Oracle: The House War: Book Six

by Michelle West

  In decades past, there were very, very few who could meet and hold that gaze. Duvari. Jarven. Ararath. Not his godfather, Hectore. Rath’s protégée, the young woman who was now The Terafin, could—but only when anger swamped her uncertainties.

  “Why have you accepted my involvement in Terafin affairs? I gave you my word that I would cease all my meddling and return to the store if you would but wake on your own.”

  “I didn’t wake on my own,” was his wife’s stiff reply.

  “It is unlike you to quibble trivialities, Hannerle.”

  She glared. The glare was comfortable and familiar. It was not, however, comforting. His wife was afraid.

  Haval understood Hannerle on an instinctive level; he always had. She was no more a mystery than The Terafin or her many allies. But she had a combination of characteristics that he found in very few. She was the sovereign of her domain, but she had always been willing to share the spaces she created. She considered her responsibilities burdens—but in the way that children were, to other couples.

  They had never had children.

  He wondered, now, how Hannerle might have changed if they had.

  And he wondered, as he observed her, his own expression remote and impenetrable, what had occurred while she slept. He felt the edge of anger; it was bracing. He was given to frequent irritation, but anger, seldom.

  “What happened?” he asked, after a long moment of silence.

  She frowned. “Don’t play games with me. You were present in the Terafin manse for my entire stay; you probably have a far better idea than I do.” She clasped her hands in her lap more tightly, and her knuckles whitened. Her skin was pale, and her cheeks, hollow. Months of forced inactivity had taken their toll.

  And that would, of course, affect her. She required her home, her space, the rules of her carefully disordered life. She needed—had needed—her husband to be part of that. He had, of course, fully expected to dance around the implacable ultimatum he expected to be handed the moment she realized she was no longer trapped in sleep.

  He had not expected that no ultimatum would be forthcoming.

  He knew his wife. There was only one reason she would forgo what was absolutely her right. “Hannerle.” He did not touch her again. She had withdrawn in place, and touching Hannerle when she was so barely self-contained had never been wise.

  She turned to stare out of the window. It was not, sadly, the window by which Haval now sat. He gentled his voice. “Hannerle.”

  She knew him. She did not know the details or particulars of his past; she never had. But she knew Haval. Perhaps that was the singular gift she had to give: she saw him. Facts were the detritus that, observed, confirmed what she knew—but Hannerle had never required outside confirmation of her knowledge.

  As proof, she said, sharply, “Jewel did not do anything. You’ve never felt threatened by her before—don’t start on my account.” When he failed to reply, she turned to glare at him. “I mean it, Haval. Don’t take this out on Jewel. Don’t you even think of taking it out on poor Finch.”

  “Hannerle, you misjudge me.” One brow rose as her lips thinned. He felt anger recede, but like any sharp-edged object, it left its mark. “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “So? You’ve never answered all of mine. I don’t recall answers being a condition of this marriage.”

  “Hannerle—”

  “I mean it. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to think about it. I want to go home. I want to go home while I can still believe I have one.” She exhaled, her shoulders curling inward, as if to ward off blows from an opponent Haval couldn’t see. “Will she survive, Haval?”

  “Who?”

  “Jewel.”

  He understood what she wanted from an answer, and it was not information. She wanted comfort. Unfortunately for both of them, she was far too perceptive to take comfort from meaningless phrases. “I do not know. I do not know where she now travels—but my conservative estimate is that the lands she now enters resemble the most startling elements of her personal chambers. She is unlikely to venture into friendly territory, but she numbers men of significant power among her small personal guard. If she is attacked—”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  He held up one placating hand. “It is not always clear what you mean.” But it was, now. “Hannerle, I am fond of The Terafin. I have always felt a debt of conscience to her.”

  Hannerle nodded. Jewel was one of the many subjects they discussed with care, skirting around the edges of events that could not be changed, and a sleeping anger that could be wakened.

  “I have followed—from a safe distance—her rise to power. It did not surprise me. But at the same time, it did. I could just as easily see her as the woman behind a shop that deals exclusively in fashions for the wealthy.”

  A grin tugged at the corner of his wife’s lips, but faded into grimace before it fell away. “She’s a good girl.”

  “She is mostly that, yes. I do not believe that she has ever done anything of which you’d disapprove—and not merely to avoid the cost of your disapproval, as I have. Hannerle, love, what did she show you? What did you see?”

  “She showed me nothing,” his wife replied. After a pause, she added, “I will not have you angry at her in my own house.”

  “We are demonstrably not in our home at the moment.” When she failed to reply, he added, “I have given my word that I will not lie to you. I will not, therefore, promise that I will not be angry; I know myself well enough.”

  “She showed me nothing,” Hannerle repeated. Her hands separated and curled into tighter fists. “But as you’ve guessed, I’m angry.”

  He had guessed she was afraid, but was wise enough to keep this to himself. “She is no longer the child she once was,” he replied, gentling his voice. “Were she, she would not be Terafin. You think of her as young—as young Jewel—because she was, when she first entered our lives. But she’s grown. She cannot be counted as a child forever.”

  “Do you understand what she faces?”

  His wife was one of the few people he knew who never failed to surprise him. But he considered her question with the same care he might have considered a question posed to him by the Kings themselves. “No. You have not seen Jewel’s personal chambers; I have. They are no longer part of the Terafin manse, although the doors that lead to—and from—them are.

  “You have seen her cats. They are the smallest part of the magic that now surrounds her, in my opinion. If Jewel herself understood what all of these things presaged, I would understand what she faced. But she does not.”

  “Do you understand it better than she does?”

  He smiled. “I have never been a modest man, Hannerle. I believe that I understand many things better than Jewel does. But in this, I am willing to admit that I am stymied. It does not suit me,” he added.

  “No. It doesn’t.” Her smile was weary, but she leaned—at last—into his shoulder. He slid an arm around her then. “She’s afraid.”

  “Yes. And she is wise to be so. I know very little of the dangers she now faces; I did not put much credence in children’s stories in my youth. I do not think what she faces will change her beyond all recognition—but yes, Hannerle, that is the heart of her fear. She has defined herself for the whole of her life by the family she’s built—and with a single exception, it is not one she can take with her while she travels.

  “She does not know what she will face. Nor do the wise. The only thing we can do for her is preserve the House.”

  “Can you,” she replied, putting the responsibility for it upon the correct shoulders, “while also preserving yourself?”

  “I have not changed, love. I have grown wiser, perhaps; I have become less competitive. Nothing I do for the House, or within it, will alter the substance of who I am. There is only one thing that could.
I will not pursue this if it will threaten you in any way.”

  She stiffened but did not withdraw. “You’d leave them on their own, then, because I demanded it?”

  “They are not children, Hannerle. Finch numbers, among her allies, the right-kin of the House. She will have the whole of the Merchant Authority at her disposal. She is no fool.”

  “She’s a—”

  “Young woman, yes. But like you, she has a spine of solid iron; she will not bend. She is more graceful in the way she refuses to bend, of course. Your home is the shop we’ve created between us; her home is House Terafin. She will not do less to protect it than you yourself would do were Elemental Fashion to be threatened. I am not certain that I have much to contribute to her success.”

  “Liar.”

  He chuckled. “I am attempting to be modest.”

  “I didn’t marry a humble man. If I believed you believe what you say, I’d be seriously worried about you.”

  “You already are.”

  She exhaled. “Yes. Because I want you to play your gods-cursed game. I would never, ever have said that would be possible—the wanting, I mean. I didn’t believe you’d ever stop the game.”

  “You know why I did.”

  “Yes. Because I couldn’t handle the cost.”

  “And now you can’t handle the cost of my inactivity?”

  “I know you’re right. I know they’re not children.”

  He waited.

  “But they’re like Jewel: they’ve never played the games you’ve played. I feel as if they’ll be walking blind into a situation which could kill them—and if they die, Haval, I’ll feel responsible.”

  “It will not be your fault. I am one man. If they die on my watch, I will not consider myself responsible.”

  “And you promised you’d never lie to me.”

  “I am not lying. While I understand the sentiments that The Terafin and her den invoke, I have trained men and women far younger than they to acts far more difficult. I understood the possible consequences before the training started—but I also understood the possible consequences were there no such men and women employed.

  “I cannot materially change either Finch or Teller ATerafin. They do not have the time or the resources necessary to learn what I might once have taught.”

  “Does anyone?”

  Haval did not reply. Sadly, Hannerle did not fail to notice.

  7th of Morel, 428 A.A.

  Terafin Manse, Averalaan Aramarelas

  Jester was fifteen minutes late. He spent those fifteen traversing the public galleries with a very junior servant who was new to the Household Staff. Servants were hired for temporary duties; it happened frequently. But they were not given a place on the Household Staff without earning it.

  Janni was new to the Staff, but not the manse; she was certainly new to the subtle changes in uniform. Her parents were inordinately proud of her new job, and she was therefore aware that she had much more to lose. Jester, like Carver, was fond of almost every element of the Household Staff. The exceptions, of course, were to be found in the senior echelons, and in the Master of the Household Staff herself.

  Jester navigated the world by finding the humor in any situation.

  The Master of the Household Staff starched her face, as far as Jester was concerned. She did not in any obvious way respond to Jester’s presence; nor would she. He was nominally adviser to a member of the House Council, after all. But she had ways of making the rest of the servants suffer.

  The servants themselves were willing to grouse about the Master of the Household Staff, but they did so reluctantly—and not on short acquaintance. If they despised the woman—Jester did—they also held her in a fascinated awe that approached reverence. Jester couldn’t understand why; he found ample fodder for comic relief in her parched, pinched voice, but little else.

  “I don’t know if you’ll be assigned to the West Wing or not,” he told Janni. “But I have hopes.”

  Her smile was genuine and entirely inappropriate, which is probably why Jester liked it so much.

  “I, on the other hand, have an appointment which I was told I couldn’t afford to miss.”

  Her dark eyes rounded. “Are you late?”

  He smiled. “I’m always late. If I were on time, any number of older patricians would die of shock, and I don’t want that on my head.”

  Janni tilted her head to the side. In her strong, soft voice she said, “I’m not sure I believe that.”

  • • •

  Jester passed between the two House Guards stationed outside the double doors of the West Wing. They were new additions, and he didn’t care for them, but Teller—or Torvan, more likely—insisted on their presence. They weren’t Chosen. It had been decided—and by whom, Jester wanted to know—that the reassignment of Chosen only a week after Jay’s departure would send the wrong signals.

  Jester was not fond of the House Guard. They were the House equivalent of the magisterial guards, and looked every inch of it. He understood, thanks to Arann’s careful and oft-repeated explanations, that guards—any guards—did their job best by being intimidating; the whole point of their presence was to discourage illegal or inappropriate behavior.

  All of the den’s earliest run-ins with the magisterians had involved the thin line of the law: they took what they could, when things were desperate. But never when they weren’t. He grimaced as the doors closed at his back. Ellerson failed to emerge from the servants’ room.

  Ellerson, starched and consistently proper, had never been Jester’s favorite person. Ironic, then, that his absence could create this hollow, silent space that implied loss. But it was a loss he could face. Carver’s absence was in all ways harder. It brought back sharp, hard shadows: it was an echo of the end of their life in the twenty-fifth holding. Lefty, Fisher, and Lander lost; Duster dead on the day the rest of the den had made their narrow escape.

  Duster dead because if she weren’t, none of them would have made it out.

  He couldn’t remember Lefty’s face. He couldn’t remember Lander’s or Fisher’s, either. But Duster? She never left him. Every time he looked at Finch, he could see the echo of Duster’s face. He’d never talked to Duster much. She was always on edge; a joke could make her laugh one day, and the next, be cause for drawn dagger and spitting, furious threat.

  He understood the fury. He understood the pain.

  He understood how hard it had been for Duster to make the choice she’d made on the night a fat, self-indulgent patrician had come under her knife: kill cleanly, or walk away from the den.

  Jester would have been fine with the messy, lingering death. No one had asked him. Duster had asked Lander—only Lander. But Lander had been the most obviously broken by their shared experiences. In his pain, she saw a reflection of the pain she herself would never acknowledge. In Jester, she saw nothing.

  Jester saw nothing himself. Nothing except the family that had been so haphazardly built. It was an awkward, angry family, prone to theft when all other avenues of extending its sputtering existence had vanished—but it was his. He was part of it. Part of it, and separate from it, as well.

  He was like Duster; he didn’t acknowledge pain. Unlike Duster, he didn’t acknowledge anger. Neither made any difference.

  Jay was gone. This time—this time she’d had the time to say good-bye. This time, she’d taken Angel with her. Angel with his broken spire, his hair flat against the curve of a skull they’d almost never seen. He looked like a stranger. He talked like Angel. Having him here wouldn’t do any good; he’d climbed walls when Jay’d been in the South.

  That left Finch and Teller, the two quietest members of the den. Teller had a sense of humor. He liked cats. He hated confrontation, but he’d learned how to diffuse the worst of it. Barston, his starched taskmaster of a secretary had seen to that, over the years. Jester kn
ew that Teller was new to his role, and the role itself was as secure as Jay was. Jay, who wasn’t here. He still didn’t worry about Teller.

  He worried about Finch.

  He worried about Finch because he knew Finch intended to take the House in everything but name. She intended to launch herself into the game patricians played—using many of the same tools: the Merchant Authority, the external contacts she’d built there over the years, her position as House Council member—even if it was junior.

  No one, after the events of The Terafin’s funeral, could take the House from Jay. Not that they hadn’t tried, in one way or another, but Jay was just damn hard to kill.

  None of the rest of them were. None of the rest of them had ever been hard to kill. They’d arrived at House Terafin in Jay’s wake, and in that wake, they’d been installed in the West Wing. Because of Jay. Because of her vision.

  They were still standing in her wake, in most ways, but they’d bled into the House as well: Arann as Chosen, Finch as merchant, Teller as right-kin. Carver was their unofficial ear behind walls. Daine was their Alowan, and if he had far more edges than Alowan had, he was also sixty years younger. Angel was her liege.

  And Jester?

  He was Jester, same as before—in better clothing. He talked to the servants in Carver’s absence because someone had to, especially now. He knew how to be practically invisible in a crowd—and he did it by demanding attention, rather than hiding from it. But the attention he demanded was jovial, friendly, and entirely noncommittal; no one felt threatened by it.

  He opened the doors to the great room and entered.

  • • •

  Haval was standing by the fireplace, his hands behind his back, his clothing unusually austere. He wore no apron. Only when Jester closed the doors in his wake did the clothier turn.

  “You asked to speak with me,” Jester said, entering the room.

  “Demonstrably.”

  Jester sauntered over to the cabinet. “Are you drinking?”

  “It depends.”