Battle: The House War: Book Five

by Michelle West

  It was just like Levec to cut to the heart of the matter. Jewel rose. “If you will lead me to the healerie?”

  “Your guards stay outside.”

  Torvan stiffened.

  “Agreed. My domicis, however, will be with me.”

  It was clear Levec wanted to argue. Jewel was almost surprised when he didn’t. He rose as well; his chair creaked more.

  * * *

  “You’ll find either three or four people awake when you arrive. They will likely be confined to bed; they’ve lost weight and strength because they’ve eaten so little. They were woken in the usual way.”

  “The rest?”

  “Sleeping. I have some of my trainees working in the healerie. Don’t touch them, don’t bother them. Don’t ask them questions; if you have questions, ask me.” He growled. Jewel almost laughed, the sound was so unexpected; his expression forbade mirth. “And do not speak a single word to the damn mages. Not one.”

  “The magi are here?”

  “Yes. By Royal command.”

  She had hoped, walking into the healerie, that an answer to Levec’s earlier question would present itself. She had hoped that she might see the sleepers as Adam saw them. She didn’t. She saw people in beds across the great room, almost all of them asleep. Levec had possibly a dozen assistants who sat in the very small spaces between those beds, trickling water into the mouths of those who would otherwise die of its lack.

  They looked exhausted. Jewel, glancing at Levec—who was glaring back at her—instantly forgave his ill-humor. The fact that many of these people were alive at all was no doubt due to the ministrations of the healers here; had they been left at home, she wasn’t certain they would have survived.

  But they had. She saw Adam in the farthest corner of the room visible from the door and headed toward him. He was seated beside the bed of an elderly woman; she was awake. Her left hand was clasped in both of his, and he was bent over her, listening to her speak. Jewel guessed she was speaking in Torra, which was confirmed as she drew close.

  She waited until Adam noticed her. He didn’t, until the old woman did.

  Jewel shook her head as he made to rise. “Introduce us?”

  Remembering his manners, Adam reddened. “I’m sorry. This is Maria. Maria, this is Jewel.” The old woman inclined her head. If she noticed the Terafin signet, she said nothing—and Jewel thought there was a decent chance she wouldn’t recognize it if she had.

  Speaking Weston, Jewel said, “Is there anything different today?”

  “No.” Adam hesitated. “I want to you to try something.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to take her other hand.”

  Jewel really wished she’d insisted on wearing practical clothing; there wasn’t much space between the beds, and even standing, her skirts were pressed over the edge of the next patient.

  She asked—in Torra—permission to do as Adam had suggested; the woman did not have the energy to radiate the suspicion Jewel was certain her Oma would have. She lifted her left hand, and Jewel caught it in both of hers.

  Adam closed his eyes. Jewel watched him, holding her breath. Nothing changed. The room looked the same. The old woman was staring—fondly—at Adam’s face. “He is a good boy,” she told Jewel, in Torra. “There are so few of those.”

  “There are,” Jewel said, smiling. She closed her eyes.

  * * *

  In the red-tinged darkness of closed eyelids, sounds, as always, were sharper. She could hear Levec’s impatient snap at the mages who habitually invaded his healerie. He wanted no interference with anyone in the healerie; he ordered them to leave The Terafin alone. She was unreasonably happy to note that the magi—at least at the moment—were lower on the scale of acceptable guests than The Terafin.

  She heard the magi’s sharp response, but didn’t recognize the voices; there were at least three. Their voices tended to overlap; one woman, two men.

  They faded into the background as she continued to listen. She could hear the sound of hands in water, of buckets being lifted—with a grunt—and set down. Closer and softer, she could hear the gentle murmur of Torra in a voice that seemed ancient, but the syllables refused to coalesce into words.

  She could hear the sound of wind; of breeze through heavy leaves. Like the Torra, it was a soft, gentle sound, and like the Torra, it almost implied words, without the harsher edge of syllables to contain them. Unlike the Torra, however, it didn’t come from the healerie.

  Jewel opened her eyes. The first thing she saw was Adam; he was seated across from her, his eyes closed, his cheeks faintly flushed. His hands were still entwined with the old woman’s—as were Jewel’s. She shifted gaze to see Maria, head propped up against a stack of pillows, blankets of varying weight covering the rest of her frail body.

  But the bed was no longer bracketed by other beds; nor was it flush against a wall. Like the shelves in The Terafin’s personal library, it appeared to have grown out of the trunk of a very large tree. Above the bed, swaying in a warm breeze, were branches; the tree was Ellariannatte.

  “Adam,” Jewel said. “Open your eyes.”

  He did. They widened as he looked beyond her shoulder. The only person who didn’t appear surprised by her surroundings was Maria, possibly because her vision wasn’t that good.

  “Where are we?” Adam asked—in Weston.

  Maria frowned. If Weston was not her mother-tongue, or even her preferred one, she wasn’t an idiot; the question was very basic. “We are in the forest,” she said. “Help me stand, Adam.” Her voice was stronger than it had been in the healerie, the tone of command sharper. Adam, accustomed to autocratic women, immediately slid an arm beneath her shoulders, supporting her weight as she sat. She slid her hand out of Jewel’s, and swiveling, placed her feet against the forest floor; they were bare.

  She was not, however; she wore clothing. Jewel was certain she’d been wearing a simple shift a moment ago, but that was gone; she wore a dress, a loose and comfortably practical one. It was a heavy cotton, a russet brown that had seen better years, and it was protected by an apron of many pockets.

  “Are we ready?” she asked him. He looked confused; he was good at that.

  “Where are your shoes?” Jewel asked.

  Maria pursed her lips in a frown. “We don’t need shoes here,” she declared, with the vast authority of age.

  “Where are we?” Adam asked.

  “Don’t you know?” One white brow rose in a distinctive arch.

  “No, Ona Maria. I’m sorry.”

  She tsked as she set her bare feet firmly against the ground. “It can’t be helped.” Her arm dropped, but she still held Adam’s hand; he looked like a much younger boy as she began to lead him away from the bedside. But she paused and turned a speculative eye upon Jewel. “You had better join us, I think.”

  Jewel, afraid to confess the same ignorance that afflicted Adam in Maria’s opinion, rose instantly. She noted that her dress, her signet ring, and her short boots remained unchanged. So, for that matter, did Adam’s clothing. The bed, however, dissolved, absorbed whole into the trunk of the great tree.

  * * *

  Maria apparently knew where she was going, which was good. Adam looked as apprehensive as Jewel felt. She wanted to speak to him, but was afraid to offend Maria.

  “Where are we going?” Adam asked.

  “To the Festival gates,” Maria replied. “They won’t be far from here. Can you hear the music?”

  Until the old woman had mentioned it, there’d been no music. But Jewel could hear it now; lute, she thought, and pipe. She could hear the baritone of a man’s voice, but couldn’t make out the words.

  “This is like Leila,” Adam said.

  It seemed that way to Jewel, but she said, “No,” before half a thought had formed.

  He didn’t argue and he didn’t question. Nor did Maria speak; she was now looking ahead, a smile deepening the lines around the corners of her mouth. The music grew in volume, and
with it, the sounds of other voices: there was a crowd gathered here. Maria slid her hand free of Adam’s, and gave him a gentle shove forward. “Go,” she told him. “And have fun.”

  “Maria—”

  “It will be over soon enough,” the old woman told Jewel. She joined the gathered crowd and was soon lost to it. Adam and Jewel remained at its outer edge.

  Adam, eyes narrowed, scanned the crowd. Crowds were a common element of dreaming; they had certainly existed in Leila’s world. But something about this crowd felt different to Jewel. It wasn’t their clothing, although they wore distinctive dresses, robes, and tunics—clearly, this was a festive gathering, and all of the participants understood as much. They all lacked shoes, which Jewel found odd. She almost considered taking hers off.

  No, she thought, it was their voices. The sound of each voice, caught briefly before the sense of its individuality was lost, was sharp, clear, distinct. It didn’t matter that some of those voices were childish and youthful, and some ancient and weathered; nor did it matter that some were deep and resonant, and some shrill and strident. She felt as if she knew these voices, although she knew she had never met any of these people before, with the possible exception of Maria.

  “Do you recognize them?” Jewel asked.

  Adam nodded slowly. He began to reel off their names, and Jewel held up a hand to stem the tide; the names meant nothing without people to attach them to, and she knew she’d forget them the moment he moved on to the next.

  Except she didn’t. As he spoke each name, she saw a brief light, a brief glow, touch individual members of the crowd. Or their backs; they were facing away from Jewel and Adam. What they saw, she couldn’t see. Taking Adam’s left hand in her right, Jewel headed around the gathering, toward the musicians that could be heard but not seen.

  * * *

  “I think they’re all here,” Adam told her. “I don’t think anyone’s missing.”

  “There were four people who were awake.”

  “Three,” Adam replied. “But Maria is here.”

  “And the other two?”

  He pointed. “Cedric and Hollin. Over there.”

  “Does that mean they’ve fallen asleep again in the healerie?”

  Adam shrugged. “Probably.”

  “Easy for you to say—Levec isn’t going to kill you.”

  He laughed. “You know Levec likes you, right?”

  “No, I really don’t.” She started to say more, and stopped, because she had reached the music. She had correctly identified the lute and the pipes. She had failed to identify baritone and tenor. Or rather, she’d failed to identify the source of the voices. Now, she could see them clearly: they weren’t human. They weren’t even close.

  She had met immortals in her travels: demons and Arianni. But the two who now sang—male and female—were neither. They were slender, slight of build, and tall, their limbs like lithe spring branches. They were a startling shade of gold, although their hair was white, shot through with green and red; it trailed from their heads to the ground in a swirl of motion that implied breeze through leaves.

  Their eyes were sky blue; there were no whites.

  She felt—as she often felt when confronted with immortals—old, ugly, and ungainly. She was almost afraid to approach them—but there was nothing forbidding in their countenance, nothing like the Winter chill that lived in Celleriant’s gaze. As she watched, hesitating, one of the smaller members of the audience ran free of its confines, laughing with delight, her arms outstretched.

  “Oh ho!” the man said, opening his arms while the pipe—no longer held in his hands—continued to play. He lifted the girl, swung her in a wide, wild arc, and let her go. Jewel inhaled sharply and started to run, but stopped as the child began to fly. Wind bore her aloft, just above the two performers, and as she sailed in sky, dodging branches, the woman turned, smiling broadly, to meet Jewel’s astonished gaze.

  “And here we have the master of the green,” she said, her smile so warm it was almost embarrassing. She offered a low and graceful bow. “We have been waiting for you, Jewel. We gathered your lost companions, your unknown servants, and we have entertained them in your absence.

  “Have you been well, my Lord?”

  Adam had come to stand by Jewel’s side, although he was staring at the two strangers, his mouth open.

  She laughed as she rose, transferring her gaze to the boy. “And you have brought an illustrious guest with you, have you not? Brother, cease your singing and come and greet our new arrivals.”

  The man laughed, lifting his arms as the child’s weight returned. She fell into them in a shrieking tumble that held very little fear, and he set her small, bare feet against the ground before he heeded his companion’s demand. The corners of his eyes were creased—or veined—with lines of merriment. “And so I shall.” The pipes, however, continued to play, absent either his fingers or his breath across them.

  He bowed to them both; his bow to Jewel was the deeper of the two, and the more flamboyant. “Jewel,” he said. “And Adam. We have been waiting your return.”

  Jewel glanced at the crowd; they had fallen more or less silent—the less being the few children who were threading their way between the press of adult legs without fear of reprisal. “I have no memory of visiting this place before,” she finally said.

  “Have you not? Perhaps you do not recognize it as it is.” He lifted an arm.

  She lifted a hand in quick response. “No,” she told him. “If you mean to pull back a curtain or somehow alter this landscape—don’t. This dream is a pleasant dream; I would not see it shift into something darker.”

  “It is not darkness that I would offer them—or you. We understood your intent. It is why we gathered those lost in the forest and brought them here. Have you come to take them from us?”

  “I have come to take them home,” she replied. “They can only remain here while they live, and every hour they spend increases the chance they will not.”

  “Will you keep nothing of them, then?” he asked, tilting his head to one side. His companion began to walk among the crowd, much as the children had done; she was not afraid of censure in any way. But she spoke to the spectators, the gathered dreamers, as she walked, and Jewel thought she saw a nod or two in her passing.

  “They are not mine.”

  Both brows rose. “Are they not, then?”

  Adam said, “She does not understand what the word means.” He was flushed. “And you will not now cast them out or claim them if she does not.”

  “No, Adam. We will not; we do not trouble ourselves with the surface of her words. We are not bound, unwilling, to this place, to seek freedom by twisting all meaning to better suit our purposes.” He threw his arms up and out, and a rain of leaves followed in their wake. In shape and form, they were Ellariannatte; in composition, they were not. But they were not quite silver, gold, or diamond. They were not leaves of fire.

  “No,” he said softly. “They are the bones of the ancient earth.” As if he could hear her thoughts. The wind caught them in its folds, as easily and as gracefully as it had caught a laughing child, and the leaves tumbled end over end above the heads of the crowd. Their hands rose as they caught them.

  She watched; she wasn’t certain why. But it seemed, as she watched, that each man, woman, and child reached for only one of these odd leaves—and none of them reached for the same leaf. As if, somehow, they could see something in the shape and motion of their falling flight that spoke specifically to them, and only them.

  “We heard your song, Jewel.”

  She stiffened. “You did not hear my song. I have no voice to sing it, and even if I did, I would not have the words.”

  He laughed. “You are so tame and timid,” he replied. “Is she not?”

  His companion had completed her circuit of the crowd to return to his side. “She is. But endearing, and beautiful in a fashion. I heard you keep the noisy ones.”

  She must be speaking of the c
ats.

  “I am indeed. I have a few words to say to the darkest of the three; I bear some of the scars of his predictable ill-temper, and I would like to return them.” But she spoke while laughing. “And perhaps we will see them again. Almost certainly, we will. You have woken us, Jewel, and we have come.” Her smile faded from lips, although her eyes were still full of its warmth.

  “But perhaps it will not happen soon. You have heard the barest whisper of our sleeping voices, and you have called it breeze. But you will hear us now, and soon. If you call our names, we will waken, and we will come to you.”

  “For what purpose?” Jewel asked.

  The woman laughed again. “Our roots have long been buried in the soil of the lands you have claimed as your own, and we are not displeased to be so chosen. We have known the long sleep of Winter—but now we feel the sweet warmth of Spring.”

  Jewel stared. Without thinking she said, “But it is Winter, still.”

  “It is Winter in all lands but yours. And it is not yet Summer in yours—that cannot happen, not yet.” Her expression became, slowly, grave. “In truth, there should be no Spring—but you have called us, and we have woken. There is a fire at the heart of this forest that is like the young sun, to us; its warmth pierces even Winter chill and banishes the long sleep. We are not all awake, not yet—but we are waking as we speak. We are not Arianni. We cannot rove as they rove, or hunt as they hunt; we ride wind, if we ride at all, and our flight is brief.

  “But our roots are buried deep in these lands, and if we cannot ride, Lord, we cannot easily be riven from them, not even by the hunters who traverse them. We stand as we stand, and we do so in defense of your lands because they are, now, also ours.

  “We will guard the ways, when you leave this place, for as long as even one tree remains standing. And you must leave, in the end. You must seek the Summer.”

  “What will you be in Summer?”

  She laughed. “As you see us, but more so.” She turned to the man she had called brother. “It is time,” she said, with more warmth than dignity. Raising her voice, she then added, “She has finally come to show you the way. But there is a price and pledge for passage, as we have told you.”