Oracle: The House War: Book Six (32 page)

“You didn’t tell them.”

Her brows rose. “You are not as ignorant as you first appear. No. I told them only of the necessity. I did not tell them of the price.

“But I perceive that Shadow is correct; you cannot remain here. I do not understand how so slight a life, so slight a force, could be here at all, but I am grateful. I ask you again, Adam, could you carry me from this place if I asked it?”

 • • • 

Help us
.

He looked at the Lady’s face. Her lips had not moved; she was not speaking. He closed his eyes as an unexpected dizziness, a shortness of breath, robbed him of useful vision.

Help us.

Eyes closed, the growling of angry, fussy cat drew closer.

His hands felt warm. His hands, palms against flesh, fingers spread wide. Standing on air that was somehow solid beneath his feet, he had touched the statue that was not, to his horror, a statue—and he had come to the mountain. Shadow had followed him.

Adam knew he had never left Jewel’s side. He knew that his hands had never left the curve of pregnant belly, the skin pulled taut by the demands of the growing life held within it. He knew that were it not for the contact between them—initiated by Adam—he would not now be here.

But he knew that, on the night Shadow had almost killed them both, he had never physically left Jewel’s chambers.

Shadow growled.

Adam growled back. Surprise seemed to silence the cat, and Adam was certain he would pay for it later—but he needed to think.

Help us
.

He needed to remember, as he had done when he had first approached a statue that he knew was alive, Levec’s voice. Levec’s words. All of Levec’s
many
words. He was healer-born. He was, according to Levec, a healer with unparalleled power. It was not within this Lady’s power to bring him to the cold, high peaks of a mountain; it was within Adam’s. Adam’s power had taken him to the dreaming in which Jewel had been trapped. Not hers.

It was the touch of the healer-born that had reached this stranger’s thoughts. It touched what lay within living flesh. A corpse did not have thoughts, desires, or fears.

And a corpse did not carry—or nourish—a living child.

It was the child who spoke, now. And that, Adam knew, was impossible. Yet he understood the simple plea. He understood the words. He could repeat them.

The Lady, seen only with the power of the healer-born, felt like a young, expectant woman. He had no experience at all with the immortal; he had tried, only once, to touch one of the cats—and Shadow still hated and feared him because of it. Even when he had walked in the dreaming, he had touched nothing but mortals, or the essence of the mortals trapped there.

And she felt both unique and
of
them. Had he not seen her, had he come blindfolded into her presence, he would never have known otherwise. Her body had shifted and changed to accommodate new life, just as Bernice’s had; he was certain that she could feed the child, when the child was born, because of those changes. If it was born, and if it lived.

Help us
.

It.

No. He. If
he
was born. If
he
lived.

“If you can save this child,” the Lady said, her voice distant but distinct, “and only this child, save him.”

How could the child speak? How could he know words? He had not been born. He had not lived. He had not learned—as children do—the language of his parents.

I have learned the language of mine
, the child replied. His voice was not a child’s voice; nor was it adult; Adam could find nothing in it that was either male or female. It was both disembodied and wed to its physicality. Yet for all that, the child was a boy.

“How?” he asked, lips trembling with the effort to say even this much.

He sensed confusion. He could not see the child; the child made no attempt to look at him. And why would he? The child had not yet opened his eyes for the first time. He had not yet drawn his first breath, or uttered his first cry.

But he had listened to his mother’s voice. He had heard her speak. Perhaps he had heard more.

I listen,
the child replied,
to the White Lady. My mother listens. She cries. I will take my mother to the White Lady.

And this, too, was wrong—but it was
less
wrong. Four-year-old children could speak with this guileless determination, this single-minded devotion.

Help us
, the child said again.
My mother will never see the White Lady again, and she is sad.

“I do not know if I can,” Adam confessed. His voice was gentle, now. There was no hesitation in it. If it was wrong that this unborn child had voice, if it was wrong that he
could
speak, he was nonetheless a child. “I can try. How long have you listened to your mother?”

Again, he felt confusion. Time was not a concept the child understood. And perhaps, he thought, that made sense. The Lady had not been born mortal. If it was true that she had become mortal, her knowledge of that condition was not yet intimate; it was entirely theoretical.

“Did you speak to your son?” he asked her, without opening his eyes.

“Always.”

“Did he always understand you?”

She was silent. To his surprise, he recognized the texture of the silence; it reminded him of Shadow’s. He looked up, then, opening the eyes he had struggled to keep shut.

He said, in the softest of voices, as if she were mortal and frightened, “He understands you. He hears your voice; I think he has always heard it. How long have you been imprisoned here?”

“I do not know how you measure time,” she replied—after far too long a pause. To his great surprise, she then said, “My child does not speak to me. I speak to him. I have told him, over and over, of all my hopes and fears and desires. I have told him what he must become, when he is finally born into this world. I have told him why he exists at all—and I have told him of the cost, to me.” She hesitated, and then caught his hand; hers were now cold. “Is he mortal?”

Adam blinked. “Yes.”

“You are
certain?
”

“Yes.”

Her eyelashes formed a perfect fan of white; they were the color of Snow’s fur. Her skin was almost as pale, now. “If it is true that you cannot touch the Immortal without changing some part of their essential nature, I ask that you do not disturb my sisters’ rest.

“But as you have discerned, I am mortal. Free me, so that I may—at last—give birth to this child.”

The child who could hear her voice. The child who had, in utero, come to understand enough of what he had heard over the long, endless period of his incubation. Centuries, Adam thought. Millennia.

Shadow hissed. “Do not do it,” he told the boy. “The Winter Queen will
know
.”

“I don’t care if the Winter Queen knows.”

“You will not speak of the White Lady in that tone.”

“My actions,” he replied, “will speak more loudly than simple words. If this is what she wanted for you—” he stopped. He looked toward a bristling, great gray cat. “She will never die, if she remains here.”

“No.”

“And she will, if she is released.”

“
Yessss
. She will die like
you
die. She will be
like you
.”

Adam said, softly, “She will be nothing like me.”

The cat hissed. “She will be
almost
like you. She will walk in
time
. She will
age
. She will
die
. The White Lady will lose her—forever. If you leave her
here
, she will continue to
be
eternal.”

“But this is
not life
, Shadow!”

“It
is
.”

Adam did not want the discussion to devolve into one better suited for squabbling children. Again. “And the child?”

“He will
never
be born.” Shadow hesitated. “I do not
know
why she did not
kill it
.”

Adam uttered a brief Torran curse at the cat’s contemptuous face.

“Destroying the child,” the Lady said gravely, “would not save me. And perhaps she understood, in the end. I cannot say. I understand that my loss will cause the White Lady grief. It is an echo of the grief we ourselves might face should we lose her forever.”

“
She
will not die.”

“If she died,” the Lady replied, “we would all die with her.”

 • • • 

Adam did not understand the love that existed in these imprisoned women for the being who had imprisoned them. But he did not always understand the love—and the hate—that existed between any man and woman of his acquaintance, be they close family, close friends, or distant strangers. Love of a particular type was, and had always been, a mystery.

But life was not, now. Not to Adam.

Help us
.

Yes
, Adam said.

Something moved beneath his hands. He felt . . . surprise. Attention. Excitement. It was a child’s excitement, not an infant’s, and unlike the plea itself, it was not contained in, or by, words.

Adam moved away from the Lady. He held out one hand—his right—palm up. He was aware, as he made this gesture, that it was not his hand that moved; beneath his palm, if he concentrated, he could feel flesh. It was like dream or nightmare, he thought. During those, he lay abed, sleeping while at the same time running in terror, eating, hiding.

Yet, as in dream or nightmare, what
felt
true was the outstretched hand.

She regarded him as if from a great remove. No matter how close he stood, there would always be distance between them.

“If you will leave this place, if you will risk the heartbreak and sorrow of the White Lady who is your life, take my hand.”

“It is to preserve what we have loved, it is to preserve the source of all that we are, and all that we might ever become, that I made my choice. I knew it would be irrevocable.” She placed her hand in his; hers did not shake at all. “I was wrong, of course. You think of my current state as punishment, and in some fashion it was—but it was more, Adam. The White Lady loves as she loves, and she does not willingly surrender that which is hers. Not to time. Not to death. Trapped upon this mountain, I would remain hers for as long as she exists.”

“But she does not visit.” He offered her a second hand, and she took that as well. “If you are not what you were—if you are as I now am—the world itself will be strange and deadly; there is every chance that if you follow me you will meet death far sooner—”

“You mean, at all?” She laughed. Her laughter was warm and deep. “We know death,” she told him; he heard her amusement but did not open his eyes to catch her expression—which was hard. “Our kin have always known death. But death is not an inevitability. We do not walk toward it. If we are powerful enough, skilled enough, fast enough, wise enough, we step out of its path; it might sweep the lands of all life but ours.

“It is of that death that you now speak, is it not? And not the one that awaits you regardless.”

He nodded. He trusted himself to nod. He understood, listening to her while gripping her hands so tightly, what the distant White Lady desired: to preserve. To keep this woman safe. To hold her above death and time and the decay that came inevitably with either. Even childbirth risked that death.

Especially childbirth.

But Adam was a healer.

And if you can only save one?
Levec asked, from a painful distance.

He did not answer.

 • • • 

Jewel did not lift her hand from the woman’s belly; for her, the feel of it, the texture of perfect, taut skin, did not change. But she opened her eyes the moment she heard the sudden absence of all breathing, looking in panic to Adam. To Adam’s hands, and to the flesh that lay beneath them.

He no longer touched a pillar, carved in the shape of an Arianni woman. He touched skin. He touched visible flesh. She understood, then, why the silence had grown so sharp and so thick.

She heard the sound of drawn blade: one. She knew who had drawn it; she almost told him to put the weapon away, but did not. She had seen the White Lady of Celleriant’s life only once, but no part of her assumed that haunting beauty was without peril. It was, it had been, death.

And she had no doubt at all that he would attack this woman if she proved to be as deadly; the only person upon whom he would not—would never—turn that sword was Ariane herself.

You are wrong, Jewel. He would not raise sword against you except at your explicit command.

The stone did not give way to flesh instantly. The ivory-pink cast of skin traveled out from Adam’s splayed hands, as if the stone were a curtain he was slowly and deliberately pushing to the side. It was not simple work; his brow was furrowed with concentration, his skin, in the cool air, beaded with sweat. Jewel’s free hand held his shoulder, bracing him.

Shadow
roared.

She startled, looking up; she could see the great cat, wings spread as he circled above these arches. Snow, riderless, replied in kind, and Night joined them. She could not tell what angered the cats—or if the cats were angered at all; they had never been shy about putting their feelings into actual words. There were no words now.

But she thought this might be the cat form of horns, of a type of complicated, sub-verbal heraldry or greeting.

Color spread up the woman’s torso, down her arms, and down her legs; it turned marble hair platinum and lent it a weight and a sheen that Jewel’s hair had never, and would never, have. She would have pushed her own straggly hair out of her eyes, but to do so she would have had to surrender her grip on Adam.

She surrendered her grip on the Arianni woman instead. Lids that had once been stone opened; lashes that had once been stone framed a very familiar silver gray. The first thing those eyes saw was Jewel Markess. They widened. Jewel placed a second hand on Adam, her palms shaking.

Adam, however, did not open his eyes; nor did he release the woman. The Arianni woman glanced down at his bowed head, and to Jewel’s surprise, she smiled. The hand that had been raised to support an arch now fell, gently and slowly, to touch his hair.