Oracle: The House War: Book Six (25 page)

“They are not, although perhaps you cannot see the truth of this in stone. You might have, had you met them when they yet existed.” He turned to Kallandras. “I know where we are. I have never been here; very, very few of my kinsmen have. Illaraphaniel would have known these halls immediately, were he to walk them.”

“Would he have cautioned us against it?” the bard asked.

“I . . . cannot say.” It sounded like yes. He drifted toward the nearest arch, and stopped in front of one of the more martial statues. “They were as we are, if legend is to be believed. As we are, and yet, more like the White Lady than any one of us could hope to be.

“They had names,” he whispered. “But I do not know them; they are not—they are never—spoken of by my kin.”

“Then how do you know about them?”

“The trees,” he replied, his voice still cloaked in hush. “The trees. The wind. The earth itself. They remember what we do not speak of; they speak of what we cannot.”

“I asked Meralonne about them, once,” Jewel said, as her eyes were drawn, once again, to the carved figures, but she looked away, to Celleriant. He drew attention, demanded it, in a different way.

His brows rose. “You cannot have asked about the twelve; you are still alive.” He spoke with absolute certainty.

“I asked about female Arianni. About the women.”

His brows shot up, into strands of loose, flowing hair. He looked incredulous. “And he answered?”

“He said there was only ever Ariane.”

“There
is
only Ariane. And for the Princes of the Court, that is the absolute truth. It defined them. It doomed them.”

“It doomed three,” Jewel said.

Be cautious, Terafin.

“It doomed all,” he replied. “Or do you think Illaraphaniel was spared? He did not, and does not, sleep—but in all other ways, he is lost, both to us, and to the White Lady.”

“That was her choice, surely?”

“Yes. Did you think her choice a kindness in any way?”

“But . . . he didn’t betray her.”

“No. No, he did not. He failed her. There is no room for failure in the Winter; there is ice and death. If there is mercy at all to be found, it is found in the Summer Court—and Summer never arrives. To some, Winter is our only truth, and it stretches into the future without end.” He reached out to touch the cheek of the statue, and his eyes widened; his hand drew back as if burned, and indeed, Jewel thought she smelled the faint hint of singed flesh.

The Winter King leaped toward Celleriant; he landed between the Arianni Lord and the pillar, lowering his tines and pawing at nothing but air.

“
What
is he
doing?
” Shadow demanded. He had come to stand at the top of the first of the stone arches, looking down at them all.

“Which one?”

“The
stupid
one,” the cat hissed. “
What
are you
thinking?
”

Celleriant looked up at the cat; if Jewel was uncertain to whom Shadow spoke, Celleriant was not. “Did you know?” he asked.

Terafin, we must move. We cannot remain here.

I don’t understand. What has changed? You said you didn’t recognize this hall.

I did not. I do not recognize it now. But I understand what Lord Celleriant believes this place must be, and I understand, now, that these columns are not as they appear.

What are they?

Come,
he said, and began to walk. Unless she wished to dismount—and given her position what must be a hundred feet about safe ground, she did not—she was a captive audience. Captive, she thought, to more than the Winter King and the heights; there was something about the statues that he now approached that she found compelling.

They were beautiful, almost in the way the Winter Queen was, for all that they were stone. She glanced once at Celleriant; he did not nurse his hand, nor did he allow Kallandras to so much as look at it. If he was injured, it was minor, and minor injuries were of little note—or so said his bearing. But his eyes were dark, the curiosity, the muted wonder—which was almost all the wonder he exposed—guttered. He watched the Winter King in a tense silence; he did not move to join him.

Come, Jewel. There is history here lost to all but the gods—and perhaps it is lost to them, as well.

Celleriant doesn’t seem to care for it.

You misunderstand. These halls were left standing as a monument and a warning to such as he.

And not to you.

Me? No. I am mortal.

He was a stag that rode at the head of the Wild Hunt. He had lived far, far longer than any mortal of Jewel’s acquaintance except Avandar. He was not, by any definition Jewel accepted, mortal.

It is not your definition that marks me,
he replied.
It is
hers
. I can travel any path her feet have touched; it is both her gift and her curse. But I cannot speak as Celleriant can; nor even as you do. If she knew that I walked here, it is not upon me that her wrath would fall. She could not expect that I would be immune to the grandeur and the beauty of the ancient. Not when it is so much kin to hers.

And it was.

She could not expect,
he continued, as he walked,
that you would be, if she conceived of your presence in this place at all.

She didn’t bring mortals here?

Jewel—there were
no
mortals in her Spring.
As he spoke, he walked past the four women in their impressive, forbidding armor; he walked between the four who wore dresses that were so fine—even made, as they were, of a single color of stone—that the white dress she’d worn on the first day of The Terafin’s funeral seemed almost ordinary and unremarkable in comparison.

Because she did not wish to hear cat complaints for the rest of the voyage, she kept this thought to herself; only the Winter King heard, and only the Winter King chuckled. He was, on the other hand, amused at the idea of outraged Snow. It was the only amusement in him. All else was given to awe with a tinge of unease.

He reached the four who stood in various states of undress; their hair flowing as if under water. Stone expressions suggested gravity, gravitas; they suggested such confidence—or arrogance—that nudity did not diminish them; it did not make of them something to be gaped at, or even desired. No more did armor or cloth.

But when he came to the last pair, Jewel stopped breathing for one long moment. The woman on her left . . . was pregnant.

 • • • 

The Winter King’s silence was one of incomprehension. What he saw made so little sense to him he was, for a moment, at a loss for words.

Jewel, however, didn’t labor under the same confusion. She nudged the Winter King forward; he did not move. She wasn’t even certain he could hear her. Instead, she turned to Kallandras, who had not yet approached the last of the standing pairs.

“Kallandras. Will the wild wind carry me for just a moment?”

“Do not be
stupid
,
stupid girl
,” Shadow hissed.

The Senniel bard nodded, although he cast one backward glance at Celleriant before the folds of his summoned wind carried him to where Jewel sat mounted. As Jewel’s, his eyes widened, his breath stilled. He spoke a word, and then another, and the wind lifted Jewel from the Winter King’s back; he tensed beneath her, returning slowly to himself.

Terafin
. Avandar, at the height of the arches, offered warning.

The wind set her down gently by Kallandras’ side. Shadow landed beside her—between them—almost at the same time. It was clear that he didn’t want to be in the presence of these statues—but Angel did. She met her den-kin’s silent gaze, held it for a moment, and then nodded.

As Celleriant had done before her, she approached a statue. And as the Arianni Lord had also done, she reached out to touch stone. Wind carried the scent of his burned flesh; her hand, however, was steady. There was something about pregnant women that made them seem like small miracles; that drew Jewel’s attention. She did not have, had never wanted, children—but there was something about the creation of life, the intimacy of carrying it so absolutely close to the heart, that she had always found compelling.

One didn’t, of course, touch the rounded belly of a random stranger—but something about pregnancy made all kinds of people approach an expectant mother. Even Jewel’s Oma, a woman noted for her suspicion and hostility toward anything that didn’t bear some trace of her familial blood, softened and drew near when evidence of encroaching infant presented itself.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Angel said; no one else spoke. Well, no one beside Shadow. The cat didn’t approve—but he disapproved of everything she did: what she ate, how she ate it, what she wore, how she wore it, how she spoke, how she didn’t speak, how she argued or didn’t argue.

Jewel shook her head. She reached out and let her palm hover above the curve of naked, stone belly, lifting her head to meet the downcast eyes of a woman who appeared to be gazing at that swell of stomach. Her left hand cradled the lower part of that belly; the right rested at its height. There was, in this one statue, an absence of some of the condescension and arrogance that graced every other face; it made her look vastly more vulnerable.

Her hair, however, did fall in such a way as to hide exposed breasts, and it seemed, as Jewel watched it, that the wind moved its strands.

“Terafin?” Kallandras whispered.

“Have you ever heard story or song about these women?”

“No. I very much doubt that any living being has. One might ask the gods in the Between, but I do not think they would now answer.”

“One god might.”

“Yes, but he will not be found Between—and should he choose to grace the impudence of your question with answer, it is an answer you will pay for with your life.”

She placed her hand against the exposed curve of flesh and jerked away almost immediately.

Shadow hissed. The hiss was soft, and it died into silence as Jewel’s eyes widened.

Her hand did not burn. Burning might have been less disturbing. Shaking her head, she once again laid her hand against the rounded curve.

No, it had not been her imagination. The skin that she touched did not feel made of stone; it wasn’t carved or worked. It was flesh, it was warm. She had once or twice touched pregnant women, just to feel evidence of the life they carried within them kick her palm.

Nothing else about the statue suggested life. Nothing. There was no movement of eye or lip, no disdain and no outrage—and had this woman been among the living, Jewel was certain there would have been, and that she would have deserved it for even daring to approach. “Adam.” She exhaled. “Snow, bring Adam to us.”

“I don’t
want
to.”

“I don’t care. Bring Adam here.”

“
Make
me.”

“With your permission, Terafin?” Kallandras asked. “I do not think it wise to descend into argument with Snow. Not in this place.”

“Not
ever
, but she is
stupid
,” Shadow pointed out. He approached the feet—the bare feet—of the pregnant woman, and hissed at them, swatting them with unsheathed claws. Jewel heard the distinct sound of blade against stone, as if he were sharpening them. She didn’t approve of his choice of stone, and made that perfectly clear.

He hissed.

Celleriant, however, had had enough of Shadow; if he now gazed at the statues with revulsion or even dread, the respect at his core was profound. Jewel caught the bright flash of blue out of the corner of her eye and turned. Celleriant now bore sword and shield.

Gods. “You deal with Lord Celleriant,” she told the Senniel bard. “I’ll deal with intransigent cats.”

It was not a burden to Kallandras to step between Shadow and Celleriant; it was not, his posture implied, a risk to have the whole of his back exposed to Shadow’s claws. What he said to Celleriant, no one else could hear—and Jewel thought, for no reason she would have been able to explain, that that was somehow right.

She dropped a hand on Shadow’s head; it had been easier months ago when he’d been shorter. Adam came drifting down to where Jewel stood; he found the lack of ground beneath his feet far more troubling than she did. That should have given her pause. It should have been more significant. But studying such significance was a luxury that she didn’t have time for at the moment.

“Matriarch?”

Odd that she could still find the time for immense frustration. She didn’t correct him. Months of correcting him amounted to almost nothing whenever events became too strange, too wild. “I want you to touch this statue,” she told him, forcing her voice to be steady.

He approached the statue the same way he had once approached the Serra Diora in the stretch of Terrean that led, in the end, to the Sea of Sorrows. He approached her as he had the same Serra on a desert night: the most beautiful mortal woman Jewel had ever laid eyes on. Then, he had carried a lute in his hands, as an offering of solace and comfort. Now, his hands were empty.

Empty, however, they had an entirely different power than they had possessed on the night he had carried Kallandras’ lute.

Adam asked no questions. As the son of the Matriarch of Arkosa, he had learned that answers were costly; that questions were a burden and a danger that no one with any wisdom willingly risked. Matriarchs did not share their secrets; the living were famously bad at keeping anything secret, in the end. Angel tensed as Adam approached the statue. So did Shadow.

She understood why.

Adam was no more a child than she had been at his age—but neither she nor Angel were that age any longer, and at this remove, he seemed painfully young. The urge to protect him was powerful. But she had placed her life in his hands, and he had, at grave risk to his own, saved it. Child or no, it was his gift that defined him in this place.

His gift and her willingness to use it.

She saw his eyes widen in shock, but he didn’t jerk his hand away as Jewel had; instead, he lifted his other hand, and placed it beside the first. His dark, southern complexion gave way to something almost green-gray. She reached out and gently placed an arm around his shoulder; he leaned back into that arm as if to brace himself.