War

by Michelle West

  “Could she have made you visible?”

  His smile was gentle. “I do not know. I did not ask.”

  “But—”

  “There are none who can easily interfere with the Winter Queen in her court; they are of her in a fashion that mortals cannot be. Were she not born to this world, were she not of it herself, she could not have contained me, could not have held on to me. There is a place the mortal dead go, and it, too, is beyond her.

  “It is where Shianne will go. She suspects this, but does not know. Could she, the White Lady would do what was done—to me—to hold Shianne forever.” He glanced, then, at Shianne, who was utterly still.

  “How are you here?” the mortal child of Ariane whispered. “How came you to leave her side?”

  “There exists, at court, one who flouts—without intent—the intention of a woman she does not understand, and she is coveted, celebrated, and indulged.”

  Jewel whispered, “Cessaly.”

  “The young Evayne brought your Artisan materials with which to craft. I am uncertain that Evayne herself knew what their purpose must be, and to ask Cessaly is to hazard an answer that will merely add layers to confusion. But it is because of Evayne that I believe I am meant, and was meant, to be here.”

  “If you were meant to be here, Ariane could have . . .”

  “You understand the difficulty. She is what she is. Had you asked it, yes. But you did not ask. And yet, I believe that this is, in some fashion, her intent as well. Come. You have something to do, and I have something to do, as well.”

  “And that?”

  “I failed you once,” he said softly.

  She bridled instantly.

  “No, it is not your accusation. Were it, I might refute it, and with ease. It is the accusation I turned—and have turned—on myself for half your life. I cannot change the past, but it haunts me.”

  “What can you do if you’re dead?” It was Angel who asked.

  “Remain,” he replied. “Where Jewel goes, I will follow. What she faces, I will face.”

  “You won’t be able to do anything.”

  “We shall see. Mandaros is . . . ill-pleased with the Winter Queen.” He placed one hand on her shoulder, and she felt its warmth, as if that warmth had been dredged from memory and made, once again, real.

  Angel was right. Rath was dead. He could not do what they could do. How foolish, then, to feel his presence as if it were comfort or shield.

  “Will Mandaros be angry at me?”

  “Oh, undoubtedly,” was his airy reply. She heard an echo of Jester in it, which surprised her. “But I won’t, and I consider that of more import.”

  She didn’t mean to laugh, but she did, and if it was brief, it was genuine.

  Angel’s surprise made clear to her that she hadn’t laughed much—at all—recently. And the word recent stretched out for days and months. He signed a single word, and she shook her head.

  “You will have to tell me,” Rath said, “what I’ve missed. But now,” he added, “look. If I understand everything that’s been said—in my presence—this is the reason you walked the Oracle’s path.”

  Shadow, sulking, said, “Is not.” He sniffed. “You only like him because he is stupid. Like you.”

  Jewel grimaced. “Shadow, please.”

  “What? What? What?”

  She hoped Night and Snow didn’t have the same reaction to Rath that Shadow did. “You’re just saying that because you can’t step on him, knock him out of the way, or destroy his things.”

  “And believe,” Angel said to Rath, “that you’re going to appreciate that.” He dodged the wing Shadow flicked in his direction, as if to make his point.

  “We can only be grateful,” Celleriant said, “that your cat did not disgrace you in the White Lady’s presence.”

  “Surely the cat would only disgrace himself,” Avandar said.

  Shadow snarled and hissed.

  And Jewel felt, as they squabbled, that she could do this. She turned her gaze into the thing that she had once called a seer’s heart, and she looked.

  * * *

  • • •

  Angel watched. Of the people present, he was the most tense, the most worried. He had always found inactivity stressful. She was the Lord he had chosen, but she was kin as well. He had admired her, but admiration had given way to something else, because admiration was something that was distant.

  He wanted to help her. He wanted to be of use. And he knew, watching her now, that there was nothing he could do, no part of this burden he could shoulder. He could be here, for all the good that might do. Shadow stepped on his foot.

  Angel frowned at the cat, and his expression froze.

  Shadow’s eyes were glowing. It was not the subtle silver patina that sometimes enveloped Arianni eyes; it was not the subtle gold that sometimes—especially in darkness—seem to light the cats’ eyes from within. It was a brilliant gold, an intense gold; it reminded Angel of the sun.

  His mother’s distant warning not to stare at the sun almost made him avert his own gaze, but the cat’s foot grew instantly heavier, as if Shadow did not understand mortal anatomy, and meant to fix Angel’s attention in place.

  “You are useless,” Shadow said, his voice, unlike his eyes, completely normal. “And stupid. But stupid is what she needs.” A growl chased the words. “She needs you to be stupid. She needs you here.”

  “To do what?” Angel hadn’t meant to speak. He knew that Jay, eyes fixed on the crystal, body rigid, did not hear him.

  “You will know.” He lifted his foot as Jay bit her lip hard enough to draw blood. She tore her gaze away from the crystal; Angel was suddenly afraid she would drop it. But Rath, seated behind her, put both of his arms out, one to either side of her, to steady her. Dead or not, he seemed solid enough—to Jay—to brace her in a way that Angel could not.

  “This is not where we need to be,” she said, and if her color was terrible, her voice was not. Angel heard the absolute certainty in it. The den had lived and died by it, when they had made their home in the hundred holdings; it was a voice that demanded instant action, removing all need for thought.

  Shadow turned; he was not pointing the way they had come.

  The Winter King turned as well.

  “Kallandras?” Jay said.

  He nodded.

  Jay put her crystal away. Angel understood that she thought of it, on some primal level, as her heart; he couldn’t. It was a deliberate choice.

  Jay then reached for the small pouch she had kept by her side for their journey; it was crafted of leather that time had diminished, something that would be considered very much beneath the station she occupied in Averalaan. Here, however, all mortal stations seemed irrelevant, and things as worn as the pouch implied familiarity and prior use.

  She took the single leaf that she had given to Carver, and that Carver had chosen—at great cost—to return. It was slender, blue, metallic; it was not a thing of her forests, and yet it had come indirectly from the lands she claimed. Nestled among leaves of silver, gold, and diamond, it nonetheless stood out, and it came instantly to the hand that trembled in search of it, as if it were alive.

  No one asked what she intended. Shianne had been birthed to the wilderness the gods once ruled; everyone else understood exactly how the Terafin forest had come into being. They trusted her to do what was necessary.

  The certainty that sometimes came with vision offered no comfort at all, because certainty had never offered absolution. Angel understood the burden of the guilt she carried. Had it been in his power, he would have relieved her of it—but he also understood that it was an essential part of who she was, and he did not want that to change any more than it already had.

  Her skin paled, her eyes closed, as if the lids themselves were too heavy to keep open. He moved instantly to stand besi
de her, ignoring Shadow’s glare. No cat words chased after it.

  She did not dig. Did not orient the leaf, did not do anything that might visibly be construed as planting it. But she hadn’t done that in the Terafin forest, either; the wind had carried the leaves, as if at her command, and the earth had accepted them. Here, she simply laid the leaf across the ground and rose.

  Angel had enough warning to brace himself as the ground beneath his feet shifted.

  8th day of Lattan, 428 A.A.

  Terafin Manse, Averalaan Aramarelas

  Teller understood the danger of doors. He entered none of them, but he did throw them open, raising his voice to shout. As he worked his way through the manor, his voice grew hoarse; he husbanded it between the opening and closing of doors. But he had opened three that were no longer connected to the manse that had been, had become, his home; they made of that home something instantly strange and dangerous, threw into doubt the stability he and the den had worked all of their adult lives to build.

  The fourth such door he opened, he could not close.

  The door became insubstantial, its brass knob losing solidity, its wooden frame buckling as if under great and sudden weight. Teller heard the crack of hard wood and had just enough time to get out of the way as something leaped through the open frame.

  The guards that the forest had sent to him leaped into action, then, but it was a subtle, strange action; it seemed, for a moment, that they were frozen in place, rooted as their distant bodies were rooted; their skin developed the rings, the circles, the grain, that defined wood—when that wood had been cut from a toppled tree.

  “Teller,” one of the two said, voice creaking, “You must leave this place. It is no longer safe.”

  “But—”

  “There is a reason that we were to evacuate the manse. If you cannot escape it, and soon, you will not survive.”

  “I don’t understand what’s happening—”

  “No,” was the grave reply. “You do not. But we are not Illaraphaniel. What he might face, we cannot face. We can root the fabric of this place in the forest, but it is a momentary shield, not a wall.”

  He realized that was what they were doing. But even so, the shape of the hall had changed, and the texture of the floor: it was no longer carpet-covered wood, but stone, and the air was cold enough he might have been outside, in winter, and not in the Lattan warmth.

  He was afraid of snow. He was afraid of the loss that came with it. On a visceral level, he remembered the horror of running through it. He remembered the loss that came at the end of that desperate run, and his own failure to acknowledge the truth of his mother’s death. He was no longer that boy, but that boy was at the heart of the man he had struggled to become.

  Laid bare, he felt the fear grow, felt the certainty of failure loom larger and larger. The air was cold. It was so cold.

  8th day of Lattan, 428 A.A.

  The Terafin Forest

  The largest body of Terafin evacuees arrived twenty minutes later. Finch spoke to them; she made herself instantly visible. Today, for perhaps the first time, she understood viscerally that she had power. And, of course, she did: her power in the Merchant Authority was commensurate with Jarven’s. She had grown from a child who had desired invisibility because being unnoticed was the best hope of safety she had, to a woman who understood the steps, the dance, of the powerful. She had grown into the role and had learned to fight by the rules of engagement that the powerful understood and used.

  She had never considered herself a power. There had been too much fear, too much struggle, in her life. She had constantly felt—and still felt—that she teetered on the edge of destruction, and one push, one successful gambit on the part of her many enemies, would cause her to topple into the abyss. She had reached for the tools at hand, had learned to wield them, just as she had learned to use lock picks under Rath’s tutelage.

  With those tools at hand, she had become more of a target, not less. She had stepped into Jarven’s office, had orchestrated her way around Jarven’s plans. People had tried to kill her. People would, she knew, continue unless she could find them first.

  There was no power in being the victim. No matter how high she rose, there were always those who stood higher, whose reach was longer, whose word carried more weight because it was heard so clearly. No matter how high she rose, there were always those intent upon transforming her into that: victim.

  She understood that to remove those people, she would need to plan with care. She desired to remove them because it would make her own survival more certain. But she could not do what she was certain Jarven would do, or would have done, in his own lean, early years—because Jarven had not, in the end, had her den. Had not thought to build it.

  For Jarven, the den was Finch’s liability. It demanded loyalty, and the return on that loyalty was something he failed to discern, failed to value. Jarven had rivals. Where respect for their abilities allowed, he had a kind of affection, but his own interests were his only guide. He assumed that all men, all women, behaved this way. Assumed that they wanted, in the end, what he wanted—and that they were merely too stupid or too incompetent to achieve it.

  He had focused on only that; nothing else was relevant. She knew Jarven considered her remarkably naive, that he regretted that naïveté because it prevented her natural rise to power. She would never become a worthy rival.

  He did not understand—and would never understand—that it was not an act of naïveté. It was a choice. He could not see the strength she derived from it. Could not understand that when she had people she loved—yes, loved, a word that caused Jarven to wince if uttered with any earnestness at all—they became the reason to learn to wield the tools that the powerful had at hand.

  The responsibilities that she shouldered were shared. She could not do what Arann could do; was not Teller; did not have Carver’s easy access to the back halls—she could think that now, if not without pain—and could not be Jay. Could never be Jay.

  She didn’t have to be Jay. She accepted it, fully and completely, because Jay loved her. Loved them. Jay turned, in the end, toward things she loved, not things she hated. Finch had chosen to become regent to help Jay, to protect what they’d all built.

  But she understood, watching the Terafin Household Staff and the Terafin junior members as they arrived at the edge of a forest Jay had only barely intentionally planted, that she did have power. It was a power that was granted to her by the people who came to her. It was a power that they accepted and believed in even when she couldn’t.

  She accepted now. She understood that it was their acknowledgment of her title and position in the house that allowed her to extend a hand that could calm their fear. It was perhaps the first time that she truly understood that the powerful simultaneously did not feel powerful, yet also were.

  She was so relieved to see Daine and his various trainees, she could have wept. None of that, however, showed on her face; none of that was offered because it implied fear, and it was a fear she could not afford to share.

  Daine, however, signed to her. We’re fine.

  Yes, Finch thought, he was, and his assistants were also fine; apprehensive, but as they stood in front of her, she could see that fear abate. She noted that Vareena, the little Astari girl whose existence had almost become a political disaster, was at his side. To Finch’s deep surprise, Vareena lifted her hands—in den-sign. I’ll protect Daine.

  Daine reddened; he could read what she’d signed. He said distinctly, “I’m in charge, Vareena.”

  The younger girl rolled her eyes.

  Finch had been busy with the affairs of the Merchant Authority in the wake of the attack that had destroyed the governing council’s office—and, after that disaster, the whole of the Merchant Guildhall. She had not, therefore, had much chance to watch Vareena. She knew that the girl had once felt it her duty to kill Daine, to
keep the knowledge of the Astari within the Astari. She knew Daine knew it as well.

  But Vareena had clearly reached some sort of peace with herself, and with Daine’s continued existence. And Finch did not question it. Maybe, later—but now, no.

  She signed to Daine, automatically delegating some of the duties she’d undertaken; Daine was, now, the healerie. It was his role within the House to care for the injured; the healerie was a neutral, safe space. He was younger than Finch, yes. But the talent to which he’d been born elevated him in the eyes of the House and all its myriad members.

  Marrick ATerafin offered her assistance as well, although he did not ask permission. He bowed—visibly, obviously, and respectfully. “You are certain these forests are safe?”

  She answered in the same fashion. “Yes. The people who stand beside the House Guard are the forest’s guard, and they will protect Terafin and all who seek shelter here. The manor is no longer safe.”

  Marrick had seen what Finch herself had seen: the distant, new spire across the bridge. Marrick had the authority, not of regent, but of Councillor; he had the easy, genial charisma that implied familiarity, kinship. She had seen him put these to use in pursuit of the House Seat, and understood that they, as any other weapon, could be used in a different fashion.

  As more of the House Council appeared before her, she surrendered more of the act of guidance to them. She even offered the Master of the Household Staff a distant and superior nod—that august woman disdained, instantly, those whose understanding of household hierarchy was so poor they attempted to treat her like a peer.

  Where Marrick was genial and comfortable, the Master of the Household Staff was not. But her starched, intimidating disapproval did not so much calm fear as redirect it into familiar channels. There wasn’t enough fear of unknown disaster to displace fear of the known Master.

  Her glare made clear that even if this was an emergency, there were rules that were to be followed. Her glance grazed the growing number of House Council members, landing, significantly, on the regent. Her unspoken message to the Household Staff was utterly clear: they had better not embarrass the Staff in public. Period.