His nod was tight and controlled.
“But I trust you less than I trust my Chosen.”
That is wise.
It’s not because he’s powerful that I don’t trust him. It’s what he is. Who he is.
“You’ve said these statues should remain untouched. Fine. I’m not a servant of the White Lady; the most I could aspire to be is her slave—and I’m never going to be that. Tell me why I should walk away. And don’t tell me it’s because that’s what she wants. Tell me why she wants it. Tell me why I should care.”
“You do not understand what you see.”
“No. I don’t. What I see is a pregnant woman. What Adam sees is that she wanted the child she was carrying. What I’m guessing is that all twelve of these women are captive because that one woman was pregnant. I understand that in the lives of the Arianni there is only one woman. I’ve met mortals who felt very much the same way: they wanted—gods know why—all male attention, all focus, upon themselves.
“And I’m certain in one or two cases that the corrosive jealousy behind that desire did cause deaths. But this isn’t death. It’s true: the Winter Queen is peerless, in my experience. She is not the only child of gods that I’ve met—but she is, without question, the most compelling. The most beautiful.
“Yet I think it possible that these twelve, were they to move and breathe and speak, would be her equal. Is that why they’re here?”
Terafin, the Senniel bard said, his voice so soft she might not have heard it were he not bard-born. He does not know. This path was made for you—but what lies upon and across it was not. If I understand the Oracle at all—and I do not make that claim—this is your test. It is the first of many.
“I don’t want to make a mistake.” Jewel did not look at the bard. “Celleriant, I’m seer-born. I’ve lived my life by my instincts.”
“And your instincts have never failed you?”
“Of course they have. My instincts are not predictable; they’re not under my control. They come and go as they please. I don’t get to choose the warnings offered; I accept them when they are.”
“And these vaunted instincts now?”
She looked, once again, to Adam—who had not moved an inch. “They tell me nothing, now.”
Jewel, two internal voices said at once, with equal measures of dismay and annoyance.
“I’ve lived most of my life trusting instinct when it arrives. I don’t even think about it. But I’ve also learned that where instinct is lacking, decisions still have to be made. In those cases, I rely on advisers and personal experience; I make educated guesses. Sometimes, it doesn’t work out.”
“You cannot compare the decisions you make in House Terafin with the decisions you will make here.” He was struggling to contain his obvious disgust at the implied comparison.
She wasn’t certain why he made the attempt.
No, you are not, the Winter King said. But that is because you do not understand the nature of his vow; nor do you fully comprehend why he made it.
You don’t understand it, either, was her flat reply.
He chuckled. In this, you are correct. The amusement fell away from his internal voice. I know who he served. You met her, much diminished, upon the hidden paths near Scarran. You have never seen her—and will never see her—at the height of her power; if you had, you would not so greatly fear the god the wise do not name. She was his equal upon fields of war, and in its many endeavors. You cannot imagine, he continued, his voice growing remote, that you are in any way her equal. You are not. You cannot be.
Jewel felt no need to argue. The Winter King stated fact, no more.
You do not understand the cost to Lord Celleriant. It is my belief that he did not fully understand it, either; he thought of glory and war and death, because those are the shadows you now cast. He thought he saw—in your power—some path by which the White Lady might once again take to, and hold, the field. And she would do so in Summer, and it is a Summer that most believed would never come again.
Jewel was silent. The silence, as she met Celleriant’s unwavering gaze, might go on forever. She was not, in the end, comfortable with silent spaces; they spoke to her of absence and death. He did not blink; she did, but this was not a contest of simple stares.
Adam surprised them both; he came to stand by her side. She glanced at him, and then immediately over his shoulder to the Senniel bard; the Senniel bard met her eyes in the same silence that held them all. But there were so many words beneath that silence.
She raised one hand; no one watching could mistake the gesture for a polite request for attention. Her palm was callused; it was not scarred—but unscarred or not, it had been cut, and blood had been shed, and blood mingled, to seal Celleriant’s oath.
She had made no like oath to him. No explicit oath. But she had hoped, at the end of either her life or this war, he might find his way back to the White Lady.
“Things change,” she told him quietly. “Even gods. I ask you again: tell me why I should not do this. Make me believe, given what you’ve observed of my life to date, that I would be committing a crime.”
“You do not even know what you will do,” he replied, his voice less heated.
“Yes, I do. I’ll trust Adam.”
Celleriant stared at the Voyani boy. His sword faded from view. “And if he does what I suspect he intends?”
“I don’t know. They are not, and could not be, my prisoners; there’s every possibility that freed, they would agree with you and attempt to kill me.”
“We are not a people who are without a sense of obligation or gratitude,” was his stiff reply.
Jewel said nothing. Adam spoke her name. She turned from Celleriant, Adam by her side, and she moved between the columns until they both came to rest in front of the woman who was with child.
“What does the wind whisper?” she asked the bard.
“A name,” Kallandras replied. “But the wind fears nothing; it is, in the end, responsible to and for no one; the stories it tells are entirely of its context, and one must tease meaning out of them only afterward.”
“What name?” Adam asked.
Kallandras smiled. “You will know it, if you can heal the damage done here. If you cannot, I will let the wind keep its secrets; they are not safely spoken of on this road. Or perhaps,” he added, as he gazed into a distance of blue sky and scudding cloud, “at all.”
• • •
Adam drew breath, exhaled, and turned to face Jewel; she placed one hand on his shoulder—whether to steady him or herself, she was uncertain. The bracelet on her wrist was warm enough now it was almost uncomfortable. She wondered if it would burn her, or if it would itself crumble to ash, and she felt a ridiculous pang of loss at the thought.
I never said, she told the Winter King, before he could speak, that I did not see what you saw in her. I never said I was immune to it. There are just things I want more.
There is nothing unique about what you want.
No. But unique doesn’t matter.
Adam placed both of his palms against the curve of the woman’s exposed belly. Jewel hesitated before she did the same. She could not later say why she felt compelled to do so. But this second contact was no less disturbing than the first, even though she now expected visual stone to feel like warm flesh; she felt movement beneath her hands. The child was alive.
She lifted her chin, looking up as Adam closed his eyes and bowed his head; she looked down as his knees folded. He did not fall; the wind bore his weight, just as it bore Jewel’s.
• • •
Adam had touched many pregnant women before. He had attended births, and on occasion, the resulting funerals of either mother or child. Childbirth was desired as much as pregnancy was oft feared; it gave life, and took life. But without children, the Arkosans were doomed to history.
&
nbsp; Within the controlled environs of the Houses of Healing, under Levec’s curmudgeonly tutelage, he had—as healer—touched pregnant women. He was not given leave to attend actual births; Levec did not trust him to remain aloof. The dying, in the opinion of the old bear of a healer, were dying no matter what age they were, and Adam did not have the fortitude to ignore the imperative to bring them back.
This implied that Levec did, and Adam was privately uncertain that was true. Levec could be—and usually was—unpleasant to outsiders. But he had almost as proprietary a concern for the injured and the ill as he did for the healers who lived within his domain. They were his responsibility, which meant on some visceral level they were his.
So was Adam, but Adam had never minded it; he found it natural. Levec in his very worst mood caused a shadow of the fear that Adam’s mother had; there was nothing the older healer could say or do that came close to some of the decisions undertaken by the Matriarch. Some of the newer healers, on the other hand, found him terrifying.
But expectant mothers did not. And Adam had never personally terrified anyone, not even the small children it had been his responsibility to care for. Visiting mothers to be were not common in the Houses of Healing, and they were almost always well-moneyed; Levec used wealth as a barrier to keep most of the many people contained in the city away.
Adam had been allowed to attend Levec during these visits. Adam had been uncertain why; he had, he told Levec, a lot of experience with expectant mothers.
“As a healer?” was Levec’s gruff bark of a question.
The answer—which Levec knew well—was no. His gift had not yet appeared the last time he had lived among women who were with child.
“You will find the experience very different,” Levec told him. “And if you still intend to return to your family—”
“I do.”
“Then it will be valuable to encounter the difference in the company of someone who can answer the many questions you will have after the fact.”
• • •
Childbirth was natural. Pregnancy was natural. The circumstances that surrounded either could be dire, tainting the fact of the child’s existence. Adam understood this. The Voyani were matrilineal because one could be guaranteed to know who one’s mother was. Knowing the father, given the violence of the clansmen and the lonelier stretches of life in the caravan, was far less guaranteed. But children were always considered good, even when the food was scarce and the lack of rains guaranteed that the coming months would be lean and harsh.
Children were the only future the Voyani had. It was not unheard of for the elderly to simply disappear into forests when the number of surviving children grew. All but the Matriarchs.
It had never occurred to Adam to question the fact of pregnancy or childbirth before. As he learned to use and control his power—although Levec was never entirely impressed by his efforts—it remained a simple fact of life, like breathing or sleeping.
Not until Levec invited him to attend an examination of Lady Bernice—a woman related in some fashion to the jovial and implacable Hectore of Araven—had that changed. It was not that the Imperial attitude toward children differed so greatly from the Voyani attitude—although it did, in ways that were both obvious and subtle; it was the physical fact of it.
There were two lives that were one. Meshed, entwined, they relied on the beating of one heart, the breathing of one set of lungs; this, he was familiar with. But they were not a simple, single body—if a body could be said, by a healer, to be simple.
They grew together, and simultaneously grew apart, the one waxing and the other waning. Levec had been unimpressed by his attempt to describe what his hands had touched, to wrap knowledge that his gift had given in words that might be understood by those not blessed by a similar gift.
Levec was so blessed, but he considered the attempt maudlin and sentimental. He was not a great lover of pets, but kept cats because they controlled the mouse population. He considered the pregnancy of cats to be similar. Adam was almost speechless. Almost.
But Levec had not finished, and Adam was able to chart the course of the pregnancy as it progressed. He was cautious, as Levec commanded, but curious. He could sense Bernice’s thoughts; her tiredness, her annoyance at the size and shape of her own body, made foreign and strange by something that was nevertheless some part of it; her fear of childbirth and its possible consequences—to herself, and to the child.
Her fear of the child itself. Her hope for, her dreams of, that same child. These were the stories she told herself; they were almost carved in her flesh. But flesh was not stone; it shifted and changed with the passage of time.
“All things must,” Levec told him. “This is the last time you will see Bernice unless she comes to visit after her son is born.”
It was a son. Levec had not chosen to divulge that information to Bernice, although of course he knew. Adam was uncertain why, but Levec could be petty when annoyed, and apparently one of the relatives of Bernice had crossed some invisible line with the older healer. He contented himself with a rather smug silence.
Having since met that relative, Adam regretted that he had not whispered the truth to Bernice, although Levec would have boxed his ears. He could not speak of it after, because the baby did not survive. Bernice survived only with Levec’s intervention; she was sent from the healerie as soon as she could be safely moved. Which meant, Adam thought, that she, too, had almost perished.
He did not understand.
“There are healers in the Houses. There are healers you consider more talented than you—why couldn’t you have called one of us?”
“Us, is it?” Levec asked, the single line of brow rising into the deeper creases of forehead.
A frown was not enough to quell Adam’s sense of betrayal and, yes, anger. “You have said yourself that my talent far surpasses yours, in your own opinion!”
“Your talent, yes. But you lack wisdom, Adam. You lack bitter experience. And so, because I am tired and weary, I will speak of my own experience.”
This surprised Adam; had he not been so upset, it might have silenced him. “We walk different paths, Healer Levec. Your experience and mine are not guaranteed to be the same—and even if we face the same circumstance, our approach and our departure might differ completely!” He spoke in Torra.
Levec’s Torra was not up to the task.
“When you touched Bernice the final time, you sensed the baby.”
Adam folded arms tightly across his chest and nodded.
“Tell me, what were his thoughts?”
“We are not to touch the thoughts—”
“Spare me. I have asked you a question. Answer it.” When Adam failed to comply, he said, “It is almost impossible for someone of your power to touch the body alone. What you touch you must never speak of—to outsiders. But I am your master, and you will answer me.” Levec mirrored Adam’s stubborn gesture; on Levec it was vastly more forbidding.
Adam inhaled. Exhaled. He had learned through bitter experience that one did not cry while speaking. Not when your mother was Matriarch.
“He had almost no thought.”
Levec nodded. “But not none?”
“Not none. But there were no words—at all—for his experience, and his experience was so small. There was no ill will, and no good; there was no desire, no fear, no hope.” Seeing Levec’s expression, Adam added, “He has not lived. What thoughts would you expect?”
“Would that have changed, should he have survived?”
Exasperated, Adam said, “Yes!” Had they been in one of the rooms that Levec used for group discussions or classes, it would have stifled all conversation but Levec’s. They were not; they were in Levec’s private office—not the one into which he reluctantly allowed the nobility of this city.
“How quickly would that have changed, Adam?”
&nbs
p; “I don’t understand you.”
Levec repeated the question in Torra. It was a simple question.
“I don’t understand why you’re asking. In order to have thought—to think, in the end, the way we think—”
Levec snorted. “The way you think and the way I think are vastly different.”
“We think in words.”
“Do you?”
“We can put our thoughts into words. We can make ourselves understood.”
“Yes. We can. And that was learned. The infant could not learn that immediately. How long would it take?”
“Levec—”
“Longer than a day? Longer than week? Longer than a month?” Levec walked across the room and sat, heavily, in the chair on the other side of his desk. The desk, like the man behind it, was worn by use and time. “I was not always the man I am now.”
“No. Once, you were an infant, too.”
“Yes. But if I was not always the man I am now, I have some experience with healing. With healing,” he added softly, “and its cost. It is why I built the Houses of Healing. It is why I find, and rescue, young healers. I have money, now—and power. It is not as hard for me to find them as it was.
“When I was younger, I believed that my power was a gift. It was meant to preserve lives and to spare others the losses I myself had endured.”
Adam nodded.
“You are wondering how, or why, that changed.”
He nodded again.
Levec smiled. It was a tired, weary expression; it contained affection, but absolutely no mirth or joy. “I founded this House so that others might hold on to that belief for longer. Healers are treated with respect in this city. They are treated with caution.
“In other cities and in other towns—the cities and towns of my youth—they were treated with similar respect in some quarters. But in others, they were treated as commodities. They were valuable—but in the way gold is valuable. Men kill for gold,” he added quietly. “And when they find it, they hold on to it. Many a man has destroyed his life—and the lives of others—rather than let go.
Oracle: The House War: Book Six Page 26
