Oracle: The House War: Book Six (65 page)

“Terafin,” he said.

As the ground broke beneath her feet, the air caught her, holding her aloft.

“They are come. They are come; where is the White Lady?”

And Jewel said, “I don’t know.”

“If you have not located her yet, you will not locate her in time; come home. Come home while any of that home still remains. I will stand while I survive. I will defend what can be defended.”

She wanted to tell him that he had destroyed half the Common in his so-called defense. The words wouldn’t come. Even in dream, this Meralonne was not the one she knew. She could no more imagine him smoking a pipe just for the petty pleasure of irritating patricians than she could imagine him as any part of her life.

“Meralonne—”

“No. But I remember being Meralonne, Terafin. You have no time. Choose, and choose quickly.”

 • • • 

This was the point at which nightmare would give way to a darkened room within any bedroom of her life. Instead it gave way to roaring cat; Shadow flew in from the left, knocked her off her feet and managed, somehow, to break her fall at the end of its wide arc. He was about as happy as she could expect.

She was not awake.

“
Stupid
stupid
girl!”

She stood in the ruins of city—or rather, Shadow did; she was mounted. Snow and Night were absent, as were Calliastra and the Warden of Dreams. The Merchant Authority was a smoking ruin; the great trees that grew—or had grown—exclusively in the Common were the only standing structures in sight—and many of them were damaged or dead.

She knew this was not real, but was afraid to examine the ruins too closely. She didn’t want to see her dead. She didn’t want to see the wreckage of Helen’s stall or the ruins of Farmer Hanson’s. She didn’t want to find bodies, because, given nightmares, she knew whose bodies she was likely to find.

Shadow hissed. He remained angry. But there was a tenor to this anger that tasted of fear.

“Where are your brothers?” Jewel asked. Her voice shook.

“They are
too smart
to be here,” Shadow replied. His voice was a thin whisper.

“You don’t dream.”

He snorted. He muttered about stupidity under his breath. Very much under his breath. Jewel slid off his back, and he allowed it—but only barely; his wings were high and he spread them at her back as she made her way toward one of the standing trees.

If this was a nightmare, it was also a dream: she recognized the tree. Or rather, she recognized the paint on its bark. Although it was illegal to “interfere” with the trees in any way, people proved, time and again, that fear of the magisterial guards wasn’t incentive enough. Especially not when love, alcohol, and ego were placed firmly on the other side of the scales.

The current act of defacement was a carefully painted infinity symbol with a name on either side. One of the names was Rendish, which was unusual; the other was Torran. As declarations of the permanence of love went, it was actually tasteful.

Scattered beneath the defaced tree were leaves; they were newly fallen and Jewel, without thought—or with as much thought as one ever had in dreams—bent to retrieve one. She had gathered these leaves as a child, her Oma standing close by in the street, keeping an eye out for magisterians, not that the guards ever stopped the children from gathering those leaves. Her Oma trusted no one but kin. To Jewel’s young eye, she didn’t much trust her kin either, but her Oma insisted there was a difference between incompetence and malice.

“You’ve no kin here.”

“I know,” Jewel replied. She was not surprised to hear her Oma’s voice, it returned to her so often. Leaf in hand, she rose.

Jewel knew this was a dream, but it was a waking dream. Even if her Oma’s expression was at its most thunderous, she was grateful to see the old woman, it had been so long. Her voice was a constant; her words—often harsh and bitter—one of the foundations on which Jewel stood. But her face, like so many things last seen in distant childhood, had grown dim, slipping through the cupped palms of memory.

The pipe in her Oma’s hand was lit, and a thin stream of pale smoke rose from the embers of burning leaves.

“You’ve no kin in the city,” her Oma said again.

“You’ve no kin,” Jewel replied, “Except me. I’m the only one left. But me? I have family here.”

“You don’t.”

“I do. As much family as my parents were to each other.”

“They had you to bind them.”

Jewel nodded. “But if I’d died—if I’d been the one to go first—they would still be bound regardless. They were my parents, yes—but they had each other, blood or no. Blood’s not everything, Oma.”

“Without blood, what is family?”

“Family,” Jewel replied. She folded her arms, but refused to retreat. She’d felt the slap of the old woman’s palm more than once, and had hated it. But she’d learned early that fear didn’t make the punishment any easier. And she wasn’t afraid, now. She knew that her Oma wouldn’t have accepted the den as kin. But when her Oma lived, she’d had blood-kin. Relatives. Son and daughter and grandchild.

Jewel, absent the family of her birth, had built one. And it meant as much to her as blood relatives had meant to the cantankerous old woman.

“Do you think calling them kin makes them kin, girl? Is that what I taught you?”

Jewel exhaled. “What you taught me is what kin
means
. We eat at the same table. We talk—and laugh and argue—in the same kitchen. We sleep under the same roof. There are those who’d die for me. There are those who already have. They’ve faced cold, and hunger, and worse, by my side. Any road I’ve traveled, they’ve been willing to travel.

“They’re my home. They’re as much my home as you once were.”

“And the rest of the city?” the old woman asked. She lifted a pipe to her lips and bit down on the end—a bad habit she’d had when annoyed. “You’ve moved up in the world. You think you’re any better than you used to be? You think you’re better than your Oma, now?”

“Yes.” Jewel’s arms tightened. She had, seconds ago, wanted to hug this elderly, critical tyrant. Seconds. “I am better than you, now—because I’m
alive
. You’re not. You died on me. The dead don’t get a say, anymore.”

To Jewel’s surprise, the old woman laughed. It was a familiar rasp of sound that ended—ah, gods, as it had always ended in the last few months of her life. With a hacking cough.

“You understand that I’m not here?” she said, when the coughing had quieted and the embarrassment of being so infirm in public—which meant, in her Oma’s case, in front of anyone else, ever—had passed.

Jewel nodded. She was dreaming, and she was not dreaming. Dreams had their own, internal reality—but she couldn’t quite fit herself into them here. Her Oma was dead. Her Oma was, no doubt, terrifying people in Mandaros’ Hall.

“Was I really all that terrifying?”

“Yes. Always.”

“Well. Well, then. That’s probably why I’m here.” She coughed again. “What are you wasting your time on, girl? Wandering around in a daze with those great, noisy creatures of yours?” She turned and pointed, with the pipe’s stem, at Shadow.

Shadow sniffed.

“What have you promised?” she continued. “And have you failed yet?”

Jewel was silent.

“You understand what you’ve seen. You understand what it means. You can’t pretend it’s opaque or confusing. You’re not an idiot. Well, not mostly an idiot. I didn’t want this for you. When your mother came home with the story about the dog—I didn’t want it. You understand that?”

Jewel swallowed. Nodded.

“But it’s never mattered what I want. And it doesn’t matter what you want, either. You are what you are. You became a power because you wanted to keep your family safe. Well, fine. We all want to keep our family safe. I’ll give you yours. You didn’t have any other choice, and it’s better than nothing.”

Jewel bridled, now, but managed to keep her silence. It was surprisingly difficult, and not made easier when Shadow hissed laughter.

“And you, shut up. If she’d listened to me, you wouldn’t be here, either. Cats are a useless lot of parasites.”

Shadow growled.

So did Jewel’s Oma. “You can kill me if you want,” the old woman told him. “All you’ll do is traumatize her. Nothing you can do—nothing at all—can hurt me now.” She turned back to Jewel. “All you want now is to hide from the choices you’ve made. It would be nice if life worked that way; it doesn’t. Never has. You’re Matriarch, now.”

“We
don’t have
Matriarchs! We’re not Voyani!”

But her Oma shook her head. “Don’t you recognize this place, girl? This is death. It’s what will be if you do nothing.”

“I’m not doing nothing—”

“As good as makes no difference. We all die. It’s what we do. But we build as well. If no one stepped in to continue the building and the repairs, this is all your Common would be: ruins. And trees. You always liked the trees,” she added, her voice softening inasmuch as it ever did. “Had no one succeeded the first of the Twin Kings, the same. Had no one stepped in to fight during the Henden of 410, this is what you would have—or maybe worse.

“You are Matriarch. Understand what Matriarchs are, and what they do. No one can make the choices you will have to make for you. No one can absolve you of them.”

“If I make a mistake—”

“Yes. Large choices have large consequences. This is what power
is
. Oh, you can argue that power is force or violence, and I won’t disagree. But it’s not
your
power. I shouldn’t be here,” she added. “I didn’t raise an idiot. You know what you need to do.”

“I—”

“You don’t want this, is that what you mean to tell me?” Her Oma spit to the side. “You should have thought of that sooner. But you’ll think of it now,” she added, turning again toward the gates that led out of the Common. “Because he’s coming.”

 • • • 

Shadow roared. He hit earth with his forepaws, and the ground beneath Jewel’s feet shook. Stones, loosened by time and disaster, fell in the distance. Jewel heard them, felt them strike ground, wished—for one long, silent moment—that they could strike her, instead.

Or that lightning strike. Or that dragon breathe. Or that earth break and swallow her. Anything, anything, but what she
knew
would follow.

And of course, nothing killed her. Nothing struck her. Nothing removed her from this nightmare that was, in the end, of her own making. She had been so careless, and it was not—it was never—she who would pay the price.

Breath deserted her as she stood, wreathed for a moment in pipe smoke and the lingering growl of shadow cat.

Carver came down what was left of the main west road of the Common.

H
E WAS PALE.
His hair hung over one eye—that hadn’t changed. But his clothing was dirty and torn in at least one place, and it was brown where blood had dried; brown and stiff. Exhaustion made his desperate run a series of stumbles and backward glances; he was being pursued, but his pursuers were far enough behind that Jewel couldn’t see them.

“Yes,” her Oma said quietly. “Do you understand? You have no time, Na’Jay. You have no time.”

She could not speak a word. She couldn’t raise voice, let alone arms; she couldn’t feel the ground beneath her feet, couldn’t feel her feet themselves. She was frozen between one breath and the next. Everything she had ever feared was contained in this moment. Gods and demons and firstborn had haunted her dreams and her nightmares, and none, in the end, could hurt her as this one did.

And would.

He looked up as she stood, immobile. He looked up, and across the distance she could see his visible eye widen. He stopped. He stumbled. She moved. She moved without will or thought, her slow single step breaking into many, all of her decision—her choice, the
only
choice—forgotten in the visceral need to be there to catch him.

Her arms were open, and then, closed; she felt his ribs, the slight weight of him, the brush of his falling hair over her own as he lowered his head into the crook of her neck. He shook.

Or perhaps she did. They were silent and inseparable for the space of several breaths.

It was Carver who pulled away first. That was the only mercy she was given. He drew back, placing both of his shaking, cold hands on her shoulders; she could see hints of the eye that was almost always covered as he looked down at her.

“Jay. Jay. Why are you here? I told you not to come.”

She had to look away. She had to look away because she was afraid to close her eyes. Her throat was too swollen for words. Any words. She knew this was a nightmare. It was only a nightmare. But clearly she knew Carver well enough that there was no difference between the waking and sleeping versions.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. And then, because she couldn’t speak, she lowered her head into his chest. “I’m sorry, Carver. I’m sorry.”

“Jay, stop.” His hands tightened. “Stop.”

Because she stood in the ruins of a city, and not in the Council Chambers of
Avantari
or the House she ruled by name, she shook her head. She wanted to weep, but fought it; if she started, she would never stop.

“What’s happened? Is everyone else safe?”

She almost laughed. But it, too, would have been on the edge of tears, and it would have pushed her over.

“No
one
else is
safe
,” Shadow said. Jewel had forgotten the gray cat in her rush across the ruins of the Common. “Not you, not
any
of her kin.”

“Then why are you here?” he demanded, ignoring both the interruption and its source.

“She is here because
you’re here
. She is as
stupid
as
you.”

Carver exhaled. “We have to leave,” he said. “I don’t know how you got here—but I hope you’ve got an escape route planned. We’re not going to have much time.” He pulled her, shifted his grip, started to head out the other side of the market circle.

She stopped him.

“Jay—I mean it—”

“I know.” She closed her eyes. “I know. I thought—I really thought—I could find you and save you. I thought I could make a path that led straight to where you landed, and I could bring you
home
.” She looked at her hands; she had left the Terafin seal in
Avantari
. But the weight of the title was never, had never been, about simple golden seals. She swallowed. “I agreed to walk the Oracle’s path. I agreed to take her test. I knew that unless I passed it I couldn’t. Find you. Find a way to reach you.

“That’s where I am, now. In a bloody winter forest in the middle of nowhere. This is a dream.”

Carver had stilled.

“It’s a dream. A nightmare. Carver—”

He lifted his hands, then. He released her and stepped back. As if he couldn’t trust his voice, he signed. He signed
go now.
And she couldn’t. She couldn’t wake. She couldn’t stop speaking.

“The Sleepers are waking. That’s why the closet opened somewhere else. That’s why I’m actually here. I need to be able to find the only living being they might—just might—obey. And I need to do it yesterday, because they’ve been sleeping under our city. Under the hundred holdings. And when they wake—” She glanced around at the ruin of the Common.

Carver clearly didn’t see the ruins as she did. She wondered if he even saw the trees. Without thought, she handed him a single leaf, the one she’d retrieved. Hands shaking, as silent now as he was, he opened his hand and took it.

“I can’t find her if I can’t pass the Oracle’s test. I’m not certain that finding her will be enough; she’s trapped somewhere. She can’t leave—and I need her to leave. I need her to
ride
.” She closed her eyes. “But I can’t—I can’t find you. I can’t save you. Carver—” she opened her eyes again, because she was weeping; she was bent with the weight of emotion that tears alone couldn’t shed.

He looked down at her. He looked down, and then he lifted his hands. He didn’t touch her; he touched, instead, something at the back of his neck. A necklace, Jewel thought. A pendant.

“Take this,” he told her. “Take this and give it to Merry.”

Her own hands opened to take what he offered.

He smiled. There was pain in it. “What will happen to the city if you don’t leave?”

“They’ll destroy it.”

He nodded. “Everything I care about is in that city.”

“Everything
I
care about
isn’t
.”

“Almost everything you care about is. In that city. Teller’s there. Finch. Angel—”

“Angel’s here. With me. I mean, he’s in the forest where I am when I’m awake.”

Carver’s smile deepened, losing some of the edge of pain. “You know what you need to do. You told Duster to—”

She lifted a hand and covered his mouth. “I told Duster to die,” she said.

He nodded. His hands signed
yes
. But he added, “She chose, Jay. She chose.” He exhaled. “Tell Merry I’m sorry. I should’ve told her—” he shook his head. “Did you find Ellerson?”

Jewel blinked. She had almost forgotten. “. . . No.” Before she could say more, she heard hooves in the distance, and she saw Carver pale. He pulled away from her. She couldn’t let him go. Her nerveless, shaking hands opened the pouch she had carried from
Avantari
’s hidden basement on the wild trek she’d undertaken.

Leaves, leaves, leaves.

And beside them in her bag, the one leaf she had been given in a different dream: blue, metallic, like and unlike the
Ellariannatte
’s leaves. She
knew
this was not the place it was meant to be. But she knew, as well, that this was all she had to offer the man she intended to abandon.

He stared at it.

“Take it.”

“It’s a leaf—”

“I
know
what it is. Take it, Carver. Take it and go.”

“What am I supposed to do with it?”

She shook her head. “You’re not awake. No matter what you think, you’re not awake. Take it and find the strength to use it.”

“And do what?”

“Plant it. I don’t know. I’m not awake, either.”

Shadow roared. The rhythm of hoofbeats changed as the sound of his anger died into stillness.

“Go,” she said again. “I’ll wake. But until I do, let me buy you whatever time I can.” She signed:
go now
, and he nodded, and he turned. Just as if they were both sixteen again, in the streets of the twenty-fifth.

She wanted to grab him. She wanted to grab him and hold him. She wanted to follow. And she
knew
that she could. In this moment, she could walk that path. She would abandon every other person who had followed her to this place, because none of them—not even Avandar—could follow where she led; not yet. But she knew that if she followed Carver here, she would wake where Carver was.

And she knew, as well, what the cost would be.

And she couldn’t pay it. That was the truth. She could not bring herself to pay it. Carver was
one life
. One. And in the balance was the life of every other person she loved, or had loved. In the balance were the Kings and The Ten and the mage-born and the makers and the bards—all save Kallandras himself. At this moment, they didn’t matter to Jewel. Had they been the only losses, she would have suffered them willingly. But in the balance, as well, were Merry and Lucille and Barston. In the balance were all of the children very like Jewel herself had once been: powerless, hungry, and lost. And in the balance, at the very end, the rest of her den: the people who had survived the twenty-fifth and The Terafin’s assassination, and the demons.

She fell to her knees; Shadow growled.

But she had fallen for a reason, had allowed her grief to bear her down with purpose; she gathered the fallen leaves of the
Ellariannatte
, and rose. As she had done once in the gardens of the Terafin manse, she set the leaves free, throwing them, with purpose, into the waiting breeze. And the breeze
was
waiting, in this dreamscape.

Wind took the leaves and carried them; their flight ended in earth. Where leaf and earth touched, the
Ellariannatte
flowered. These were not trees of silver, gold, or diamond. They were not trees of blue metal—and she wondered, then, if the leaf she had left Carver could be planted here at all.

They were the trees that had girded the Common.

Where disaster had killed or injured those trees, new trees sprouted, reaching up, and up again, as if straining to achieve their full growth in time. What approached those trees—if anything did—she couldn’t see. She didn’t want to see. She wanted to believe that Carver would somehow escape them. That he would live without her aid. That he could somehow buy her time.

Time to visit the Oracle. Time to find the Winter Queen. Time to save the rest of her home.

And she didn’t, and couldn’t, believe it. She knew it was a miracle that Carver was still alive. She
knew
he was. But the only miracles Jewel had ever been able to count on in life were generally the ones best left for nightmare.

The trees were a small forest in the ruins of what had once been the center of her life. She turned; Carver was gone. So was her Oma. Only Shadow remained, and he watched her with wide, unblinking eyes.

She failed to move.

Shadow closed the gap between them. He said nothing. He didn’t even tell her how stupid she was, or had been—and she had, and knew it. There were leaves on the ground, and she bent and retrieved one, as if she were a child again.

She held it in one palm; in the other, enclosed in the fist her hand had become, was a pendant. To give to Merry.

She was grateful that she was not resident in the manse. It was the last thing Carver had asked of her. It was one of the only favors he had ever explicitly requested. And she was coward enough that the thought of fulfilling it crushed her.

But this was a dream. It was a nightmare and it was a dream. Even in the wilderness of her current waking life, she would wake. She would wake and leave as much of it behind as she could.

“It is time,” Shadow told her.

Jewel nodded.

 • • • 

She woke to campfire and Calliastra; to Celleriant and the Winter King. She woke surrounded by gray fur and gray wings; the first sound she heard was the hissing of angry cat; it was the closest thing to her ear.

Waking was awkward. Even Calliastra’s normal hauteur had broken, and the uneasiness that replaced it looked so foreign on the firstborn face that Jewel almost failed to recognize her. She rose, and as she did, she opened her hands.

From the right fell something that sparkled in the early morning light. From the left, a leaf that no tree in this forest had shed.

She stared at them. She stared, and then bent, stiffly and slowly, as if she had aged decades in one night. Her hands trembled as she lifted the pendant from packed snow and dirt; she held it aloft. It caught light. It was a simple thing, really: a locket in the shape of an oval. She had no doubt that if she opened it, at least one half of the two sides would be filled.

But she didn’t.

It wasn’t meant for her.

Nothing, this morning, was. She lifted the chain in trembling hands, and lowered it over her head; it caught in strands of her hair and she tore at them. She would wear this—it was the only way she could be guaranteed to keep it safe.

 • • • 

When Angel woke, he knew something was wrong. He signed—to Adam—and Adam shook his head, his lips thinner than usual, his gentle smile completely absent. No one appeared to have gone missing during a night spent in the admittedly warm but very cramped hole they had dug out of snow that was probably, from the looks of this forest, older than Angel.

Calliastra was tending the fire. Celleriant was beside her, at a cold but respectful distance. Kallandras was preparing food, with Terrick’s help—or perhaps the reverse. Shianne sat opposite Calliastra; she was the only person present who didn’t seem to be aware of the raven-haired, disturbingly attractive child of—if Jay was right—gods. No; her eyes were on Jay; she was watchful.

She was, Angel thought, worried.

Jay was pacing. She stopped when Angel caught her attention—mostly by stepping into the path her feet had crushed into the snow. He froze—it was cold enough for that—when he saw her eyes.

They were red.

“Jay?”

She started to speak, stopped. Three times. And then she inhaled and lifted shaking hands instead. Her hands were mittened—mittens being the piece of Winter clothing she most disliked—and seeing this she bunched those hands into fists instead.

“What happened?”

She said nothing. A long nothing. And he remembered the long days spent in the old apartment in the twenty-fifth, waiting. Waiting, first, for Fisher, and then after, for Lefty. Her expression reminded him of those days, because the only thing that was different about it was the years that had passed over her face in the interim.