Battle: The House War: Book Five

by Michelle West

  The subtle, of course, was present; he did not trust Rymark. His robes were overlaid in translucent, orange light. Jewel thought it wise. There was nothing in her memories to gentle her reaction to Rymark; they were not kind. In response, she was unkind; she waited. She did not choose to give him any privacy—at all—in which to experience the drastic transformation.

  “Terafin,” Meralonne said quietly.

  She glanced at him, but said nothing. Avandar remained close at hand; Angel stood back. Shadow was the only bored personage in the room, although he made enough noise to compensate for everyone else’s silence.

  Did you kill her? Did you kill Amarais? It was the only question that mattered. She clasped her hands loosely behind her back to stop herself from pushing hair out of her eyes. It was a nervous gesture Avandar decried. What he was willing to tolerate in even a member of the Terafin Council, he was unwilling to accept in The Terafin.

  Rymark ATerafin appeared beneath the center of the arch. He appeared—to her deep surprise—without his guards. She watched his expression with care, uncertain as to what she hoped to see there. His eyes widened as he gazed into the distance of shelving that was now very odd forest. Of all the things she would have predicted, triumph wasn’t on the list. But there was, about the smile that transformed his face, triumph.

  “Terafin.” His bow was deep, graceful, and a touch too long. He noted Meralonne APhaniel—he couldn’t help but notice him—with the curt nod reserved for questionable equals in social gatherings. “The library is . . . much changed.”

  “It is, although it is of lesser concern at the moment.” That dragged his attention away from the depths of purple sky. “You requested an interview.”

  He glanced more tellingly at Meralonne APhaniel. “Terafin. The matter is wholly of interest to the House.”

  “Member APhaniel is the House Mage, and as such, indispensable at this time. He is not present as a member of the Order of Knowledge or its internal Council.”

  “He is nonetheless a member of both.”

  “I will not play these games,” she replied. “I do not desire his absence, and his contract is to the House.”

  “My position in the Order is tenuous,” Rymark replied. He spoke without apparent concern, and kept his gaze on the Lord of his House. “The Council of the Magi is politically sensitive. If Member APhaniel remains, I will seek your ear at another time.”

  “You will not,” she replied. “I am not, now, so desperate for information that I will allow the games of the Order of Knowledge to interfere with my schedule and my priorities. You mentioned, in passing, the subject of the interview. It is a subject of grave concern and interest—which is why I have made room in my schedule to speak with you.

  “But it is not, at the moment, of grave enough concern that I will dismiss my mage at your behest; if he serves as nothing else, he serves as witness.”

  Rymark’s eyes rather predictably narrowed. “And an external witness is now considered a necessity in a matter that has direct bearing upon House affairs?”

  “There are some magics, as you must well know, that are not subject to the legal exemptions that otherwise govern House Law.”

  His eyes narrowed further.

  She lifted a hand. “I’m unwilling to play games with you. You are not here at my request, but at your own, and if you have come to posture, I will retire to better prepare for my interview with the Exalted on the morrow.”

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘‘YOU SAID YOU HAD INFORMATION about the Shining Court.”

  Rymark stiffened, but did not glance at Meralonne. Jewel did. The mage’s silver eyes were narrowed, but betrayed no surprise. “I did.”

  “I am less concerned with the Shining Court than I have ever been.”

  “That is unwise,” Rymark replied. “You do not know who presides over the Lords of that Court.”

  “I think I do. What I don’t know is the composition of the rest of the Court, although I imagine there are Kialli among its numbers.”

  “The Court matters little. The composition of the Court—with a few key exceptions—is not specifically of note. What matters is the Lord of the Shining City.”

  “Allasakar.”

  Shadow hissed; the hiss deepened into a low rumble of sound and motion. Even Rymark looked surprised and ill-pleased to hear the god’s name spoken so bluntly. He fell silent; they all did, except for Shadow.

  “House Law,” Meralonne said, into that silence, “does not provide exemptions for acts of treason.”

  Rymark said nothing, adopting—where Meralonne was concerned—his usual arrogant disdain. This required flexibility, as he had adopted a much, much more conciliatory approach to The Terafin.

  “Assassination of a member of House Terafin is not an act of treason,” Jewel said, in his stead.

  “No, indeed,” the mage agreed. “Consorting with demonologists, being a demonologist, or colluding with demons, however, is. If we agree that the method of assassination was, in fact, demonic—and there are credible witnesses to that effect, among them the Kings, we must also therefore agree that the act was treasonous.”

  Jewel glanced at Meralonne. “Member APhaniel, I believe I said I was done—for the day—with games. They offer me little and cost me a great deal of time.” She forced her hands to remain by her sides, although they were creeping up toward their perch on her hips.

  “Very well. ATerafin, you have claimed knowledge of the Shining Court, however indirectly. The Shining Court is the body politic of the Shining City; it serves Allasakar in all ways.”

  Rymark again said nothing.

  “I will not ask you how you come to have that knowledge, since we are to dispense with pretense. I will ask, instead, why you have kept it to yourself until now.”

  “Perhaps I did not think it relevant,” Rymark replied, turning once again to Jewel. “Might we retire to your office?”

  Jewel raised a brow. “I have no idea where the office now is, if it currently exists at all. I have felt no need for it; the meetings that have occurred in the library so far have been of a private nature.” She considered the table and the fountain, and glanced at Avandar.

  No. I consider it unwise.

  Why? She had her own reasons.

  You do not, of course, trust him; that is both fair and wise. But you have not yet decided, Jewel, whether or not he will leave this room alive. If he does not, it doesn’t matter what he sees; if he does, it is much more of a concern.

  What do you counsel?

  I? Caution. No more, no less. I have frequently allowed those who meant me harm to live. I have not always chosen to do so; it depended entirely on their relative power and the advantage to be gained by either action on my part.

  You want to know what he knows.

  No, Jewel; I consider what he knows to be, as you have implied, of trivial value. You want to know what he knows.

  She did. She felt a horrible traitor for choosing the politics of the moment—and of the future—over the need for the justice for which the House Sword was named. “Very well. Let us look,” she told Rymark and Meralonne, “for the offices that once occupied space within my personal rooms.”

  * * *

  Meralonne did not object, and that should have been a warning. Nor did he reach for his pipe—and Jewel was probably the only woman of any consequence with whom he dealt who didn’t strongly dislike it. He nodded to Rymark; Rymark passed him by, as if his presence were, in the end, of little consequence.

  Jewel frequently considered Meralonne a colossal inconvenience; she never considered him inconsequential. She didn’t, now; he was gazing up at the sky, his eyes slightly narrowed, as if he expected something to emerge from its purple folds. Nothing did, not even clouds, but wind swept strands of his hair from his face. She noted only then that he hadn’t bothered to rebraid it.

  He had been one of the first people of any import she’d been introduced to upon her arrival in the manse, and she had been forced
to work with him for weeks, crawling and digging through the dirt while he smoked his pipe and looked alternately bored, annoyed, or lazy. She had had long conversations across the breakfast nook in the West Wing about his approach to their joint investigation; she had seen him all but scream at The Terafin in frustration and fury.

  And she had never seen him, she knew, the way others did. Meralonne did not age. He hadn’t aged a minute in the sixteen years since their first introduction. But sometimes she could see what lay behind the patina of mercurial, slightly vindictive mage: something ancient, something wild, something ultimately unconcerned with the petty day-to-day world in which the majority of her heart lay bound.

  She had seen it the first time Meralonne APhaniel had faced a demon lord; she had seen it each and every time thereafter. Something in him came alive only then, as if such life-and-death struggles were the only thing into which he could throw the whole of his heart.

  She saw that in him, now. She had always considered it compelling. Finch thought it beautiful, but cold. She shook herself, turned away, thinking of her office, of the room that had been an office. It was small, tastefully furnished, and almost never used.

  It was not the place for Meralonne APhaniel.

  She learned at least one thing from Rymark’s presence in her inner sanctum: he was not the force, either consciously or subconsciously, that Meralonne APhaniel had become. She had known of Rymark for almost as long, had seen him, resentful and dismissive, from her first tentative entry into the House Council meetings at the unfortunate age of sixteen, but she had never been forced to work by his side in any significant way.

  She had never seen him wield the magic in which his sense of his own power was based. Oh, she’d seen him call fire—but there was something about it that had seemed, to her eyes, almost mundane in comparison with APhaniel’s magic—or Sigurne’s. Had he pulled sword or dagger, it would have had the same effect as his fire did: it was a threat, a danger, but it was entirely and quintessentially a human one.

  He was just a man she liked to hate, not more, not less.

  An arch, very similar to the one that led from the library to the manse, appeared some thirty yards ahead. The one marked difference, to Jewel’s eye, was the adornment. Where the arch that led to the manse was covered in creeping vines that were nonetheless leafy and delicate to the eye, these were marked by thorns and flowers that looked almost like roses.

  Meralonne approached them first, his gray eyes wide. “Have a care with the thorns,” he said softly.

  “Do you recognize the flower?”

  “I do. I have not seen them in a long, long time.” He pulled back, but not far; they had captured his attention more thoroughly than Rymark. Or at least they held it. “I find it interesting that they grace this arch.”

  “Given the amount of interesting we’ve had in the past few months, that isn’t a comfort.”

  “In all probability, no.” He bowed to her. While technically a bow upon greeting and departure was not outside of the bounds of polite society given his relative rank in the Order of Knowledge, and her absolute rank in House Terafin, it was also seldom offered by Meralonne, a man to whom etiquette mattered only in the presence of the Kings.

  Rymark noticed, of course; Jewel wondered if that had been the point. She was accustomed to watching the House Council for obvious—and subtle—social interaction. She was not accustomed to watching Meralonne in the same fashion.

  Avandar was silent in every possible way as she approached the arch, taking a deep, grounding breath. Shadow shouldered Angel aside, and given Angel’s expression, she thought he would fill in for Snow or Night and push back; to avoid this, she stopped stalling and walked through the arch.

  * * *

  The office was not the office she had last seen, and given how little she expected it to be used, the last sighting had occurred during Amarais’ reign. It was also unlike the sparsely furnished room in which Teller held most of the official meetings the House required. The sweep of warm wood, covered mostly by expensive rugs, had been eschewed in favor of stone; the stone was not the marble of the foyer or any of the public areas within the manse.

  It was gray and chill; footsteps across its breadth sounded like thunder, even Jewel’s.

  There was, however, a long, wide runner that led from the door to a table that was better suited to a council of war than an office; if the room contained a desk, she couldn’t see it. There were no shelves on the walls to either side of the door; nor was there one on the far wall. The lack on the far wall, however, was because there was no space; it was occupied by a window that seemed to go on forever. Light entered the room from that window, but it was a sharp light that fell in spokes and revealed every mote of dust in the air as it did.

  There were weapons on the walls in place of the shelving that contained strategic books in the right-kin’s office. She recognized some of them, but not all, and as she couldn’t use any of them, she left them well alone. Meralonne, however, approached the walls to Jewel’s right; Jewel walked past the table to the window. When she reached it, she stopped.

  Shadow nudged her back with his head; she stepped aside so that he could join her, since he clearly hadn’t noticed the width of the window and the lack of anyone standing in front of any other part of it. Both she and her unobservant cat gazed out. It wasn’t the horizon of sea and sky that caught Jewel’s attention, because even if it was the wrong sea and the wrong coast—lacking, among other things, a harbor—it was far enough away not to be cause for concern.

  No, it was the sudden drop; the window looked out and down. She could see the sides of a cliff or a gorge, and beneath it, at the full length of its drop, a green valley that ran parallel to the horizon for as far as the eye could see. The sky beyond the window wasn’t amethyst, but azure; there wasn’t a cloud in sight. There were birds, or what she assumed were birds until Shadow began to growl.

  “APhaniel?” she said, her voice muted.

  He came away from his inspection of the weapons and joined her at the window in silence. It was an electric silence.

  “You recognized the weapons,” she said softly.

  “Not all of them, Terafin, but two, yes.”

  “Do I want to know?”

  “Their previous wielders are unlikely to return to either haunt you or accuse you of their theft, if that is your concern.”

  “Were they mortal?”

  “I will decline to answer that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it is of little consequence. At least two of the weapons in your collection would cause enterprising thieves to spend the rest of their natural lives in an attempt to remove them; they were made by Artisans.”

  Jewel’s jaw felt unhinged. She closed it with difficulty. She didn’t even ask him how he was so certain, because Rymark had wheeled to look over his shoulder at the walls and their suddenly more valuable adornments.

  “What valley is that?” she asked.

  “Do you not recognize it, Terafin?”

  “No, not from this remove. I have spent most of my life in the city.”

  “But not all, and I would guess not the most significant part of it, to date.” He raised a hand to the glass; his hand passed through it. Her eyes widened, but his did not. His were bright now. “Do you recognize the coastline?”

  “No, not in any way.”

  “Then perhaps your journey did not bring you to this remote place. I did not expect it,” he added, his voice soft, Rymark and the necessities of the Order of Knowledge all but forgotten. “I confess I am surprised at the shape and the composition of this room. You said you sought your office?”

  She nodded.

  “Clearly you have long considered your office a place of battle.” A pale brow rose, along with the corners of his lips. “Shadow,” he said, addressing the cat without bothering to look at him. “Can you fly and return?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I don’t think that’s wise,” Jewel sai
d, before she considered the audience. Shadow hissed and immediately leaped up—and through—what Jewel would have sworn looked like glass. Nothing shattered as he left. “Did you do that on purpose?”

  Meralonne smiled. “I did not, in the end, do anything; he was responding—predictably—to you.” He turned. “You have let them grow wild.” It wasn’t an accusation, but only barely missed that mark.

  “I didn’t choose their forms. I’m not sure they did, either. The Warden of Dreams saw no difference—at all—between this Shadow and Shadow as he first appeared.” She paused as a thought struck her. “Are they going to get any bigger?”

  “They are capable of far more visible ferocity,” he replied, after a thoughtful pause.

  “How did they become cats?”

  “I believe that their essential nature does not notably change. They are alarmingly at home in the halls of your manse; I am not certain it bodes well for the future. Have they killed here?” He might have been asking if they destroyed carpets by his tone of voice.

  “Only assassins.”

  “You are certain?”

  “Yes. They’ve destroyed three beds, six chairs, and the baseboards in four rooms, if that counts.”

  “It does not, as you well know. You must now watch yourself with care; what you deny yourself, Terafin, they will accept as a natural limitation on their own behavior. Waver, and they will waver.”

  “It is not my habit to go around killing people,” she replied, heat entering the chill of the response.

  “No. But power affects the powerful in different—and unpredictable—ways. The rules that have governed your life up to this point are much changed, and what is acceptable in times of war has oft been unacceptable in times of peace.” Having made his point, he underscored it: he turned, at last, to Rymark ATerafin, who stood on the other side of Jewel, staring into the vast panorama of unnatural wilderness beneath them all.

  “ATerafin.”

  Rymark turned slowly. He was pale, but smiling, his eyes wide with something that might have been wonder on any other face. “So,” he said softly, acknowledging Meralonne. “It is true.”