Battle: The House War: Book Five

by Michelle West

  “What charge?”

  He did not answer. Instead, he lifted one wing, as if the wings were prehensile, and touched the lowest of the branches that shadowed his face. The wing did not sever branch; the fire did not burn wing. “Once,” he said, his voice even softer, “I knew a woman who could make such trees. She loved the irony of their shape: wood of fire, wood that burns and is never consumed. But she could make vines of shadow and towers of nightmare; she could make beds of water, and cradles of stone; she could make whole homes of air, although she could never fly.”

  “Was she mortal?”

  “Of course. She was mortal, and she was Sen. She founded the first of the great Cities of Man. It is long in the past; it is forgotten by all—all save the firstborn.”

  “The gods—”

  “The gods do not remember as we remember; they no longer live in a world in which time rules event. And they do not speak to us,” he added bitterly. “Only to mortals.”

  “There is one god—”

  “You speak of Allasakar?”

  She did, but couldn’t bring herself to use his name. Not here, where so much was laid bare. As she walked, the butterflies grew restless. “Adam.”

  Adam stepped forward, emerging from her shadow. She held out her arm, and he placed his hands directly in front of both butterflies; after a moment, they crawled into them. They did not attempt to fly. She was grateful. When both of the dreamers were safely in Adam’s hands, she, too, approached the tree of fire. She reached out and laid her palm against the trunk; it felt like warm bark. It sounded like bonfire.

  “Yes. It cannot burn you, cannot harm you; the whole of its power faces outward. Were I to touch the bark of this tree in the fashion you have just done, I would burn.”

  “There is one god in this world.”

  “There are two,” he replied. “Allasakar is not at the height of his power; he lives where mortals might, with difficulty, live. He can touch the wild roads; he can walk them. But he is not master of what they are, not yet—nor do I think he will ever be. The unnamed god wrought well, here. But even his work must fail, in the end; anything that is part of the world is subject to the ravages of time and change, even the hidden ways.

  “Do you wish to know what the world was like when the gods walked? Live here, and learn.”

  Jewel shook her head. “I’ve seen enough of it.”

  “Oh?”

  “In dreams.” She was aware of the irony of the statement, and his smile indicated acknowledgment. “The dreams were enough, for me.”

  “Do you know why the Cities of Man rose?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then you must ask the nameless god—or his daughter. You have seen her; I sense her presence in your dreaming. She is—”

  “Evayne.”

  He nodded. “She has long dreamed on these roads, and we have traveled to her when she is absent. Your burden is not—yet—her burden. But your burden, she cannot shoulder.”

  “She can’t claim these lands.”

  “No. No more could she build what you will build. The Cities of Man were safe—for man. They were not safe, on the other hand, for you and your kind. But you built them, regardless, and those who were born with talents, some fragment of power that echoed the divine, came to the cities you had built. So, too, the god-born—but not the firstborn.” He lowered his wings, bowed his head. When he lifted it again, she was ready for what she saw in his face: a different man, a different Warden.

  His wings fanned out with a snap toward the branches of Jewel’s tree.

  Jewel didn’t blink. “You can’t cut fire,” she told him, her voice even, her hand gripping bark. “It doesn’t bleed.”

  “And will you now destroy me?” he asked, lips curved in a smile as sharp as his wings.

  “If I could.”

  “I did not kill your dreamers.” He lifted an arm.

  “No.”

  “Yet it is I who bear the brunt of your anger, not my brother. That is always the way; there is only one god who has ever favored me. Come, then. If you will fight, fight.” He gestured, and from the heights of the sky—night-sky, clear and cold—came three winged cats. They were larger than Jewel had ever seen them; their claws were exposed, their fangs glittering as if they were made of diamond.

  And why not diamond, she thought? They had once been stone.

  “Come, if you will. I tire of waiting. I am nightmare; I shift and change the world until it is mine. You run in terror from the things you recognize when you enter these lands; the familiar is no comfort. There is no fear I have not seen.”

  It was true. She felt the air darken, as if air had a color; the night became winter cold, and in the shadows between her trees, she heard the sibilants of whisper. She shook her head. “I’ve done this one,” she told him, remembering the Green Deepings. “My dead don’t scare me.”

  “Perhaps not. You fear death.”

  “Yes.”

  “But not your own.” He gestured, and she heard Adam’s breath sharpen. Turning, she saw his eyes were wide, the whites exposed around irises that were dark in the night sky.

  “You cannot kill Adam,” she told the Warden of Dreams. “Any other dreamer—but not Adam. Adam of Arkosa,” she added, in a tone of voice her Oma would have used. Adam blinked.

  “Matriarch.”

  Jewel sighed and accepted the title; for Adam it had more power than being The Terafin had had for Leila.

  The cats circled. They growled; they didn’t speak.

  “Matriarch—those beasts—”

  “Yes. They’re the cats. Be careful what you call them,” she added. “Because when we all wake up from this—”

  “You will not wake.”

  “—They’re going to remember every word you said. They’re pathetically easily insulted.” Jewel shook her head; she could hear the crackle of fire as if it were a voice. She called fire, and it came; the tree’s branches lengthened and sharpened.

  “It is not me you will fight,” the Warden of Dreams told her.

  “Oh?”

  “It is them.”

  She glanced up as he spoke, because as he spoke, the cats came. Ebon, Ivory, and night-mist, they flew above the thermals around the tree of fire.

  “I understand what your brother was attempting to tell me,” she said softly. These cats were nightmare cats; they were not the cats who traipsed and sprawled across any available space in the Terafin manse, demanding attention. They did not speak; they did not batter each other with gloved claws. Their teeth gleamed orange and gold in the fire’s shed light; their eyes were obsidian.

  “They are not yours,” he told her.

  “I’m sorry. They are. They are mine the way the tree is mine; it doesn’t matter how you’ve touched or changed them. They will not serve you.”

  “Then they will die.”

  She shook her head again. “Snow,” she whispered. “Night. Shadow. Come.”

  They came at her command, utterly silent, as if aware that their silence was vastly more threatening than their litany of complaints and verbal threats.

  “Matriarch—”

  They alighted on the ground between Jewel and the Warden; the tree burned above them, crackling as if in greeting. They circled her, heads low to ground, jaws open, tails twitching; the pads of their paws broke twigs and branches in the undergrowth she couldn’t see. They did not look at all like the cats that babysat Ariel.

  But they were.

  She knew it, had perhaps always known it. They spoke and fought and broke furniture, she thought, because it was something that made them vastly more frustrating and at the same time vastly less frightening. It was a gift.

  Or perhaps, a curse. They were cats, after all.

  The fire traveled from her right hand across her shoulders and down her left arm. Night sprang at her, fangs bared, claws extended; they closed on flame and stopped, unable to pierce its armor. He didn’t complain—he snarled. She reached out with her left
hand and touched his forehead, moving past claws and fangs as if they were illusion. “Night,” she whispered.

  His eyes rounded; as they did, she saw black recede until they were once again golden. He blinked, as if waking from a particularly deep sleep. Aside from his eyes, nothing changed; he was still half again the size he had been the last time she’d seen him in the waking world. But he turned on his brothers as they leaped.

  There were two; the fire caught them, branches lashing out like limbs. Shadow skittered across the forest floor, digging his claws into earth to stop himself. Snow, she touched, just as Night landed on his back, snarling in fury. His fur was soft; softer than it was in life; his eyes were darker. Everything about his form and shape was askew—but she knew him, the way one knows anything transformed by dream.

  “Snow.”

  The cats really were right—they were stupid names. But they were the names she’d given them, without thought and in a rush, and they were the names by which every other member of the House now knew them. They weren’t demonic names; they weren’t calling cards by which the cats could be magically summoned, but they didn’t have to be.

  He growled, his larger throat emitting a much deeper sound than it ever had before. But he turned as Shadow stalked across the grass.

  Shadow, she thought, was the hardest of the three; the least frivolous, the least easily bored—although boredom was his anthem, when he chose one. Snow and Night came to stand to either side of her, but she sent Night to guard Adam; he went without complaint. Not a single word. Even in the dreaming, it felt unnatural.

  Shadow was canny; he did not spring, the way Night had, and he avoided the branches of the tree of fire.

  Without taking her eyes off Shadow, she said, “Snow—the Warden.”

  Snow leaped, silent, streamlined. Fire flowed off his back as if it were colored water; it was her fire. The Warden of Dreams raised wings; they sounded like swords leaving sheaths. More than that, she didn’t see, because as Snow leaped, Shadow did likewise.

  His claws were not diamond, not ebony; they weren’t solid at all. They passed through the flame that enveloped her arms and her chest. Adam cried out; she bit her lip to prevent joining him as she brought her hands forward to touch the third cat.

  He was clever, this cat; her hands passed through his body, touching nothing; the same couldn’t be said for his claws; she felt them shred dress and skin. Adam cried out in Torra; a warning and a curse. She stumbled; his palms caught the back of her neck—the only exposed skin a formal dress of this nature allowed.

  “Adam—don’t—”

  It was like telling the waking cats not to complain.

  “You named him,” the Warden of Dreams said; his voice surrounded her.

  She’d named Night as well, but Night was, and had remained, solid. Shadow bit her arm, forcing her back; she stumbled, her hand leaving the anchor of her tree. Fire guttered around her.

  Adam’s hands were warm. She felt pain in her arm and across her lower abdomen; she felt heat rush from the back of her upper spine toward the wounds she had taken from this nightmare version of Shadow. They met, each diminishing in the contact. Night leaped on Shadow—and fell through him. Both cats hissed; it was as close to their normal voices as they’d yet come.

  “No—Night—”

  Only Night bled.

  Jewel threw herself to the side, breaking Adam’s contact as Shadow leaped again, claws extended. She felt the warmth of tree, but it was out of her reach, and she knew that without the fire—

  No. No, she didn’t. Her eyes snapped open. It was like a second waking. The landscape hadn’t changed; it was night, contained Night, Shadow, Snow, and the Warden; there were trees that the darkness made gray at a distance, and one tree whose light, red and orange, couldn’t be dimmed. She wasn’t touching the tree, but it burned at the heart of this forest, and if she was in these lands, the fire was hers.

  She lowered her arm and turned as Shadow landed. His tail twitched, his ears were high; his fangs glittered, wet and red. He was beautiful. She heard growling in the distance; Shadow was silent; he watched her. His fur rippled as he shifted position; she knew he would leap again.

  She shook her head. In the dreamscape, her hair didn’t fall into her eyes. It was such an odd detail to notice while facing death. But she’d seen death so often, now; the death that Shadow offered wasn’t new. It was cloaked in magic, in mystery, in things that were older in all ways than Jewel herself—but it wasn’t new.

  “You were right,” she told the cat as his wings flexed. “I should have named you something different. But none of the names I have would suit you, and you can’t name yourself.”

  The moment the words left her lips, Shadow left the ground; they were both significant, but only one of the two would kill her. She leaped to the left—farther away from the tree of fire. His claws clipped her arm, but the dress was already ruined; he cut skin as neatly—as cleanly—as the sharpest of knives before he landed again.

  He stood between Jewel and her tree; he meant to herd her. She didn’t tell him it was pointless, not in so many words. She couldn’t change his name, not here; it was the name by which he was now known. She wondered if the Winter King had ever named these three. Probably not. Names, clearly, had power.

  But everything here had power. She called the fire without touching the tree, and it came. It was raiment of bonfire light, not sun, and it cloaked her, covered her, fell from her shoulders and arms as if it were a dress made by Snow. It shone in the night sky. She heard Adam’s choked gasp and turned to glance at him.

  “Matriarch—”

  “I’m not burning,” she told him gently. She turned back to Shadow. Shadow was watching, eyes unblinking; she avoided meeting his gaze for any length of time. Staring contests with cats never worked out well for her; at most, she’d get teary eyes.

  She knew Shadow. He had accompanied her into her dreams before; he had walked into a vision of the past, and watched by her side as Amarais Handernesse ATerafin had placed a sword and a ring—neither magical, both of incalculable value to only two living women—into the waters of the maker-born created statuary. He had seen the desert that lay at the heart of the Sea of Sorrows, unchanged by dreaming. He had protected her from the worst of her nightmares.

  She couldn’t touch him here. She’d tried.

  But she lifted both hands as he gathered to spring again. This time he didn’t reach her. He reached only the fire, although it wore her shape. Landing in the center of flames that burned nothing, his head snapped up, his wings, out. He attempted to push himself off the ground.

  “Shadows are cast things,” she told him softly. “They don’t exist where there’s no light.”

  He snarled; she had never seem him look so bestial. The fire that she had worn as cloth wrapped itself around the great form of the winged predator, caressing his fur and the whole of his wings—something Jewel would never dare do in life. They weren’t hands, those flames; they were light.

  “Shadows,” she continued, as she approached him, “can’t be cast by nothing. Something has to stand in the light, to catch it, to block it.”

  Reaching out, she touched the top of his head, the way she did when she wanted him to settle down in public. In private, it had always been a lost cause—and what was more private, in the end, than the dreams that came with sleep? Her palm flat against the space between erect ears, she swallowed warmth and nightmare. She heard his sudden hiss as if at a great remove. “Tell me what you see,” she demanded.

  He growled, wings straining against flame, although Jewel’s hands passed through it.

  She knelt on the ground before his open jaws. “Shadow,” she said, voice softer. “Tell me what you see.”

  His eyes widened; they were so large in his face, they reminded her of the Winter King’s eyes. She could feel his fur, although she touched only the top of his head; she could feel the stretched tension of wings that were flight-feather, fur, and something oth
er. The fire rolled along their edges, and their edges were sharp, stiff. What she had done with the fire of the demon lord, she could do—in this moment—with the heart of the cat.

  She could . . . plant him. It would certainly stop him—but he would never fly at the heights of this forest again. He would never fly in her dreams.

  “Shadow,” she said a third time. “Tell me what you see.”

  He rumbled and growled; his wings flattened as he stopped struggling against the pull of the fire.

  “I see,” he said, his voice deeper and louder, a thing felt just as much as it was heard, “a less stupid girl.”

  She closed her eyes.

  “Jewel—”

  Snapped them open again, to see that he had somehow managed to break free of her containing fire. He leaped. Catch him, she heard, although she didn’t recognize the voice immediately. Catch him, contain him, or he will destroy you.

  It was true; his claws pierced the skirts of her dress. He was wild, here; wild, dangerous—deadly. But he had always been that. Always. She didn’t see it most days, because it wasn’t something she wanted to see.

  But it wasn’t the first time she’d held something deadly in the heart of her home. Duster had stayed, after all. Duster. So much that was wild and strange and deadly brought her back to Duster. Why had Duster stayed with her? They were so damn different. They’d had different parents, different families, different childhoods. Duster couldn’t be caged; she couldn’t be chained. The rules that Duster lived by had always been her own rules.

  Or had they?

  No. Yes and no. Jewel couldn’t remember demanding anything from Duster, except this: Kill cleanly. Kill cleanly, and come home.

  And if she had refused? There would be no home for her in the den. She couldn’t make Duster into Finch or Teller—but if she could have, she wouldn’t; she didn’t need another Finch or another Teller; she already had one of each. She needed Duster—but she needed to know that Duster could control her rage and her violence when Jewel needed both controlled. That was it.

  Duster on the other hand, had never tried to kill her. Had she, even once—

  Jewel grimaced. Had she, Jewel would have accepted it; what she would never accept was Duster attempting to harm anyone else in the den. But Duster was not a cat. Duster couldn’t fly.