Firstborn

by Michelle West

  The page led her to Master Gilafas’ room.

  • • •

  The door that led to the rooms of the most powerful man in the Empire was not what Jewel might otherwise have expected. It was narrow, short, and plain, and would have been at home protecting the contents of a closet. The surface of the wood had clearly been cared for, but it was deeply scratched in a familiar way. Jewel looked at her cat, lifting her brows in question.

  Shadow hissed. “It wasn’t me. It was Night.” Since the cats generally blamed each other for crimes both real and imagined, Jewel thought there was only a small chance that this was the truth.

  “I really like your cat,” the girl whispered. “I’ll wait outside.”

  But the cat, who preened slightly at attention from a young woman, flicked his wings. “We will leave a different way. If you wait here, you will starve.” He glanced at Jewel and added, “which would be better than dying of boredom.”

  • • •

  The room into which Jewel stepped was not empty; it was not, however, occupied by the guildmaster. It was a tidy room, lined with bookshelves; there was a writing table at its heart, with four worn and empty chairs around it. She hushed Shadow to listen for the sound of either movement or voice and was rewarded instantly by two things. The first: a small thread of sound, something musical that suggested a song. The second: a crash. It was the crash she responded to first. She ran.

  She found the guildmaster standing in the midst of—of all things—a small mountain of paintbrushes and palettes which had clearly not seen use in a while. He did not appear to be aware of them, or perhaps that was wrong; they appeared to have been on a shelf or table that had been in the way. As she watched, he shoved two books off a table with an irritable sweep of his right arm; they joined the brushes and the palettes on the floor with an audible thud.

  Teller would have shrieked in shocked outrage at the sight. Books were expensive and precious; to see them tossed off the table as if they were unwanted first drafts of complicated political letters would have been too much for him.

  “Master ADelios,” she said.

  He continued to hum, but there was a frenzied pitch to the tune as she drew near. Shadow flexed his claws. “Don’t even think it. I mean it.”

  “But he’s doing it. He won’t notice.”

  “They’re his things. He’s allowed to make a mess of his own things.”

  “Well, where are my things?” Shadow demanded.

  It was the cat’s angry demand that drew the guildmaster’s attention. He frowned, blinked; his voice lost the subtle, rising hum that Jewel had first heard. “I don’t know,” he said—to the cat. “I do not believe I have anything of yours in my personal rooms.”

  “In the other rooms?” the cat asked, as if it were natural that Gilafas would indeed have something in his possession that belonged to a winged predator.

  “Maybe. Some of the rooms are very old. And very strange.”

  Shadow hissed. “You call me strange?”

  “He said the rooms were strange, Shadow.” What she needed now was not a petulant, whiny cat, because that generally led to a petty, destructive cat.

  “Ah, yes. I did. I was looking for something,” he added, almost apologetically. He turned to Jewel. “Terafin.”

  He even started to bow.

  But the bow froze before he could complete it; his eyes rounded, his mouth opened, and he stared. It was different from the very obvious stares she’d received—or rather, her dress had received—previously.

  “What,” he asked, half frozen, half bent, “have you made of yourself?”

  • • •

  This was a dream.

  In dreams, you often knew things you knew nowhere else. You had parents who were not, in the waking world, your parents—but you didn’t question them in the dream. You didn’t deny them. You had den-kin you’d never seen, homes you’d never encountered. You had knowledge that was strictly of, and for, the dreaming.

  And she knew, thinking this, that she might never truly dream again. She knew what she was here for. And it was knowledge she didn’t have, or hadn’t had, until the dream had enfolded her, but it was also real.

  She straightened her shoulders, and for the first time in the presence of someone other than the Oracle, she reached into herself and withdrew her heart from the cavity of her chest.

  Or she started to make that attempt. The guildmaster caught both of her hands in his. “No,” he said. “Perhaps you know what you have made better than one who has not and could never make it. But it is a making, and I am a maker. Do not do this.”

  “This is the reason I left Averalaan. The reason I left home.”

  He glanced at the cat. “You could not find the materials you needed here? I have, once or twice, been forced to travel to do just that.”

  “No, Guildmaster. It was to make something of myself that I left. It is because I have succeeded that I am here.”

  He met and held her gaze. There was a weariness in his expression and an all-encompassing compassion that skirted dangerously close to the edge of pity. He did not, however, release her hands. “I believe,” he told her, “I have something for you.” He turned to one of the messy worktables and retrieved what looked, at this distance, like a key ring. He had released only one of her hands. “My apologies for any overfamiliarity. If we are not somehow attached, either you—or I—will become lost in these rooms. I cannot be guaranteed to find you again in time.”

  “I thought the pages—”

  “No, Terafin. The pages are not permitted beyond my workrooms. They are allowed to wander the halls to find it; it is good exercise for them and keeps them out of trouble. But they do not enter the heart of Fabril’s reach. Only the maker-born can.”

  “I’m not maker-born.”

  “I misspoke.” He hesitated. “It is my belief that you could both enter and leave—but where you would emerge, I do not know. You might travel the whole of Fabril’s creation and return. You might be lost to one dell, one landscape, and perish. Come. Before we leave, I wish you to see my butterflies.”

  • • •

  He led Jewel, hand warm in his, cat silent in their wake, to another room and, through it, to a small hall. The walls were stone, the ceilings short, almost squat. There were no windows; the whole of its short length was lit by magestones. Gilafas frowned. “You are not afraid of butterflies, are you?”

  She wasn’t, of course, but she no longer trusted butterflies to be butterflies—not in the dreaming. She did not explain this to Gilafas. She had explained it to almost no one. But Adam, were he here, might understand.

  Before she could answer his question, he continued. “Do you know, I had a student once? I did not want her. When she came to me, I did not want her.”

  “She wanted to become a maker?”

  “No, Terafin.” The door opened. “Or, perhaps, yes. Tell me, have you ever desired to become human?”

  • • •

  The room was full of butterflies. Jewel must have breathed because eventually she had to exhale—but she did not recall anything about the first few minutes in that room except the butterflies. They were not, as they had been in prior dreams, glowing pale lights. They had the form, the shape, the implied delicacy of butterflies—but they were not, in the end, alive. As if each had been spun of blown glass, made whole, set down, these butterflies waited. Not all were translucent; some were green, some blue, some tinted gold; some were red, and some a delicate purple that was still too deep to be lilac.

  “There are birds, as well, but they do not appear to be nesting here today.”

  She frowned, trying to pick up the shattered thread of the guildmaster’s conversation. It was difficult. “You made these?” she whispered.

  As if her voice was breeze—or wind—the butterflies moved. Some closed their wings, and some took to air, fluttering as if agitated or excited. She froze.

  “If you don’t close your mouth, they will fly in, stupid
girl.”

  She snapped her jaw shut but inhaled sharply when she heard the cat flexing his claws against the stone floor. “Do not even think of harming a single one, Shadow. I mean it.”

  “They are not real.”

  “They are.”

  Shadow hissed. “They are not alive. I cannot kill them.”

  “Don’t break them. Please.”

  Gilafas waited until this exchange reached its natural conclusion before he answered her question. “No, Terafin. These were made—at least I believe they were made—by my student.”

  “The one you didn’t want.”

  “The only Artisan ever born who I believe might rival Fabril at the peak of his powers, yes.”

  • • •

  The butterflies had an affinity for Master Gilafas which was immediately obvious. They surrendered their various perches, seeking instead like space across his arms, his shoulders, the top of his head. Some, like enterprising children, landed on the tops of shoes almost hidden by the drape of his working robes.

  “Can you hear them?” he asked softly.

  She listened. Whatever he could hear, she could not. But she did not doubt that he could, in this place. He was a portly, older man, but he looked like—not a god, not exactly, he was too solid for that, but perhaps like a fey sorcerer of stories of old. She was not afraid of him.

  She was afraid for him. And that was unwelcome. She had not come here for that.

  “Why did you come, stupid girl?” Shadow was staring at the butterflies, his claws twitching rhythmically.

  Jewel was staring at the only other glass in the room. At first glance, it looked like the centerpiece for a large window; it was of colored glass, like the windows in the naves of the great cathedrals on the Isle. But it was small, she thought, as she approached it.

  Small or no, it was so finely crafted she knew it for maker’s work the moment she laid eyes on it. Years of merchanting supplied numbers, figures, some normal way of assigning a value, all irrelevant. The stained glass work depicted a young woman, eyes closed, head slightly bowed. She was golden in cast, in tone; her hair, her skin, her eyelashes. Her lips were the deep but pale pink of the young—those healthy and well fed.

  She was the heart of this room. No, she was half of it.

  The other half was watching her.

  “Fabril made this place,” she said because she could think of nothing else to say.

  “So the guild has always believed.”

  Something about the phrasing gave her pause. “You don’t believe it?”

  “No. I have been told, however, that Fabril made it his own. Fabril was the greatest of the maker-born. He was without parallel.”

  A pause. Into it, Jewel said, “You don’t believe that mortals made this tower.”

  His smile was youthful and wise at the same time. “Very good, Terafin. I do not know who made it. I, like many, assumed it was Fabril’s reach for a reason. He was not guildmaster, in his time; I do not believe the guild as it is currently constituted existed. But the mortal maker-born were valued, even when the gods walked—or so I was once told.”

  “By who?” she asked; it was the only question she could think of asking.

  “By the Winter Queen.”

  • • •

  The temperature in the room plunged between one held breath and its escape.

  “I have something I have created for you, I believe.”

  Her eyes widened as the merchant experience returned in a rush. It had been implied, heavily, that she might preside over the ruin of her House—that she might witness the fall of Kings and Empire—but she had never assumed that ruin to be financial folly. No, she told herself. This is a dream. It’s a dream.

  “Stupid, stupid girl.”

  “Your companion is not terribly polite,” Gilafas said. But he smiled. “Yet it is heartening to see that the heart of a cat, no matter its size or ferocity, remains the same.”

  Shadow could not decide if this was an insult or not; it was said as if it were praise. While he puzzled, his own insults diminished.

  “I’m accustomed to it. It’s when they’re quiet that I’m really in trouble.” She swallowed. “I don’t believe I commissioned—”

  He swatted the words away, and butterflies rose from his hands as he did. “That piece,” he said, pointing to the stained-glass work, “was mine. It was a true making.” There was, in his voice, no pride at all. Jewel wondered then if the maker-born were driven like the seer-born—if the gift mastered them, and not the other way around; if it drove them, hurt them, confused them.

  It was the first time she had ever wondered.

  As if he could hear the question she had not asked—and it was a dream, anything was possible—he said, “I was disappointed when I had finished. Sometimes we know what we will craft; sometimes we do not. But I recognized it for what it is: a true work. That figure,” he added softly, “was the student of whom I spoke. Her name was Cessaly.”

  “Was?”

  “I do not know what she is called now. She is in the Winter lands, ruled by the Wild Hunt and their cold, cold Queen.” His smile was wan, and mostly sane. “Do you know, on the first day of The Terafin’s funeral rites, when I saw you in that dress, I was reminded of Winter? I was reminded of snow, and cold, and also of blood and death.

  “What I make, Terafin, is made; sometimes I do not understand its full purpose. But I understood the purpose of this window on the last night I saw Cessaly. Cessaly did not require a window such as this—and it is a window. She walked, one night, into the Winter—through one of Fabril’s many halls. I am not certain. I tried to follow. I tried to find her—and she was almost impossible to find on some days.

  “I would find her, hands almost bleeding, lips cracked; she had worked and worked and because we did not know where, there was no one to feed her, to make her drink, to stand guard at her back so reality itself did not destroy her.

  “I have some of the things she made; she left them. But it is not for me to decide who they were made for.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We make, Terafin. The creation is the drive. Only when we are finished—and some are never truly finished—do we understand who the creations are for. It is not irrelevant, not exactly, but it is not the reason we make when compelled.”

  “But the guild—”

  “Yes. The makers make. They craft. They are in command of what they make when they undertake commissions. But these? This window? They are not commissions. Or perhaps they are commissions of the soul; things that drive us that we cannot name because we cannot see it, cannot hear it, except in rare, rare moments.

  “This window was one. I came to understand what this window did. Or does. For the first time, I became profoundly grateful for my gift.”

  “What—what does it do?”

  “It is connected, always, to Cessaly.” His smile dimmed, but its ghost remained comfortably on his face; he was lost for a moment in memory, and some of that memory was good. But it was shadowed—as memories often are—by loss. She did not ask.

  “These butterflies—”

  “Cessaly made them. Cessaly makes them. They come through the window and into this room. The birds were later inventions, but they came through this window as well.”

  “Can they return?”

  “I do not think they have ever tried. They are not, as you understand it, alive—but they are like little vessels. They are,” he added, the smile deepening, “for me. While they come, I know she is well. She is making, and she is allowed to make what she is moved to make. She was always in search of materials here; she would wander dreadfully in her urgent need to find them, and she could not clearly tell us what she needed most of the time.

  “I want to find her. I am sorry—I wander, it is my age. I have desired to find her since the night she—she left. I believe, with your help, I might do so, at last.”

  “The Winter is not a safe place for you,” Jewel replied, before tho
ught closed her mouth.

  “I know. But the Winter Queen is said to value the maker-born, and it is clear Cessaly is alive, and in some fashion, she is content.” He exhaled. “At least that is the story I tell myself, but I cannot completely believe it—it is too infused with my desire to be able to do so.

  “When you return, you will agree to allow me to accompany you, or you will not leave through this door.”

  Jewel was confused. Shadow stepped—far more heavily than was warranted—on her foot. “Return?”

  He turned to her, then, the smile sliding from his face. A man of power, an autocratic man who was accustomed to having his own way, remained. It was both frightening and comforting—because this man, she could fight.

  “You will return to your home,” he replied, voice soft. “You are searching, Terafin, perhaps as I have been searching. You have not yet finished; you require passage.”

  She stared at him, thinking this is a dream. And as the rest, it was both true and false. “It’s not for my sake that I require it,” she said at last, attempting to choose her words with care, as one did not, in a dream. “It is for the sake of this city, for the people who live within these walls.”

  “There has been enough sacrifice,” was his angry reply. “There has been enough loss for the sake of this city, this Empire, these people. I had no choice but to pay the cost—no, even that is wrong. But I have sacrificed enough. I have searched, Terafin. Did you know? I have studied. I have besieged the Order of Knowledge with demands for information and lore.

  “Only one of their members was even remotely useful, and he is no longer resident within his rooms there. He is now, if rumor is to be believed, resident within yours.”