Skirmish: A House War Novel (25 page)

“You have come to offer me your service.” Her voice, like her sword, was snow; her eyes were silver. Around her, armored men moved on their restive mounts; he was aware that they spoke. But the only voice he could hear was hers.

“Of what value is your service,” she continued coldly, “when you are without even the humblest of weapons?”

Here, in the heart of the Green Deepings, the Winter was strong. Celleriant did not—could not—rise. “I have a sword, Lady. And a shield. I will be your weapon and your wall.”

“I see neither. Have you misplaced them?” She glanced above his head then, her eyes rising to the silent bower of branches high above her face.

This was his forest. This was his home. It was dark and shrouded now, but surely Summer waited? He glanced at his empty hands. He heard the words of the ancient trees. There was no place in the forest for those weapons.

But he had summoned them. He had fashioned them. He had called them, and in the end, they had come. They were hers, even if they were absent; they had
always
been hers; he understood that the moment he had first laid eyes on her, although he had always been aware of her presence.

He called them now, in defiance.

He called them in fear.

But his hands remained empty.

She had no mercy in her; she was Winter, and she was absolute. Turning to her host, she motioned them forward; they spared him a single glance, no more. The hooves of their mounts left marks in the perfect surface of snow.

Ariane. Ariane. Ariane.

“What is your name?”

He stared at her. He opened his mouth. He could not remember being young, but he knew he was young here, now; he was callow, inexperienced. He could not bear even the weight of her momentary inspection, her icy disapproval. Yet he had yearned for it. He had yearned for it, even in Summer, when the voice of the forest had been at its strongest and warmest, and the air was filled with sound.

What is your name? Where is your name?

He could not rise. He could not move. He could not speak. In horror, in the depth of a humiliation he had never conceived of, he watched as the Winter Queen’s expression froze.

Her eyes widened, and silver spilled like blood into the air. She said—she spoke—a single word of denial as she stiffened—and shattered.

Silent, he watched as shards flew to the right and left of Jewel ATerafin.

In her hand, burning like blue light, he saw his sword. He stumbled to his feet in sudden panic. The feeling was so visceral he might have been young again—a reminder that reminiscences elided the truth of youth.

“Wake up,” she said sharply, her voice rough and unpleasant. “You’ll die of—of exposure.” Her words made no sense, and her grip on the sword would have pained him even if the sword had been a cold, dead slab of tempered metal. “Your shield is on your arm, if you can still see your arm. Celleriant, damn you,
look at where you are
. Look.
See it
. Your sword is going to bleed me to death while you stand there.” She jabbed at air with his sword for emphasis, as if she could make punctuation purely physical.

He stared at her for a long, cold moment, and then he straightened, looking past her, looking past the blue edge of his sword. “ATerafin.”

“Yes.” She walked toward him as if drawn—or dragged. He held out a hand. “Give me your word that you’ll hold onto it this time, or I’m not giving it back.”

“You will find that very, very costly.”

She snorted. It was a graceless, foolish sound. “Does it matter?”

“Pardon?”

“Does it matter how costly it’ll be? You dropped it. I caught it before it hit ice.”

“You do not understand the nature of that sword.”

“No. But I understand what would have happened to you if I hadn’t. Do you?”

He looked around at the bitter, broken landscape. After a pause, he said, “Yes. I…did not understand the nature of the danger.”

And she had.

For just a moment he saw her as the scion—the diminished and undignified scion—of the ancient seers of the long dead Cities of Man. It was seldom that he chose to remember either their significance or their power; he did so now. She had been called seer-born by Viandaran, but this was the first time Celleriant had ever been convinced that she was—that she could be—a power in her own right.

In her bumbling way, she had been honest; her hand was bleeding. Her blood trailed down her wrist and across her sleeves; it also trailed down the hilt of the sword to the blade itself, where it evaporated.

She could hold his sword. She could not wield it, of course, but Celleriant doubted that she was capable of wielding any sword that was not wrought for imbeciles. Yet mortal men had died for daring to simply touch the hilt of his blade in the past. His own kin could not approach the blade as she had—although perhaps they were unwilling to pay its price.

“Yes, ATerafin. I give you my word that I will hold on to the sword. I will not let it drop here. I will never,” he added softly, “be parted from it again.”

She exhaled, losing color, but also losing the exaggerated posture of human anger. She pried her fingers from the sword’s hilt; he saw that her knuckles had whitened and her skin was almost blue. He took the sword with care and frowned as he examined only its edge; in the gleaming light
of this false Winter, its color had shifted almost imperceptibly. No one but Celleriant would notice; no one save perhaps Ariane herself.

“That is not the way,” he told her coldly, “to blood this blade.”

“You’re welcome.” She started to say more—she never seemed to be short of the babble that mortals so prized—but stopped herself. “So…do you know where we are?”

“I have some idea, yes.”

“Good. Can you get us out of here?”

He stared at her as if she’d just asked him to cut off his own arm—or worse. It was an expression with which she was regrettably familiar, but not on his face. She laughed; she couldn’t help herself. Her laughter didn’t noticeably improve his mood.

“Do you mean to imply that you came here without
any
knowledge of where we now are?”

“Imply? No. If you want, I’ll say it outright: I have no idea where we are.”

“How did you arrive here?”

“On the back of the Winter King, if you must know. If it makes you feel any better, Ariane didn’t specifically tell you to keep me alive.”

“I cannot discharge the duties I was charged with if you are dead,” he replied.

“Or if you are?”

He raised a pale brow. “My death would be considered an acceptable reason for failure.”

She snorted. “Do none of your people have any sense of humor?”

His smile was slender and very cold. “We do.”

“You win. Tell me where we are?”

“In a dream.”

“A nightmare?”

“If you prefer.”

“Do we have any control over the shape the dream takes?”

“Dreams are not my specialty, ATerafin. Do you normally exert that control over your own?”

“No. But mine can’t kill me.” She glanced down at her injured hand. “And I’m betting when we get out of this one, I’m still going to be bleeding.”

He nodded as if the blood was inconsequential. “Come. Follow. Follow closely.”

“Why?”

“The heart of the dream is waking.”

Jewel looked at the mostly frozen water; from there, she looked up to where the growth of vines overhung what was apparently a small basin. “I came that way,” she finally said, pointing.

He frowned. “Through the vines?”

“There wasn’t any other way to reach you.
I
can’t fly.”

“No more can I, now.” He began to walk, and his steps were apparently heavy enough to fracture the ice’s surface. “Mortal dreams, like most mortal power, are echoes of the truth. Mortals can conceive of greatness, but seldom achieve it. Your dreams are different. You touch what is there—but not, if Viandaran’s comments are true—deliberately. You stumble; you are mostly, but not entirely, blind.

“Nonetheless, you could travel here.”

Jewel hesitated, and then lifted her wrist. Around it, the strands of Ariane’s hair had thickened into a distinctive bracelet. Artisans might have crafted it.

Celleriant glanced at its twining strands. He even lifted a hand to touch them, but stopped short and pulled back. “I see. I will not even say that you do not understand the magnitude of her gift, ATerafin—but rather, that you are beginning to understand it.” He shook his head and a smile—one that was neither cold nor cruel—touched the corners of his mouth and his perfect, gray eyes. “It is because of her gift that you walk here now, but it is not because of her gift that you are capable, in the end, of doing so.”

“If this is a dream, can we wake up?”

He laughed then. The sound made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end; it was like lightning strike, and it was so close. “Perhaps you have always been sleeping; perhaps it is now that you truly begin to wake.” He lifted an arm, and his hair began to move in the sudden breeze. “Witness, Jewel. The children of the gods are waking, and you have touched the edge of a single such child’s power. It has touched you.

“The gods have always been transformative.” He held out a hand and she stared at it until he said, “Yes, I mean for you to take it.”

And, oh, it was cold when she did. It was like ice.

“Yes,” he said, divining her thoughts. “It is like the ice here. The ice is mine. Emblem of Winter and the cost of Winter. Come, ATerafin. I begin to understand.”

“Good. Explain it to me.”

“We regret Winter when it is long past its season, and only then. There has been no Summer for centuries. It should be Summer now, for the Hunt was called and the Winter Queen rode. Yet we are still trapped in Winter, still frozen in time.”

She waited to hear more, or tried; his grip on her hand didn’t allow her to stand still. He began to drag her in the direction she’d pointed out, and the desire to preserve some dignity meant that she ran to keep up.

Celleriant had no difficulty climbing the side of the basin. Jewel might have, but he had her clamber up onto his armor-plated back and cling, arms twined around his neck. It should have been awkward, and maybe for her it was; he didn’t appear to notice her weight. Nor did he have difficulty with the ice- and snow-covered vines. He drew his sword. Not for Lord Celleriant the indignity of crawling over, under, and around anything that stood in his way. But this time, the vines withered, defenseless; this time they sprouted no leaves, and drew no blood.

“They’re not—not attacking you.”

“No.”

“Why? Why is it different this time?”

He glanced over his shoulder. “Winter reigns here.”

“But—”

“Even dreams have their own rationale. It was to drive me—to drive us—here that the tree so distorted itself; it succeeded. But that tree and these vines are no longer one. Come.”

She glanced through the passage he’d cut, at the exposed and sharp edges his sword had left. He built a bower of sorts as they walked, and Jewel frowned.

“I don’t think it took me this long to reach you,” she finally said.

“How would you know? Time passes differently here, if it can be said to pass at all.”

“Then where are we going?”

“To the Winter King. If he carried you here, Jewel, he can carry you out. I do not guarantee that it will be entirely safe—but safety could not have been your first concern if you commanded him to bring you here at all.”

“And you?”

One silver brow rose. “ATerafin, you surprise me.”

“Maybe more mortals would if you paid attention.”

“Perhaps. But in the Winter Court one pays attention to the things that can kill one.”

“That’s not true of everyone.”

“No, ATerafin. It is not. But it has always been true of me.” He cut through the last of the twisting vines. A pathway now opened up across snow imprinted by a single set of footprints; they were hers. “Go.”

“Come with me.”

“I will not ride the Winter King while I still breathe.”

“…why?”

“He will not carry me.” He turned to glance at the fractured vines. “The dream is broken, ATerafin. I will emerge on my own. But I have some work left to do.”

“Wait.”

“One would think that it is you who are the immortal, given the time you waste. For what would you have me wait?”

“You’re injured. In our world.”

“Ah.”

“You’ve taken wounds to your upper arms, and to at least your left thigh; I think there’s also a wound in your chest.”

He lifted a mailed hand and flattened his palm across that chest. Then he nodded. “You are correct.”

“Celleriant—”

“They are not insignificant, but they are no longer my master. I have work to do here, and it will not wait, unless you desire the dreamscape to enfold The Terafin’s funeral.”

Still she hesitated, torn.

“This is not the first time you have left your kin in order to further your own goals.” Celleriant had swallowed Winter. The fact of ice, the fact of cold that killed, adorned his voice and his words. She saw herself in them, hated what she heard. Truth was like that, some days.

“No. It’s not.” Turning, she began to sprint down the path her footsteps traced. The snow impeded her flight, but not by much, because she hadn’t been struggling for all that long before the Winter King appeared. He knelt on his forelegs. Angel still sat astride his back, his arms shaking even at this distance, his hands around the King’s tines.

Jewel
.

“I got him. But he won’t follow.”

No.

“How do you know?”

It is still Winter here. We must away before the Winter ends; the path will go with it, and I am not winged.

She clambered up his back, between Angel and his neck; he rose. She tried to grip his horns and felt nothing at all in her palms except the bitter, biting cold. Her teeth began to chatter.

“Angel.”

“I’m here.”

“Aren’t you freezing?”

She felt his shrug against her shoulder blade; she couldn’t turn to look. “I’m cold,” he said. “But I’ve got Rendish blood and I can’t disgrace it by complaining about a little snow that I can’t see.”