Oracle: The House War: Book Six

by Michelle West

  “But you have heard this before, and it is not of this that I intended to speak.”

  Any healer that lived in the buildings that comprised Levec’s Houses of Healing had, of course, heard worse. In the culture of the Voyani and the clansmen, healers were not valued. They were feared. The people of the Dominion understood that nothing was free; the more valuable the gift, the more onerous, and barbed, the obligation it incurred. There were those who chose to use their powers when those powers were discovered, but they were treated with suspicion. Except, of course, at need.

  “When I was older than you are now—some decade older, so honestly, I should have known better—I was brought in secret to the house of a wealthy man. His wife—his second wife—was with child, and the pregnancy had been problematic. The delivery had been no easier.

  “The midwives had offered him the choice of saving either the life of the mother or the life of the child; he was desperate for an heir, and he chose, without question, the child.”

  Adam said nothing. The death of a child in childbed was considered a tragedy; it was also a fact of life. If the mother lived, she might, in the end, bear other children and bring other life to the desert’s edge.

  “But the child was not delivered cleanly, for all that they made that choice. There was difficulty with breathing. I was brought to heal the babe, if it were possible.”

  Adam continued to say nothing, but now he felt uneasy.

  “The child’s birth had been compromised by the cord that bound it to its mother.” Levec exhaled, shifting in place, his gaze firmly fixed to the perpetual clutter of desk. To anything in the room that was not Adam. “And so, Adam, I healed that child. I called him back from the bridge.”

  “Was he—was his mother waiting?”

  Levec did not reply.

  And that was answer enough, for Adam. But it did not offend him in any way. In his youth, the Bridge of the beyond, and the whole of the pantheon of the Northern gods, had been a children’s story, if even that. The Voyani, a harsh people, understood only the Lord and the Lady; they knew that the winds that howled in the hottest and coldest of desert climes were the only fate that waited those who had once lived.

  Only when the strange power he possessed had awakened did he understand that the Northern stories were true. But true or no, it was right that the dead wait and the living live. Even an infant.

  Levec’s expression disagreed. He was silent. He had started this discussion; Adam was surprised to see him falter; Levec seldom hesitated. But he understood, from that hesitation, that the child had not survived. He waited.

  He waited, watching the older healer, seeing in the etched lines of his face the first sign of age’s weakness, and not age’s signal strength. Without thought, he crossed the room, passed the desk, and came to stand beside Levec’s chair, where he gently laid a light arm across Levec’s substantial shoulders.

  “The child did not survive,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  “No. And not for the usual reasons. When we heal the dying, we must go to where they are. We call them. We find them. They cling to us, and we allow them to become some part of who we are; it is the only way we will find our own way back.

  “They cling because they think, Adam. They have some sense of who they are; they have a very strong sense of their own isolation. They know that the mist and the fog in which they are lost—and often to which they come in some pain—is not life. They have fear. They have expectation. They have explicit desire. And they know profound loneliness.

  “A newborn infant does not; not in the same way. They exist in the moment. In the moment that they know hunger, it is the whole of their world, but if fed, it passes; they do not retain enough to build causal thoughts. Not at birth. If an infant is lost at the foot of the bridge, his fear is visceral. He has no thoughts to drive that fear.

  “And when found, an infant clings in a different way. His sense of self does not exist; it does not weather the contact with a healer—at least not with this one. I was fully a man. I had anger, perhaps even rage, and bitterness; I had seen enough of humanity to despise it. I had fears, and they drove me. My desires drove me. I am not in any way an invisible presence. Perhaps it would have been different had you been the healer to answer the summons.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “The child did not struggle; when I found him, he followed. He returned to life—and health—but the healing was difficult and long. I gave the infant to his father and the wet nurse he had already engaged in the event of an emergency. I did not feel the compulsion that normally comes when healing the dying. I thought, when I was paid, that I was done.” He fell silent again.

  But this silence, Adam understood. “Levec,” he said, voice soft, “you saved my life. You brought me here. When you understood that this city—this home—was too confusing, you let me go to Finch and her den. I argue with you, it’s true—but there was very little difference between argument and discussion among the Arkosans, unless weapons were involved.

  “You do not need to tell me more. You have told me all that I need to hear. I trust you. I trust you as if you were kin.”

  He thought Levec was done, he was silent for so long. He was surprised when the older healer began to speak once again.

  “Because infants have so little thought, they rely on instinct. They do not question it. They exist in single moments at a time. The only adults who do likewise are those who have taken severe injuries to their heads. An infant’s instincts, however, are visceral. They have a strength that is not tempered by prior experience. When an infant is born to his or her mother, and the mother lives, the child forms an immediate attachment to her.

  “In the case where the mother dies, they form that attachment to the wet nurse. This is both natural and expected.” He inhaled.

  Adam froze.

  “You understand,” Levec said softly.

  And he did. “The child formed that attachment to you.”

  Levec nodded.

  “And you did not know.”

  “No. I did not feel the same attachment to the child that a mother might have felt—or a father for that matter. As I said—perhaps, had you been the healer, it might have been different.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  “No, Adam, I don’t. The babe would not eat. He did not form attachments the way a motherless child has throughout history. He knew only that I was absent, that I was gone, and that I was the center of the world. All that I accomplished, in the end, was that. The bond between healer and dying was strong enough to become rooted in the formless instinct of his mind.

  “He would not eat. He lived the rest of his very short life in hunger, terror, and fear.”

  Adam swallowed. “And if you had stayed?”

  “I cannot say. I do not know how much of the child’s natural development was damaged by his exposure to me. Children are not adults. Infants are not children. It is possible that had I remained in that house, he would have lived. I do not know what his life would have been like. I do not know how much of me he retained—but absent any other experience, that might be all he was capable of becoming: a stunted, abandoned version of me.

  “I believe a stunted, abandoned version of someone like you would be a far better choice—but—”

  “You think the child would not adjust to its own life.”

  “I do not think the child would survive even you. And I will not expose you to that. I will not expose a completely blameless infant to it, either.” Levec shook Adam’s arm off. “I am far too old, and far too bitter, Adam. I cannot believe it would work well for either of you. I have seen many deaths. I have met many I would consign quite happily to that state. I have seen men and women I trusted become those men and women whose death would fill me with momentary peace.

  “I will not say it is impossible that the outcome would b
e somehow beneficial in the end. But I will say that it is not worth the terrible risk. I could—barely—live with the knowledge of what I had done. I could accept it, learn from it, and move on. I do not believe the same could be said for you, and I am unwilling to hurt or scar you.”

  “If I chose—”

  “If I offered you the choice, it would be no choice, Adam. There is only one choice, ever, that you could make. And you can damn well make it when you live in your own house.”

  “Ono Levec—”

  “I am not your uncle.” Levec pushed himself out of his chair. He seemed to understand that the visceral denial of the honorific stung, and took a longer, deeper breath. “You are a child, to me. Not my child, but a child.”

  “I am not considered a child by my people,” Adam replied. “I am—”

  “You’re fourteen years old.”

  “Yes.”

  “You must forgive the elderly, boy.”

  “You are not elderly.”

  “It’s all context. Compared to Sigurne Mellifas, I am a spring chicken. But compared to you? I have seen—and done—much, much more living. I want you to have a life that is not about regret and fear and isolation. You are,” he said again, “a child. And when I look at you, I want to protect you from the things that scarred me. I know what I endured. I was tested by life. I am tested constantly by it now—especially my patience. I know, however, that I can endure, because I have.

  “I don’t want you to have the same scars. I don’t want to discover that you’re one of the people who can’t endure. Before you argue, I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen it happen many times.”

  Adam shook his head. “I should have called you Oma instead,” he replied.

  Levec frowned. “That means—”

  “Grandmother. We can’t be protected from life. We can—while we are very young—be protected from death, and any people that I have ever encountered attempt to protect their children from death. I have been given a gift. You’ve said that you want me—you want all of the healers you train—to believe that that gift is a blessing for as long as they possibly can.

  “And Levec, I do. If it weren’t for you, if it weren’t for this smelly, loud, crowded city, I wouldn’t. It would be a guilty secret, known only to my kin. But if I can’t use it to help or save others, why was I given the gift at all?”

  Levec glared. “You think there’s a reason for everything?” he barked. “You think there’s a reason that children are born blind or deaf or even dying? You think there’s a reason that some are born to squalor and some to wealth? Do you have rocks for brains?”

  “But—”

  “But what?”

  “You just said that you believed—”

  “Because I was an idiot.”

  “. . . And you want us to have the comfort of idiocy?” Adam asked, in honest confusion. “You are so much like a Matriarch in personality; you are nothing like a Matriarch in intent.”

  “I want you to be happy.” Levec lifted a large hand and placed it—heavily—on Adam’s shoulder.

  “That is a sad definition of happiness.”

  Levec looked surprised.

  “You believe that we cannot see the world as it is and know happiness. And so we must be raised and coddled in ignorance. Perhaps, if we never learn what a sword is, we will somehow never die at the end of one. Perhaps if we never learn that people do bad things, bad things will never happen to us?” He snorted. He could practically hear his mother’s contempt, although she was dead and distant.

  “Happiness is not all of one thing, and sorrow doesn’t obliterate happiness. It might, if we were trapped forever in the moment of sorrow. If the rest of life couldn’t touch us or warm us. But we’re not. I have seen my kin die,” he continued. “I have held children whom the fevers would not leave; I have held them while they screamed for me, because they couldn’t see that I was there. And, yes, Levec—it was horrible. She screamed and cried—and me? I cried, too. I think I may have screamed.”

  “You should not have been the one responsible for—”

  “I was the one she wanted. Should my mother have bade me plug my ears and run miles away so that I couldn’t hear her? I would have hated her for it. I would never ever have thanked her.

  “And maybe if I held that child now, I could make her understand that I was there, and that I loved her to the end.”

  Levec said nothing.

  “But that child gave me many memories. All of her life. Some of the memories are good, and some have become better, with time.”

  The older healer snorted. “Fourteen years, boy, is not a lot of time.”

  “It is, to me. When I think of her death, it hurts. It’s true. And it is true that if I thought only of her death, she would be pain and loss. But when I think of her, I don’t just think of her death. I don’t just think of our loss.

  “You can’t protect me from life. Not even the Matriarch could do that. You can help me to see life clearly. You can help me to see what’s in front of my face, because sometimes the sun is in my eyes, and I can’t. But you can’t decide—for me—what my life has to be about, or what it has to mean, or what it can’t mean. I am not you. You are not me.”

  Levec closed his eyes for a long moment. When he opened them, he looked weary. But he no longer looked angry. There was so much anger in Levec, Adam thought. So much anger—and so much love. Levec could never be Matriarch, of course; no more could Adam. But it was of Matriarchs he thought, now.

  This man had taken the burden of Matriarchs across his broad shoulders. He had no living kin. Neither did Jewel or many members of her den. But both Levec and Jewel made family, and Adam understood family.

  “My Ona Elena once told me something important,” Adam said, hesitant now that the force of Levec’s anger had deserted him. “Happiness is like a seed.” Before Levec could speak, Adam lifted a hand. “She said that anger and hatred and love are like seeds as well. All the things we feel that endure, are.”

  “And we are?”

  “Dirt,” Adam replied.

  “I might agree with that statement, but I’m certain you intend to go elsewhere with it.”

  “We are earth. But we are like different types of earth, in different climates. Not all seeds that fall from a tree take root. Not all things that take root survive. We cannot be given happiness. Only the seed of it. We might not recognize the seed,” he added. “Because we can’t see the tree it might become. We are surrounded by trees, and the seed in our hands looks nothing like them.

  “For some, the earth is damp and fertile, and all seeds take root. But for others, the earth is hard, and water scarce. Elena believed that no man—or woman—starts life as a desert. But without trees, any man or woman can become one.

  “She thought all things could take root in me, but she was my Ona,” he added, with a trace of self-consciousness. “She told me it was important to take the seeds, to plant them, and to tend them. To water them, when water was scarce; to protect them from water when it was a deluge. She said that only by growing those trees in ourselves could we then have seeds to give to others.

  “Rich or poor, child or man, anyone can plant such a seed.”

  “And the other seeds? The anger, the bitterness?”

  Adam nodded. “Those, too, come from others. They are not gifts in the same way, but they require soil and if we are not careful, it is those seedlings we tend and shelter, and if those are the trees we favor, it is their seeds we pass on. And anyone can grow those seeds, just as everyone can grow the others.

  “The seeds are all there. We can’t choose, for others, which seeds they tend. We can only hope to make good choices for ourselves.”

  “And what am I giving you now?”

  Adam smiled. “You are giving me worry, but it is a worry that comes from a place in which I feel safe.”

/>   “And will you heed my worry?”

  “Always. But I will not always adopt it as my own. I know that you love me.” Levec never liked to hear the word “love.” “I know that your fear comes from experience; it is not idle. But I know it comes from your experience. A day will come, perhaps, when I will return to you and tell you that you were right.”

  Levec nodded, then. “The damnable thing is this. If you were not a person who desperately wanted to help others, I wouldn’t care much for you at all. It’s always the kind ones that break my heart, in the end. I cannot command you when you leave my home. I can ask. I will ask you, Adam: do not do this. Do not interfere with those who have not lived.

  “Now, get out of my office. I have work to do.”

  • • •

  Get out of my memories, Adam thought. I have work to do.

  He was afraid. He had traveled with fear as a companion for so much of the past year. He had lost his mother because his mother could see no path to walk but the one that led to her death. She, like Jewel, was Matriarch; she, like Jewel, was gifted with visions that were woven into the fabric of reality.

  He had lost his family in the desert—although they still lived. He had found a second family, hesitantly, within the Terafin manse, with its endless maze of walls, its lack of small, comfortable spaces, its lack of open sky or breeze.

  But he had found himself, bitterly and in isolation, in Levec’s broad, protective shadow. All of the healing he’d done, he’d done at Levec’s command; all but one. Levec had taken credit for most of it, where credit was due, and Adam absolutely understood why.

  He had, he knew, been blessed by the Lady; his life had been passed over by the Lord. He survived. He was taller, rounder; he did not face starvation or privation within House Terafin. Nor did he face the endless contempt of the clansmen—for he privately thought of the Terafin Council, and most of the people who bore its name, as clansmen. Jewel had even brought Ariel from the Dominion, a child missing fingers and family. He had, as he could, taken care of her, because feeding the children had been his most important job.