Skirmish: A House War Novel

by West, Michelle

  “Or you’ll miss out on all the fun?”

  “Yessss.”

  Cats. Jewel looked at the leaves. They seemed to be, to her touch, the exact same leaves she had carried with her from the forests that had surrounded a castle made of glass—or ice; it belonged to the Winter King, after all. The Winter King and his only companions: these cats, winged so they might escape gravity; stone so they might escape harm.

  They were not stone now. They were not, she thought, cats. It made her wonder about the man the Winter King had once been before he had become Ariane’s. A lesson, if ever one was needed, about the nature of immortals and what they did to the mortals who weren’t even allowed to die without their intervention.

  She leaned into the fur of the gray cat, catching the thought before it unspooled. It was part of what she wanted, wasn’t it? To hold what she held; to keep it safe from harm for as long as she lived. To keep her den alive—always alive—no matter who might wish otherwise. Why? Because she loved them. Because they were hers. So, too, was the Winter King claimed, but Jewel was not Ariane. Not the Queen of Winter; not the leader of the Wild Hunt. Had he loved her?

  He must have. He must have, even if to Jewel love had seemed irrelevant to Ariane. It didn’t touch her; it didn’t change her; it didn’t show her the way.

  She held this thought as well. She had come, terrified, to the Terafin manse in the grip of Avandar’s power, on the back of the Winter King. A different King, of course, and yet he, too, lived and died at the whim of the Winter Queen. Jewel shook her head to clear it, and some thoughts made way, but others clung, just as the vines of the tree had.

  She loved her den. She loved her House. She loved the ghost of the city she had once grown up in. All of her ghosts, she thought bitterly. The ghosts of her childhood; the ghosts of her parents; the ghost—the voluble ghost—of her Oma. She had never had the power to hold them by her side; she’d had the ability to weep or plead, no more—and weeping or pleading seldom turned hearts. But they’d lived—and died—as men and women; no forest had surrounded them; no Winter Queen had loved them and frozen them, fixing them in place until the last possible moment.

  And if you could? She whispered something to Arann as the sound of cracking wood grew louder. Would you have loved them? Or would they have become as animate as any chunk of ice, any frozen thing?

  You can’t save it all. You can’t. You can’t hold on to anything forever because people change. They grow. So did she, but she didn’t fear her own growth. They’re yours because you love them. You’re theirs, because you love them. But they are what they are.

  And Jewel? She was what she was, as well. She would let them fight this war; she would keep them by her side for as long as she could. But not longer, even had she the power. She had seen the shadow of eternity in Avandar’s dreams; if she looked now, she could see its edges in his eyes. And she never wanted that for her den. Or herself.

  But she would do everything she could to protect them. Maybe this was the sole advantage mortals had: everything she could do was not everything, in the end, that the Winter Queen could. She held out the leaf of silver and it shone in the darkness as the cats somewhere at her back began to growl.

  Chapter Nine

  TREES OF SILVER. Trees with leaves that were forever suspended in moonlight. Trees ancient, profound, rooted in mystery. Jewel had touched them. Had she changed them? No, not more than this: she had taken a leaf, one of thousands. Not more, not less. But she had returned to her home bearing its strangeness and its mystery, as if by so doing she could capture some tiny part of its essence. It had been real.

  It was real now.

  As real as the cat who padded across ground breaking nothing beneath its huge paws. She touched the space between his ears; his head was still warm. Not soft, not really—his fur was a little too rough for that. “We are,” the cat said gravely, “what we are.”

  She turned in the direction of the only source of light and said, “And they’re angry.”

  “Only a little. We were very bored.”

  “Where did the Winter King go?”

  “Oh, away. Away.”

  “And shouldn’t it be Summer?”

  “Summer, hmph. We are Winter cats.”

  Jewel stopped. She could see the trunks of the trees that comprised this forest, but never clearly; she could sense their height by the absence of sky. But there was space here, for her leaf; space for her and her cat. She knelt and the cat hissed. “What, this time?”

  “You cannot kneel here.”

  “Oh, but you can lie down on your belly and roll around the undergrowth.”

  “That’s different.”

  “How?”

  “We’re not asking for anything.”

  The men and women who’d frequented Gabriel ATerafin’s office over the decades would probably have claimed the same, and with as much truth. “I need to clear some space.”

  The cat hissed.

  Jewel stood. She stood because a new voice had entered the nearby sounds of annoyed cat, and she recognized it. Or part of it. It was cold, certain, and as eternal as the Winter seemed to be.

  She said, softly, “Demon.”

  The cat nodded and hissed. “Kneel if you must. It looks untidy, but it won’t kill you. Probably.”

  “It is not the path she must fear.”

  Jewel stiffened; the leaves were now trembling in her hands.

  “If she must kneel—and it is inevitable—she will kneel to me.”

  Turning, hair on the back of her neck rising in a way that reminded her suspiciously of the cats, she stepped onto the road. And it was a road, even if it looked like a slender footpath. She felt its shape against the soles of her feet, as if, for a moment, she’d left her shoes behind. As a child, she’d done it often, much to the consternation of her Oma, who’d considered shoelessness a crime against familial pride.

  Arann stepped in front of her; she put a hand on his shoulder and gently drew him to her side. Not behind; she wanted to, even if on the face of it it was stupid—but she didn’t. The white cat and black cat took to the air, circling the demon who stood on the path yards away from the single tree with its multiple mismatched leaves.

  He was not the first demon she’d seen, and she knew, meeting his gaze, that he wouldn’t be the last unless she died here. But the demons she had seen were not this man. He looked human.

  No, no that was wrong. He looked immortal, the way Celleriant did. The way the Winter Queen herself did; he was beautiful. It was the beauty of distant mountains; the beauty of the azure sky on a perfect, clear day; it was the beauty of things untouchable by those bound to ground—and life. His lips, in the darkness, were almost red, his eyes so dark they were black. He carried no weapons—but then again, on most days neither did Celleriant.

  She had no desire to see those weapons again. “To whom am I expected to kneel?”

  “To Lord Ishavriel of the Fist of God, Duke of the Hells.”

  She turned and glanced over her shoulder.

  “Do not look for aid, little mortal. You are lost here, and you have been found.”

  “No,” she replied, voice low. “I’m not lost. Don’t you recognize this, Lord Ishavriel? You’re on my turf, now.”

  His midnight brows rose over his perfect eyes; his lips tilted briefly at a smile. “These paths were not created for—or by—mortals. You aspire to much. But you are—as so many of your kind—out of your depth here.”

  The cats circled in utter silence. His expression rippled in a frown. “Leave,” he told them, the single word quiet and so deep Jewel wanted to obey it herself.

  The white cat hissed in reply.

  “I do not know how you came to be here. If you will not—or cannot—leave, that is your choice and your folly; interfere with me here and it will be your destruction.” He raised a hand and pointed at the tree of many leaves. Fire left his fingers, but not in a bolt; flames flickered and circled in the air as if they were vines. They
reached out, twisting and turning through that air, as if burrowing through something invisible toward the tree’s trunk.

  Lord Ishavriel’s brows rose again, but this time when they fell, they fell across narrowed eyes. “So,” he said.

  Jewel could never say why she did what she did next: She lifted the hands that contained the three leaves this one tree had returned to her keeping. They glowed like magelights in the darkness.

  “This is how your kin came to Terafin,” she said, voice a Winter voice. “You walked.” Heat melted ice and snow; heat of rage. She had learned not to rail against death; it was pointless and it hurt the people around her. Death was faceless and impersonal; it came, in the end, whether it was wanted or no.

  But not this death.

  Not these creatures.

  Was he immortal? Yes. And beautiful. So far above her comprehension that she shouldn’t have dared to raise hand against him. But she did; she wanted to raise so much more.

  “What are you doing?” the demon Lord demanded, shedding shadow as naturally as the three leaves now shed light. No, not just the three; all of the leaves on the tree.

  This Lord was her enemy. She felt the truth profoundly; it was so large she’d no words big enough to encompass it. He—or his kin—had come through her gardens, through her grounds; they had passed by her shrines and beneath the eyes of the most watchful and suspicious of men.

  Fire burned in the dark air; fire reached for the trunk of the tree. She felt it; saw the lone tree the cats had called hers as if it were natural. She lifted the leaves higher and as she did she felt it: the evening breeze, its chill a balance to the heat of fire. It felt familiar, although it wasn’t the wind that carried Celleriant; nor was it the wind that had carried the Senniel master bard, Kallandras.

  No. This was a sea breeze. A sea breeze in Henden, heavy with the promise of storm and salt, humid even in the dryness. She could taste it on her lips and her tongue, and it was blessedly familiar; the winds in the desert had had none of her life in them. The wind tugged at the leaves in her hands and she gave them over to its keeping. Hands now empty she made her way toward the tree under the watchful gaze of the man who had called himself a Duke of the Hells.

  She placed one palm against the tree, and it was familiar in the same way the breeze had been. It was not the tree in which Celleriant had almost ended his ancient existence; that had been the tree’s dream of itself; she understood that now, the insight as sharp as any vision that had ever moved her to action. But the tree was waking. So, too, was Jewel Markess ATerafin.

  She reached out for the fire. It was hot—she’d expected that. But hot or no, it didn’t actually burn her. Lord Ishavriel’s expression etched itself into memory—and it was a memory that would bring her comfort for as long as it remained. The fire stopped moving, but it kept its shape: twisting vines. Where it touched Jewel’s fingertips, those vines budded, and the buds burst into crackling red-orange leaves. Leaves this color she’d seen all her life, as the seasons turned. The seasons passed much more quickly now that she was no longer five or six. But they came, regardless, and in the Autumn, the leaves’ final burst of color was fanfare. It promised Winter. But it was born from the promise of Spring, was birthed the moment the branches budded. Spring, beginning, youth and growth; Autumn, end, but oh, the beauty of it.

  The tree reached out as Jewel did, and it touched those burning, flickering leaves, those echoes of the Autumn of her youth; a branch grew that was the shape and the color of fire.

  “It wasn’t the leaves,” Jewel said softly, to darkness and air.

  “No,” the gray cat agreed.

  The fire left Lord Ishavriel’s hands in a rush, leaping toward the tree, where it twined, leaves blooming. The bark beneath it didn’t burn; instead, the tree began to absorb the fire and the heat, just as it had absorbed one red leaf.

  The white cat dared to hiss, and this time, when fire left the demon Lord’s hands, it looked like red lightning. The cat dodged, but the fire had singed its fur.

  The wind rose as Jewel watched.

  She lifted her voice and she called; the Winter King came down the path at her back. She couldn’t see him immediately because she didn’t turn, but he was silver now, presence of moonlight, his tines gleaming like leaves—Winter leaves. He reached her side and lowered his head; she touched the tips of his antlers, no more. She’d no intention of mounting. Nor did he kneel to allow it; he waited, his eyes still blue, his gaze upon the demon.

  The demon drew his sword in response. It came from no sheath she could see, forming instead, full and whole, in his hand. His hair rose in a wind that seemed to be moving in a different direction from the wind she now felt. She knew that to leave the tree would be to stand in the same wind that moved that hair; it was also death.

  Do you see the path, Jewel? the Winter King asked, his voice soft.

  She looked at the ground beneath her feet. There had been roots there moments before; she’d almost tripped over at least three of them. They were gone, now. What remained in their wake were familiar cobblestones. They were worn, just as a footpath is, by the passage of so many feet across their surface; they were even cracked in places. She saw the shadows of familiar weeds; the weeds themselves were absent.

  “I see it.”

  Do you understand it?

  “Does it matter?” She shook her head, and curls adjusted their fall to land in her eyes. “I know where I am. I’m home. Even here, I’m home.” Lifting her voice, she said, “Go back. Go back to the Hells or wherever it is you call home these days.”

  In reply, the demon Lord lifted his sword and brought it down, blade first, into the path. The cobblestones shifted—they had to; the ground beneath them shuddered as if it was about to break. Roots lifted themselves from their dirt moorings; leaves fell from the height of distant branches.

  The wind took them, gathering them with a flourish that made their descent more a dance than a fall. She watched as they swirled; not even Lord Ishavriel’s presence could force her gaze away. Diamond tips brushed her cheeks; gold caught a moment in her hair. But the white-edged leaves of the Common’s symbolic forest caressed her forehead like velvet. Like familiar hands.

  Lord Ishavriel lifted his sword again, and this time, he brought it down against…air. It shuddered to a halt as red lightning spread in a fan around its edge. The Winter King’s head rose; his forehooves lifted as he reared. Jewel shook her head, her hand still on the tree.

  “You were right,” she told the gray cat.

  “Of course I was right. About what?”

  “There aren’t enough trees.” She smiled. The leaves rose above her head in a hollow column. For a moment they looked like butterflies. They left the folds of the twisting wind, heading in different directions, fluttering as a stray gust blew them back. She watched them the way she had once watched the light shows governed by the magi on the Day of Return. Some spread beyond whatever barrier kept Lord Ishavriel at bay, and he destroyed them, his fire consuming and melting them as they struggled.

  But he could not destroy them all; the winds carried them to and fro, where not even he could gather them. Nor did they seek just the air above the demon; they sought the forest behind Jewel’s back—and in greater number. Silver wings, golden wings, echoes of moonlight and sunlight, found purchase and haven along the trunks of standing shadows—the trees she could only barely see and had not yet touched.

  She said to the cat, “I’m dreaming.”

  The cat licked its paw and said nothing. But the Winter King said, No.

  Yes, she replied. But I’ve always had dreams. Sometimes they can change little bits of the world, that’s all.

  It is not the dreams that have changed them, Jewel. It is you.

  She shook her head. If the world could be changed that easily, it wouldn’t be my world. She thought of the holdings, of the orphans, of the farmers and the tavern owners and the merchants, big and small. Of the living, and of the dead. Her dead. So man
y people whose lives she would save if she could change them just by dreaming. So many deaths she’d erase. She’d dreamed about making those changes for most of her life.

  No?

  But the world was the world. Life was life, death was death. There were no guarantees, had never been any—there was struggle, and sometimes, there was triumph. Sometimes there was just bleak loss. Yet out of loss, the den had built its opposite, over the years. Out of sorrow, they’d learned—as if such lessons were needed—to appreciate joy. They remembered pain, yes; it rooted them. It grounded them. But it was the hope and the joy that sustained them.

  No. Those people, that world—it’s real. It’s real and it turns so slowly you might never notice it’s moving at all. But I need it. It defines me. It’s who I am. The demon’s sword struck air again, its descent frustrated by things unseen. She could feel the edge of its blade as if it were a distant pressure. Distant, inexorable. I’m dreaming, here. Dreaming. It’s not a nightmare, not yet. But, it’s my damn dream.