couldn’t fight, couldn’t be owned.

  They were beautiful, to her. And for now, they would be her first step into a wilderness that had not been claimed, and it seemed a right first step. If she had to shout her own name into a wilderness that gods had once walked, there
was no better way.

  “Shadow, take us down.”

  “Land. Don’t land. Land now.”

  Jewel almost laughed. “I’m sorry, I was rude.”

  “You are alwayssssss rude.”

  “Yes, I know. I’m sorry,” she said again. “Eldest, could you please take us down?”

  He sniffed. “These are stupid trees.”

  Angel’s snort was meant for Jewel’s ears. “Can you find a flight path down that won’t knock the two of us off your back?”

  “I don’t care if you fall.”

  “I care, Shadow,” Jewel said.

  “Sssssoooo what? You care about stupid things!” He veered sharply to the left and then dropped like a stone. Angel cursed freely, but in Rendish, which was unusual. Jewel didn’t curse; she caught the steadying arms that Angel had put around her and grabbed them both. She knew that the Winter King would not have dropped Angel had he consented to carry him at all; the Winter King could be trusted with any burden she placed on his back.

  She had no such confidence in Shadow.

  Branches cracked as he struck them with his wings; leaves flew as they were sheared from their moorings. Down, which had seemed a long, long way away, approached with alarming speed. But Jewel could not see the nothingness that had so concerned her den-kin. She could see roots; she could see the way they overlapped each other as if struggling for dominance or space. It reminded her of the cats themselves.

  It was an odd thought.

  “I really hate flying,” Angel said, in between the Rendish he squeezed out.

  “It hates you, stupid boy.” Shadow replied. But the rest of his spiteful commentary was aimed squarely at the trees that dared—dared!—to grow in his way. Although the trees were not as tightly packed as the bars of fences might have been, Shadow ate air the way wild horses ate ground.

  The gray cat roared at the trees as if they were his enemies, and he did claw the bark of at least two as he slid to the side to avoid them. Jewel screamed in a rush of breath that ended with nervous laughter as he once again righted himself. But she had held on to Angel’s arms until her knuckles were white and she could no longer feel her own fingers.

  Shadow came to a stop, digging claws into the bark of the large root beneath his feet. It was angled, but not steeply, and as Jewel slid from cat to ground—a tangle of roots that would never be flat—she rubbed her hands together. The air was cold. Angel was rubbing his forearms, but reserved most of his glaring for the great, gray cat.

  Shadow was hissing at fallen leaves, which he then proceeded to shred with great smugness. Jewel almost laughed, but in Shadow’s mind, offending a cat’s dignity was the greatest of insults. She managed to turn her widening smile in Angel’s direction. Angel found Shadow’s tirade far less amusing.

  “Shadow, tell the others that it’s safe to join us. Please,” she added, with hasty self-consciousness that did absolutely nothing to mollify the cat.

  He clawed at bits of bark. “Fine. Fine. They can come here, and they can die of boredom, too!” He bunched, gathered, and pushed himself free of whatever gravity held him here, spitting and cursing all the while.

  * * *

  • • •

  Jewel sat astride a root and leaned her back into a tree trunk. She couldn’t hear the Arianni. She couldn’t hear the butterfly’s unnerving song. She couldn’t even hear Shadow—and she was certain he was hissing and spitting up a storm. Angel was silent, across a small clearing of roots, his back likewise shored up by a huge trunk. He lifted his hands in den-sign, and she lifted hers in response, and they idled away the silence speaking as they had once spoken, in their own crowded apartment in the twenty-fifth. She could see that early den so clearly: Lefty leaning against the wall between the two windows, beside Lander who conversed almost solely in den-sign.

  She could see Duster. Fisher.

  She could see home.

  He must have known, because his den-sign stopped for one long moment. But she shook her head, smiling. Thoughts of the dead didn’t trouble her here. They’d been alive. They’d been part of her home. Even the silent, active language of den-sign was proof of that. What point regret that they were no longer here? It would change nothing. They had been here. And they had laughed. They’d cried. They’d cursed. They’d lived.

  Jewel hated death because death was loss.

  But if they’d never been alive, never been family to her, she would know and feel no grief. She couldn’t imagine a life in which nothing was precious to her—because that was the only life that would be impervious to the grief of loss.

  And why was she even thinking this now? She shook her head.

  Kallandras came down from the skies. The ring on his thumb—an odd place to wear a ring—was glowing faintly, in strange synchronicity with the butterfly on his shoulder.

  “Terafin,” he said gravely. “Ellariannatte.”

  “The Kings’ trees,” she replied, rising. She dusted bits of bark and leaf off her legs. “Do you hear the trees in my forest?”

  He nodded, but only after a pause.

  “Can you hear them here?”

  He did not answer. He met her steady gaze, and in his eyes she saw, for a moment, the gaze of soldiers who had seen battle, had survived it, and had never quite broken free of the fields on which they had lost so many of their comrades. “The Winter people are coming,” he said. “Shadow has delayed their departure somewhat.”

  “Please tell me he wasn’t insulting the Wild Hunt.”

  “I make it a practice not to lie to the powerful.”

  “You’re a bard!”

  “Indeed, Terafin.” He smiled, which warmed the lines of his face. He was like Haval, she thought. His face, his expression, was the mask that he wore. He might shift or change that mask to suit his own purposes, but did he ever remove it?

  “Why are you here? Did Solran send you?”

  He winced, which Jewel interpreted as a no.

  “I am here because of a vow I made in my youth.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No, Terafin. But it is not a vow made to you, and it is not, in the end, a vow made for you or your sake. You are a single battle in a long war, and only when the war is over will I be free.” He bowed then. “And I say too much.”

  “I did ask.”

  “Yes. But you are not the first to ask, and I seldom answer that question.” His smile shifted, becoming something leaner, sharper. “What will you do with the knowledge?”

  “Nothing. No,” she added, standing slowly. “I’ll do what I was going to do anyway.”

  “And that?”

  “Make use of your power while you’re willing to offer it.”

  He looked as if he would say more, but Shadow’s invective became all of the noise in this strange forest. Nor was his voice the only one raised. To her consternation, Jewel heard horns.

  For one long moment she was afraid that they were the horns of the heralds, even here—but no. They were the horns of the Wild Hunt.

  Angel winced and mouthed a single word. Shadow.

  Jewel, however, said it out loud. Her Oma could not have done better in her foulest of moods. Hands perched on her hips in uncomfortable fists, she waited.

  The great gray cat came down, his wings once again clipping bark and scarring it.

  “What did I tell you?” she said, through clenched teeth.

  He blinked and failed to meet her eyes.

  Kallandras said, “I will go to the Wild Hunt.”

  “I need Shadow alive,” Jewel replied. “I can’t sacrifice him to the anger of the Wild Hunt, even if it is justified.” She had no doubt that it was. She had seen one of the cats unseat—and probably kill—one of the Winter Queen’s riders. But he had not been her cat at the time. He had been a thing of stone and magic, a thing of Winter, and the
ancient Winter King. What he had done there had had no bearing on her, and it could be argued—probably unsuccessfully—that it had been done in self-defense; the Winter Queen seemed to have no love for the cats.

  Now? Shadow was hers. If he was not den, he was part of her home. What he did would reflect on his master.

  “I warned you,” a familiar voice said. Calliastra came out of the sky as Kallandras had done, her wings folding into shadows and then invisibility as her feet touched ground. Or root.

  “Did he kill someone?” Jewel asked, voice both higher and softer.

  “It wasn’t me! I didn’t do it!”

  Calliastra ignored him. “He injured someone. I do not believe he will die.”

  There was a glint of red on the left side of Shadow’s jaw. Jewel wished, for just a moment, that she had brought Adam with her—but the immortals of her acquaintance had always refused healing.

  “He is coming anyway,” Shadow said, still refusing to meet her eyes.

  “He can’t.”

  “He can.”

  “I want him in the manse, Shadow.”

  “Where he’s safe, yes, yes, yes. But she is not in the manse.”

  “Shadow—”

  “She is mortal, and she is not mortal. He will come, or the child might die.”

  “He’s not allowed—”

  She heard more horns, and she heard a different growl. Failing to meet her eyes, Shadow nonetheless managed to radiate smugness. She looked at the blood—it was blood—at the corners of his mouth.

  Shadow, however, was here. Jewel deflated. “It really wasn’t you?”

  Shadow looked smug while he bled.

  The horns continued. They were joined by cries of anger, of challenge.

  “You are never to injure another member of the Wild Hunt without my direct command. Do you understand?”

  Silence.

  “I mean it, Shadow. I need you here, but I’ll do without if you can’t follow this single, simple rule.”

  “They started it,” he finally hissed.

  Jewel glanced above his head to Calliastra. The daughter of darkness offered an elegant shrug. Jewel continued to stare; she lifted her hands in rapid den-sign before she remembered that Calliastra was not versed in that language.