Battle: The House War: Book Five

by Michelle West

  She gestured, and the only weapon the dreamscape offered came to her hands. Had she been Celleriant, it would have been a sword of blue fire; had she been Avandar, it would have been a sword of golden light. She was Jewel Markess. She got a collar; a collar of red-and-gold flame. A collar that would fit around the throat of a hunting cat—if she could force him to stand still for long enough without losing one, or both, of her hands.

  She gripped it tightly; felt her fingers press into her own palms. The flame was like Shadow; it was insubstantial to touch. Yet it rested in her palms like a demand or a promise.

  “Shadow,” she said, just that.

  He snarled; his body compressed as he gathered to leap against the fire that had managed to—barely—contain him. There was blood on his claws and his fangs; it was hers. She wondered if she were bleeding in the waking world, or if Adam had closed the wounds there as well. She could hear shouting, muffled and wordless, in the distance.

  The great cat broke free; strands of fire twined around his legs and his wings, slowing him. Muscles gleaming gray and red in the reflected light, he lunged. His teeth caught her left leg; she stumbled. Adam was there almost instantly.

  This time, Shadow turned on the Voyani boy. Adam was waiting for him.

  Adam, no.

  I am not a child.

  When he broke contact, she knew why; Shadow was upon him, jaws snapping at Adam’s throat. He’d tucked his chin, lifted his arms; he knew what his body could survive—and so did Jewel.

  But she rolled, rose, her leg whole, her hands still grasping the collar; it fell open, as if flowering, and she could see the ebon buckle that girded the flame. She approached Shadow and his wings swept her back, striking her at her ribs. She was already in motion, her body avoiding the blow before her mind could register the movement. She moved again, dodging, until she faced his back; he was clawing at Adam’s chest, exposing the ribs and the flesh that lay beneath cloth and skin.

  Adam made no sound.

  Someone else did; it was muffled, attenuated—like a scream that has to pass through walls. She rolled, rose, and this time, she summoned fire, not to cage, but to burn.

  Shadow shrieked; it was a sound that she had never heard him make. In this fight, on his terms, he had taken the form of his name; the fire had passed around him or through him. Even Jewel’s hands had found no purchase at all. But now? Fire burned. She didn’t wonder why; she knew.

  The great cat let go of Adam, turning; fire blackened the tips of his feathers. I’m sorry, she thought grimly. But there are some things I will never allow you to do. The fire shifted, changing; he was once again ensnared in the flame.

  Jewel was robed in it as well. She approached Shadow as he hissed. This time, he was injured; the fire both burned and confined. He snapped at her; he lunged. She reached out with both hands; he tucked his chin the same way—the exact same way—that Adam had.

  But his fangs were red with blood. Some of that blood was hers.

  I have you now. In the dreaming, that blood was of her. It didn’t matter how it had come to adorn his fangs, his claws. Like the fire from the burning tree, she did not need to contain it, or touch it, to use its power.

  Red liquid beaded, elongated. It congealed as she concentrated, forming a fine, beaded chain—a chain of red mist, dark against the brighter red-orange of flame. She said nothing at all as that chain then wrapped itself tightly around his open jaws, cutting into his fur, cutting into his skin—which nothing else had managed to do. Here, the cats bled, and here, his blood blended with hers and with Adam’s. He could not fight himself.

  “No,” she told him, voice steady, although smoke made it rough, “here, you are mine.” He attempted to batter her with his head, but the chain tightened as he struggled; in the end, he was forced to be still to preserve the front of his face. She said nothing, offered no apology; she had the clarity sometimes achieved in dreams—because in dreams, she could kill, and sometimes, in triumph, she did. Had she forgotten that?

  Had she remembered only terror and the flight of the helpless, passive observer?

  She did not want to kill Shadow; she did not want to unmake him or reduce him to something irretrievably other. She felt the fire tighten around his form. There was a moment at which the fire bore the shape of many branches, and she remembered how this tree had come into being. But Shadow was not a tree, not a formless act of aggression; he was a cat. She had no desire to plant him, and even the desire—sudden and visceral—to kill was gone. Adam was alive. Adam was whole.

  She slid the collar around his neck; the buckle closed itself. His breath was warm against her forehead as she bent; warm as she rose.

  She stepped back from him; the fire that burned guttered. The fire that limned him otherwise did not. He ceased his struggle, and as he did the chains that bound his massive jaws slid away, once again becoming a warm, red liquid—albeit with a very different shape. She wondered, idly, if his face would be scarred by this night’s work, and found, with a pang, that she cared. It surprised her. Shadow’s fangs receded into the line of his jaw as he stopped his attempts to bite off her hands—or worse.

  “If I extinguish all light,” she told him, “you cease to exist.”

  “But then there is only darkness.” His voice was recognizably his own—but deeper, fuller; it rumbled.

  She nodded. “If I call the Summer, Night fades; Snow melts.”

  “Oh, them. Let me out.”

  “You are already free. Go help your brothers.”

  He dared a glance at Adam; Adam, shirt shredded, was on his feet. He was pale, but unharmed. Shadow growled.

  “Shadow.”

  “I don’t like it when he touches me.”

  “He wasn’t touching you until you tried to rip my throat out. Go help your brothers.”

  Shadow’s muscles once again shifted and tensed as he gathered his body to leap. She knew a moment of awe—not fear—as he cleared ground; the fire—her fire—surrounded his body like a halo.

  Adam approached her, reached out; his hand was trembling. Before he could lower it, she caught it in both of her own, drawing him closer.

  His touch took pain, gathered it, drew it from her—and with it, some part of herself—as if she was defined, in the end, by pain, and its absence left her hollow. His voice was clear; it was not—yet—a man’s voice, but no longer a child’s. He was fourteen years old. Fourteen, a healer, Voyani—and the only other person who could, unaltered by Winter Queen or Warden, stand on this path with her now.

  “You mustn’t,” he told her, attempting to retrieve the hand he knew he shouldn’t have raised.

  She shook her head. “Not here. There, yes—there it will be hard. I think Shadow almost killed me.”

  “He almost killed us both,” Adam replied, giving up on the struggle that owned only half of his divided heart. He stepped into the fire that surrounded her, and it opened to encompass them both. “Will we need to help them?”

  “We already are,” was her soft reply. “But heal them? No. I don’t think you’d survive the attempt—they really can hold grudges.”

  “Why do they hate it so much?” As a healer, hatred was not one of the reactions that Adam was accustomed to facing.

  “Because healers change the shape of what is.”

  “No—we—”

  “Yes. I didn’t understand that until today. Tonight. Now. They change what is, they deny what is. The reality of injury—the aftermath of it—most of us learn to live with it; we’ve no other choice. But when you come—or even when Levec does—you give us a different choice, and we take it because it’s what we want; it’s what we dream of: loss of pain, a return to wholeness.”

  “And the cats—”

  She shook her head.

  * * *

  The cats had taken to, and remained in, the air; the air was not a challenge for the Warden of Dreams. Where the Warden fought, the sky shifted color and texture; there were no clouds, and the sunlight was sharp
and harsh—lances and spokes that hit forest floor. She had only ever seen Summer light used against demons—but what she had said was true. In the dreaming, the names she had so casually and irritably given three complaining, whining cats had a force and a power that they couldn’t have in the waking world.

  Snow and Night were at a disadvantage here—but Shadow was not. If he wasn’t a creature of light, he existed only as an artifact of it. In the fight on the forest floor, the light had been shed by a burning tree. But in the Summer light? He was stronger, more solid.

  Adam’s hand in hers as if she were once again a child in the Common, she watched as the light obeyed the Warden’s unspoken command, shifting in place as if it were a moving shield; darting toward Snow and Night, falling in areas where Shadow wasn’t.

  As they bore witness, the butterflies came. They landed on Jewel’s shoulders, on her arms; they settled on Adam’s head. In ones and twos, they accumulated until they were a living quilt, each element discrete. Adam’s gaze was drawn to the butterflies as they landed; once or twice he whispered a name.

  “Is Hannerle here?” she asked, although she couldn’t remove her gaze from the sharp, staccato aerial dance of the Warden and the three cats. The cats were black, white, gray; the Warden was a moving swirl of colors, most of which she could not name. His wings caught Snow and Night; Snow bled. She thought Night might have, too, but the red was lost to the color of his coat, the sheen of it bright and reflective. The Warden’s wings passed through Shadow as they stiffened, hardening; flight feathers dropped away from their stretched width.

  What was left was leathery; bat wings, not eagle’s; there were rents and tears beneath the pinions, but the wings were dream wings; they obeyed no physical dictates. When they started to burn, she held her breath; they were echoes of the wings of Lord Darranatos. To the Warden’s hands came whip and sword. They were not red; nor were they blue or gold.

  They were leather, she thought; leather and steel; plain, workaday weapons that any House Guard might wield in the line of duty. Except, perhaps, for the whip.

  But dreams found reality and made it larger, smaller, or just plain stranger than life. In his hands, the weapons were enough. Snow shrieked and fell, spinning in place as he plummeted. Night roared; Shadow fell utterly silent.

  Jewel extricated her hand from Adam’s; she ran; at her back, his voice followed.

  Above her head as she approached, Night, Shadow, and the Warden were circling; the tight, cramped space of fang and claws had been widened by the reach of whip and sword. Snow lay beneath the Warden’s feet, against the undergrowth; above his open eyes, diamond leaves fell. She reached his side in a rush of outstretched hands and bent knees, skidding to a stop in the undergrowth against his supine back.

  “Snow!”

  He was so much larger than her Snow, and he was silent. She couldn’t imagine this cat creating a dress that even the Winter Queen might be proud to wear; couldn’t imagine this cat slashing the legs of a chair into hard-wood splinters because he was annoyed with Night.

  But she could imagine him dying. She could imagine his absence. They opened before her like the sudden and unexpected plunge of unseen cliff. “Snow.”

  The great cat wheezed.

  Above her head she heard the sudden sharp intake of breath and she looked up in time for blood to adorn her cheek. A drop or two, heralding, as rain did, the start of summer storm in the Common.

  This was not the Common. The blood was Night’s. His fall was not as uncontrolled as Snow’s; he managed a glide into the lowest of a silver tree’s branches. They broke; silver rained. Night did not rise again.

  This was not what Jewel wanted. Here, in dream, she struggled against the sudden, visceral terror of the worst of her nightmares, and she lost ground almost instantly.

  The cats ate too much; they broke plates; they gouged tables in the guest room out of sheer boredom. They had wings. They could fly, and speak. There was no place for them in the Terafin manse—but regardless, they had made one.

  They were hers, these cats; they were part of her den. They fit more easily into the West Wing and its environs in two months than Avandar had in a decade. They weren’t human, no; they were clearly immortal. They were beautiful in silence and in their sleek and perfect movements—when they could be silent, which was so infrequent.

  He would kill them.

  He would kill them, and she would never find them again, not even in dreams; the Warden wouldn’t allow her the peculiar grace of that nocturnal haunting.

  Above her head, Shadow growled—this growl contained words. “Stupid girl! Think! Look at his weapons!”

  Of the three, he was the only one she had forced to find his voice. She wanted to hear it again. She didn’t even mind that he called her stupid; it was like a sign of affection. But she looked up at the Warden, and at Shadow, limned in red-gold light; her fire was burning, there. It wasn’t her fire she’d been told to examine.

  She looked at the Warden’s weapons. At this distance, they were even more ordinary than they had been when she had observed them by Adam’s side; she could see that the sword’s blade was notched—and that, the House Guard would only tolerate immediately after a fight. The whip flew; she couldn’t examine its many tongues, but she could see that the grip was shiny and dark, the way aged leather was when it had been handled by too many hands.

  She frowned. Snow lifted his head and dropped it in her lap, and she grunted; it was heavy.

  But it was deliberate. She met his golden eyes, heard his wheezing breath, tried not to see the wound and the blood that fell from it. She was no healer, not even in her dreams; what Adam could do, she couldn’t. And Adam couldn’t touch the cats; they would die first.

  They would die.

  No. No, think, damn it. What was Shadow trying to tell her? And why, she thought, shunting fear aside for a deep, deep irritation, was he being so damn oblique? His life hung in the balance; Snow and Night were already too injured to fight—or to fly—and he was giving her disparaging hints as if this were still a game.

  It is always a game, with cats. The mice do not understand this.

  The voice was familiar, but unrecognizable, and she accepted its presence the way she accepted anything in her dreams; it was a fact of the now, very like a fact of life. She looked at the weapons again; there was nothing to mark them as extraordinary, except for the fact of their wielder.

  Oh. She shifted Snow’s head off her lap and rose. “Adam,” she said, raising her voice without looking back. She held out a hand, and he came to her side, trailing butterflies. “I understand.”

  “What must I do?” he asked.

  “Hold my hand. This is going to be a little rough.”

  He was happy to catch and hold the hand she offered him; she felt his palm. It was warm, rough, and slightly sweaty. She closed her eyes; heard the growl and hiss of one flying cat, and the labored breathing of another; Night was too far away.

  Adam’s breath sharpened. “You are going to wake us,” he said.

  “Yes,” she replied, squeezing his fingers between her own where they were interlaced, “and no.”

  Since the fighting had started, she had heard muffled, distant voices. She hadn’t listened carefully; a face full of Shadow’s fangs made distant voices almost irrelevant. She listened now.

  She knew whose voices they were. She knew she was abed, in the Terafin’s personal chambers; she knew that the Chosen would be there. Angel. She was less certain of Teller or Finch; Finch would be at the Merchant Authority, if this were morning.

  But was it? Was it only morning?

  “Adam, when did they send for you?” Her breath tightened. “Were they careful? Was Levec there?”

  “They sent for Levec in a panic,” he replied. “Levec came with me, as he did every day we woke The Terafin while you were gone.”

  “Was it morning?”

  “It was late morning.”

  “I hope we haven’t been sleeping for to
o long.”

  Something about the way his eyes slid to the side caught her attention. “It was late morning when you arrived.”

  “Yes.”

  “Earlier you said it wasn’t yet morning. Adam—”

  “It is not yet morning,” he told her. “Of the second day.”

  Her knuckles were white; she was afraid. Waking from a nightmare didn’t frighten her, of course. But this wasn’t waking. It was something other, something different, and if it didn’t work, or if it worked out badly, she might never wake again. Not fully. Neither would Adam.

  The Warden of Dreams laughed, and she looked up; Shadow was caught in a web—a web that looked as if it were spun by a giant spider, or several, between the overlapping branches of the great trees. She reached out with fire, and fire began to burn its edges.

  “I’ve missed the Council of The Ten.”

  Adam’s expression made clear that he thought she’d momentarily taken leave of her senses.

  “And the meeting with the Kings.”

  “Jewel, now is not the time.”

  No, she thought, it wasn’t. She once again focused on the voices, on the muffled words, because Shadow was utterly silent. Familiar voices. Familiar—and unfamiliar at the same time—bed and room. Night, not day; moonlight not sunlight. Adam’s hand was probably half its normal width by this time, she was crushing it so hard—but it was better Adam than butterflies. Shadow couldn’t—hadn’t—killed him; nothing Jewel could do to him would be worse.

  She closed her eyes, and the sounds—as they often did when her eyes were closed—became louder and more distinct. “Can you hear them?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s time.”

  “Time?”

  “To wake up.” She swallowed. With a free hand, she reached for Snow and felt his unnaturally soft fur. “Snow?”

  Snow didn’t answer. His breath was rough and wheezy.

  What did the Terafin’s bedroom really look like? What did it feel like? Was it large? Yes. And the ceilings were high. The floors were a sharp and gleaming wood, over which rugs had been laid. There were windows limned in a subtle orange glow that did away with the need for bars.