She remembered clearly the metamorphosis that occurred after the conflict with the Warden of Dream and Nightmare; remembered, less clearly, the size and shape they had first donned when she had met them, in the flesh, in the forest of metal and diamond. And she remembered the instant growth in size and stature, the deepening of their voices made far less threatening by the continued pettiness of their constant whining.
But to the immortal, there had been no difference. They recognized the cats in any form and shape. What they saw, Jewel and her kin did not see.
Until now.
They were cats the way dragons were cats, but without the scales. Their edges were blurred, smudged—it wasn’t the drift of raised fur, but something indistinct, something even her seer-born eyes failed to grasp. She had seen, in Meralonne, a precursor to what he had, or was, becoming; she had seen the truth of demons in the eyes of the men whose forms—or literal corpses—they chose to inhabit. But she had not seen this in the cats.
They were like living nightmares: larger in all ways than they could possibly physically be, indefinite in shape; they seemed to her half-finished or unfinished, and even the colors by which she’d offhandedly chosen their names began to bleed into each other—and into sky and blood and light. They were called “eldest” by any immortal who felt tolerant enough to interact with them—but they had passed through the tangle and back without apparent harm.
Corallonne had not been concerned for them. Nor had Calliastra.
And yet . . . even in their sudden transformation, the center of their forms retained the colors for which she had named them: white, black, and gray. They had shed wings as if wings were superfluous and, given the movement of their enlarged mass, they were. She could see the glitter of teeth, even at this distance, and the teeth were also the color of their names, polished and hard and long.
Jewel! Two voices now. The Winter King—hers—and Avandar’s, raised in consternation or even fear. She was almost confused.
There is danger, Avandar said, as the Winter King said, Beware your former cats!
Certainly the cats seemed more of a threat to the Sleepers than Jewel herself did in comparison.
They won’t hurt me.
You do not understand what you have unleashed—
They won’t hurt me. Can’t you hear them?
As if they had heard the Winter King and Avandar—and given Shadow, they might have—the cats started to add layers of syllables to their roars. They weren’t drawing room words; there was nothing polite, nothing measured about them. But she understood them in all the languages she knew, because she could hear them in all the languages she knew.
MINE.
* * *
• • •
Adam closed the newest lacerations; healed the fractured shin. He glanced once at Angel, but Angel, teeth clamped in a thin line that was now partly red, shook his head emphatically. Adam accepted what Angel did not say. And he did not say what he felt as he healed The Terafin; it wasn’t necessary. If the Matriarch survived, in some fashion, the city would survive.
Adam had not seen Arkosa rise from the sands of the Sea of Sorrows.
But he watched now as this city—whatever its ancient name must be—struggled to rise from something that was not a desert. He thought of Arkosa, of home, of Matriarchs and the bitter history that had driven his people from their cities, and he wondered if the other Voyani clans had made the trek to their homes, as Arkosa had.
He understood the need for cities now, although he had never truly seen a living city until he had come to Averalaan. He understood the why of their ancient defenses. Had he not seen a mountain rise from the waters of the bay? If she survived, the Matriarch would drive these enemies beyond the walls upon which she had taken her stand.
And she would survive.
* * *
• • •
Jewel sent a whisper to the bards and a whisper to the Kings as Arann reached them. The host of the Arianni did not breach her wall of frost, those few that had ridden through the gap torn in walls of flame. She did not understand why they could not travel as the Sleepers did but did not question it further.
Instead she turned her thoughts, at last, to her forest, the heart of her domain.
To Finch.
And Finch was not in the lee of the tree of fire.
* * *
• • •
The eldest, rooted, did not reply, not immediately. Finch felt minutes stretch, testing her patience, heightening the growing fear that had driven her away from the tree of fire. That fire had not existed in this forest until Jay; the eldest, however, had existed for as long as the forest itself.
She did not have the power of the Warden. She could not compel obedience; could not force him to offer the answer that now consumed most of her thought. Will was not power, not for someone like Finch.
“Where is Teller?” she asked.
The tree said, “I have answered, Finch.”
Drawing upon the facial neutrality she had learned at Jarven’s side, she said, “My apologies, Eldest; I did not hear your answer.”
The branches shook, and leaves fell. Three leaves.
“It is difficult,” the tree then said, “to speak with mortals; it is taxing because there is so much you do not hear, so much you cannot see.” The earth beneath Finch’s feet rumbled; she traversed the ground quickly, and knelt to pick up the leaves, because kneeling provided stability. She could not tell if her hands were shaking because of the fear she could not quite contain, or because the whole of her body shook in response to the tremors.
“My apologies, Eldest.” She forced her voice to be steady. “I did not realize that this was meant to be an answer. You are, of course, right: I cannot understand it.”
The rumbling continued until Finch had retrieved the third fallen leaf. “You will need these, Finch,” the tree said, “if you survive.”
She said nothing, but bowed to him, the leaves in her hands immeasurably heavier in the wake of his words. “Can you tell me—in words, so I can understand—where Teller is?”
“He is not, precisely, here,” the eldest said. Before she could repeat the question, the eldest continued. “I can see him, Finch. But even I cannot reach him. He cannot hear my voice, just as you cannot hear it; he cannot perceive the roots of our Lord’s lands, just as you cannot. But he is injured, and the trees that are rooted beside him are withering. He will be lost to the wilderness and the dreamscapes of the Sleepers.”
Silence.
“Show me.”
The words were not Finch’s words, the voice was not hers. She recognized both instantly, and felt, for a moment, a giddy relief: the strings of tension and fear had been suddenly cut.
Jay was home.
Jay was back.
“Show me.”
* * *
• • •
Meralonne APhaniel stiffened. A brief smile transformed the cast of his expression; there was sorrow in it, and resignation, and a touch of surprise. “It is gratifying, on occasion, to be wrong.”
Sigurne did not ask what had transpired, but he turned to her fully, the fury of light and blood above them apparently irrelevant. When he held out a hand, she took it.
“Come,” he said. “I do not believe it will be safe to stand here.” She rose as he did.
* * *
• • •
Shadow roared. His voice contained words, but there were too many, and they were too complicated; to understand them required thought, concentration, deliberation. She had no time for them. She could not hear the eldest’s answer, but she could feel it in the chill in the air, in the tremor of the stone beneath her feet, and in the beating of her own heart.
Had Adam not been with her, she would have died, because she locked her legs, locked her arms, refused to obey the physical imperative of instinct that had kept he
r alive. She held the heart. Whatever she had carried in her right hand—leaves, she thought—she dropped; she cupped the seer’s crystal in both of her palms.
Shadow came in from the left, a cloud in the shape of a giant winged cat; only his eyes seemed solid. Solid and endless. She thought he meant to knock her off the wall, but even so, she could not move or speak or look away.
She had found Teller.
* * *
• • •
It was cold. It was so cold his body shuddered in an attempt to generate some heat. He was bleeding, but, ironically, the injury had been caused by his cat, and not the men who were mounted upon stags similar to the Winter King Jay rode. Only a handful of these mounted men had remained; the rest had followed the road that had disappeared behind them.
The forest beings, set to guard and protect him, had done their best. Teller was certain that they had done better than Haval had ever expected—but in the end, it was not the mortal weapons to which they had been trained that were their power. They had not abandoned those armaments, but had set them aside, near Teller, where he might—if he let go of his cat—retrieve them. They were meant for the failure the spirits now saw as inevitable.
Teller was aware that trees were felled by men with axes or saws. He was aware that the wood was then dried and became timber; those parts that could not be salvaged—the knots, the gaps and evidence of insects—could be burned for warmth. The host of the Wild Hunt did not carry axes; they carried swords. But those swords did not seem to dull or notch; they did not lose their edge no matter how often they bit into flesh made of wood. All of wood, sap serving as blood. The forest guardians had conferred very little as they had interposed themselves between the Arianni and Teller.
The Wild Hunt had asked the arborii to step aside, and they had refused. They had refused extremely respectfully; they obviously held the Wild Hunt in high regard.
“He is our Lord’s Teller.”
“You are not, now, in your Lord’s lands.”
Again, they bowed heads respectfully and apologetically. “We are. As you are in your Lord’s lands. We will not trespass; we understand the power of, the strength of, your Lord, and we owe his kin the greatest of debts, for they woke us fully.”
Almost, the Arianni seemed confused, as if the words that Teller had heard spoken were in a language with which he was entirely unfamiliar. That confusion cleared, however, pushed aside by something far colder and far more imperious.
“You will either step aside or be destroyed.”
“That is not, yet, within your capability,” the tree replied, in a sorrowful, deep voice.
“It will be. Our Lords have woken. The punishment decreed by the gods themselves has frayed and ended; nor are there gods to invoke its fetters again. If you will not stand aside, you will perish. Think you that any might hold these lands against our lords?”
And the tree’s single word reply was enough to unleash the force of the Wild Hunt’s fury. “Yes.”
* * *
• • •
Avandar’s voice, the Winter King’s voice, became inconsequential as she stood her ground. Standing her ground was much, much harder than it had ever been.
Not so hard as it will, Jewel Markess. The memory of a dead ruler’s words; the Terafin spirit, who had come to her as Torvan ATerafin in the Terafin shrine. The years have given you wisdom, of a type, but they have not changed your nature. You are ATerafin in times of peace.
What is The Terafin’s name?
Amarais, born Handernesse.
No, Jewel, born Markess, that is not her name. She is The Terafin.
And I’m Markess.
Yes. You are standing on the edge of the field of battle. The time is our distant past, during the baronial wars. Two sides are readying for a battle that has been long coming, and upon this battle, the fate of the Empire rests.
She could hear his voice so clearly, she might be standing once again beneath the Terafin shrine erected, in the end, for its rulers. She had not understood that, the first time she had approached it. The shrine had been shelter of a kind; a quiet space in which to confront her own fears, her own failures, her own bitter regrets.
You stand upon the edge of the field in that battle; you have seen skirmish, you have seen war; you have both ridden and marched as a soldier. But you are not a soldier now; you have a rank, and a responsibility. Into your keeping the standard has fallen.
She had come to understand the nature of both the shrine and the responsibility that it had guarded, and guided, for centuries. The spirit was gone, finally, to the Halls of Mandaros. There was no further advice to be gained . . . and no peace.
You know that if the standard falls, the hope of the regiments fall with it. That you are, while keeping this piece of pretty cloth, and its bearer, safe, succoring those men who cannot see you, those thousands who will never even know your name.
With you, in this war, is your young adjutant. Teller ATerafin.
And she remembered. The memory was a living thing, a vicious thing; it cut her in ways that even the Sleepers had not. She had almost left the shrine that day. She had not liked the direction the conversation had taken; had not wanted to follow its turn to its end. And had she left? She might not now be plagued by these endless, echoing words. But she had not left. She had not lifted hands from the altar of Terafin, upon which men and women offered House Terafin everything.
A small group of men, with a mage and the use of two demons, is about to spring its trap upon your standard. You have the vision, Jewel, and because of this, you see clearly. You also see, clearly, that you have two choices: You can go now to warn the mage—in which case, the flag will not fall to this attack—or you can ride, in haste, to that stop thirty yards away, in which your adjutant is pacing out his nervous attention so as not to disturb you; he has always been considerate.
You cannot do both.
Jewel Markess would ride to the aid of young Teller.
Jewel ATerafin would summon the mage.
You do not have the luxury, now, of being both, and for this, I apologize. Amarais would know her way to the only choice available, and she would accept it. But it is not her war, Jewel; it is yours.
* * *
• • •
The first of the spirits had fallen, his limbs pared from him by the impact of a sword’s edge, over and over again. He did not surrender; he fought—but his weapon had been the roots he had planted, the roots he had grown, in what had once been a Terafin hall. Teller could not immediately recall which hall because it was a Winter landscape now. Only a small patch of wall and floor remained; the snow and the cold had eaten everything else.
Teller crouched on that small patch; he had been forbidden movement, but the warning had not been necessary. He understood in some fashion that the reason the Arianni swords were having such a difficult time was the patch of wall and floor. This was still the Terafin manse. It was still Jay’s.
The second spirit fared no better than the first; splinters flew, clinging to Teller’s hair and his clothing. He could not prevent the Wild Hunt from entering this tiny patch of sanity and sanctuary, and when they did, he would die. He imagined what Jay would say when she realized he had come all this way for a cat. He knew what Barston would say, and maybe, just maybe, death would be a mercy, because he would hear neither.
The snow reminded him of the first day he’d met Jay, in the hundred holdings. He had been running through its endless white, looking for his mother. And she had come running through that same white, leaving different footprints, looking for him. His entire world had come to an end when he had found what he sought in increasing desperation.
And it had started again when Jay found what she sought.
She had given him his life back, albeit in a different form. She had not left him for starvation and death. It was, he thought, as the spirit finally
lost its arm, her life. Hers to use. If he died here—when he died here—he wanted to tell her that. It wasn’t his death that defined him, it was the decades she had given him. He regretted nothing. Anywhere she had been, any home she had offered, had been home because she was in it.
He bowed his head then, protecting a cat that wanted to escape into the wilderness. And he knew that if they removed his head or his arm, the cat would run. But it had a better chance of survival without Teller than with him.
The sharp crack of timber was loud, almost final.
* * *
• • •
She had left Carver.
She had gifted him with the blue leaf and she had left him. She had understood, in that moment, that she could not choose Carver, because to do so was to doom everyone else. She had paid that price. Had thought that was the price. Of power. Of the Oracle’s test. Of rulership. It had not destroyed her. It had not broken her.
But Carver was not Teller.
Carver’s death had not been certain. She understood that only now. She had abandoned Carver for the sake of the rest of Terafin, which included the rest of her den. In just such a fashion had she abandoned Duster, but the difference between the two decisions had obscured the similarities.
Duster had not been Teller, either.
But she had expected that both Duster and Carver had had some chance to survive. The fact that Duster had died did not change that fact. Some chance was not certainty.
There was no chance, now, that Teller would survive. She could not command the Arianni, and she could not command her own forces—any of them—to ride to Teller’s aid. They could not reach him now. They could not reach him in time.
She shouted for Night, shouted at Shadow, and they understood but did not move, did not leave the combat into which they had thrown the whole of their weight and power.
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