Firstborn

by Michelle West

  But Adam’s question remained. Did she believe the apartment had been empty yesterday? Not likely. The building was more-or-less warm, more-or-less clean. Someone—someone else—had called this home. Where had they gone? Were they dead?

  And if they were already dead, if that price had been paid, did it matter?

  She reached for Adam’s hand again; she had dropped it to sign. Yes. Yes it mattered. Jay would never have turned a family out of their home. She would never have killed them to take it over. She would never do it now, consciously.

  But she was, Adam had said, dreaming. And in dreams, things happened offstage. They happened before the dream itself started, their history accepted, immutable, known.

  Adam’s hand tightened around hers; it was no longer clear who was offering the comfort and who was receiving it.

  “I will wait,” Haval told them both. “I will make inquiries in your absence.”

  “Inquiries?” Finch asked, voice as hollow as she felt.

  “Answers to Adam’s question.”

  She didn’t want the answer. She was afraid of it. She was afraid she knew what it was. Jay. Lifting her voice, she said, “Is there any food left?”

  “Some,” Jester answered, grinning. “Carver’s sitting on Angel.” It was a literal description. Angel wasn’t thrilled about it either. She felt the smile tug at her lips, felt the old exasperation, and walked into her home, her heart’s home.

  • • •

  The door, open until that moment, closed at her back. Adam, however, was not on the outside. He’d been wrong, Finch thought; she’d been right. Adam was den, even if he had been adopted in Jay’s absence. He knew her. He had saved her life. He had kept her from the bridge, knitting her wounds whole while they both slept.

  And Jay, sleeping or waking, knew him. She accepted him. But he didn’t belong in this here-and-now, and she knew this, too.

  Who? Lander signed, from the far wall. Finch wasn’t certain anyone had seen it; they’d spoken the words out loud, except for Duster, who glared. Finch looked down to see that her clothing hadn’t changed. She was dressed as the regent of House Terafin. Her hair was uncomfortably bound, her feet restricted by very fine boots.

  “Jay,” she said, turning.

  Jay was standing to one side of a table too small to eat at, a bowl in her hands. The bowl had been meant for Finch, but she set it down, frowning, her brows drawn together in confusion. “Finch?”

  “You’ve been dreaming,” Finch said. Here, in this room, she let the tears slide. She was with kin here. The only person who’d hate it was Duster, and Duster was dead. She lifted her hand, and Adam’s rose with it. “They can’t wake you. They’re afraid.”

  “I’ve been . . . dreaming.” She looked around the room, and many of its occupants froze. Three did not: Arann, Jester, Teller. Their clothing, unlike Finch’s, remained Helen’s creations: solid and well-made, but of scraps and ends large enough to be useful. It wasn’t just their clothing, of course; they were fourteen or fifteen years of age again.

  Arann bowed head into hands for a long, long breath.

  “Yes, Matriarch.” Adam’s voice was soft, his expression one of open worry. “You have been learning what the Oracle can teach you. We do not know what the lessons entail—I have been too afraid to ask.”

  “Afraid?”

  “It is the business of Matriarchs—and the Oracle is the first Matriarch. She terrifies me.”

  “Me, too. Not as much as Yollana did, though.”

  Adam privately agreed. The Oracle knew everything, or she could know it. When everything was your secret, your knowledge, it was less dangerous to know something of your business—you knew something simply by breathing.

  “You’re here to wake me.”

  Adam nodded.

  “And Finch is here to help you?”

  Finch nodded.

  Wanly, Jay said, “I don’t want to wake up.”

  “What we had here was good. Better than a House Council plotting your downfall. Better than the demons. Better than a god. Not much quieter than a wing full of cats, though.” She wanted to say, but it’s not real. She couldn’t. The dreams that Adam had entered had led him to Averalaan. They’d led him to Finch. They’d led him to reality.

  Finch let go of Adam’s hand and crossed the room. She wanted to hug Jay but didn’t. “I’m regent. I’ll hold things together here. Come home.”

  “I think I may have been trying to do that,” Jay answered. And she aged as she spoke. The room emptied, not slowly, but instantly; only the living—or the waking—remained.

  Teller blinked and looked around. The room felt empty, almost funereal—but the living did remain: Finch, Jester, Arann. Angel? he signed.

  Alive. Eating, Jay signed back. “Thanks for letting me take him. It helps.”

  Jester signed, Carver?

  Jay signed, Alive.

  She stopped. Looked at her hands as if they belonged to someone else. Turned them up, regarding the cup of empty palms attached to her own arms. Her eyes widened, her breath sharpened, her mouth opened, corners turned up in what might become a genuine smile—

  And then she was gone.

  The room was empty. The furniture—such as it was—remained. The bowls, mostly empty. The remnants of food.

  Jester swore, and Finch realized that the clothing—such as it was—also remained. “Don’t,” she told him mildly. “Arann’s going to be in actual trouble—his armor wasn’t cheap.”

  • • •

  Neither was his sword, and the sword was also gone. He had daggers, and they weren’t particularly good daggers, although they’d been considered great, back in the day.

  “Carver’s alive,” Teller said.

  “Has she found him, then?”

  “No,” Adam said. “We haven’t, not yet.”

  “But he’s alive. You saw her face. You saw her eyes. She answered. She knew.” Jester turned toward the windows. “Doesn’t mean he’ll stay that way, but still.”

  It was Arann who said, “He’s alive for now. That’s enough.”

  Finch walked to the table, knelt beside it, and lifted a dagger that remained on the floor. “Recognize this?” she asked, lifting its scabbard.

  “Duster’s,” Teller replied.

  “She was so pissed off,” Jester added, grinning. “We were lucky no one died. But she kept it. No one was allowed to touch the damn thing without losing fingers.”

  “It was the best knife in the house,” Finch said. “And it was all hers. From us.” She was crying and didn’t care. “We have to get back.” She turned to Adam.

  Adam was gone.

  • • •

  The Matriarch woke him. Jewel. The Terafin. Jay.

  His throat was dry, his eyes almost sandy with sleep. He sat up in a darkened room, and realized it was the same room in which he’d accepted the Oracle’s help. He listed to the left, but Jewel caught his shoulder before he fell out of bed. Since the beds were so close to the floor—much closer than the towering beds in the Terafin manse—falling wouldn’t injure him.

  Shadow’s growl came from the left into which he would have fallen, and he changed his mind.

  “You were dreaming,” the Matriarch said.

  It had felt so real. “So were you.” He looked past her to Angel and signed. What happened?

  “You touched the Oracle’s crystal,” Angel—hair no longer rising in a spire—said.

  “And I collapsed?”

  Angel’s hesitation was marked. “No. You faded.”

  “Faded.”

  “We watched you disappear.” He glanced at Shianne and away. “We were worried until Snow pointed out that Shadow had gone with you.”

  The Oracle was no longer in the room, Adam saw. “What did the Oracle say?”

  “She said it was a very good sign.”

  “That Shadow came with me?”

  “That you took so long to . . . vanish.”

  Jewel, seated on the side of th
e bed, was staring into her empty hands. “Adam, will you walk with me? When you can actually stand without falling over, I mean.”

  • • •

  Standing without falling over took another hour. During that hour he drank a clear, dark tea. It was bitter and faintly spicy. He ate some kind of northern stew. He listened to the cats insult each other. He listened to Shianne talk, although she was speaking to someone across the room.

  During this time, the Matriarch was silent. She signed to Angel, but kept to herself, her shoulders slumped, her gaze apprehensive. As if, Adam thought, she was trying to memorize every detail of this room and its occupants.

  He knew that Matriarchs dreamed. They dreamed of the future, a future dressed in veils that only experience of the actual events pierced completely. He remembered the discussions his own mother had had with her daughter and her closest sister when she had experienced a prophetic dream and couldn’t make sense of it.

  He wondered if Jewel’s dreams would ever be so merciful again. He had come to understand that there was mercy of a kind in ignorance.

  • • •

  The Oracle’s abode was bright with artificial light. It was a warren of halls and rooms. Adam had thought the Terafin manse confusing and confining when he had first come to Averalaan—but the geography of the manse made sense. He could, and did, memorize it until he no longer got lost when he walked its halls.

  He would never know enough of these caves that he could do so here. It had taken him two days to understand that the halls and the rooms changed. They weren’t illusory—he could, and did, open doors at random, and they opened into perfectly normal rooms, although some were very oddly decorated. But he could not depend on their location.

  Only the rooms in which the Matriarch’s companions resided were fixed in place, and Adam suspected that they, too, would be unanchored and free to wander when they were at last vacated.

  Jewel, however, seemed to be able to navigate here. She was not—according to Carver—very good with geography or maps; she had been the last person to become comfortable with the layout of the Terafin manse. Here, however, she knew where she was going.

  “It’s easier,” she said, when he asked. “In the Oracle’s domain, you only have to focus on where you want to go and start walking. Everything here changes constantly, so there’s no point in memorizing all the halls or rooms between where you were and where you want to go. It’s like it was designed for me.” She spoke Torra. “Do you remember my dream?”

  He nodded, reached into his pocket, and found—by touch—a small, silvered ball. It hung from a chain.

  Jewel stared at it, arrested.

  “Finch insisted I take it,” he said. “She wanted me to bring food.”

  “That’s not food.”

  “It’s her compromise. It’s tea.”

  Jewel had paled; she resumed her walk, and Adam fell in beside her. His was the longer stride. It wasn’t difficult to keep up. He’d considered keeping the sieve hidden, allowing the Matriarch to believe that she’d had an unusual dream, a gift of learning to better understand her own power. But he was not comfortable knowing more about a Matriarch’s business than she knew herself.

  And that was not the whole of the reason for his hesitation. Haval had said there had definitely been people living in that apartment before the Matriarch had started dreaming. Adam had no way of knowing whether or not those people would—or could—return to the home she had reclaimed. He had no idea what had happened to them.

  He knew only that if Haval was correct, they had ceased to exist the minute she had sought a dream of family and home.

  One wanted, when one was young, family. Love. The Voyani considered the Voyanne their home—but even they dreamed of a time when they could at last set down their burdens and rest. The Voyanne was a road to be walked until they could return home.

  But the Voyani could not merely wish something into being.

  Even Adam, as a small child, had wished. He had daydreamed. He now understood how dangerous even the most benign of daydreams could be if they could be made real instantly.

  “It was real,” Jewel said, accepting the filled tea ball.

  He said nothing.

  “Tell me what happened. Tell me what happened to you.”

  As they walked, he did. She stopped him once or twice, to ask questions or to clarify for herself what he was describing; she didn’t seem best pleased to hear that Jarven had been not only in her forest on his own, but near her burning tree. But she kept turning the tea ball over and over in her hands as she listened.

  And when he got to the end, she said, “I don’t know what happened to the people who were living in the apartment. You were right,” she added, voice dropping. “There’s no way those rooms were empty.”

  She looked at the ball again, and then looked up. “Carver’s alive. When Jester asked, I answered—he’s still alive.”

  “They know,” Adam replied. “They knew what it meant the minute you signed the word. Where are we going?”

  “Oh, outside.” She smiled at his expression. “You won’t need winter clothing where we’re going.”

  • • •

  She was right. The final door she touched opened into a forest. It was green and warm and noisy the way forests are noisy. There was a large rock in a small clearing—it wore a skirt of moss and was bathed in sunlight. He thought he recognized it.

  She led him to the rock and then sat across its gentle, concave surface; Adam joined her. “You’re worried,” she said, her knees folded up beneath her chin.

  “Not as worried as you are.”

  “You woke me.”

  “You woke yourself, I think. I was there, yes—but you saw me, and you remembered. I tried to wake you before that, and nothing happened. Whatever your dreams are now, they’re not like the dreams the Wardens manipulated.” He spoke Torra as well, for ease and for comfort. He didn’t dislike Weston, but to Adam, Weston was always going to be a merchant language, a language of commerce. Torra was the language of kin and family.

  She didn’t argue.

  “I couldn’t reach you at all without the Oracle’s intervention.”

  “Did you see her?” Jewel asked. It was a strange question, but Adam understood what she meant.

  “I didn’t look.”

  “No?”

  “I was trying to find you. I was focused only on that. But she’s the Oracle, a child of gods, and we already know that she can appear anywhere. She can animate stone and force it to speak with her voice.”

  “You think she sent you to Averalaan.” It wasn’t a question.

  But it wasn’t accurate, either. Adam frowned. After a pause in which he poked at the niggling doubt, he said, “No. I think she allowed me to enter your dreams.”

  “But you were in Averalaan.” She held up the tea ball; it caught sunlight, reflecting it on nearby tree trunks.

  He nodded again. “I think your dreams brought me to Averalaan.”

  “The wagon?”

  “Yes. I don’t understand it, but yes. I did enter your dreams.” Thought now coalesced into something he could capture with words. “I think I faded from here not when I touched the Oracle’s crystal, but when I opened the door of the Matriarch’s wagon and stepped into the city itself. If I had never found the wagon, I would not have found you—I think the Oracle gave me a vision of the wagon itself, but not—not more.”

  • • •

  At the end of the waking day, Jewel came to the small oasis. She had never owned a garden, no matter how small, and while she could be said to own the many gardens—some enclosed in expensive glass—of Terafin, she did not consider them hers. But she owned the forest into which those gardens and grounds now led. This oasis was not her forest; she had not created this small space.

  The earth beneath her feet, the trees above her head, the breeze that tugged at her hair, even the insects that buzzed near her ear, seemed to sing. She could not join them; she couldn’t pronoun
ce the words she heard. On the third day, she recognized the odd song as a name. A long, complicated name.

  “Yes,” the Oracle said. “It is mine.”

  And that made sense to Jewel. She was The Terafin, but she had the name she was born with. No one but den used it now. No one would until she died, and even then, only if some of what she loved and had built survived.

  The night that Adam had returned her to the Oracle’s caverns had been long and sleepless, by design. Adam had collapsed instantly; Jewel had collapsed slowly.

  “Will it always be like this?” she asked.

  The Oracle understood the question. “I do not know, daughter. You are not Evayne, and it was she I worked with most closely in all of your long history.” The history, Jewel thought, of mortals. “Had I the time, I would work thus with you—but this is your final day. You must leave—and leave soon. Your path is not as difficult to walk as hers has been and will be. But you could not walk it as she has. You are not god-born.”

  “Do you know what happened to the former occupants of that apartment?”

  “Do you not?”

  Jewel’s hands became fists. “I’ve spent all day searching.” She grimaced. “Nine hours, heart exposed, eyes watering. I can’t find anything.”

  “That is your answer, then.”

  Silence. Jewel forced herself to break it. “What do you mean?”

  “They do not exist, Jewel.”

  “They’re dead?”

  “That is not what I said. They do not exist. Not now.”

  “Did they?”

  “That is a question you should be able to answer at this point in your training. But you have spent a day searching. I have allowed it. You learn best when you have immediate incentive. You have now reached the point where the exercise and the search have nothing left to teach you.

  “You are not Evayne. You are Jewel Markess. You were born in, and of, Averalaan. Beneath your feet, the firstborn lay imprisoned in their long sleep, their dreams of failure and conquest. Across your bay, the god-born rule; the spires of the three stretch to the heights of sky. In your streets, the Kialli walk again. And in your garden, the Ellariannatte bloom.

  “You are not immortal. You are not a god. You are confined by time while you walk here. There are answers you might search for within your own lands; there are answers you search for in mine. But only in these places can you impede time’s flow, and even then, it is a pocket. You will age while you work and learn, even if time outside of you does not pass.