“Fog,” she said. “Fog with Andrei in it.” Almost as afterthought, she added, “You shouldn’t move around here. It’s not safe.”
“Thank you for your opinion. You can see me?”
“I can see you with difficulty; you’re standing in Andrei’s shadow.”
“And Jarven?”
Jewel grimaced. “Jarven, I can see.”
Jarven chuckled. It was a dry sound; it was also a sharp one. “You need me, Terafin.” Jarven’s voice was so clear, it might have been the only voice in the fog.
“Terafin has always needed you.”
He waved the words away as irrelevant, and Jewel accepted this; they were. What The Terafin—what Amarais—had required of Jarven ATerafin she might have had from a handful of her best merchants. What he could offer now had changed, and Jewel was not at all happy to see it, because there was, about the merchant she had never trusted, something that spoke of, spoke to, her forest.
He knew. Of course he knew. He was very like Haval in his ability to observe. Haval didn’t trust him, but Haval didn’t trust anyone.
Nor should you, the Winter King said, echoing every argument about power and rulership they had ever had.
“What Terafin needs, Terafin, is defined by two things. The first: the House ruler. In this case, that would be you. But the second? Its enemies. You do not wish to make an enemy of me.”
• • •
Shadow stiffened, turning; he slid out from under Jewel’s hand before she could stop him. She had not been offended by Jarven’s words; she considered them as a merchant might. They were the opening steps of a negotiation, and at that, a negotiation that was purely business as usual.
“Shadow!”
The gray cat stalked across the foggy, shadowed terrain as if he owned it. But his steps did not turn whatever it was beneath his feet to stone—she knew the distinctive sound of cat claws against stone flooring.
Jarven glanced once at the cat, his eyes narrowing. “I would not suggest,” he began.
Shadow leaped. Night, growling, began to pace toward Jarven, but Jarven was no longer where the great gray cat landed.
“Shadow! Night!” She almost leaped forward, then stumbled because her feet did not move. Cursing—loudly—she repeated the names she had given the cats in such an offhand way. “Jarven is not an enemy, and I will be very, very angry if you hurt him!”
“Hurt him?” Shadow growled. “We will kill him.”
“We will eat him,” Night agreed.
Calliastra laughed.
Adam’s voice, thin and whispery, reached her—as did his hand. The hand steadied her completely. Adam was not a child, but he was not the age of the rest of her den. Maybe, she thought, as she reached for the hand that now rested on her arm, she needed his presence, not because he was healer-born—and powerful—but because he reminded her, by youth, by optimism, by his ready acceptance of life, of all the things she wanted to protect.
All the things that would perish if she made a wrong move here.
“I see,” he whispered, “what Hectore sees.”
“Do you see—”
“I think Hectore has always seen his servant as you see him now. But I see ocean, Matriarch. I see sand. I see distant spires on the horizon.”
“In the water?”
“No.” Silence. A beat, two, while Adam struggled with Weston. Weston was his language of respect, because it forced him to think about his choice of words. “The sand is in the Sea of Sorrows. The spires are there.” He hesitated. “I see trees, Terafin, such as we have never seen in the desert.”
Jewel did not think of any of this terrain as real. But Andrei was here, with Hectore. “When you say the sand is in the Sea of Sorrows—”
“Some part of these lands overlaps the desert.”
“You’re certain?”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
She frowned. “Why are you apologizing?”
“Because I do not think this path will lead to where you must go. I do not think it will return us to the city at the heart of your Empire.”
“Averalaan,” she said automatically. “Averalaan Aramarelas.”
“Yes.” She marked his hesitation as the fog around his face cleared enough that she could see his expression. “I think you are bringing me home.”
Home was hundreds of miles away from where she needed to be. Home was nowhere near the Winter Queen. She swallowed.
Shadow’s roar swamped anything she might have said. She meant to tell Adam that it wasn’t possible, but knew, of a sudden, that he was right. She was, somehow, taking him home. Or rather, Adam’s home was now their only escape.
But she saw the great movement of cloud and fog as the gray cat leaped, once again, for Jarven—and this time, she saw blood. It hung in the air like a fine, beaded necklace, absent the flesh that had shed it.
“You are stupid,” Shadow roared—at Jewel, of course. But his attacks on the Terafin merchant ceased the minute he drew blood. The blood remained. Jarven, who had clearly shed it, did not; he was nowhere near the cats. He looked mildly surprised; given the cut of his clothing—and the rents in it, which were not part of the initial design—Jewel would not have been surprised at outrage.
Night hissed at Jarven. It was the laughter hiss.
Shadow came back to Jewel’s side, impervious to her very real glare. And her fear, which was never far behind.
“Terafin,” Andrei said, “I believe you must gather your cats now. We will not have long.” He glanced at the blood that remained in the air, and added, “Have a care what you weave, maker. His blood is not kin to your blood, and his existence is thin and slender compared to your own.”
And the air said, “Of course it is not like ours—he is mortal.”
“He is mostly mortal,” Andrei replied, with gravity. “But so, too, is your master.”
“She is not our master.”
“You are not her master,” Andrei told the cat. He was talking, Jewel realized, to Snow—and Snow was answering. She felt relief in the midst of confusion.
As if he could hear her, Andrei said, “The fog that you see, Terafin, is not fog. What Hectore sees is what I—or some part of me—can see. What you see . . . is Snow.”
“Snow?”
“Yes.”
“The fog is . . . Snow?”
“Yes.”
“Do you see him as fog?”
“I? No, Terafin.”
“What do you see?”
“I see the tangle,” he replied. “I hear its many, many voices. They speak to me—or parts of me. You asked what the Winter King did to the cats. You asked why he turned them into stone, moving statues.”
“That’s not exactly what I asked.”
“Ah. Perhaps I am too aware of the answer to remember the question’s exact wording clearly.”
Hectore cleared his throat; as this was the third time he had done so, Andrei ceded the figurative floor to him. “I believe I met your Winter King.” He spoke with certainty.
Impossible, Jewel’s Winter King said.
“He was clearly a man, but his attendants were not. They were Lord Celleriant’s people—but far more fell in mood. He had built a road into the tangle, as Andrei calls it, to find the cats.” Hectore hesitated, eyeing the two that were visible to Jewel. “I do not see your white cat,” he finally said. “Andrei does. I . . . do not believe that the Winter King saw your cats as you now see them.”
“Your cats,” Shianne said quietly, “entered the tangle some long, long while ago. Before they did, they were not as you see them now.”
“How did you recognize them?” Jewel asked.
The question seemed to surprise Shianne, judging by her silence. As Jewel waited for her answer, she, too, grew in solidity, in clarity—as if the fog were reluctantly moving to cede some space to her. “I do not understand the question,” she finally admitted. And it seemed an admission, and even a costly one.
“You knew the cats when you
saw them. You offered advice on how they should be handled. Andrei seems to recognize—to see—Snow, when I can’t. If the mist, the fog, is Snow—and it must be, I’d know his voice anywhere—I can’t recognize it as Snow.” She could, however, recognize the hissing sound of the white cat’s laughter.
“You are too loud,” Snow then said. “And I am working.”
This caused Shianne to fall instantly silent. It didn’t have the same effect on Jewel. “What are you working on?”
The hissing reply was not laughter, this time. But the roar, the wild sound that reminded Jewel of breaking earth and fire, was gone. If she could not see her cat, he was present. Shadow came to sit by her; he was inspecting his paws—or perhaps claws—as if they displeased him.
“You were here,” Shadow told her. “You were stupid.”
“I am here,” she replied.
“Yes. You are here. And he is here. He is here. He will not recognize you.”
“Who?” But even as she said it, she knew. Without thought, without anything but instinct, she reached for the air—because the air was fog, and the fog was the third of her triumvirate of loud, whiny, obnoxious, and destructive cats. And the air coalesced—not smoothly, and not all at once, but in discrete chunks of white fur and the flesh that underlay it: a leg, an ear, a whisker, a feather. They hovered, bloodless and almost distinct as their own separate entities.
Snow hissed. “I am busy,” he snapped, and feathers smacked her wrist; her hand tingled. “I am too busy for you.”
Shadow snarled, and Night hissed laughter, and a white tail joined the other disparate parts, at a remove from the two solid cats, black and gray. At the center of these pieces, obviously alive, obviously part of a greater whole, while entirely separate from it, were beads of crimson and scarlet. Jarven’s blood.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” she said to the white cat.
“Because you are stupid. She says you don’t tell us how to behave, but she ignores him.” The she was not immediately identifiable, the him was. Jarven. “You are stuuuuuuupid. He is dangerous.”
“He can’t kill me while I have you.”
This seemed to offend Shadow. “Of course not!”
“He is too mortal to serve. You should have demanded his oath before you allowed this.”
“Snow—I didn’t allow anything.”
Snow’s shriek was comforting. The assertion that she was stupid, which came again, was also strangely comforting. Jewel had never, in her life, felt smart.
Calliastra chuckled as she, too, became completely visible, completely present. Beneath her feet—which were curiously bare—Jewel could now see sand. “You should feel honored,” she told Jewel, as she watched the beads that had once been blood—and might still be—come together in a short strand. “The eldest does not make, often, and if I understand what I have seen, he endeavors to create for you.”
“I don’t want it.”
Three shrieks, then.
“May I ask what it is?” Jarven said; it was the first time he had spoken since Shadow had launched himself so murderously.
“I have no idea,” Jewel replied. She was uneasy. People did not try to kill Jarven, not more than once.
“No, of course not. I did not mean the question for you.” In shredded clothing, he had a stillness, a straightness, that implied none of his dignity relied on the merely external.
Snow did not dignify the question with a response, and Jewel, in Snow’s position, would have. A very carefully worded, very carefully offered response, with as little actual information as she could manage.
“They serve her,” Shadow said—to Jarven. “You serve them. You should serve her.”
“She is Terafin. I am ATerafin. Of course I serve her.”
“You don’t understand service.”
“Because I am mortal?”
“Because you are Jarven,” Jewel said, before Shadow could. “You only barely understand alliance.” This, on the other hand, was not carefully worded. Her legs hurt. She was tired, even exhausted. She had become amazed at just how much pain standing in one place could cause. She wanted to walk, to move, to find a place where she could sit and massage stiff legs, stiff feet.
Jarven’s smile was sharp, but fluid. “I understand alliance as men of power understand it. I understand alliance as Finch ATerafin understands it.”
“And as I don’t?”
“As you choose not to, yes. You are, I believe, an orphan. You chose to build family—a choice I did not myself make, when I found myself in your circumstance. And, perhaps, had I met you at the age I found myself alone in the world, I might have become like your Finch. Ah, no, like your Jester. I did not. I chose to see—clearly—what was set before me. I chose to see danger when it was present. I chose to be dangerous myself.
“I did not choose responsibility for others; I expect no one to take responsibility for me.”
“Lucille,” Jewel said, flat-voiced; she folded her arms.
“I do not expect that; I attempt, where possible, to avoid it. As you suspect, I value her. I do not value her enough to guarantee her life or safety were she to work against my interests. There is no one in my life, Terafin, who is of more value to me than I am. There are many in yours, and it makes rulership very complicated.
“A ruler has no friends.”
“And Hectore is not your friend?”
“Hectore is an old, worthy, adversary. He is comfortable to me because we both understand the rules of the game by which I play. But he is kin to you in some fashion; he is canny enough—powerful enough—that he can survive it. I was not.” Jarven’s smile deepened. “I see that I have surprised you.”
He had. He had not, judging by Hectore’s expression, surprised the Araven patris. And he had, judging from Andrei’s, annoyed the Araven servant.
“I am capable of a great deal of charm. I am honest when honesty will best serve my interests; I am dishonest, otherwise. Honesty bores me; it is singular.”
“It is not,” Jewel told him, her voice softer. “It is singular only when there’s one truth, but there are many.” She thought of Carver then.
“Perhaps. I see your cat has almost coalesced.”
She glanced at Snow; Jarven was right. His face, his jaws, his ears, and of course his fur, seemed to have knit themselves into mostly contiguous pieces, and in the right positions for them. But his jaws were open, and in his mouth was a string of red beads that ended in a pale, ivory clasp. It was ivory the way bones were, when bleached by sun and sand and wind.
And she remembered Gilafas’ words—the words he spoke that were not his own while he endeavored to create—and felt a pang. Snow trotted to her, as if he were carrying a dead—and old—fish. She held out her hands and he spat the bracelet—it was too short to be a necklace, at least for anyone over the age of four—into them.
“Could you—could you unmake this and—and take back . . .”
Shadow and Night hissed laughter—uproarious laughter, apparently. Snow simply looked disgusted, especially when Calliastra’s low, deep voice joined the black and the gray. “You will never understand how fortunate you are that the eldest have chosen to find your ignorance amusing.”
“If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather be less ignorant.”
“That,” Andrei said quietly, “is almost inevitable. I am sorry.” He glanced, once, at Jarven, and then his gaze moved to encompass the three cats. His expression, never friendly, soured as he considered them. “You should not have brought her here.”
“We found her here,” Shadow countered. He sniffed the air, his expression shifting into weary disgust. To his brothers he said, “He is almost here.”
“We should kill him,” Night said.
“We should eat him,” Snow agreed.
“I should very much like to see you try,” a new voice replied.
And Jewel, Terafin, seer, turned instantly toward a voice she recognized, and a man she did not. And she took a step
. Finally.
• • •
He was not a young man, in either appearance or bearing; there was none of the slenderness of youth, none of the softness or the uncertainty. Jewel herself was not a child, but she was not, and would never become, this man. He had none of Jarven’s ready charm, none of his apparent flexibility—but it was of Jarven she thought first.
Thinking it, she slid the bracelet around her bare wrist. The clasp, like the bracelet, was magical; it shut itself with an authoritative click that ivory shouldn’t have been able to make. She glanced once at Snow, who was staring—with some fascination—at the man Jewel had met, briefly, as the Winter King. The last Winter King. The final one.
The thought discomfited the stag who resided at the back of her mind, but he did not argue; he, too, recognized the man. This is what he was, Jewel’s Winter King said. This is what he was in the beginning.
You recognize him.
As do you, but not in the same way. He is Winter King. Can you not feel the season?
In the chill of his expression? Perhaps. But in her dreaming—and she thought of it, still, as a dream—he had been skeletal, all but dead, the armor that encased him holding his bones in place.
Yes, the former Tor Amanion said. He was strong, in the end, in a way none of his forebears were. He wished to win, and the desire for victory was absolute; he cut himself off from the Winter Queen, and no yearning, no desire, could force him to return.
But Jewel said, No, I don’t think that’s it.
Oh? Chilly word.
He trusted that she would be strong enough, in the end, to reach him.
The Winter King that she rode did not, ever, criticize the master who had, in a moment of pique, ordered him to serve Jewel. He was therefore silent.
In the end, she did reach him. But not, Jewel added, on her own. She spoke without spite, and without satisfaction. Even the scions of gods were not islands. They were not absolute. And how could they be? What defined a ruler was subjects. In isolation, there were none. What defined a victory was defeat, and again, without the defeated, what point victory?
She looked up from her wrist, letting her hand fall to the side as she did.
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