She understood now why Jarven had made the decisions he had: Jarven believed that this was to be the future, and Jarven was unwilling to become irrelevant in any game he was forced to play simply by existing. But she thought that the power of the wilderness was the power of the talent-born; one could not simply, by work and dint of intellect and learning, gain it. It must sting, to have a lifetime of achievements rendered all but useless.
“Does it sting you?” the forest asked. And she felt the question as an earthquake, although the ground beneath her feet did not move. “Do not kneel, Finch. It is not necessary.”
“Is it offensive?” she found voice to ask.
The air rumbled. “. . . No. But you understand that we each seek gestures of respect we can both understand and replicate.”
She swallowed. “Eldest—”
“If you had time, mortal child, I would teach you my name—but it is long and difficult for one such as yourself, and time has never been your gift, either to give or to receive. It is not in your nature. Come, approach without fear.”
Finch approached. Fear was an essential part of the reason she had come; she could not simply shed it. This was the heart of the wilderness, a place to which, and of which, she was not born. She was aware of its otherness, aware of the fact that she did not belong to it.
“Child,” the tree said—she could see no face, no mouth, no spirit such as the Ellariannatte possessed, “You must learn. You must learn to belong to it; it is what your world will—and must, now, if I understand the reason for your presence—become. But come, ask your question.”
She didn’t ask the tree how it knew what that question was, because for a moment she understood: she had asked it in the forest. She had asked it of the forest.
“What do you want from Jay?”
“That is not the question you came to ask.”
“I know.”
“Ask that question, then.”
But Finch hesitated. The air trembled; she could not, for a moment, discern why: anger? Amusement?
“The latter. You have come to this forest, you have heard its voice, you have given commands in the Lord’s stead—and only now do you think to ask the cost? This is why we think of you—of all of you—as young.”
Finch nodded. “But, Eldest, that isn’t an answer. It’s a criticism I absolutely deserve, but it’s not an answer.”
“Do you now think that you deserve an answer?”
Finch shook her head.
“And if I told you that I will answer only one question, is that the question you would allow to stand?”
And this, Finch thought, was the burden that was placed, always, on those who ruled, those who lead. She understood in that moment that Jarven was, had always been, wrong. She was not a ruler. She was never going to become what she believed a ruler should be. “No.”
“No, indeed. Ask your question, Finch ATerafin. Ask, but understand: I cannot change the answer. There is no guarantee that you will like the answer you receive.”
She opened her mouth, wordless, as if the gentle warning was an answer in and of itself. She found her voice with difficulty, speaking above the fear, or through it. And when she spoke, her voice was not quiet; there was a surprisingly lack of hesitance in the words themselves.
“Where is Teller?”
* * *
• • •
Jester heard the question.
Arann heard it.
Haval heard it.
Daine heard it.
In the skies above the remade cathedral, Calliastra heard it. Only Calliastra smiled, because only Calliastra understood the why of it, the truth to which such hearing spoke. The answer, she did not hear, and in some fashion it was irrelevant. She bowed her head a moment as she unfurled her wings, revealing the darkness of their full majesty. Below her, trapped for the moment upon the ground nearest the grand stairs that served as inanimate herald, three men looked up.
* * *
• • •
Angel did not hear the question.
But Jewel did. Had she not been on Shadow’s back, she would have frozen or stumbled; Shadow, however, did neither.
Where is Teller?
Her heart was not in her hands; it was, figuratively, in her throat, blocking all words, all momentary breath.
She had walked away from Carver. She had chosen to leave him. And she wondered, while she struggled to breathe, struggled to tighten her knees to retain her grip upon the back of the great, gray cat, if she had done that—could do that—because on some level she had known what must come: that choices she made in a future that had not yet unfolded would return Carver to her.
Where is Teller?
As if the question was asked of her, she once again reached into her chest—but she did it without thought and without fear. No—that was wrong. She was afraid. She was terrified. But she was not terrified of what her hands would touch, would contain, would cup; it was the lack of an answer that would doom her. Doom them all.
She recognized the voice, heard the shallows of Finch’s anger inform the question, and beneath those shallows, the echo of her own fear, made visceral, made suddenly real. That fear spoke of things that were not fear, but history, and a history that was good, perhaps even necessary to the people that Jewel and Finch had become.
“Shadow—”
“We are close,” the cat growled, voice low, more of a sensation than a sound. He did not tell her not to do what she was, even now, doing. Nor did Rath, seated behind her, the arms that braced her drawing her more closely to him, as if he could prevent what Shadow could not: her fall, at speed.
The cat was not a cat; the man who now offered her protection and stability was already dead. Nothing in Jewel’s world had fully made sense since before she had come to Terafin, and she accepted that because she had no time to worry at it, to interrogate it. Even the pain she felt as she pulled out what was a physical representation of a metaphorical heart was insignificant now.
The one thing that did make sense, the one thing that had always made sense, was her family: the den. They had her back. They’d had her back when the world had started to twist and warp, becoming an echo of itself, seen through nightmares. Or dreams. They’d had it when she had promised Amarais the only thing Amarais had desired so that she might go to the Halls of Judgment in peace.
They were the foundation on which she stood. They were the foundation from which she could govern.
Where is Teller?
The question echoed; it had pierced the whole of her thought, cutting through all other fears as if it were a blade. She did not know of whom Finch asked the question. She could not hear an answer, if an answer was offered at all. But something had set Finch off—and it wasn’t small or trivial; that wasn’t the way Finch worked.
It no longer mattered.
She did not pause to wonder how she could hear Finch. She hadn’t paused to wonder how she could tell the wild elements to knock it off, clean up after themselves, and go to their rooms, either. Not when she’d done it, and she’d only wondered later, when all the consequences began to spill into her lap, one after another.
She had, between her palms, the heart she had traveled to the Oracle to be able to control. It lay there, the clouds beneath a crystalline surface rolling slowly into themselves, white becoming gray, gray becoming darker before once again giving way to white. She had left her den, left her House, and walked the Oracle’s path so that she could have control over the visions that had been boon and bane to her since her childhood.
Well, she had control now. She could ask the question. She could see every single answer that might possibly exist for it, and as she narrowed her eyes, she steeled herself for all of them.
“Where is Teller?”
“You don’t need to assssssssssk out loud. If you do, everyone will know what you’re thi
nking.”
“She doesn’t think,” another voice said. It was Snow.
“Is your brother also here?”
“Why do you need him?”
Which was yes. She relaxed very slightly, although her arms were tense and shaking. The cats, in all their chaotic, self-indulgent, childish glory, were part of home to her. Maybe they always had been.
They almost killed you.
And that, Jewel thought, was as real as anything else in this wilderness; it was both true and distant, known and yet not viscerally felt. What was real, now, was the question to which she had demanded an answer.
And it was a question of now, a question of not-yet, and a question with roots in things that had already happened. She could not change anything but the not-yet. It was to the future that she therefore looked. But that future made no immediate sense to her, and because it didn’t, the past and the present poured in while she watched.
* * *
• • •
She saw the forest guard, armed with House weapons; tall, lithe, yet somehow rooted. She saw the golden fox, saw Jester, saw Birgide—and saw, as well, the flight of leaves of fire, drifting through the city with intent, as if each were independently alive. She saw the deep amethyst of familiar skies; saw the winged harptalons and, worse, the dragon; she saw the rise of a dark cathedral, and also its miraculous transformation. She saw the dead: men, women, children; saw the dying who had failed to somehow reach the line of trees before they were felled. She saw the host of the Arianni riding across the surface of the bay; saw them riding through the streets, and felt her throat constrict. But she saw the banners of The Kalakar and The Berrilya, and thought of another battlefield, another war, and she felt hope.
She saw the Ellariannatte; heard the bardsong, saw the magi with their golden weapons. She did not see Teller.
She saw the Sleepers; saw the three become four, felt the onset of sudden dread take her lungs, stilling them. But the sky above the newly formed building darkened suddenly, not into the deeper hues of purple that might herald the fall of a night she had never once seen in her personal chambers, but a shade of midnight; great wings unfurled, trapping and shunting sunlight aside. Which sun, she did not know. She had not seen sun in the skies of her personal chambers, either; just the light that implied that sun existed, somewhere.
Feathers long and sharp as scythes extended from that midnight, and at the heart of the darkness was a woman she recognized. Calliastra in flight. Calliastra in the mortal lands which now also contained her father. Her eyes were a shade of violet, ringed with gold, and seemed far, far larger than her face; they called the attention, compelled it, until they were the only thing that Jewel could see; all else was momentarily forgotten.
But the eyes widened before narrowing into obviously angry slits, and although Calliastra in fury remained compelling, the visceral urge to look away and seek safety allowed Jewel to once again regain some modicum of control. She pulled back, pulled away, and froze.
Calliastra was far closer to the ground than she had been; she had pulled her wings in, but Jewel suspected they were not necessary to her flight. The light was harsh and bright in comparison, and it fell in spokes through the tears in a darkness that was more shadow than feather.
In that light, she truly saw the Sleepers.
Had she not been mounted on Shadow, she might have frozen completely; might have forgotten the crystal through which this vision had been granted. Not even when approaching Ariane upon her growing throne had she felt so overwhelmed, so awed. These men were the heart of Winter, devoid of even the promise of warmth that was early spring. But winter, seen from a remove, could be beautiful, and in the dead heat of summer, one might yearn for it. Yearn for the pristine fall of white, the clarity of sky, beneath which the world might be hidden or transformed. Only when the cold set in and the lack of warmth and shelter made itself felt did one remember that the winter was death.
But before then, it was an expanse of pure, pale, untouched white; it was a stillness that held everything it touched; it was too large to command, too large to understand, too large to question—and where there were questions, there were no answers. They were an act of nature, like earthquakes, like tidal waves, like storms that destroyed, unseeing, the ships that were unfortunate enough to be caught out at sea when they hit.
Jewel had seen gods in the Between. She had heard their voices, a chorus of perfectly overlapping sound. She had been aware of what she was not, but she had not felt the visceral desire to bow, to give her life over instantly to beings who were older, wiser, vastly more experienced. Nor had she felt ashamed of her mortality, of her singular vision, her tiny voice.
These men were everything the gods had not been, and she understood, in a rare flash of an intuition that was not subconscious, that this was because they now walked in the mortal world.
And she thought of the god they did not name, and of these men, and thought that maybe, just maybe, that god might encounter more than just feeble resistance if he faced the Sleepers. But another thought occurred to her as she looked at their cold, piercingly beautiful faces: He had faced the Sleepers, once.
At the end of that encounter, he had assumed the mantle Lord of the Hells, and the Sleepers had slept. And now, eyes blazing a kind of silver light that did not blind, they had woken, and they surveyed the ruins of a city that they did not—yet—rule.
Shadow fell across their upturned faces, and to her surprise, the three moved as something hit the stairs on which they had been standing, shattering what she assumed was stone. And, in a fashion, it was; it was living stone. She could, from Shadow’s back, feel both the shattering and the way the resultant pieces pulled back together, remaking the stairs that were no longer directly beneath the Sleepers’ feet.
And she could see that one of the Sleepers—only one—rose in the folds of wind, taking to skies that were filled with streaks of shadow lightning and beating, dark wings. She should not have recognized him because he was almost of a piece with the other three; his hair was fluid, long, each strand catching and holding light as if it were glass or diamond; his sword was blue fire, blue lightning, something that scarred simple, mortal vision.
But she did, regardless: he was Meralonne, he was Illaraphaniel, he was her House Mage. She opened her mouth to shout orders, but snapped her teeth shut again at the enormity of even the thought. Who was she to give orders to him?
Who was she to give orders to Calliastra, with whom he closed? She saw the clatter of his blade’s edge—which could be heard more than truly seen—against long, dark claws, and heard, of all things, the wild exuberance of Calliastra’s laughter.
“And will your brethren skulk like cowardly mortals upon the ground?” Her words could be heard across the whole of the city, Jewel was certain. They could be heard across worlds, after all.
She could not likewise hear Meralonne’s reply. Perhaps he had not made one.
A second winged creature joined the fray. Both of the combatants turned to look at him, and both, to Jewel’s eyes, wore similar expressions, their rounding eyes and their silence betraying surprise. Or shock.
She had seen this creature once before, in the dim recess of a room that had been carved, overnight, in the basements of Avantari. His form flickered as his wings extended. They were not Calliastra’s wings; they were not all of one thing, and to Jewel’s admittedly inexpert eye, there was no way they should have allowed the body to which they were attached any aerial buoyancy. At all.
But even so, changed utterly in every conceivable way, she knew that this creature was Andrei. He had come to face the Sleepers. He had come to Calliastra’s aid. That would be tricky, because Calliastra was prickly in the same way Duster had been, and you didn’t have her back unless she’d agreed to a plan that required it before she started to fight. Or unless she might actually go down.
“I will not let you har
m them.” It was Meralonne who spoke.
“And I will not let them destroy this city.”
“It is not yours, Namann.”
“It is as much mine as it is yours, Illaraphaniel. And they are coming, soon, your brethren, the lost princes. Can you not see what is happening beneath our feet?”
Meralonne did not look.
Calliastra, however, did. Her eyes lit from within, her lips rising at the corners in what appeared to be genuine—if dangerous—delight. Beneath their feet, the Sleepers had spread out on the lowest edge of their grand staircase. They bore their shields and their swords as if, finally, prepared for battle, and through the trees she could see three men struggle to join them.
No, not men: they had the platinum hair that was characteristic of the Arianni, and also the silver eyes. But their armor and their tabards—strangely fuzzy even in the searing vision granted by the crystal—were torn, dented, tattered, and the weapons they carried dim with . . . blood. They did not, however, carry shields; they carried instead poles to which flags had been attached. No, not flags; they carried standards. Ah. These, then, were the heralds.
Without warning, Andrei swooped down, and Calliastra did something other, but before either could reach the heralds, the trees seemed to . . . close. As if they had been a door and were now reasserting their existence as living wall. Those trees were Ellariannatte, all; they were her trees. And she could see them stretch out, and out again, into the city, the trunks like a map, a code, something that could not be missed.
The Sleepers, however, moved toward that living wall.
War Page 57