Battle: The House War: Book Five

by Michelle West

  “And how do you know that? You are not a native, and you have lived in the Houses of Healing and the Terafin manse, nowhere else.”

  “Finch told me. Finch, Teller, Carver.”

  Levec’s skepticism tightened his brow. It was amazing how much of a weather vane that brow could be.

  “It’s probably true,” Jewel offered. “It’s Finch, after all.” She hesitated. She did not want Adam removed from the manse, but dim memories of Alowan’s enforced separation from Arann haunted her. Adam had saved her life; she owed him. But what she owed him now was uncertain. On the other hand, that’s what Levec was here to tell her.

  Levec, however, shoved both of his blocky hands behind his back as he approached Adam. “I will return to the Houses of Healing,” he said. “I do not doubt you; Leila will no doubt be awake. If it is safe, I will send her back to her family. I would like you to visit.”

  Not a demand.

  “Can you now wake the others in the same fashion?”

  Adam turned to Jewel. “I cannot do it myself,” he told Levec. “Jewel must help.”

  “Jewel—The Terafin—is in much demand at the moment. There is some uproar occurring in Avantari, and rumors persist throughout the holdings.”

  “About my death?”

  “I did not say they were well-founded.” Glaring pointedly at the front of a dress that was more blood than cloth, he added, “but had Adam not been present, they would have been.” He exhaled. That conceded, he returned his full attention to the younger man. “I know what the sleepers have come to mean to you. I will not tell you you are wrong; you are strong, Adam.

  “But you must stay in the West Wing, and The Terafin must remain in her own rooms. If you cannot do even this, you will return to the Houses of Healing for at least a month.”

  “I can do this,” Adam replied. His Weston then deserted him as he turned to Jewel. “I don’t think we’ll be able to wake the sleepers from the Houses of Healing.”

  Jewel nodded; she wasn’t certain, either.

  It was Avandar, carrying a dress with care over his left arm, who said, “If The Terafin decides to exercise her power, it should be possible. Those who were struck with the sleeping sickness came from across the holdings as well as the Isle; they did not come from the Terafin manse. If they could be ensnared in the holdings, they can, in theory, be wakened from the holdings as well.”

  Adam wilted.

  Jewel, however, put an arm around his shoulder—or started to; Levec barked, and both she and Adam froze like children caught playing in the fountains in the Common by annoyed magisterial guards.

  “I must be getting old,” he muttered, as he caught Adam by the arm and dragged him toward the door. “When I was younger, I would never have allowed any of my healers to take this great a risk at his age.”

  * * *

  Jewel said, once Levec had cleared the door, “I like him.”

  “Adam?” Angel asked; he’d remained silent throughout Levec’s visit.

  “Levec. He reminds me of my Oma—and there aren’t many men who can do that.” She turned to Avandar and removed the dress he was carrying from his arms. Lifting her arms, she allowed her domicis to lever the nightdress over her head. “How bad is it going to be?” she asked, some of the syllables muffled as the dress passed over her face.

  “Survivable. The Kings, however, have expressed concern at your absence.”

  She had slept through the command appearance with the Exalted in the Hall of Wise Counsel. “Did they send it through Duvari?”

  “No, Terafin.” He glanced at the windows; dawn was slowly brightening the sky. “But there are several messages in the right-kin’s office, none of which can safely be consigned to the nebulous future.”

  Jewel nodded absently and turned toward Angel. “Did the room always look like this? I mean—before the walls were shredded?”

  Avandar’s brows rose. Angel’s didn’t, but the rest of his expression froze.

  “. . . No,” Avandar replied.

  Now that she was awake and no one was trying to kill her—or anyone else—she looked with care at the windows, the flooring, the bed itself. The walls were a mess, so it was harder to assess their original length. Or height. But the ceilings, she thought, looked wrong; they made her feel much shorter.

  She glanced up, and up again. Angel caught her before she toppled backward.

  What had once been ceiling in the normal sense of the word was gone; instead, the bowers of trees—or vines, it was hard to tell, they were so thick—now interceded between open sky and the rest of the bedroom. The leaves were of silver, gold, and diamond, but wound around and through them, the green and golden leaves of the trees in the Common, edged in a frill of ivory.

  “I’m awake, aren’t I?” she asked.

  Angel pushed her back to standing. “You’re awake.”

  “When did this—”

  “It wasn’t like this when you were sleeping, but given the choice, I’ll take this.”

  “The window—”

  “I wasn’t paying much attention to the window,” Angel admitted. “And I haven’t seen this room that often—”

  “It is markedly different,” Avandar said.

  “The wall—”

  “It is my suspicion that the wall will correct itself overnight.”

  “Have you been outside of this room? Did anything else change?”

  “You are the person who can best answer that question.”

  Clearly, she thought with some irritation, she couldn’t. She dressed quickly, allowing Avandar to fuss with her hair; he was neither as thorough nor as painful as Ellerson could be. Dressed, cleaned up to the degree that was possible when time was of the essence, Jewel approached the open doors of the room. The Chosen fell in behind her. In any other rooms in the manse, they would form up around her. Angel took up the right, leaving Avandar his customary position to the left.

  Before she could leave the room—the glimpse of the hall implied that at least the hall was normal—the three cats sauntered in. They were still the wrong size, subtly the wrong shape, but were now hissing and squabbling, in admittedly lower voices.

  Angel signed, moving his hands without raising his arms.

  Night ignored him; Shadow gave him the evil eye, or the cat variant of same. Snow stepped on Night’s tail, and since they were blocking the door, it was not the optimum place for a scuffle. Not that that seemed to deter them on most days. “Gentlemen,” Jewel said, dropping hands to her hips and glaring.

  Shadow tilted his head to the side. “Yessss?”

  “We’re leaving. You’re in the way.”

  The three cats stopped snapping at each other. Snow examined his paws; they were also larger. Night, however, pushed his head around the corner of the doorframe, hissed, and drew back. “Why are they allowed to scratch the walls?”

  “They didn’t. The Warden of Dreams did. Anytime you’re the Warden of Dreams, I promise not to complain if you destroy the walls.”

  Avandar cleared his throat.

  “Cosmetically speaking.”

  Night appeared to think about this, inasmuch as cats ever did. “So,” he said slyly, “if we try to—”

  “No.” She exhaled. “You don’t seem hurt.”

  “Of course not.”

  Neither did Snow.

  “Do you remember what happened?”

  They all stared at her as if she had just said the most idiotic thing they had ever heard. Then again, on a bad day, every sentence she uttered was, by acclaim, the most idiotic thing they’d ever heard, and it seemed there was no lower limit to her idiocy.

  “Did I change your shape?”

  Once again a look bounced between the three of them. “What do you think?” Snow asked.

  At this very moment, she was wondering how she had managed to miss them in their absence. Memory was obviously kind. “I think I preferred your former shapes. At this point, I think I would prefer something much smaller.”

&n
bsp; They hissed in unison, but they got out of the way. Unfortunately, they then joined what was rapidly becoming a procession, and she could hear the hissing of laughter at her back. Since the cats generally laughed at someone else’s expense—or, to be fair, at each other’s—this was not a comfort.

  “Do not bother the Chosen,” she told them. The hall was as she remembered it; the same pale color, the same baseboards and detail work in the corners of the ceiling. There were no branches here, no leaves or vines. She exhaled and glanced at Avandar.

  “I would suggest we visit the library before we repair to the right-kin’s office.”

  * * *

  The last thing she wanted was to see the library altered in any way. It was one of the first rooms she had seen; it was the room in which Ellerson had taken his leave, and the room in which she had been ordered to accept Avandar as her domicis. She glanced at him, lips curving in a smile; he raised a brow in response.

  “You look almost feline, Terafin; I would be cautious about the expressions you adopt from your cats, were I you.”

  Her smile broadened, but she ducked her head to hide the worst—or the best—of it, as Angel opened the doors—the unchanged doors—at the end of the hall.

  * * *

  “I don’t understand,” she whispered. No one else said a word, if the cats were discounted. Even Angel’s hands were still. The library was not the library she remembered. She could understand why the bedroom had altered in dimensions, why the windows were different; she had had to struggle to remember them; to force her dreaming self and her waking self to merge. But she had not once thought of the library; that wasn’t where her body lay.

  This room—if it could even be called that, anymore—was in no way the library of The Terafin. Oh, there were books; she could see them at a distance. The long, pristine table at which The Terafin had often worked, books piled to either side, was gone. The shelves, cataloged and tended by Terafin librarians, were gone as well, although shelving of a sort remained. There were no rugs, there were no paintings, and above them, as her gaze reached for the skylight through which moons and sun could be glimpsed, she saw that there was no roof.

  “Terafin.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Avandar said nothing. The Chosen said nothing. Jewel stood, almost frozen, until Shadow nudged her upper back with the flat of his head. “Go on, go on,” he said, practically purring. “Go look at it.”

  He was as heavy as he looked; she stumbled in a way Amarais would never have stumbled during her stewardship, her rulership, of the House. The floor was of bleached wood; it was harder than its color suggested, and very, very smooth. It stretched across a span of floor so large the doors appeared to have been moved—or done away with all together. Since they were the doors that led into the entire suite of rooms, this was a disaster.

  “It’s not, you know,” Shadow whispered. It sounded like a growl. “I think you could do better,” he added, as he stepped heavily on Angel’s foot and shouldered him out of the way. Angel’s gestures were, while in den-sign, also universal.

  There were trees in the library. They seemed to rise up from the perfect and pristine hardwood as if the whole of the floor was their roots. They grew at the ends of what had once been shelves, and indeed, shelves rested between their locked branches; they did not look particularly stable at first glance. She didn’t want to see the archivist’s reaction—she thought he would die of apoplexy. But these trees were not gold, not silver, and certainly not diamond; nor were they the great trees that encircled and shadowed the Common. White bark girded them as they rose, and their leaves were a pale, pale green; they seemed new, and young.

  She swallowed. “Please tell me,” she said, in the faintest of voices she had yet used, “that that’s not water I hear.”

  Angel winced.

  “Clearly I need a better class of liar.”

  Avandar did not seem as troubled as Angel, and of course if the Chosen were worried, they would keep it to themselves while on duty. They took this duty, given the appearance of the Warden, very seriously, although Jewel did not feel they were in any danger here—not until the archivist actually visited.

  She glanced up at the sky and frowned.

  “Tell me the sky isn’t purple.”

  “Let me get Jester,” Angel offered.

  She cursed. There was no roof. There was a sky, but no sun, and the color was amethyst. She walked more quickly toward the sound of water, although she paused in front of the shelves that were bracketed by trees. To her surprise, the shelves grew like branches from the trunks.

  “A maker couldn’t have done this,” Angel whispered.

  “An Artisan could,” Jewel replied.

  “A very few Artisans,” Avandar agreed. He was not, damn him, disturbed at all.

  She couldn’t help herself; she ran her fingers across the lip of the shelving, and then reached up hesitantly to pull down a leather-bound tome. She recognized the book; it was one of the many left by previous rulers as guidance, as history, and—in some cases—bitter complaint. She checked the rest of the shelf and felt the knot of tension between her shoulder blades relaxing. “The books are the same.”

  Avandar raised a brow, but knew her well enough to offer no other disagreement.

  Shadow was almost bouncing. His claws clicked against the wood and she winced; the floors wouldn’t stay pristine for very long if the cats came and went as they pleased. As if to underscore this concern, Night and Snow started to snarl—at each other—and paws were raised, claws extended.

  I missed them, she told herself. I missed having them here. She must be insane. On the other hand, they had not yet knocked over a tree and they avoided shoving each other into the shelving, for which she tried to be grateful.

  The shelves—which were now much more widely spaced than they had been, continued like a long hall across the pale floors, and if the skies were a purple not normally associated with bright light, it was day, here, and the shadows they cast were short enough it might have been close to midday, on either side. There was no undergrowth; the trees did not imply the whole of a forest.

  As they reached the end of the shelving, the floor continued, like a field that hasn’t yet begun to sprout the seeds that have been planted. She could see that the shelves themselves continued on the far side of the open space, but that wasn’t what caught her eye.

  In the center of the library—and she knew it was the center—were two things: the long, spare table that she associated with Amarais at work, and a fountain.

  * * *

  Jewel did not cry in public. It was a lesson she’d learned early in childhood from her Oma, and it clung—or she did; at a remove it was hard to separate the two. Reinforced by Amarais and her absolute control over the emotions she revealed, it was at the core of how Jewel defined strength.

  She was therefore silent as she approached the long table; she did not dare, for minutes, to speak at all, because she knew that tears would follow words. Avandar was silent to her left; Angel silent in a different way to her right. The Chosen were always silent while on duty. The only noise in the room came from the cats.

  There was rather a lot of it. Even had they chosen silence, their claws made noise; a constant patter of little clicks broken by words and the occasional petty shoving. But their voices, lower in register, were comfortingly familiar; their arguments, their jostling for position, their insults—they were the same as they would have been in any corner of the world. Real, magical, surreal—the cats walked through worlds, their essence unchanged.

  “You are not too stupid to learn this,” Shadow said, leaving Night and Snow to bicker.

  She knew she hadn’t spoken aloud. The fact that he answered should have disturbed her—but it’s not like she had much privacy as The Terafin, regardless. “I’ll have to learn.”

  “Yessss.” His head was at the height of her shoulder, now.

  “I really, really want you to go back to your former s
ize.”

  Night sneezed. Snow’s tail narrowly avoided Night’s snapping jaws a few seconds later. Jewel glared at them, and they ignored her, but her heart wasn’t in it; she turned once again to the table. Shadow shouldered Avandar out of the way and slid between the domicis and Jewel; Shadow was the only one who followed closely as she walked the last few yards to the table itself. There were four chairs at this table; they were also unaltered by the transformation that had overtaken the rest of what could no longer be called a room.

  “If you scratch this table,” Jewel told the much larger, gray cat, “I will kill you myself.”

  Shadow hissed.

  “The chairs?” Snow asked, sidling up on the right.

  “The chairs, too.”

  She approached the chair at the head of the table; it was the chair in which The Terafin sat when she desired privacy in which to work. Two months, more, she’d been buried—but death didn’t change the past, and the past was so strong here it was almost alive. Jewel could no more take that chair than she could have when The Terafin occupied it. She took, instead, the chair to the left—it was, on the occasions she’d been commanded to join The Terafin, hers.

  There were almost no scratches on the table’s surface; it was oiled to a gleaming shine, especially beneath a midday sky—even a purple one. But there were books on the table, in a haphazard pile, one left open as if the person studying it had taken a momentary break from its dry, procedural words.

  And she wanted that woman to come back from stretching her legs, to resume her seat, to focus once again on those words and the work at hand. Her eyes did sting; she closed them for a long moment. When she opened them again, the chair was occupied.

  But it was not occupied by The Terafin. Not even her dreams would be that kind.

  No, it was occupied by a woman she had seen only a handful of times in her life—and each was burned into memory, like a brand burned skin, claiming forever some part of what it touched.

  “Evayne.”

  “Terafin.”

  Her face was hooded, but she lifted her hands and drew the folds of midnight from the contours of her face. She was a woman, not a girl; she was not quite of an age with Amarais at the height of her power, but she was close. Her eyes were violet and unblinking, but Jewel thought them a lesser shade of the same color that now adorned the sky—as if the seer were a window and Jewel was looking through its haze.