War

by Michelle West

  She did not speak; he did not require it. The moment his eyes met hers, he nodded, and turned once again to the hand he had loosely clasped in his own, to the man who lay bleeding just in front of his bent knees.

  She watched him. She understood as she did that this was the reason that she had drawn out this crystal; that this was the reason she had walked the Oracle’s path and made the final, almost crushing trek across a tiny, barely lit room. This moment. She was meant to watch; she was meant to see, she was meant to witness.

  Seer-born.

  She did not know how healing worked. She had heard theories but, in the end, considered them almost pointless discussions, better suited to angry members of the Order of Knowledge than to rulers; she knew that healers did heal, and in any practical sense, that was the only thing that mattered. Or that had mattered.

  But she had been wrong. Not that any of the knowledge of the healer-born would have helped her here; what Adam did was not what healers did. She knew she could ask—would one day ask, if she survived—Levec, and he would be as mystified, but far more grouchy.

  And yet, part of her understood. She did not look in to the light at the center of the crystal, but she had no need to do so; what it saw, she saw, in some fashion. She knew. She understood. And she had chosen to know and understand in this place, beyond Fabril’s reach, beyond the reach of mortals.

  She was not surprised when Angel cried out; not surprised when Adam did—in shock, in fear—because she knew the moment when Vennaire would step forward and drive his sword through the chest of the injured man. She knew, as well, that the man was expecting the blow, that he even managed to offer a brief, wintry smile to Vennaire before the sword came down.

  Adam tightened his grip; she could see the whiteness of his knuckles, could see the way the boy’s hands became the man’s; she could see the sudden color that changed the cast of his skin, darkening it, deepening it. She understood that he was trying, as healers will, to preserve the Arianni life, and knew that he would not be allowed to do so.

  She knew what Vennaire knew.

  This was their only way home.

  And in the bitter cold, made brighter by her own observation, the glow of the things she carried, some solid and some intangible, in the cups of her palms, she waited, because she knew, knew, that Adam could find the path, but he could not walk it on his own. And even if he could, alone would avail them little.

  It might kill him, but his death would solve nothing.

  She stepped forward, shifting her grip on the crystal until she carried it in one hand; she reached out with her left hand and placed it, gently, on the top of Adam’s head. He wore no hat, now, and heat rose from his tangled hair into the palm of her hand.

  Shadow purred.

  The irate repetition of what seemed to be his favorite word stopped. Jewel could see his golden eyes, unblinking in the light. “You could have spared her,” he said, the perpetual whine she thought of as natural cat voice absent. “You both could have spared her. You could have done this the last time we stopped.”

  Jewel nodded; it was true. Had she known, she would have allowed Adam to do then what he did now; would have withdrawn the heart of her seer-born power from the chest in which it was sheltered.

  But she hadn’t known then. Hadn’t understood what was required.

  And she could not be unhappy about Darranatos’ death. Yes, Shianne was in pain; that pain, that loss, dogged her every movement, her every expression. Regardless, Darranatos would not have died to any other sword, in any other moment. She wondered if some unconscious seer-born instinct had forced her to stay Adam’s hand the first time, but she did not know.

  Darranatos had been a danger, a threat to even the most powerful of the Hidden Court. Were it not for the sorrow of Shianne, Jewel was certain everyone present would be dead.

  “Not me,” Shadow said. “Or her.” He meant Calliastra.

  Jewel glanced at Calliastra; this was a mistake. Calliastra, born of two gods, was, like Shadow, solid, visible; nothing about her was shaky or obscured. And she was darkness; she absorbed light as if it were air, or sustenance, and the darkness in her eyes seemed to spread as she did. Her wings rose up, even folded as they were across her back; her skin was the color of ice or mortal death. This, Jewel could bear.

  But even framed as she was by shadows that stole light and killed warmth, even pale as the death that she would inevitably bring to all those around her whose warmth she craved, her expression was an urchin’s expression, a child’s expression, torn by loss and fear and need; those desperate eyes were rounded, the line of her brow gathered in ridges of pain. No anger, there, to push someone away; no desire to appear strong. She was a cry in the wilderness, and her arms—her arms were outstretched.

  Even knowing that they were death, this woman, this child, could not help but reach for those around her who might be able to grasp those hands in their own.

  She almost stepped away from Adam, so strong was the need she saw, but Shadow stepped on both of her feet, nearly causing her to topple. She gasped, righting herself, and clutching tightly at the crystal; she knew that she must not be separated from it.

  Her left hand was no longer upon Adam’s bowed head; she had reached instinctively for Calliastra. And she would, she thought, determined. She would reach for Calliastra again, with these hands.

  But not now, as Shadow reminded her. Not now. She turned back to Adam. Her hand did not tighten; he was not Shadow, who required habitual, constant reminders. She almost dropped her hand to Adam’s shoulder but could not lift it; the impulse was wrong.

  Adam’s chin lowered further; she stood, she watched, the sound of her heart unnaturally loud, her breathing fading from her awareness. Adam’s hands were glowing softly in this harsh, visual haze. His hands, knuckles weathered and lined by sun and sand; his hands, youthful and supple. She could not see his bent face, and yet she could sense the moment his eyes opened, as if they were shutters or windows thrown wide, and in haste.

  He spoke a word that she could not hear; she could remember the sense of it, the tone of it, the texture of it, but the actual syllables escaped her, then and forever. Nor did it now matter. The Arianni were not mortal. They had no souls. They did not, upon death, shed their bodies and the pain of their life’s end, and traverse the bridge to the beyond; nor did they come at last to the Halls of Mandaros, where they relived the choices of their life, to be judged at last.

  They were not born as mortals were born. She had been told that by an offended Shadow, and she had thought, at the time, that she understood what that meant. She was wrong, had been wrong. The word birth had connotations that Jewel could not escape, so she shed that word. They were created. They were created the way the first man, in some stories, some myths, some legends, had been created; they were offered, whole, to the world. Living, breathing, they were part of that world in a way that mortals were not. They were of it. They were of it, and they were of their parents, their creators.

  And when they perished, their essence returned to those creators.

  She thought of Darranatos then. She thought of the ash that was scattered by wind. She understood, in that brief flash of insight, that Darranatos, first among princes, would not die as the Arianni did; that the power that had been given him by the White Lady had been lost to her in the instant he had chosen to ally himself with the god she would not name.

  Not for him, this slow unfolding of life and life’s essence; not for him the return, at last, to Ariane. But for the man whose chest had been pierced by Vennaire’s sword, it was different. They were gathered in the wilderness—high or low, Jewel was uncertain—and this single death was a sacrifice.

  She did not know what Ariane would make of it; did not know if she would grieve. She could not imagine it—but until the moment Shianne had gathered the remnants of Darranatos in her arms, she could not have conceived o
f that grief among any who had been born to the White Lady.

  What she knew was that Adam, healer-born, followed the fading life essence of the dying Arianni. What she knew was that Adam could see the path that it took; that he could—as he had done with the wild earth and Terafin forest—hold it somehow in place; that he could weave the here and the there together, forcing them to occupy the same space for a brief period of time.

  It was not healing.

  “It is,” Shadow said, his voice soft. “It is what healing is to the wilderness. It is why he is to be feared and avoided. Those that were made can be unmade. They can be altered.”

  Adam did not hear Shadow; Jewel did. She continued to watch. What she had not seen on the day they had met demons in the Winter lands beyond the Oracle’s cave, she saw clearly now: the strands of this place, the strands of these people, and the strands of the lands to which the Arianni dead must return. He followed the dead, caught some hint of the where, the how, and he held them.

  This was where they must go. This was how.

  Jewel lifted her hand from Adam’s head and, kneeling, reached, instead, for his hands, placing the left palm down across them and raising the light. His eyes were closed, but she knew that he could see that light, somehow; that he could work with it, and by it, both.

  She felt the minute he reached for it, and for her, and she stiffened; she heard Shadow’s hiss by her ear, but the hiss was unnecessary. She knew that this is where she must be, and how. She was mortal. She was seer-born. She had visited the Oracle, had taken the Oracle’s test.

  Or had started it; she was no longer certain it was done.

  She would not surrender Adam to the wilderness. She would not lose his future to his present, to this moment. She was Jewel Markess ATerafin. She had stood in the Stone Deepings, face-to-face with Ariane and the Wild Hunt. She had held that ground.

  She had held that ground with far less visceral incentive. Adam stood before her, his literal future visible to the eyes, exposed by the crystal she clutched in a shaking, extended arm. And beside her, less solid but no less real, was Angel. If no others had been involved, it wouldn’t have mattered at all. She understood that their lives were at stake—that, in the end, all their lives were at stake—but that was for later, if ever.

  The now was enough.

  She did not think of home. She did not think of Taverson’s, or the hundred holdings in which she and her den had come together. She thought, instead, of Adam, of Angel, and of Amarais Handernesse ATerafin; of the promises made to the woman who had been both her ruler and her benefactor, surrendering in the process all hope of peace for herself.

  And she thought of Finch, of Teller, of Arann; of Jester and Carver; of Ellerson. She thought of home, not as a physical place, but as an interior one: something she carried with her, something she was part of, no matter where she stood. She had never let go of it—and she never would. Never while she lived and, given Mandaros, possibly never, period.

  She curved her hands and her fingers above Adam’s, as if by so doing, she could pin him in place, could prevent him from following the path he sought, prevent him from being devoured by what she was now certain awaited: The White Lady.

  Adam built his path. But he built it around Jewel, built it, in part, of her. She felt the cold of winter suddenly freeze the hand in which she gripped the singular proof of her encounter with the darkness in the Oracle’s caverns: her own fear.

  Her fear had made the room seem endless; the space of a few yards extending for miles in the dark. Every step she had taken had been an effort, and the weight of that fear had grown, and grown again, until she couldn’t stand on two feet. She had crawled. She had—shaking, nauseous, unable to draw a full breath into her lungs—crawled the rest of the way.

  If the fear had vanished when she had reached her destination, she might have forgotten it. Might have set it down, set it aside, and refused to resume its burden. But the worst fear remained, enclosing her so tightly she could barely move. And yet she had. Sweating, shaking, more terrified than she had ever been, she had moved. She had taken the knife.

  She had cut into her own heart.

  This, then, was what remained.

  She closed her eyes. It made no difference. She had cursed and feared her talent for so much of her life, had hidden it whenever it was possible. But it was that talent that had brought her her den; that talent that had brought her to Terafin, and that talent that had given her a place on the House Council long before she understood the politics—of power, of necessity.

  She would never consider it a curse again. A burden, yes—but responsibility was, because the cost of failure rose, and rose, and rose. Yet the chance of success was still there, no matter how faint, glimmering brightly; she could not let the darkness of her own fear eclipse it, or it would vanish from sight.

  She felt the ground change; the air remained wintry and cool, the crystal in her palm a thing of ice that caused a pain that never quite gave way to welcome numbness.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder; knew instantly it was Angel’s and smiled; she felt the shift of paws across one of her feet—Shadow; she felt the wordless hum of something that might have been approval and the utter stunned silence that joined it. And she heard—

  She heard the butterfly’s song.

  * * *

  • • •

  The butterfly’s song changed the whole of the landscape that was, even as she watched, being knit together, being woven, by Adam. By the healer-born. She saw the wilderness from his eyes, felt it almost as he felt it: it was a living thing, a body entire, vast and almost unknowable to mortals such as they were. But the part that he could touch, he did. He understood the moment that the Arianni’s life ended because he could see where what was not quite a soul began to move.

  Beneath that movement, that figurative, intangible movement, he created a gate, a path. She saw, and she added to it, standing, both feet on the ground, her heart in her hand. She offered the wilderness that heart, or knowledge of that heart; she did not make demands of the land because she could not. She was not and would never be Lord here; she had not grown up in these forests and come of age in them; she had not wandered beneath the boughs of these trees, gathering fallen leaves as if they were the brightest and sweetest of flowers.

  She heard a second song join the butterfly; she heard Kallandras’ subtle harmony; she heard the sudden silence that swept across the Arianni—an absence of sound, of breath, a hush that was nonetheless full of life and awareness and yearning.

  The moon came out in the skies above Adam’s hands—skies which were cloudless now, and almost serene. And where they had been silent, as if sound might shatter the world, the Arianni began to sing. Their voices were quiet, whispers, their words almost unintelligible.

  But she knew this song. Although she had never heard it before, it felt as familiar as cradle song—a cradle song for a cold, cruel people. She had thought that the powerful and the immortal were above—beyond—the need for something as trivial as love and affection, the things that she had valued all her life, and she realized, as the singing grew in volume, that she had been wrong.

  But the definition of love to the Arianni was merciless and complete.

  Jewel expected things from her friends. She expected some respect, some consideration, and some loyalty; she expected to both give and receive support. She expected those friends to share as much of a life with her as they could; she expected to join that effort with everything she had. She expected good days, bad days, and the days in between.

  The Arianni expected nothing. They wanted—she heard it now—everything, but even were nothing to be offered, it would be enough to know that they were, somehow, in the presence of the Winter Queen.

  The White Lady.

  “Gilafas,” she said, although she had not intended to speak.

  He lowered his hood once
again, appearing beside Angel so suddenly, Angel dropped instantly into a defensive stance.

  “Yes,” he said, as if she had—as if she could—command him. He did not touch Adam; instead, he drew leaves and branches from the folds of a robe that no longer seemed natural to Jewel’s vision. Gilafas, however, was; he looked entirely himself. She could not see the changing shape of hands or face, as she did with Adam, but every line in the older guildmaster’s face was so clear, so sharp, he looked too real, too solid.

  The eyes that met hers were familiar.

  The man she saw now was the man she had met in a dream—a dream from which she had awoken, wearing a ring. His smile acknowledged the recognition, but there was more to it than that; he seemed . . . younger, somehow. No, not younger; he seemed joyful, which robbed his face of years, of ages, of the patina of loss and regret.

  She had watched him work in a dream, and it was in a dream, she felt, that she watched him now, for part of what he now worked with his maker’s hands was what Adam was building.

  And as he worked, she saw that the maker-born power was a power, like sight or healing, for the branches and leaves that he had gathered were put together in a form they could not have taken, and from their natural, irregular shapes, Gilafas built an arch; it stood, its wood grain revealed as if grain were inner light caught and caged by bark, and across those grains, the familiar and beloved leaves of the Ellariannatte were set, and they rustled, as if in a gentle breeze.

  The arch was taller than the man; larger by far than the stained-glass window he had shown her, and she knew that the two were similar, although they had nothing visual in common. As he worked, the butterfly came to rest upon his shoulder, but its flight and its presence did not disturb him.

  The Winter King came to stand by her side; he was silent, even in her thoughts, but she saw that he trembled; his hooves came, at last, to ground, but they left no mark, as if he were suddenly afraid to do so.

  The singing grew louder until the voices were like storm—but a summer storm, not the ice and death of winter snow—and Gilafas continued to work, Adam to bind, and Jewel to witness.