War

by Michelle West

  “I thought, at first, that my survival was a great wrong—but it was a fate decreed by the Lord I had failed, and I accepted it.” He was restless, and the wind reflected it; Gyrrick would not have been surprised had he simply turned and vanished.

  He did not. That was the thing Gyrrick would remember most clearly about this conversation.

  “I learned to hear your tiny voices. I learned to live your tiny lives. I learned to find beauty in small things I would not have noticed when I had true freedom. But I likewise found beauty in things that I would have noticed, even at the height of my power.”

  Gyrrick was silent, but he met, and held Meralonne’s gaze.

  “Yes,” the magi replied. “Sigurne. It is to Sigurne you must look for your orders; it is Sigurne you must protect if my name is not protection enough. And in this place, at this time, it may not be. I have seen what my brethren have not seen; I have lived in a fashion no one of my kin has willingly lived. But I have come to understand, as the wilderness slowly wakes, that what I once was was not destroyed; I, too, was sleeping.

  “And, Gyrrick, I have attempted not to wake. When the wind calls my name, I hear it, but it is contained; that much, I have learned. I do not know what will wake in me when I am at last reunited with the firstborn princes.” His voice trembled, but it was not with fear.

  “When?” Gyrrick asked. Just that.

  Nor did Meralonne pretend not to understand. “I do not know, for certain—but soon, Gyrrick. Soon, I think.”

  “And we will know?”

  “You will know. It is to the guildmaster that you owe—and have always owed—your loyalty; it was for the guildmaster that I chose to teach you at all. But you will be needed, should this city survive—and if it does survive, it will be in large part due to your efforts—yours, and the mortals who have made it their home. The Terafin’s forest grows, and it grows quickly. I do not desire your deaths, but when the time comes, I am not certain to remember that. Desire mine, at that point. Prove to me that you are the last, the strongest, of my students.”

  As he spoke, the wind at last reached for the magi; they leaped into its folds, and Meralonne carried them to the edge of the Common. He saluted them once, from the air, as he left them.

  8th day of Lattan, 428 A.A.

  The Common, Averalaan

  The doors were taller than the most forbidding doors that graced Avantari, the palace of Kings. They were wider, thicker, and their hinges were utterly silent, as if such noises were an insult to the dignity of those who resided within.

  Jester had hands on a dagger that he had no illusions would be of use; it was a comfort to him, a sign that he was willing to struggle, even if that struggle availed him little but personal dignity, in the end. And that was not like him.

  “Steady,” a familiar voice said, somewhere to his right. That he took comfort in the voice said a lot about his state of mind, because it was Jarven’s.

  “She needs more time,” Jester said, voice flat.

  “And you know this how?”

  “Because she said so. Or were you not eavesdropping, then?”

  “Interesting. Eldest, may I set you down?”

  A golden fox appeared at Jester’s feet. In form and shape, he was both beautiful and harmless; his fur was sleek, its patina warm. He looked up a perfectly formed nose, the demand—it would injure his self-respect to make a request—completely obvious in the gesture.

  Jester knelt and offered to carry him by the simple expedient of opening his arms. He was not terribly surprised to find the fox heavy. Nor did he need Jarven’s quiet reminder that respect was of tantamount import when dealing with the forest elders. He understood that he carried a predator, and that that predator was of far greater danger than Jarven.

  But, philosophically, he also accepted that death was death, and he could only die once. It didn’t matter if the fox was vastly more dangerous than Jarven; didn’t matter if Jarven was vastly more dangerous than a violent gang of roving youths in the poorest of the holdings. Death was death.

  Death was coming.

  “How much more time?” the fox asked, the words slow and patient, as if Jester’s ability to understand them were in grave doubt.

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Can you ask her now?”

  “You can’t?”

  The fox chuckled. “You are not nearly as unintelligent as Jarven assumes.”

  This did rankle, but only slightly.

  Jester forgot about time, forgot about Jarven, forgot about everything except the fox in his arms and the men who were emerging from the building that had devoured so much of the Common.

  They were three.

  They bore the blue shields of their kind, but there was a difference to the color, to the texture, of that luminosity: in the hands of the three, the shields seemed more like captured lightning than simple light. They had not drawn swords, not yet, and Jester felt a faint and ridiculous hope.

  “Birgide,” he whispered, mouth dry. But he did not ask the question the fox had asked. There was no measure of time that she could give him that would make sense. Not now.

  He felt the ground beneath his feet shift, and since that ground was now the twined roots of towering trees, he understood the answer: not yet.

  “Soon,” he told the fox.

  “Tell me, what do you see when you look at them?” The fox might have been talking about flowers in the Terafin gardens for all the urgency contained in his voice.

  Jester had no words. And that was also not like him. He had seen gods in the Between—as seldom as humanly possible—and they had not had the effect upon him that these three men had. Gods were not Sleepers. He understood that, now. They existed in the Between, and it was only there, in the half-shaped, mist strewn world that they might be perceived at all. They were not part of the world in which humanity lived and worked and struggled; they were other, they were at a distance.

  These men were not.

  Jester remembered that the gods had once walked the world. He understood it in some fashion, because one such god had been responsible for death and destruction in the Terafin manse, hard on the heels of the den’s first arrival. And he knew that the threat that shadowed the Empire—the world itself—was a god enthroned, for the moment, in the Northern Wastes, ruling his Shining Court.

  But the bestial god and the distant shadow did not have the power, the grace, the immediacy of the three who came fully out from under the line of the magnificent arch.

  They had the long, pale hair of the Wild Hunt, yes; they were of a height, if he attempted to view them objectively, with Celleriant.

  But Celleriant was an echo, a shadow, a hastily drawn charcoal sketch in comparison; what they were, Celleriant was not, and would never be. Jester considered Celleriant beautiful, but he distrusted patrician beauty. Beauty in a physical sense was, for Jester, a warning, a caution. He kept his distance from it, and in general, it kept its distance from him.

  But these men?

  They were far more compelling. Far more exalted. He felt, mouth dry, that he should not even dare to cross their paths or meet their gazes; that he should not dare to call these lands his home, that had been their prison. That none should call them home, given the profanity of the act of caging them.

  The fox bit his hand.

  He didn’t make a sound, viscerally aware that any sound from him would attract attention he did not want. But the pain had returned him to himself, for the moment.

  “You see them,” the fox said. “You understand.”

  He did.

  And he hated the understanding and hated himself for falling under that spell, for considering himself worthless in comparison. He understood fear of power. He understood the need for invisibility. He understood that he didn’t measure up to most threats—he’d grown up that way. He didn’t worry about
what was fair or just; those were arguments for people who had enough power to care. Demanding fairness or justice had always been games played by people with the certainty of power. For Jester, orphaned, sold, and only barely rescued? He stayed out of the way of the powerful. He didn’t care about fair. He cared about survival. Being right was of no value if it was his corpse in the street.

  But that was fear. There was no objective worth that defined his life. He was not immortal. He was not a god. But he had as much right to walk the streets of this city as they did. More, even. It was his home.

  “Sorry,” he said quietly to the fox in his arms.

  “You are mortal,” the fox replied. “As is our Lord. It is not a besetting sin, but you are coming to understand that there are no besetting sins in the wilderness. There is power, and there is survival. You will be fine, for the moment. I am not certain our Warden is up to the task set her—but time will tell. Set me down, Jester. I will return to you, if you remain.”

  “And Jarven?”

  “Is Jarven; his business is not my business.” The fox leaped delicately, gracefully, to the ground. He then made his way over the gnarl of entwined roots, his feet leaving no trace as he passed through the barrier of trees that Birgide was, even now, attempting to thicken.

  And as he walked, he seemed to grow, to shift in size—and in shape—to become something other, something larger, and something infinitely closer to the divine. Jester had understood, intellectually, that there was a reason the fox was called elder and treated with respect by the forest denizens—but they treated the damn cats the same way.

  Here and now, Jester wondered if the cats, like the fox, could adopt other forms. On the night they had almost—almost—killed Adam and Jay, they had returned to Jay’s side enlarged in size; it was only their voices and their behavior that had established them, firmly, as the winged petulances the entire manse knew.

  But they had never taken on a form that was almost—but not quite—human before. The fox did. And as one man, the three who now stood at the crest of the grand, wide stairs, looked toward him. He did not, however, leave the shade of the Ellariannatte.

  He bowed. It was an oddly graceful bow, not Imperial, and not Southern; it almost seemed like the overture to a complicated, complex dance. The branches above the fox seemed to weave and bow in a similar fashion.

  The three who stood before the open doors did not return that bow. But one among them stepped forward, as if by silent assent. He spoke a long word that Jester did not understand; he assumed it was a name. Or a song; it seemed to be a verse.

  The fox replied in kind. And then, in a language Jester could understand, he continued. “It is not our wish to detain you, nor is it our wish to show any disrespect; it is not the desire of this most ancient of places to dishonor you or your kin.”

  The stranger looked up, at the crown of trees; his gaze then fell to their roots. “And will you speak on behalf of your Lord? Does your Lord know so little of respect or reverence that she does not venture forth to greet us?”

  “She is gone to the court of the White Lady, on an errand for that august person,” the fox replied, his voice far more neutral. A thread of defiance ran through these offered words, a hint of a dare that Jester—could he find voice—would never have expressed.

  Silence. Jester understood the texture of that dare, understood the implication in all the words the fox had chosen. They were truth, but, like Jarven, the fox did not prize honesty; like anything else at hand, it was a tool to be used only when it engendered the desired reaction.

  “We do not recognize your Lord’s name,” the first man said. “We hear it, but it is so slight it contains no weight, no meaning. It is almost ephemeral.”

  The fox said nothing.

  The trees, however, seemed to shake at a wind that touched nothing else—and there was wind now, but the branches did not move as if conversing with its currents. Jester glanced back at Birgide and froze.

  She was pale, trembling as if she were kin to those branches, these trees. She did not have the elegance of the Arianni, did not compel as the immortals did, but what he saw in her now felt like the heart of rage. Or fear. Or loss. He had released her hand to become conveyance for a creature that could have easily walked the short distance he all but demanded to be carried, and he regretted it.

  He turned his back on gods and knew it. He turned away from the sense of awe, of dread, of something that was too raw and too deep to be called worship. Why?

  Because he had meant every word he had said about Birgide. The others might not know it yet, but Birgide was den. She was kin.

  He reached her side and, once again, grabbed her hand, as if his own hand was an anchor. She did not try to pull away; did not seem to even notice that Jester was there, at her side. But her hand tightened, returning his grip, and as it did, she closed her red, red eyes.

  The High Wilderness

  There was pain. Jewel understood, in that moment, that there would always be pain. It was not, however, strictly physical. Although her hands appeared to all watching—and in some fashion to her, herself—to be piercing her chest, they cut nothing, tore nothing physical; there was no blood, no gaping hole, nothing that threatened to end her life.

  She closed hands around her heart. She felt it, not as crystal; it was not hard, it had no sharp edges; it was warm, its softness belying its visual shape. And she understood, as she looked at it, that it was not pain she felt; it was fear. Fear had always been her enemy.

  Shadow did not step on her foot, did not call her stupid, did not tell her to put it away. Nor did he tell her that this was suicide, that it was folly, that it was unsafe. The latter, she did not need to be told. She had walked the Oracle’s path, and she understood that there was no safety in this act—that there would never be safety in it. There was fear. And what she saw would confirm that fear, if fear was allowed to be the only measure by which she judged.

  There was so much to fear.

  But all of the things she feared—the death of her den-kin, the destruction of her city, the loss of her home—were layers wrapped around a single core. She was afraid that she could not prevent those things. She was afraid that she could not save anything. She knew who she was. She knew that she was not—had never truly—been up to the task.

  Shadow did not speak.

  No one did. She thought she caught a flicker of movement, thought Angel might have signed, but no one said a word. She was looking at her closed hands; hints of light, of something that might be light, leaked from between her fingers. She pried her hands open, almost as if they belonged to someone else. Her hands were in her way.

  As was she.

  She was not up to the task.

  She had sent Duster to lead the den out of their home. She had sent Duster to die. She had given orders that the undercity be abandoned, but she had lost Lander anyway. She had failed to lead The Terafin—and Meralonne—to that undercity, had failed to warn people in time, and she had been utterly powerless to save the people who had been spirited into the darkness and the torture and death that awaited them in that terrible, terrible Henden.

  She had failed to save Amarais.

  In all the futures she had been haphazardly shown, there had never been enough information for certainty, and when she had, in the grip of talent, been certain, it was immediate, visceral—a thing more felt than thought. Thought had come later.

  She was seer-born, but she was only one person—and in spite of that, people pinned their hopes on her. Those hopes continued to accrete; she was bowed by them, bent with their weight, because she could not live up to them.

  She could not walk away from them; could never walk away. But here, in this place, she felt so immobilized by the weight, the breadth, of those hopes that she could not walk at all.

  She closed her eyes, bowed her head. One thing at a time. One thing.

&
nbsp; She had to go home. She had to get home. And she had to do it now.

  Her mouth was dry as she forced her eyes open; her arms shook. She discarded the what-ifs and the should-haves because, in the end, they would not help her here. Perhaps later she might—as she so often did, and so bitterly—learn from her mistakes. But even if they had lessons to teach her, she could not change the past. Had never been able to change it.

  She had managed to change what had not yet become the future.

  One step. One step at a time. What she needed to do now was go home. What she needed to find, not by the querulous instinct of a wild talent, but with deliberation, was the path that would take her there. And this was why she had followed the Oracle. So that she had that choice.

  Choice itself was terrifying, because if one had the choice, the responsibility that came with making the right one was much, much larger. Helplessness was not what she wanted, but when she had had no choice, her mistakes had not doomed other people.

  But her choices wouldn’t have saved them, either.

  “Jewel,” Rath said, startling her.

  She did not look at him but clung to the familiar and long-absent sound of his voice.

  “I am here because I wore a ring that was crafted by, made by, the Winter Queen. I was, while alive, one tool in her long and bitter war. But she does not surrender what she owns.”

  “If I’d known—if I’d known—”

  “I would have been the boon you asked for.”

  She swallowed. Swallowed and frowned. “How do you know? How do you know what I asked for?”

  This time she turned, her heart in her hands—and in her expression, her voice.

  “I was there. I have been there since I invoked what the ring offered.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “See me? No. But you were not meant to see me. I told you: the Winter Queen does not easily or willingly surrender what she owns. She did not go to great lengths to hide my presence; it was not necessary.”