Oracle: The House War: Book Six

by Michelle West

  I don’t understand. What has changed? You said you didn’t recognize this hall.

  I did not. I do not recognize it now. But I understand what Lord Celleriant believes this place must be, and I understand, now, that these columns are not as they appear.

  What are they?

  Come, he said, and began to walk. Unless she wished to dismount—and given her position what must be a hundred feet about safe ground, she did not—she was a captive audience. Captive, she thought, to more than the Winter King and the heights; there was something about the statues that he now approached that she found compelling.

  They were beautiful, almost in the way the Winter Queen was, for all that they were stone. She glanced once at Celleriant; he did not nurse his hand, nor did he allow Kallandras to so much as look at it. If he was injured, it was minor, and minor injuries were of little note—or so said his bearing. But his eyes were dark, the curiosity, the muted wonder—which was almost all the wonder he exposed—guttered. He watched the Winter King in a tense silence; he did not move to join him.

  Come, Jewel. There is history here lost to all but the gods—and perhaps it is lost to them, as well.

  Celleriant doesn’t seem to care for it.

  You misunderstand. These halls were left standing as a monument and a warning to such as he.

  And not to you.

  Me? No. I am mortal.

  He was a stag that rode at the head of the Wild Hunt. He had lived far, far longer than any mortal of Jewel’s acquaintance except Avandar. He was not, by any definition Jewel accepted, mortal.

  It is not your definition that marks me, he replied. It is hers. I can travel any path her feet have touched; it is both her gift and her curse. But I cannot speak as Celleriant can; nor even as you do. If she knew that I walked here, it is not upon me that her wrath would fall. She could not expect that I would be immune to the grandeur and the beauty of the ancient. Not when it is so much kin to hers.

  And it was.

  She could not expect, he continued, as he walked, that you would be, if she conceived of your presence in this place at all.

  She didn’t bring mortals here?

  Jewel—there were no mortals in her Spring. As he spoke, he walked past the four women in their impressive, forbidding armor; he walked between the four who wore dresses that were so fine—even made, as they were, of a single color of stone—that the white dress she’d worn on the first day of The Terafin’s funeral seemed almost ordinary and unremarkable in comparison.

  Because she did not wish to hear cat complaints for the rest of the voyage, she kept this thought to herself; only the Winter King heard, and only the Winter King chuckled. He was, on the other hand, amused at the idea of outraged Snow. It was the only amusement in him. All else was given to awe with a tinge of unease.

  He reached the four who stood in various states of undress; their hair flowing as if under water. Stone expressions suggested gravity, gravitas; they suggested such confidence—or arrogance—that nudity did not diminish them; it did not make of them something to be gaped at, or even desired. No more did armor or cloth.

  But when he came to the last pair, Jewel stopped breathing for one long moment. The woman on her left . . . was pregnant.

  • • •

  The Winter King’s silence was one of incomprehension. What he saw made so little sense to him he was, for a moment, at a loss for words.

  Jewel, however, didn’t labor under the same confusion. She nudged the Winter King forward; he did not move. She wasn’t even certain he could hear her. Instead, she turned to Kallandras, who had not yet approached the last of the standing pairs.

  “Kallandras. Will the wild wind carry me for just a moment?”

  “Do not be stupid, stupid girl,” Shadow hissed.

  The Senniel bard nodded, although he cast one backward glance at Celleriant before the folds of his summoned wind carried him to where Jewel sat mounted. As Jewel’s, his eyes widened, his breath stilled. He spoke a word, and then another, and the wind lifted Jewel from the Winter King’s back; he tensed beneath her, returning slowly to himself.

  Terafin. Avandar, at the height of the arches, offered warning.

  The wind set her down gently by Kallandras’ side. Shadow landed beside her—between them—almost at the same time. It was clear that he didn’t want to be in the presence of these statues—but Angel did. She met her den-kin’s silent gaze, held it for a moment, and then nodded.

  As Celleriant had done before her, she approached a statue. And as the Arianni Lord had also done, she reached out to touch stone. Wind carried the scent of his burned flesh; her hand, however, was steady. There was something about pregnant women that made them seem like small miracles; that drew Jewel’s attention. She did not have, had never wanted, children—but there was something about the creation of life, the intimacy of carrying it so absolutely close to the heart, that she had always found compelling.

  One didn’t, of course, touch the rounded belly of a random stranger—but something about pregnancy made all kinds of people approach an expectant mother. Even Jewel’s Oma, a woman noted for her suspicion and hostility toward anything that didn’t bear some trace of her familial blood, softened and drew near when evidence of encroaching infant presented itself.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” Angel said; no one else spoke. Well, no one beside Shadow. The cat didn’t approve—but he disapproved of everything she did: what she ate, how she ate it, what she wore, how she wore it, how she spoke, how she didn’t speak, how she argued or didn’t argue.

  Jewel shook her head. She reached out and let her palm hover above the curve of naked, stone belly, lifting her head to meet the downcast eyes of a woman who appeared to be gazing at that swell of stomach. Her left hand cradled the lower part of that belly; the right rested at its height. There was, in this one statue, an absence of some of the condescension and arrogance that graced every other face; it made her look vastly more vulnerable.

  Her hair, however, did fall in such a way as to hide exposed breasts, and it seemed, as Jewel watched it, that the wind moved its strands.

  “Terafin?” Kallandras whispered.

  “Have you ever heard story or song about these women?”

  “No. I very much doubt that any living being has. One might ask the gods in the Between, but I do not think they would now answer.”

  “One god might.”

  “Yes, but he will not be found Between—and should he choose to grace the impudence of your question with answer, it is an answer you will pay for with your life.”

  She placed her hand against the exposed curve of flesh and jerked away almost immediately.

  Shadow hissed. The hiss was soft, and it died into silence as Jewel’s eyes widened.

  Her hand did not burn. Burning might have been less disturbing. Shaking her head, she once again laid her hand against the rounded curve.

  No, it had not been her imagination. The skin that she touched did not feel made of stone; it wasn’t carved or worked. It was flesh, it was warm. She had once or twice touched pregnant women, just to feel evidence of the life they carried within them kick her palm.

  Nothing else about the statue suggested life. Nothing. There was no movement of eye or lip, no disdain and no outrage—and had this woman been among the living, Jewel was certain there would have been, and that she would have deserved it for even daring to approach. “Adam.” She exhaled. “Snow, bring Adam to us.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I don’t care. Bring Adam here.”

  “Make me.”

  “With your permission, Terafin?” Kallandras asked. “I do not think it wise to descend into argument with Snow. Not in this place.”

  “Not ever, but she is stupid,” Shadow pointed out. He approached the feet—the bare feet—of the pregnant woman, and hissed at them, sw
atting them with unsheathed claws. Jewel heard the distinct sound of blade against stone, as if he were sharpening them. She didn’t approve of his choice of stone, and made that perfectly clear.

  He hissed.

  Celleriant, however, had had enough of Shadow; if he now gazed at the statues with revulsion or even dread, the respect at his core was profound. Jewel caught the bright flash of blue out of the corner of her eye and turned. Celleriant now bore sword and shield.

  Gods. “You deal with Lord Celleriant,” she told the Senniel bard. “I’ll deal with intransigent cats.”

  It was not a burden to Kallandras to step between Shadow and Celleriant; it was not, his posture implied, a risk to have the whole of his back exposed to Shadow’s claws. What he said to Celleriant, no one else could hear—and Jewel thought, for no reason she would have been able to explain, that that was somehow right.

  She dropped a hand on Shadow’s head; it had been easier months ago when he’d been shorter. Adam came drifting down to where Jewel stood; he found the lack of ground beneath his feet far more troubling than she did. That should have given her pause. It should have been more significant. But studying such significance was a luxury that she didn’t have time for at the moment.

  “Matriarch?”

  Odd that she could still find the time for immense frustration. She didn’t correct him. Months of correcting him amounted to almost nothing whenever events became too strange, too wild. “I want you to touch this statue,” she told him, forcing her voice to be steady.

  He approached the statue the same way he had once approached the Serra Diora in the stretch of Terrean that led, in the end, to the Sea of Sorrows. He approached her as he had the same Serra on a desert night: the most beautiful mortal woman Jewel had ever laid eyes on. Then, he had carried a lute in his hands, as an offering of solace and comfort. Now, his hands were empty.

  Empty, however, they had an entirely different power than they had possessed on the night he had carried Kallandras’ lute.

  Adam asked no questions. As the son of the Matriarch of Arkosa, he had learned that answers were costly; that questions were a burden and a danger that no one with any wisdom willingly risked. Matriarchs did not share their secrets; the living were famously bad at keeping anything secret, in the end. Angel tensed as Adam approached the statue. So did Shadow.

  She understood why.

  Adam was no more a child than she had been at his age—but neither she nor Angel were that age any longer, and at this remove, he seemed painfully young. The urge to protect him was powerful. But she had placed her life in his hands, and he had, at grave risk to his own, saved it. Child or no, it was his gift that defined him in this place.

  His gift and her willingness to use it.

  She saw his eyes widen in shock, but he didn’t jerk his hand away as Jewel had; instead, he lifted his other hand, and placed it beside the first. His dark, southern complexion gave way to something almost green-gray. She reached out and gently placed an arm around his shoulder; he leaned back into that arm as if to brace himself.

  “It’s alive, isn’t it?” she asked him. “The baby’s alive.”

  “It’s more—it’s worse—” Adam whispered, in Torra. He lifted hands; they shook; nor did they stop shaking when he clenched them in fists. He wheeled, the lack of ground beneath his feet forgotten in his distress. He approached the woman who stood as part of this pair, reached for her hand. Healers needed to have skin to skin contact—but she was all of stone.

  Jewel glanced at her palm. Stone.

  Adam did not examine his hands; he had no need. Nothing in him doubted what his touch told him. He traversed the columns of statues, passing between each with increasing speed. He clutched the hands of the statues, where hands were exposed, or faces, where they were not. He did not speak a word; all of his urgency found expression in either motion or a frozen immobility.

  Only when he stood at the foot of the columns did he stop.

  Jewel moved toward him with no will of her own; the air carried her at the whim of the bard, and let her down gently beside Adam. He was tense, his shoulders drawn inward as if to ward off a blow; he was staring at a space beyond her right arm as if he must see something—anything—other than the statues themselves.

  Celleriant drifted toward him, and with him came Kallandras; neither man spoke. Both had eyes for the healer.

  Avandar.

  Silence.

  Do you know who these women were?

  No. The Arianni are not known for their honesty, but in this case, trust Celleriant. If he does not know for certain, none among us—save perhaps your cursed cats—do.

  Does the Oracle?

  Of a certainty.

  Did she mean for me to see this?

  That, I cannot say. Even in my time, the Oracle’s treachery was rooted in simple fact. Or complex fact. She did not stoop to lie; those who chose to take her tests did. It was the lies they told themselves, in the end, that destroyed them; the Oracle allows for no lies. Remember this. What you see here is.

  I don’t understand what I see.

  Yes. That is the Oracle’s curse. Or her gift. Philosophers were split, down the centuries, over which it was.

  Would the gods know?

  Yes. But I am not certain the gods would answer if you asked. There is a pall of tragedy over this place. You will not, he added softly, reach the ears of the gods here. The lands between do not easily come into being upon the hidden paths.

  She set a gentle arm around Adam’s shoulders. After a long, silent breath, he slumped, the tension leaving his back, his arms. The color did not return to his face, and his eyes looked almost bruised.

  “Yes,” he whispered, although she did not repeat her earlier question. “Yes, the child is alive.”

  She didn’t ask him how that was possible, although she wanted to know. If these woman were Arianni in some fashion, childbirth might have rules that mortals did not share.

  He turned to her, and she drew him into her arms as if he were a younger child; she offered him shelter, of a kind.

  “What would you have me do?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know that there’s anything you can do.” She meant it. She spoke with conviction. But as the words left her lips, as they died into the watchful silence of too many silent men, she knew she was wrong.

  She wanted to send him back, then. To send him to Finch, to Terafin, to Averalaan Aramarelas, where he might, for a small time, be safe from truths such as these that had no place in either of their lives.

  That had had no place.

  He knew. She was not one of nature’s better liars; it was a skill she had learned only with time and effort, and moments of great vulnerability cut those lessons loose and set them adrift. She, therefore, chose her words with care. “What do you want to do?”

  He understood what she could not put into words: her uncertainty. Her fear. She had asked the wrong question. She was the Matriarch, here. She accepted it, finally, and fully. She wondered if Yollana, that ancient, terrifying pillar of living steel, felt the doubts Jewel herself now felt. She wondered if Yollana had seen magics such as these. What would she do? What would she dare?

  Yollana, like Jewel, was seer-born; unlike Jewel, she had never set foot upon the Oracle’s path. She relied, for guidance, on the whim of vision that arrived without warning.

  Jewel had had no dreams of these women. She had had no warning about these paths. “Are they all alive?” she asked him, her voice quiet, her arms steady.

  He nodded into her shoulder.

  There was a reason that Matriarchs did not allow themselves to be touched by the healer-born. A reason the Arianni likewise declined. A healer’s touch was not simple touch; it could not be. While they healed the injured, they might touch unguarded thoughts; they might enter them, examine them. If the healed man or woman was dyi
ng, the possibility became a certainty.

  These statues that were not flesh were not the stone they appeared to be. They were not—could not—be dying; what Adam touched in the brief contact could not bind him the way the dying did. She tightened her arms as if to say she wouldn’t allow it.

  “They are not mortal,” Kallandras said, surprising her. She glanced up, over Adam’s bowed head and curved back.

  “They couldn’t be.” She bent her head again. “Can they hear us?”

  He nodded.

  “They’re aware that we’re here.”

  He nodded again.

  “They don’t understand us.”

  This time he shook his head.

  Jewel, we must leave this place. We must leave it untouched, the Winter King said.

  We’ve already touched it. And there’s a baby—

  That is why we must leave. If these women are kin, in some fashion, to the Winter Queen, that woman, all appearances aside, cannot be with child.

  I think I know pregnancy when I see it.

  Were she mortal, I would not deny that. But she is not. She was not, if she is as she appears. The Winter Queen and her kind cannot bear children. They are Immortal.

  So? Gods have borne children. The firstborn are all, in theory, the offspring of the gods that walked this world.

  Do you imagine that those births are anything like yours?

  It had never occurred to her to wonder; birth was so much a part of life. When she heard the phrase “child of,” it conjured instant images of that process. It made the gods seem more human. It also made sense: if mortals were somehow the creation of the ancient gods, that there would be echoes of that divinity in the much shorter, much smaller lives of the mortals they created.

  You do not understand. Death is an artifact of birth. Where there is birth, death is inevitable. We use the word “child” or even offspring when we speak of the gods, of things ancient and immortal. We use the word “birth.” Both are metaphors and both are inexact.

  She’s pregnant. There is nothing metaphorical about it.

  Yes. That is very much what I now fear. But if she is pregnant, Jewel, she has not yet given birth. And if she does, she gives birth to death. Do not interfere in what you see.