“Don’t you?”
“No. I cannot see—and I have dwelled upon the question since I first became aware of what she carried—how she might achieve what we ourselves could not. Were she not Sen, I would not have left the matter in her hands.” His smile was grim, bitter, careworn. “But I would have left it in no one’s hands, even if I were certain of my own failure.
“Hope is a very bitter thing. The fact that she is Sen will avail her nothing in the wilderness. She cannot own it all; not even the gods at their zenith could. And she is wed to this place, tied to it, rooted in it. What she requires she will not find elsewhere.”
“What exactly is a Sen?”
“I forget myself. Come. Can you not hear his voice?”
Jester shook his head.
“You make me doubt myself, on rare occasions.”
“Oh?”
“If you cannot hear something so rich, so obvious, so deep, what hope that Sigurne, who is of your kind, will be able to do so? I might show her the wonders of this, or any other, land, and she might see it as you see it: akin to the lifeless, dull lands that birthed you.”
* * *
• • •
“He hears me, Illaraphaniel.”
Meralonne raised a brow before his silver eyes narrowed.
Jester shook his head again. “Oh, I heard that,” he added.
The voice, unaccompanied by something as mundane as a speaker, said, “You are wrong.”
It was not Jester’s habit to argue with invisible immortals—if the trees qualified as that. “I have nothing against lying,” he told the magi, “if that even needs to be stated.”
“It does not. The problem with you and your kin is that you do not understand what truth is. In all practical ways, you are born lying, and you die lying.”
“You are wrong, Jester ATerafin,” the forest voice said again. “You have heard me since you touched the branches of my many trees.”
Or since they’d touched him. He kept this to himself, however.
“But the use of the word ‘hear’ is limiting. When the forest speaks to one such as Illaraphaniel, words are not required; at times, they can be obstructions. Tell me, did you bring him here, or did he bring you?”
“The latter,” Jester said, but felt compelled to add, “I asked him to enter The Terafin’s forest. I assumed we’d do it the normal way.”
The leaves seemed to chuckle, and the sun that had been absent nonetheless seemed to shed warmth in the still air. “And what, then, is normal to your kin?”
“Walking, for one.” Jester did not recognize the voice; it was not the fox. Nor did it seem like the oddly playful voices of the tree spirits when they chose to step out of the bark that was their natural resting state.
“The forest is afraid of you, Illaraphaniel. It fears what you must become. What you are, in fact, in the process of becoming.”
“And that is wise,” the magi replied.
“The saplings were ever thus; they are vulnerable to many things, and any living being requires fear if it is to become cautious. But tell me, Jester, tell us: do you not fear him? Do you not see the changes that my own saplings see?”
“I see changes,” Jester said quietly. “But to be fair, I’ve never particularly liked Meralonne.”
The forest laughed. It was a gale of sound, the friction of tens of thousands of leaves. “You are bold, indeed. So, too, many of our young—but I must warn you, many do not survive it. If we cannot learn from such experiences—and death, indeed, is limiting—we might learn from the folly of those nearest to us. I try not to pity you,” he added.
“Pity?” Jester was not offended, which was strange.
“You cannot see him as we see him; you cannot see him as we once saw him. To behold Illaraphaniel at his zenith was almost to walk at the side of gods.”
“I’ve seen gods,” Jester replied.
“No, child, you have not; you have seen their echoes, their spirits, the meager shadows that they could leave behind.”
Meralonne had begun to walk more quickly, and with more obvious purpose.
“We owe a debt to the White Lady—all of us, whose roots must sink, at last, into the soil of the wilderness, high, low, or absent. And Illaraphaniel did not desert us. He did not fall prey to the presence of the gods, named or no. He heard us, always; we believe he was aware of even our sleeping voices.
“The Winter has been so long.”
As the forest spoke, Meralonne finally surrendered; he summoned the air. Jester thought summon was the wrong word, though; there was deliberation, but conversely almost no intent that Jester could see. No; the wind came, in wide sweeping arcs; both the magi and Jester were caught up, and the roots over which Jester had been struggling to walk became irrelevant.
Whatever it was that Jewel had seen in Meralonne, whatever her talent had revealed, she had never quite put into words. The forest didn’t need words.
Ah.
The forest didn’t require speech. There were no patricians here, no political games; there were no artful contracts in which clauses attempted to undermine the superficial agreement itself. The forest understood what Jay wanted, had understood it better than Jester.
Or maybe not. Jester himself had never asked Jay for the words. He had never served her—inasmuch as he served anyone—because he had made oaths to her. Oh, he’d made oaths to Terafin; there was no other way to be adopted into the great house. But those words had meant nothing to him; they meant nothing now.
No.
No, it was best to be honest with himself; he didn’t have to speak the words out loud, didn’t have to convince anyone else who might be watching. If he required protection from even the thoughts he kept to himself, he was in serious trouble.
The words themselves had meant nothing; they were a means to an end, and the end was desirable. But the end itself meant something. To his younger self, half a lifetime ago, the end had been safety. Safety from the elements, from the dens that roamed the streets of the lower holdings, from the starvation that came with lack of money, from the thievery that came with the same lack. It meant an end to fear of freezing. It meant that he would never ever return to the place Jay’d plucked him from.
And all of that had been true. He had been safe from all those things.
But he had come face-to-face with gods, with demons, with creatures that existed on the periphery of his awareness in remembered snatches of children’s tales—most told streetside by other kids. He had come to stand beneath the burning boughs of a tree of fire. He had endured the endless whining of winged cats—animals that would have terrified him had he met them in any other context.
And why?
Because this was where Jay was. This was where Finch was. He had accepted the House Name, had sworn the House oath, because he wanted to be where his den was. They would never leave him behind. He believed that now. And he had—for no smart reason—believed it, even then, in the twenty-fifth holding. He had believed it when the den had started to disappear—Fisher, Lefty, Lander; he had believed it, searching with increasing desperation in the undercity, in the dark, for people who would never return.
He had believed it when Duster had gone to fight—and die. He understood that Jay was sometimes naive. That it was hard to want what she wanted when men like Rymark or Haerrad existed. It was easy to believe that to fight those men, to win against them, she must become them, or very like them. It made sense that Jarven was the model of survival.
But Jay had never become them. Finch was more pragmatic—but Finch could not become them, either. Because she had Teller. She had Jay. Jester was no moral compass; there was nothing she could do that he would not forgive. There was nothing any of them could do—except possibly betray each other—that he wouldn’t forgive.
What Jay needed, Jester understood.
S
he needed the den.
She needed the forest to have the same moral compass that she did.
And Jester had never had that. Oh, he was squeamish; he didn’t really enjoy the thought of slitting someone’s throat. But he had no opposition to it on principal. He looked up at Meralonne’s back, which seemed to be retreating as night fell.
Jay would lose it, he thought, and knew it for truth. If what she’d built, if who she was, couldn’t be preserved somehow, nothing would be preserved. She had been essential in Jester’s life. Always. But Jester’s life did not materially affect the entirety of Averalaan. Or it hadn’t, until now.
And he realized, watching Meralonne, that he could not do it. Whatever he was required to be, it wasn’t in him. He could care for Jay. No, damn it, he could love her—he hated that word, hated its use, hated the way it was a collection of trivial letters meant to be plastered over something that should never be touched or poked or described—but loving her didn’t change his essential nature. He couldn’t resent her for being what he wasn’t. He’d never, ever done that.
But he couldn’t live up to her. He couldn’t be what she was, what she needed.
As he saw the back of the magi disappear, as he stopped all forward motion for one long moment, he heard, at last, the heart of the forest. Not the voice; that he’d heard when it chose to speak the first time.
Duster.
And he understood.
“She would have slapped me,” Jester said.
“Yes. I am occupied with Illaraphaniel and, regardless, I cannot judge my own strength where mortals are concerned. We hear what she does not say. We hear what you do not hear. We do not understand why you do not hear it, it is so clear.”
“I’m too loud most days,” Jester replied. “It drowns out the quiet sounds.”
“It is not a quiet sound.” This time, there was a direction to the voice, and Jester followed it.
Remembering Duster. Remembering the truth of her. Remembering, as well, that they had needed her. That Jay had needed her.
“I can’t give what she gave,” Jester said quietly.
“Do you think she requires it? She has accepted what you give. She sees it, if you do not. And she is Lord. Her will is absolute to us. Her survival is our imperative. We are not concerned with you, except in that one regard. It would damage her, to lose you. It would damage her were you to lose yourself. Therefore, we cannot allow it.”
“How can you prevent it?” he asked, more curious now than defiant.
“We admit that we are not entirely certain; mortals are fragile and complicated in ways that we are not. Your loyalties are muddy, your beliefs are often lies that you tell yourself, your talents are all but invisible. It is hard to hear you speak; we must listen, and we must extend the whole of our effort to do so.”
“It’s probably not worth your time.”
Into the forest, through the trees, walked a man that Jester had never seen before, his skin the color of new wood, his hair a tangle of emerald and white that trailed down either side of his face. His eyes were green, white, blue, with pupils of stained ebony.
At his side walked Meralonne, but cloaked, darker and somehow smaller, as if the light that had shone so bright in his eyes had been extinguished.
“She would be angry to hear you speak so.”
“Probably. But it’s not like she hasn’t heard it before.”
The stranger smiled. “She has not,” he said, lifting a hand to touch Jester’s left shoulder. “It is not something you have offered her in your thin words. You have barely spoken of it in the silence of your thoughts, your own boundaries. But you must leave it behind now. We cannot afford to divert our attention. You cannot fight our battles.
“We cannot fight yours. What we give her, the wilderness could give, should she expend her will and her power. But no. It is not what she is. She is not aware of us, but we are aware of each other. We have been enemies in the past; we might be enemies in the future—but we work now toward one goal. You are part of that goal. Go back to the heart of her lands, and do not trouble us with your doubts or your fears.
“Here, fear is deadly.”
“I’m not afraid,” Jester said.
“You are. Your fear is an echo of hers, and it is the fear that is difficult for us—for all of us—to shoulder. Do not add to it. She needs what you give, even if we cannot see it ourselves.” He turned to the magi.
“This is all that I can now do for you, Illaraphaniel. But I ask—no.”
Meralonne’s smile was weary. “I have lived too long among his kind,” he said, indicating Jester. “And you have not. But I have never been ruled by mortals; what you hear, I have never heard.”
“Nor had any desire to hear?”
Jester thought the question rhetorical.
Clearly, Meralonne did not. “I have heard,” he finally said, after a deliberate pause, “the things I am capable of hearing. Even in the strange and unusual, we oft seek some reminder of our essential nature.”
“And yet you have come to me.”
“Not deliberately.”
“Ah, Illaraphaniel. You have almost grown roots, who have the unfettered freedom of the great serpents. It is a wonder, to us, to see the shadows laid across your perfect brow. Almost, it moves us.”
“It cannot last,” was the soft reply.
“No. What you have given, I cannot hold for long—and should it cause harm in any fashion, I must release it. And no, Jester,” he added, although Jester had not said a single word, “I cannot destroy it.”
“Even if it would aid our Lord?”
“Even so.” He turned to Meralonne. “I have given the gift that I could; I did not expect you might return. But I take pride, Illaraphaniel. When you find the Summer path, when you walk it, when you at last see the wild forge, you will return bearing some essential part of me, and I will fight at your side as your shield.” He did not bow. The trees—the spirits—that Jester conversed with from time to time could.
“I have not returned to that forge or that maker,” was Meralonne’s soft reply, “but even now, you have become my shield. I cannot imagine that such a shield would break, even at the strongest blow the dead might strike.”
At the mention of the dead, the man stiffened. “Do not speak of them here. The earth sleeps, but we still feel its ancient rage, and it is slow, very slow, to forgive.”
“Not so slow as we,” Meralonne replied. What the stranger could not do, he did: he bowed.
One hand reached out to touch his bent head; the other briefly squeezed Jester’s shoulder. “Go, then. If the only other gift remaining is time, I will grant what I can of it.”
“Eldest?”
“I do not wish to face you in battle. No—I do not wish to face you as enemy, as foe. Jewel understands in a way the others do not. If you ride through her lands, attempting to lay waste to those who dwell here, it will sadden her, but it will not sting or cut; she would not consider it betrayal.”
“And that is why you can offer what you have offered?”
The stranger smiled. “That is beneath you, Illaraphaniel.”
“Is it? I have come to believe that very little is beneath me, I have lived in her mortal lands for so long.” He turned to Jester. “Come. They will be waiting, and they are not the most patient of men.”
“They can be,” Jester said.
“Be wary of the fox’s get,” the stranger said.
Jester glanced into the distance. “I always am.”
* * *
• • •
They walked together toward the tree of fire, Meralonne following Jester’s lead. This would have been humorous at any other time, because Jester had no idea where he was headed. The forest didn’t immediately surrender a visible path, and the trees looked the same to him. But he understood, as he walked, that the mag
i was no longer certain he could find it on his own.
It was ironic. In the wilderness, the blind led the blind.
“How do you know him?”
“Him?”
Jester grimaced. “The tree. He is a tree, right?”
“He is a tree the way a tiny sand lizard is a dragon,” was the almost scornful reply. No, it wasn’t almost scornful; it was disgusted. And it sounded normal—or normal for Meralonne APhaniel, First Circle mage. Magi. Jester turned toward him to see that he was carrying an unlit pipe. One red brow rose.
“One does not summon fire in this forest unless one is its Lord,” Meralonne said, voice curt.
Jester thought he would never hate pipe smoke again for as long as he lived. He said a silent benediction for the great elder tree of this forest, and the leaves above his head rustled and flew, as if in response.
* * *
• • •
The fox came to meet them before they had reached the tree of fire—but not before they had seen its colorful, miniature sunset in the distance. In the illumination of that odd, unnatural light, the fox’s shadow loomed large; it seemed to imply something the size of a—Jester deliberately fumbled the word. Meralonne did not appear to notice—or perhaps he had always noticed. He treated the fox with a respect he seldom offered anyone else, not even Sigurne.
He offered the fox that respect now. The fox, head canted to the side, stared at him with unblinking eyes. He then walked into his own shadow, and it remained there, unmoving, as if it were a web he had laid across this part of Jay’s lands. This was not a comfortable thought. Nor was Jester entirely comfortable when the fox came to stand at his feet, looking down his nose although his nose was pointed up, toward Jester’s face.
He understood the command and knelt to lift the gold-furred, big-eared creature in his arms. Unlike the cats, the fox was easily carried; he weighed less than Teller’s cats had when they were kittens.
“Isn’t Jarven supposed to be doing this?” he asked.
“Jarven? He has other responsibilities. And he is far too wild to be reliable in this fashion.”
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