Nor did that light cover only the ground; it spread in waves, as if they were the heart of all light and all fire; it caught those who had not gained ground in midair. He heard the screams, cut short, of distant creatures; the wind carried the smell of charred flesh. Charred flesh and ocean air and the odd, cloying sweetness of something he did not know to name, blending and twisting together in a way that spoke not of home but of the wilderness at war.
From the cobbled ground below, corpses vanished, blown off the streets by the force of the Sleepers’ power, and through those streets, as the crowns of the Ellariannatte caught fire, buildings rose; buildings and four great pillars. No architects were needed to plan them, to carve them, to raise them with their teams of men or horses; nor did they look unstable, for all their height.
But Angel had seen pillars that rested easily in the heights of silent, still air. These were not things of man, and not meant for them. He had wondered, once, who had lived in the buried, hidden city beneath the streets of this one. And he knew it didn’t matter. What lived here—what would live here—would be these Sleepers, these four.
Snow roared; Angel drew the sword he had considered unwise. Sheets of pale blue air—like waves, like tidal forces—traveled toward the cats, toward Calliastra. Fire singed Snow’s fur, and the roar became a snarl of fury; the white cat was trembling with it and had apparently lost the ability to form something as petty as words.
Angel didn’t like his chances of remaining mounted, but he trusted Jay.
“Don’t,” the cat snapped. “This air is not her air; this wind is not hers. She cannot command what they command. If you fall, you will die. They are awake now. They are awake, and they are angry.” The fire sputtered, as if it had consumed the white cat’s rage, but Angel could see that, like waves, the blue light in the sky continued as if it would never end.
He glanced down, and down again, and he saw the city—his city by adoption, not by birth—give way, slowly but inexorably, to the city desired by these Sleeping princes, these scions of the court of the White Lady. There was no room for Angel in it. There was no room for people in it. And soon, there would be no people in its streets and, even if they somehow survived, no place for them to live. They were being hunted, even now, by the small armies of the Sleepers. He could not hear their voices; could not hear their shouts or screams.
Only the voices of the Sleepers were audible. He could hear their words; they were thunder. They could not be unheard. And he understood them, just as he understood the Winter Queen when she chose to speak to the merely mortal. Adam heard her speak Torra; Angel heard Weston. Terrick heard Rendish. The language itself didn’t matter.
The only place in the city that he could not see buildings in the process of being devoured by sudden gaps in the earth was almost on the water, and there, from the relative safety of Snow’s back, he could see the Kings. They were not as fine, not as glittering as the cold, cold beauty of the White Lady’s princes, but they were just as solid. They faced the gathered host of the Wild Hunt, but Angel thought they would persevere for some time yet.
And it wouldn’t matter in the end. If the Kings survived, and there was no one over whom they could rule, what purpose did they have? But even thinking it, he saw that where they stood, people did not fall, and perhaps that was purpose enough when lives—all lives—were in peril.
He raised his sword as the next wave was almost upon them; it was warm in his hand, and it seemed to vibrate enough that it should have been hard to hold steady. It was not. As the wave reached them, he told Snow to pivot, and Snow did—with complaint. But Angel’s sword sliced cleanly through the blue, viscous air, and it passed harmlessly to the left and the right.
Snow acknowledged that Angel had some use, but only a really, tiny bit.
Angel accepted this because—and he would never acknowledge this where the cats had even the slightest chance of hearing it—a complaining cat was far more comfortable than a grim, silent predator. It made him feel that he was at home, and that home was still relevant.
Above the complaints, he told Snow where to fly, where to hover, when to change altitude, and the cat continued to both grumble and obey, but made very clear how boring Angel was. And how bored Snow was.
Angel was not, however, the only person present in the air who could hear Snow; Calliastra snarled in outrage. Snow responded in kind, while Angel deftly used the blade upon which he had sworn his oath to The Terafin as a very precise shield. He remained in the air nearest Shadow and Jay.
But Shianne and the Winter King did not.
Angel was not surprised to see them go, but he knew that Adam was with them. Jay trusted both the Winter King and Shianne. She was certain they would survive. But Adam, no. He half expected the wind to pluck Adam off the Winter King’s back and drop him on Night—and it seemed to him, in the glance he could spare, that the wind tried.
But he remembered that the Winter King did not lose a rider that he had accepted and understood the full force of those words now. Shianne, adorned with golden blade, drove the Winter King through his paces as she headed directly for the Sleepers, those lost brethren that had not been asleep when she had last walked the world, before time and circumstance had forever altered her very nature.
She was not of them now. She would age and she would die, just as Angel and all of his kin. But some essential part of who she had been was still who she was. The Kialli recognized her. Meralonne recognized her. The Sleepers would recognize her as well; she was certain of that.
Angel wasn’t sure this was wise. She was angry, if that word was not too small to contain the whole of her rage and her bitter sense of betrayal.
Lord Celleriant was not. If Celleriant felt a similar anger at the demons, he had never expressed it, and in combat against them he had been almost savagely joyful, not furious. But against the Sleepers? No. There was something akin to sorrow, to grief, but not rage.
Then again, Celleriant served Jay. He served her truly, not as the Winter King did, but by his own oath, his own blood, something that none of the Arianni would do. Serve a god? Maybe. Serve a mortal? Never.
Angel could not watch her progress while he darted between these odd, aerial attacks, but he knew the moment the Sleepers became aware of Shianne, because those attacks were suspended. The changes upon the ground, however, were not.
As one man, three of the four turned to her; Meralonne did not, but he was already aware of her existence, of her presence, at Jay’s side.
The breath of the world seemed held as they stared at her on the Winter King’s back, Adam in front of her. Her sword was reflected for a moment in the width of their eyes; they seemed transfixed, silent, unable to find words.
Shianne, however, was not.
And she spoke three names.
Narianatalle.
Fanniallarant.
Taressarian.
Angel could hear the syllables; he could hear Shianne as clearly as if she, too, were a prince of the ancient court. But her voice had always held power, and never more than when she met her distant and sundered kin. These men were of the White Lady; they had not abandoned her for a different god, a different lord. But they had not obeyed her orders, either; it was a lesser betrayal than that of the Kialli, which did not change its essential nature. But it was a betrayal that had occurred because of their love of, their regard for, their loyalty to, the White Lady.
The White Lady acknowledged their existence, in a fashion. But she had surrendered them to the gods for their failure, and the gods had decreed that they sleep. The gods, however, were no longer here, no longer anywhere in this world, and that sleep, once broken, could never be assured again.
None of this mattered to Shianne. She had heard the story, had listened, had, in a fashion, grieved—but it was not at their fall; it was at their folly. If she failed entirely to understand the why of the Kialli, she could symp
athize with the why of the Sleepers’ refusal, in the end, to obey their Lord’s command.
Had she not done the same?
But she, too, felt the visceral, eternal hatred that the White Lady now felt for the god they did not name; it was both a burning heat and a rage that was also bitter and chill. They had been tasked with his destruction, and in the name of love, of loyalty, they had failed.
All of her anger, all of her sorrow, were contained in the enormity of three names, and they were names that Angel had never heard spoken.
“No, stupid boy—no one has. No one can speak those names, not even the other one.”
“She did.”
Snow did not reply. He veered toward Night, clipped his side, and veered away, as if the whole of the destruction and transformation that continued beneath their feet was irrelevant, a game. But if it was, it was a deadly game; Snow did not approach the Sleepers. Calliastra engaged only one: Meralonne. And the other winged figure seemed, for a moment, to bow in Shianne’s direction, and then it was gone.
* * *
• • •
They did not move toward her, but waited, their silence watchful, measured, and just as turbulent as the silence that had fallen after the names had left her lips. They saw the Winter King, saw the mortal boy, and saw the color of her armaments; they understood what that color must mean, but simultaneously failed to understand.
The Winter King slowed as he reached them; Shianne did not dismount. Nor did she divest herself of her sword—no more did they. The silence was terrible, and it was Shianne who broke it first.
She was mortal, but the bard-born were mortal as well, and she had some measure of their power. Her voice was heard; even the pillars that rose out of the earth seemed to freeze, to hesitate, at the sound of her voice.
But Angel did not understand her words; they were not meant for him. Nor were they meant for Jay or those who fought or crawled upon the surface of the changed and changing city.
Kallandras came to float, freely, by Angel’s side. Celleriant, however, remained with his Lord, watching. The brief glimpses of his expression afforded by Snow’s careening flight implied Winter; a lack of motion, a lack of color. And Angel thought: they are all, in some fashion, forsworn. And they would change that in a heartbeat if they now could.
Angel urged Snow toward Jay, lifting the hand that did not carry the sword. He gestured in broad den-sign, and at a distance, he could see Jay blink, frown, struggle. She still held the seer’s crystal cupped—or clutched—in her palms, and the light it emanated changed the cast of her skin, lightening the untouched strands of flyaway hair, emphasizing her expression.
He signed anyway.
* * *
• • •
She saw it.
She saw it but could not acknowledge it; she did not dare lift either of her hands. The seer’s crystal, the seer’s heart, was not a fragile thing—it could not be and survive—but it was not invulnerable; it was a metaphor made real. It was the heart of her power, and she could not use that power if she could not hold it thus; the power, instead, used her.
Information streamed in, images blinking in and out in rapid succession. She could see the sky and what it contained; could see the streets, made unfamiliar by the growth of trees and the newly rising buildings; could see the bodies—not all of them human—that lined the street, giving way as the shape of the streets did to the things that were growing from the earth beneath them.
And she understood that the ancient earth was awake now, and that it built as the Sleepers commanded. So, too, had true stone remade parts of Avantari, at her angry and hasty command. But the streets of this city were not the wooded, shadowed darkness of her forest, and in these lands—
No.
Avantari was not, had never been, Terafin. But the earth as far as the Kings’ home had heard her and obeyed. She had been afraid, on some level, ever since; the Kings had justifiably been alarmed by what she had—without intent—achieved. She had understood, when she had finally seen what the stone from the Deepings had wrought, why the Kings were alarmed. Why Duvari’s hatred of her had increased so sharply.
Avantari was not Terafin.
But Avantari and its environs had been shaped by her word, her voice, her commands, regardless.
So, too, the apartment in the twenty-fifth holding—and she had not even been in the city at the time of that shaping. And she had—
No.
But she held her heart in her hands, and No was not permissible, not acceptable; it was even harmful. She could almost feel the city slip away from her, as if it were a single, living entity whose attention had been captured—and held—by invaders with more power, more gravitas, than she had ever, and would ever, display. She could see them clearly and understood that they were kin to gods in a way that she and her kin, near and far, could never be, and never hope to be. Not even the Warlord, her domicis, who was immortal.
She had caused an entire family to disappear because she had dreamed. Because she had desired a place of safety—and safety was the den before everything in the undercity had gone bad. Safety was Lefty, Fisher, Lander, Duster—all alive, all bickering. She remembered the dream.
And she knew that the people who had lived in that apartment on the day, in the minute, of that dream’s start were gone. She did not know if they were dead; knew only that they no longer existed in the hundred holdings. That apartment, those rooms, were now empty, and would remain so. And why?
She understood the need for shelter, understood the imperatives of poverty, understood the plight of orphans, with no family, no matter how poor, to champion them. And all that understanding had not mattered. What she wanted—from the distant safety of the Oracle’s abode—she had created, somehow, and that creation had eclipsed the real. It had eclipsed the truth.
The changes she had wrought in Avantari were as nothing in comparison, although the anger of the Kings was the greater threat. No one had died. No one had simply disappeared. There was nothing in Avantari that Jewel wanted—not on the first day she had set foot on its steps, not on the day the two large rooms had been created, and not today. Everything of value was now in the streets below her.
But no, that was not true. Had never been true; there were servants and their complicated hierarchies who had, no doubt, remained in the palace proper, and they had value. But they did not have the responsibilities that the god-born Twin Kings had. Their loved ones would notice their absence, their loss—but the entire Empire would feel the loss of the Kings.
It was not up to Jewel—it must never be up to Jewel—to define worth.
All of these people—both the dead, in their growing number beneath her, and the living, had value. Even the people she hated. Even the people she had, indirectly but deliberately, killed. She could not, at this remove, decide who deserved to live, and who to die. That wasn’t her responsibility. It was the responsibility of the two men who now fought—successfully—beneath her feet, beneath Shadow’s wings.
She felt something that might be love and might be awe and might be envy as she extended the brief glimpse of those two men almost unconsciously. In the crystal, in her heart, she could see them as clearly as she would have if she were standing beside them. She could see the lines of their faces, worn by time and wind and sun and the heavy toll of the responsibility Jewel was grateful was not hers.
In their hands they carried the weapons—and they were weapons, no matter their shape—crafted long ago by Fabril, and those weapons provided the foundation for the resistance of the forces that fought alongside them: Astari, magi, Kings’ Swords.
She could see Hectore, walking and standing among people from disparate social strata; could see Andrei—and recognize him in spite of his constantly shifting shape—swooping down across the malformed streets, claws colliding with the claws of the surviving predators who still sought to gain dominance
among the terrified and the helpless; she could see Arann, his size, his strength, turned toward the task she had set him. Had set all of her den.
And she could hear the earth’s slow voice, a frenzy of whisper, of words made manifestly real, as buildings continued to take shape. She had forbidden the earth any action that she had not countenanced, or commanded, herself. And she had not countenanced this. But these buildings, in shape, in architecture so similar to the undercity’s ruins, did not shudder or shiver or move as the earth moved; the buildings constructed by the citizens of Averalaan did. People did not live in what the Sleepers commanded be built—not Jewel’s people, at any time of her life—but they could.
And they would have roofs that did not sag or disintegrate; walls that did not tilt, did not lean, were not troubled by something as inconsequential as weather. Her crystal shifted images, rolling past the buildings that were, even now, continuing their slow rise.
She saw Jester, saw him struggle with Birgide’s weight, and drew breath, a hiss of sound that mingled fear and anger; she did not know what had happened to Birgide. And the crystal answered, as if she had asked, had demanded, an answer to that question; images flickered by. Voices. Words. The sense of time passing in each. She saw blood, Birgide’s blood, and heard her voice, although the Warden chosen by her forest did not speak them aloud.
She lifted her voice for the first time since she had arrived above her city.
“Birgide.”
* * *
• • •
Birgide Viranyi stirred.
Jester knew why. He had heard Jay’s voice, the single name heavy with multiple meanings. He would bet that anyone who still lived had. He lifted a hand in den-sign, although no one would theoretically see it. He might have lifted his voice, but he had no desire to shout into Birgide’s ear.
War Page 59