Oracle: The House War: Book Six

by Michelle West

  “Adam, tell me—are they even sane?”

  He nodded again. He trembled for a while and then grew still, lifting his chin from her shoulder, and lifting his own shoulders as well. Jewel closed her eyes; it was brief. “The mother. I have to ask one question about the mother.”

  He waited.

  She struggled to find the words. She felt the shadow of the Winter King’s fear as if she had swallowed it whole and made it a visceral part of herself. She did not understand what had happened here, but she understood that he was right: something would change, somehow, if things were not left alone.

  “Did she want this child?”

  He nodded.

  “Do you—did they tell you what happened to them?”

  He shook his head. “It’s not easy to touch them. But her voice was clearest, to me. The others—they are all weeping. They are all lost.” He hesitated, and then forged on. “When I call the dead back from the shores of the river, I find them because they are lost. They have not yet crossed the bridge; they have not yet found peace.

  “They weep, like that. They weep and they hear me when I call. These women will never reach the bridge, but it’s as if they’re inches from it.”

  “They do not walk that bridge,” Celleriant said. His voice held both ice and fire; his hands were not completely steady. Jewel wouldn’t have been surprised to see his sword and his shield come to those hands; she was in fact more surprised when they didn’t.

  “No,” was Adam’s grave—and surprisingly steady—reply. “They do not. They cannot see it; they will not find it on their own. They wander, instead. They speak a name.”

  “Do not speak that name here,” the Arianni Prince commanded.

  Adam frowned. “Why? It is a name you know. It is a name you speak. You speak it with reverence, and you speak it in sorrow.” He turned toward the statues, and added, “it is not different, for them.”

  “If they are here, they are here at her whim. They betrayed her. This is the price they must pay.”

  “Did they betray her in the same way the Sleepers did?” Jewel asked.

  Celleriant closed his eyes; platinum lashes rested against pale skin for a long moment before he opened them again. “Lord, I do not know. We are not mortals. We do not labor at the whim of the god-born Kings. We do not judge. There is no law but Ariane’s. There is no justice but hers. You think of right or wrong as if they are a cage, a law, unto themselves. There is no equivalent, for us. She is not beholden to any external laws; she is beholden to her own, and her oaths, when freely given.”

  “Do you feel no sympathy for the Sleepers, then?”

  “Does it signify anything?” Wind caressed his hair. He was otherwise motionless. “I understand why they made the choice they did. I also understand that there was a price to be paid for that choice. They knew what that price would be, and they accepted the cost.”

  “You have never seen this place before.”

  “No.”

  Jewel, be cautious. Two voices: Avandar’s and the Winter King’s.

  If I were cautious, we wouldn’t be here.

  “How are the Arianni born?”

  He glanced at her, his face expressionless. He then turned to Kallandras. “I am not certain I understand the question; do you?”

  Kallandras did not smile.

  “You speak, sometimes, of youth. Of your youth,” Jewel said, trying again. “You speak of that youth as we sometimes speak of our childhood.”

  “Ah. We were young, once. All of us.”

  “As young,” Jewel asked, “as these women?”

  “Lord, I do not know. What would you have me say? Or do? If they are truly alive, would you have me destroy them?”

  “No!”

  “Would you have me offer them pity, then? If they are as old as you fear, they will not thank you; nor will they, in the end, feel anything but contempt or rage for me. Pity such as you counsel is an insult; it implies that I am so certain of my power they are irrelevant.”

  “There is a difference between pity and sympathy.”

  “I have not seen it. I have not,” he added, when she opened her mouth, “made a careful study of mortals, but I have lived some months in your home. Mortals are noisy; they demand attention they could not otherwise merit, they are so inconsequential. They offer pity to each other.”

  “They do not offer pity. They offer sympathy.”

  “The difference must be subtle indeed.”

  “Pity is what we offer those who are so unfortunate we cannot conceive of living their lives. Sympathy is what we offer when we have lived their life, or when we’ve feared to have no choice but to live it. We offer it because we understand what the other person now faces.”

  “Ah. I do not understand what they face,” he replied.

  She surrendered. “Could she do this?”

  “Yes. It is her work. You cannot see it.”

  Jewel shook her head, and then reached up to shove hair out of her eyes. “Do you see the woman at the head of the column?”

  He said nothing. The wind grew stronger and colder while she waited for his reply. The Winter King’s disapproval was cold in an entirely different way; she ignored it with effort. Her palm, resting against the side of her leg, ached.

  She was not, now, the ruler Yollana of the Havalla Voyani was. She dreaded the day she must become that leader; she thought it would break her. And perhaps it had broken some part of Yollana as well, and she had sacrificed that part to preserve what she could of her kin. Triage was not a concept that Jewel welcomed; she understood it, when the figures were dry on paper and the people they affected were out of sight.

  She was a seer. Out of sight meant different things to different people.

  Her palm continued to ache; the pain grew stronger. She hadn’t—she would swear she hadn’t—been burned.

  Even captive, the Arianni were not without power or influence. Where we were forced to fight them, we killed, the Winter King said.

  I only touched—

  Yes.

  She turned, eyes widening, to face Adam. He had touched them all.

  Chapter Nine

  SHE WANTED TO SPEAK, but her throat was suddenly dry with fear. She had been silent this way many, many times in the past, but she never grew accustomed to it.

  Adam was here because she had asked him to accompany her.

  Adam had made contact with the statues of the Arianni because she had demanded it.

  Yes, Jewel. You are Matriarch to Adam. He accepts your word as law because your only goal is the preservation of your kin.

  She could have accepted that if she had asked him to take the risk with any deliberation; if she had moved him strategically; if she had had no other choice. But none of this was true in this instance. None.

  Not none, Jewel. You are seer-born, and this is the path that will test you. It will break you, or it will be your making, as all such tests are.

  They aren’t, she replied, thinking of the ways in which everyone she knew had been half-broken; they’d retained enough of their sanity to remake themselves, but not enough to become whole.

  That is the fate of humanity; we are fragile and simultaneously strong enough to keep moving. You are not here because you can see the end of every path you choose; you can barely see a yard in front of you now. You are here because you are seer-born.

  Avandar, if he—

  Yes?

  She shook her head.

  What, Jewel, will you decide to do?

  She raised her hand, turning the palm up toward her eyes. She examined it for blisters, looking for evidence of an injury that would justify the ache. Her hand was untouched.

  She offered it to Adam. “I’m not a Matriarch like Evallen or Yollana. You’ve already saved my life—at least once. There’s nothing about me that you
haven’t seen. I touched the statue first. My hand aches. I can’t see anything wrong with it because I can’t look the way you can.”

  He exhaled. “My mother—”

  “I know. And Yollana would have chopped off her hand before asking for your opinion. But I can’t be either Evallen or Yollana; I wasn’t raised to it.” She thought of her Oma and grimaced. “I wasn’t consistently raised to it.” Exhaling heavily she added, “I think you’re here because, in the end, Arkosa needs you to be here. What you can do, no other healer in Levec’s experience can do.

  “I don’t know if Levec would have felt what you—or I—felt on touch.”

  Kallandras said, “Terafin, with your permission?”

  “I think we’ve taken enough risks today.”

  But Kallandras was already moving. It is not your risk, but mine. In this case, it is not for your sake that I make the request.

  “Kallandras—”

  He flew swiftly beyond the reach of her voice, like graceful storm. The wind buoyed him, carried him, and dropped him ten feet; he laughed in delight, and she could not tell if it was feigned. But he came to a kind of rest in front of the pregnant woman, and he offered her a perfect, humble bow. Rules of etiquette differed by culture and class, as Jewel had found to her chagrin; she wasn’t certain what the Arianni would make of the gesture, if she saw it at all.

  He was a long time bowing; she thought he must be speaking. But he spoke—and listened—as bard, and in the end, he reached out and placed a very gentle hand upon the swell of rounded stomach.

  She was annoyed to find she was holding her breath. But she could not apparently remember to breathe until he said, “She is stone, to me. Perfect stone. Had you asked, I would have said she was maker-made.” He bowed again. The wind carried him back to Jewel. Or perhaps back to Celleriant. It was hard to tell.

  “Your hand doesn’t ache, does it?”

  “No, Terafin. I might touch a wall in any manse save yours with the same effect. If there is life within these statues, it is a life felt by Adam, and by you.”

  “Celleriant also—”

  “What he felt was danger and death, not life.”

  Avandar said, “There is an enchantment laid upon these pillars, which is to be expected given their location.”

  Kallandras nodded. “I do not believe Lord Celleriant felt flesh when he made contact; he felt fire and pain. These are not meant to be touched by one such as he.”

  And mortals, if the Winter King was right, hadn’t existed. They had, therefore, never been a consideration.

  “Was it a protective spell?” Jewel asked of Avandar.

  “I would consider it proscriptive rather than protective, but the enchantment could serve either purpose. It is an odd question,” the domicis added. “Is there a reason for it?”

  “Adam said he felt sorrow and longing.” Jewel understood both. “Not anger. Were I somehow entrapped this way, and capable of being both aware and sane for the duration, it’s not sorrow I’d feel. I’d be angry.”

  “You do not serve the White Lady.” Celleriant’s voice implied that ice could burn. And maybe, for the Arianni, it could. “There is no anger in us—not for her. She could cast us aside, she could send us to our deaths, and we would fear only that our deaths would not serve her purpose. She could,” he added softly, oh so softly, “order us to serve a mortal seer, and we would serve to the best and the fullest of our abilities.”

  Jewel closed her eyes.

  “And we would do so, Lord, because she desired it. And while we did as she commanded, we would dream of the Winter Court, and the Summer, but in so doing we would not dream of our kin; we would dream of the White Lady. You are mortal,” he said again. “You have seen the White Lady. You have faced her, challenged her, and you have survived. You think of her as beautiful. You believe that her beauty haunts your life; that it makes mockery of any other beauty.”

  Jewel swallowed, but nodded. “Beauty doesn’t mean to me what it means to you,” she finally said, as if this pale truth were somehow a defense.

  “Perhaps not. Yours is a gray, empty world, full of squat hovels and inconsequential lives. You could not understand, could not yearn for beauty and live in the lands you do.

  “If these women are, as you now fear, alive in some fashion, they once stood in the White Lady’s shadow. They are kin to me, not to you; they feel their loss and their sorrow at the White Lady’s absence. Sorrow tells you nothing about their fate; it tells you nothing about their crime.

  “And it tells you less than nothing about the intent and the desire of the White Lady.”

  • • •

  Jewel stood, now, at the back of the columns, not their head. She reached down and pulled up her sleeve. Twined around her wrist were three braided strands of hair, the braid so slender it should have been almost invisible. But it caught light and reflected it in a fine curved line, and where the wind was cold, a band of warmth lay against her skin. This, she thought, must be why she could touch the statues with fingers that failed to feel the stone her eyes saw.

  She wanted to take the bracelet off, and almost did; Celleriant’s hand closed around hers. He shook his head, mute, and she heeded the warning. “I only wanted to see if they—if they feel the same when I’m not wearing her gift.”

  “Do not part from that gift for any reason on these roads.” His tone implied that the last part of the sentence was superfluous, and some hint of the passion that underlay his previous words remained with her. She knew, were these three strands of hair in his keeping, he would die before they left it. And he would kill.

  She glanced at Adam, who had fallen silent and still while Celleriant spoke. The Arkosan boy now lifted his chin, awaiting her command. She had wondered what Yollana would do here. But even wondering, she knew. Yollana would touch nothing. She would allow no one else to touch anything, either. Her world was not this world; it was the world of the Voyanne. It was rough, and it had edges in the hidden and the ancient; she walked those edges only at great need.

  The Havallan Matriarch had made sacrifices in order to walk them. She made blood plans against inevitable necessity. Kinship was not proof against need; no one, not even Yollana herself, could be certain that they would be spared should Yollana deem death and sacrifice essential. The Matriarch had lost sight in one eye as the price she must pay for the crimes—and gods, they were crimes—she had committed against a handful of her kin in order to preserve the majority.

  Jewel understood that she could never be Yollana. She was grateful that Yollana existed—and more grateful that she was confined, in the end, to the Southern Dominion, a land that made harsh people and deserts. Choices made people; grim choices made grim people. Jewel understood that no matter how harsh her own childhood had been—with its loss and its abrupt end—she had never faced the choices that Yollana had.

  She was almost certain she could not face them, now. She bowed head, inhaled, counting breath. One. Two. Three. In the middle of air that had no ground for mooring, standing in front of living statues created by a woman who was kin to gods, and perhaps more powerful than most of them, the faces that came to her were her dead: Lefty. Lander. Fisher.

  Duster. Duster shrugged, as if to say fancy-ass statues weren’t of interest. But she carried two daggers, and her spine was straight and tall, the way it had always been just before she launched into her own kind of battles.

  Not her dead, then. But her living returned as well. It was Finch she saw. Finch. Teller. Arann. People who would never have come to her at all had she not been willing to make choices based entirely on a power that, itself, had roots in the hidden and the wild. Had she walked away from the things that were not her life and therefore not her problem, what kind of life would she have?

  Not this one.

  Not the life in which the family she’d built—kin, all, no matter what her Oma wo
uld have said—surrounded her, supported her, and, yes, loved her. She had brought only one of them with her, and she lifted her face to him now. Snow had taken to air again; he did not trust these statues, and given the rise of his fur, he considered them dangerous.

  Night had not landed at all.

  “Yes,” she told Adam.

  He said nothing.

  “If you can help them, help. If you feel you can free them, free them.” She heard Celleriant draw sword, and lifted one imperious hand.

  Turning to face him, she said, “Am I your lord, Celleriant? Do I hold your oath?”

  He stood, sword in hand, eyes glinting with the reflection of blue, harsh light.

  “This is not the first time I travel a path that Ariane would not have me travel,” she continued, when he failed to raise that blade—but also failed to answer her question. “It will not be the first time I choose to stand against her. Were it not for that choice—”

  “I would never have failed her,” Celleriant replied, voice low.

  Jewel acknowledged this without evident sympathy, not difficult in this case because she felt almost none. “Perhaps not. If you kill me, you will fail her now.”

  His brows rose. She felt wind enfold her, tugging her hair up and out of her face; she expected to move—or to be moved. She wasn’t. She was standing on thin air, her feet slightly separated, her hands stiff and straight by her sides.

  “I am, as you often say, weak in the parlance of your kin. I don’t doubt it. I don’t regret it. You hate the Lord of the Hells. The White Lady loathes him, as do I. But in your view of the world, hatred is almost meaningless. What he did to your kin—what he did to the White Lady—he had the power to do. You seem to prize power—all of you—without pausing to consider how it’s used. You consider mercy a weakness. You have no concept of justice that I understand, when all is said and done. As long as bad things are not done to you or yours, you don’t care.

  “We do. Maybe because we’re weak and we have to care. I don’t know, and at this point, I don’t care. You are bound to me by your own choice, is that right?”