Oracle: The House War: Book Six (26 page)

“It’s alive, isn’t it?” she asked him. “The baby’s alive.”

“It’s more—it’s worse—” Adam whispered, in Torra. He lifted hands; they shook; nor did they stop shaking when he clenched them in fists. He wheeled, the lack of ground beneath his feet forgotten in his distress. He approached the woman who stood as part of this pair, reached for her hand. Healers needed to have skin to skin contact—but she was all of stone.

Jewel glanced at her palm. Stone.

Adam did not examine his hands; he had no need. Nothing in him doubted what his touch told him. He traversed the columns of statues, passing between each with increasing speed. He clutched the hands of the statues, where hands were exposed, or faces, where they were not. He did not speak a word; all of his urgency found expression in either motion or a frozen immobility.

Only when he stood at the foot of the columns did he stop.

Jewel moved toward him with no will of her own; the air carried her at the whim of the bard, and let her down gently beside Adam. He was tense, his shoulders drawn inward as if to ward off a blow; he was staring at a space beyond her right arm as if he must see something—anything—other than the statues themselves.

Celleriant drifted toward him, and with him came Kallandras; neither man spoke. Both had eyes for the healer.

Avandar.

Silence.

Do you know who these women were?

No. The Arianni are not known for their honesty, but in this case, trust Celleriant. If he does not know for certain, none among us—save perhaps your cursed cats—do.

Does the Oracle?

Of a certainty.

Did she mean for me to see this?

That, I cannot say. Even in my time, the Oracle’s treachery was rooted in simple fact. Or complex fact. She did not stoop to lie; those who chose to take her tests did. It was the lies they told themselves, in the end, that destroyed them; the Oracle allows for no lies. Remember this. What you see here
is
.

I don’t understand what I see.

Yes. That is the Oracle’s curse. Or her gift. Philosophers were split, down the centuries, over which it was.

Would the gods know?

Yes. But I am not certain the gods would answer if you asked. There is a pall of tragedy over this place. You will not,
he added softly,
reach the ears of the gods here. The lands between do not easily come into being upon the hidden paths.

She set a gentle arm around Adam’s shoulders. After a long, silent breath, he slumped, the tension leaving his back, his arms. The color did not return to his face, and his eyes looked almost bruised.

“Yes,” he whispered, although she did not repeat her earlier question. “Yes, the child is alive.”

She didn’t ask him how that was possible, although she wanted to know. If these woman were Arianni in some fashion, childbirth might have rules that mortals did not share.

He turned to her, and she drew him into her arms as if he were a younger child; she offered him shelter, of a kind.

“What would you have me do?” he whispered.

“I don’t know that there’s anything you can do.” She meant it. She spoke with conviction. But as the words left her lips, as they died into the watchful silence of too many silent men, she
knew
she was wrong.

She wanted to send him back, then. To send him to Finch, to Terafin, to
Averalaan Aramarelas
, where he might, for a small time, be safe from truths such as these that had no place in either of their lives.

That had had no place.

He knew. She was not one of nature’s better liars; it was a skill she had learned only with time and effort, and moments of great vulnerability cut those lessons loose and set them adrift. She, therefore, chose her words with care. “What do you want to do?”

He understood what she could not put into words: her uncertainty. Her fear. She had asked the wrong question. She was the Matriarch, here. She accepted it, finally, and fully. She wondered if Yollana, that ancient, terrifying pillar of living steel, felt the doubts Jewel herself now felt. She wondered if Yollana had seen magics such as these. What would she do? What would she dare?

Yollana, like Jewel, was seer-born; unlike Jewel, she had never set foot upon the Oracle’s path. She relied, for guidance, on the whim of vision that arrived without warning.

Jewel had had no dreams of these women. She had had no warning about these paths. “Are they all alive?” she asked him, her voice quiet, her arms steady.

He nodded into her shoulder.

There was a reason that Matriarchs did not allow themselves to be touched by the healer-born. A reason the Arianni likewise declined. A healer’s touch was not simple touch; it could not be. While they healed the injured, they might touch unguarded thoughts; they might enter them, examine them. If the healed man or woman was dying, the possibility became a certainty.

These statues that were not flesh were not the stone they appeared to be. They were not—could not—be dying; what Adam touched in the brief contact could not bind him the way the dying did. She tightened her arms as if to say she wouldn’t
allow
it.

“They are not mortal,” Kallandras said, surprising her. She glanced up, over Adam’s bowed head and curved back.

“They couldn’t be.” She bent her head again. “Can they hear us?”

He nodded.

“They’re aware that we’re here.”

He nodded again.

“They don’t understand us.”

This time he shook his head.

Jewel, we must leave this place. We must leave it untouched,
the Winter King said.

We’ve already touched it. And there’s a baby—

That is
why
we must leave. If these women are kin, in some fashion, to the Winter Queen, that woman, all appearances aside, cannot be with child.

I think I know pregnancy when I see it.

Were she mortal, I would not deny that. But she is not. She was not, if she is as she appears. The Winter Queen and her kind
cannot
bear children. They are Immortal.

So? Gods have borne children. The firstborn are all, in theory, the offspring of the gods that walked this world.

Do you imagine that those births are anything like yours?

It had never occurred to her to wonder; birth was so much a part of life. When she heard the phrase “child of,” it conjured instant images of that process. It made the gods seem more human. It also made sense: if mortals were somehow the creation of the ancient gods, that there would be echoes of that divinity in the much shorter, much smaller lives of the mortals they created.

You do not understand. Death is an artifact of birth. Where there is birth, death is inevitable. We use the word “child” or even offspring when we speak of the gods, of things ancient and immortal. We use the word “birth.” Both are metaphors and both are inexact.

She’s pregnant. There is nothing metaphorical about it.

Yes. That is very much what I now fear. But if she is pregnant, Jewel, she has not yet given birth. And if she does, she gives birth to death. Do not interfere in what you see.

“Adam, tell me—are they even sane?”

He nodded again. He trembled for a while and then grew still, lifting his chin from her shoulder, and lifting his own shoulders as well. Jewel closed her eyes; it was brief. “The mother. I have to ask one question about the mother.”

He waited.

She struggled to find the words. She felt the shadow of the Winter King’s fear as if she had swallowed it whole and made it a visceral part of herself. She did not understand what had happened here, but she understood that he was right: something would change, somehow, if things were not left alone.

“Did she want this child?”

He nodded.

“Do you—did they tell you what happened to them?”

He shook his head. “It’s not easy to touch them. But her voice was clearest, to me. The others—they are all weeping. They are all lost.” He hesitated, and then forged on. “When I call the dead back from the shores of the river, I find them because they are lost. They have not yet crossed the bridge; they have not yet found peace.

“They weep, like that. They weep and they hear me when I call. These women will never reach the bridge, but it’s as if they’re inches from it.”

“They do not walk that bridge,” Celleriant said. His voice held both ice and fire; his hands were not completely steady. Jewel wouldn’t have been surprised to see his sword and his shield come to those hands; she was in fact more surprised when they didn’t.

“No,” was Adam’s grave—and surprisingly steady—reply. “They do not. They cannot see it; they will not find it on their own. They wander, instead. They speak a name.”

“Do not speak that name here,” the Arianni Prince commanded.

Adam frowned. “Why? It is a name you know. It is a name you speak. You speak it with reverence, and you speak it in sorrow.” He turned toward the statues, and added, “it is not different, for them.”

“If they are here, they are here at her whim. They betrayed her. This is the price they must pay.”

“Did they betray her in the same way the Sleepers did?” Jewel asked.

Celleriant closed his eyes; platinum lashes rested against pale skin for a long moment before he opened them again. “Lord, I do not know. We are not mortals. We do not labor at the whim of the god-born Kings. We do not judge. There is no law but Ariane’s. There is no justice but hers. You think of right or wrong as if they are a cage, a law, unto themselves. There
is
no equivalent, for us. She is not beholden to any external laws; she is beholden to her own, and her oaths, when freely given.”

“Do you feel no sympathy for the Sleepers, then?”

“Does it signify anything?” Wind caressed his hair. He was otherwise motionless. “I understand why they made the choice they did. I also understand that there was a price to be paid for that choice. They knew what that price would be, and they accepted the cost.”

“You have never seen this place before.”

“No.”

Jewel, be cautious.
Two voices: Avandar’s and the Winter King’s.

If I were cautious, we wouldn’t
be here
.

“How are the Arianni born?”

He glanced at her, his face expressionless. He then turned to Kallandras. “I am not certain I understand the question; do you?”

Kallandras did not smile.

“You speak, sometimes, of youth. Of your youth,” Jewel said, trying again. “You speak of that youth as we sometimes speak of our childhood.”

“Ah. We were young, once. All of us.”

“As young,” Jewel asked, “as these women?”

“Lord,
I do not know
. What would you have me say? Or do? If they are truly alive, would you have me destroy them?”

“No!”

“Would you have me offer them pity, then? If they are as old as you fear, they will not thank you; nor will they, in the end, feel anything but contempt or rage for me. Pity such as you counsel is an insult; it implies that I am so certain of my power they are irrelevant.”

“There is a difference between pity and sympathy.”

“I have not seen it. I have not,” he added, when she opened her mouth, “made a careful study of mortals, but I have lived some months in your home. Mortals are noisy; they demand attention they could not otherwise merit, they are so inconsequential. They offer pity to each other.”

“They do not offer
pity
. They offer sympathy.”

“The difference must be subtle indeed.”

“Pity is what we offer those who are so unfortunate we cannot conceive of living their lives. Sympathy is what we offer when we
have
lived their life, or when we’ve feared to have no choice but to live it. We offer it because we understand what the other person now faces.”

“Ah. I do not understand what they face,” he replied.

She surrendered. “Could she do this?”

“Yes. It is her work. You cannot see it.”

Jewel shook her head, and then reached up to shove hair out of her eyes. “Do you see the woman at the head of the column?”

He said nothing. The wind grew stronger and colder while she waited for his reply. The Winter King’s disapproval was cold in an entirely different way; she ignored it with effort. Her palm, resting against the side of her leg, ached.

She was not, now, the ruler Yollana of the Havalla Voyani was. She dreaded the day she must become that leader; she thought it would break her. And perhaps it had broken some part of Yollana as well, and she had sacrificed that part to preserve what she could of her kin. Triage was not a concept that Jewel welcomed; she understood it, when the figures were dry on paper and the people they affected were out of sight.

She was a seer. Out of sight meant different things to different people.

Her palm continued to ache; the pain grew stronger. She hadn’t—she would swear she hadn’t—been burned.

Even captive, the Arianni were not without power or influence. Where we were forced to fight them, we killed,
the Winter King said.

I only touched—

Yes.

She turned, eyes widening, to face Adam. He had touched them all.