Battle: The House War: Book Five
Page 79
“To destroy him, to banish him, to sever his ties with the world into which she was born—and in which, ultimately, she was doomed to exist should the gods leave and the Covenant come into effect—she served the gods.” The bitter, bitter cold in his voice reminded Jewel of her youth in the streets of the twenty-fifth holding.
“And we served her. We served the White Lady. She commanded, Terafin, and we obeyed. It was our privilege. It was our reason for existence.”
His eyes were silver, and bright. His voice lost the edge of killing cold. His hair swept past his shoulders to fall in a moving drape down his back. She thought he would draw sword again, but no sword came to his hand. “She was as a god, to us, and she was deep in the councils of the nameless god.
“She was there when Moorelas’ sword was forged, and she paid the price it demanded; so, too, the gods. She gave it her blood and her name and her oath. Understand that all of the gods did; all but one.
“Imagine our dismay when it became clear that such a sword, such a weapon, was meant to be wielded by a mortal.” His tone of voice conveyed some of that dismay; he used the word mortal the way the Chosen might use the word rabbit, it seemed to contain so little sense. “A mortal.
“Nor was one found that could wield that sword. Many came, to be tested; the test was not a simple act. It was not a test of blood; it was not a test of lineage. A test of courage? A test of skill? No, not even that. It was not a test that the wise could comprehend. We were not privy to the methods of the test; the sword itself decided.
“And so we waited. We warred. We died and we conquered. The lands broke and changed beneath the feet of our armies, and we rode the crest of their shifting waves. But in time, a man arrived who could wield the sword, and he meant to wield it against Allasakar.
“He was mortal. The White Lady understood that the sword could not be wielded by any other hand, and she had waited long, in her own reckoning, for the sword to make its choice. But she did not trust mortals. She trusted the swordbearer’s intent, yes—but his competence? How could she?
“And so she came to the Princes of her court, and she chose from among them four who would journey at the side of Moorelas. Four. But we understood the whole of her intent by the time we reached the shadows cast by Allasakar’s vast and changing fortress. We understood that Allasakar was the only god who stood between the cleaving of two worlds; if he could be killed, Terafin, then the Covenant could be signed, and the gods could depart.
“And with the gods, the wilderness of the world would be sealed, and the firstborn—those born to and of the plane—would be banished into the hidden corners; even the White Lady herself.
“And mortals would be left to crawl across the husk of the world, digging in their dirt in peace. No more could the White Lady ride forth; no more could she take—and hold—the lands she desired. She would be a shadow of herself, and her lands, a tiny fraction of what they might otherwise have been.
“And she was willing to do this, to see her enemy destroyed. She herself would survive.”
Jewel said, “They were not.”
“No, Terafin. She commanded, and in this case, they could not obey. Obedience meant her destruction.”
“She is not dead.”
“No. But she is not what she was. They were willing to lose her in order to preserve her. They were willing to sacrifice the thing they held dear above all things. They knew her wrath would be great and endless.”
“And you were not.”
“I served the White Lady,” he replied. After a long pause, he added, “And I would serve. If she had commanded our destruction, none of us would have resisted. But she did not ask that. She asked us to lessen her. She asked us to destroy almost all of her power and her endless beauty.” He turned to the Chosen, which Jewel had not expected. “You serve your Lord. You have sworn your lives to the protection of all that she holds dear.
“Would you cripple her, if she commanded it? Would you break her legs and her arms?”
They were silent in the face of his words; they were only barely a question. They looked to Jewel. Jewel hesitated for a long moment, and then nodded.
Gordon did not choose to answer. But Marave stepped forward. “Yes. If she commanded it, I would obey.” She said it with a trace of defiance—but that trace ran through her entire personality like tempered steel.
“Why?”
“I trust The Terafin. I entrust her with my life. She is the whole of my duty. But I am not The Terafin, thank the gods. Her decisions, and their consequences, are not mine to bear. If I did not trust her—if I did not trust her absolutely—I would never have taken the oath. And if she commanded me to injure her—or cripple her—I would hate it, but I would trust that there was a reason for the command. Even if I couldn’t see a reason for it, even if none came to me—I would trust that there was one.”
Her answer, rather than annoying the mage, robbed him of words for a long, long moment. What was left in their wake was a slowly kindling smile. “Even so,” he said, his voice once again the voice of the mage who lived in—and served—the Order of Knowledge. He glanced, again, at Jewel.
“You have your answer,” he told her softly.
“Marave,” Jewel said. The Chosen nodded, waiting. “If I ordered the Chosen to do this thing, and Gordon refused, would he then be forsworn?”
Marave hesitated. It was not an obvious hesitation, but Jewel marked it. “The Chosen serve as a body. If the Chosen refused, if the Captains of the Chosen refused, we would all be forsworn. But if any one of us could achieve the task you set us, no, Terafin. We are the men and women you Chose. We are not all one thing or another. We were asked to serve with both thought and conscience; we are not simple House Guards.
“You are our Lord. But our oath to Terafin does not require that we give up our core beliefs in service to yours. We are free to speak, and we are free to disagree—at your behest. It is the foundation of the choice we are asked to make.”
“Thank you, Marave.” Jewel turned once again to Meralonne. “The Winter Queen is not The Terafin.”
“No,” was his grave reply. “She seldom forgives. Her orders are not to be questioned; her commands are absolute. I understood the choice they made, and I have never been certain that my own choice was not an act of cowardice, in the end.”
Jewel was silent at the magnitude of his confession. It made him seem human, a fact she was certain he would never appreciate. “But you have not returned to the host.”
“No, Terafin. There is no return for me, save by her leave; she has never given it. Allasakar did not perish at the end of the long war. He was gravely injured, and he was contained—as the Sleepers were contained—by the combined efforts of the gods. A seal was set upon them, and the Hells were given to Allasakar.
“He was therefore beyond the White Lady’s reach.”
“Until now.”
“Until now.” His smile was bitter. “And so the lost Princes will be given a chance to redeem themselves in her eyes. She has fallen, as we feared, but she is still the White Lady, and as the bindings that hold the hidden ways separate from the mortal realms fray, you will see some echo of her ancient glory.
“I have waited against hope for that day. I have waited for my brothers to finally wake.” He bowed. It was a low, graceful gesture of respect, none of it feigned. “It is not yet their time.”
“Will you know?” she asked softly. “Will you know when it is? Or will the time be decided in its entirety by Allasakar?”
“The roads of the future were never mine to traverse,” he replied. “But, yes, I believe I will know. There is one event that must occur before we have any hope of returning to the side of our Lady.”
“And that?”
His smile was cool. “We must at the side of a mortal ride against the god, as we once did, under Moorelas’ shadow.”
* * *
The silence seemed to stretch and lengthen. Meralonne’s lips framed a sharp, cutting smile;
he knew what those words meant to the people in this city. To fall under Moorelas’ shadow was death; even the adults who minded their children in the lee of the great statue avoided the shadows the stone figure cast.
Duster had emerged from the undercity into that shadow. Duster was dead.
She shook her head to clear it, but the image clung anyway. Duster. Duster as she was, as Jewel had last seen her. She had not aged with time, but memory did not make, of Duster, a young girl. A child.
“The sword,” she whispered.
“It is said that the sword could not be destroyed except by the combined will of the gods. That act will never occur upon this plane.”
“It is said?”
“The sword could not be destroyed,” he replied. “Attempts were made. They failed. The best the gods could do was to bind it, bury it, and keep it hidden from all mortal knowledge. That was done, in a fashion, but without their knowledge. No god can tell you what became of the blade. But if the gods choose to answer directly, they will admit that they do not know its fate.”
“And you?”
“Not I,” he replied softly. “Were I to find it, I could not wield it. It was meant for mortal hands. Nor could I find and enslave a mortal to wield the sword at my bidding. I told you: the sword tests. The sword judges. The Kialli have been searching since their Lord took his place upon the throne in the frozen wastes—but they have not found it.
“There is some hope that the blade itself might fail if it achieves its goal: it was meant to end Allasakar’s life. But, Jewel,” he added, forgetting himself, and forgetting a title he must viscerally consider irrelevant, “it was a blade meant to kill a god.
“It is our belief that it could be wielded against any god.”
“It can’t be wielded against any god that is not on the plane.”
“No. But there are two who are.” And one of the two, she thought, he hated. The Winter Queen had given no command in regard to that god.
What must it be like to demand the utter and absolute obedience of men like Meralonne?
You do, Avandar replied. Or you would if you desired it. Lord Celleriant has bound himself to you.
She knew. She knew. When Mordanant had come to take her life, she had not even flinched. Celleriant was not by her side when the cats had attacked his brother, but she had felt no fear. She had known on some instinctive level that Celleriant would arrive at need.
He was a match for his brother. He was possibly more than a match. Jewel frowned. “Meralonne, how are the Arianni born?”
Platinum brows rose in shock; she might have asked him the intimate details of his sex life to far lesser effect.
“I’ve never seen an Arianni woman before.”
“You have.”
“I haven’t. I’ve seen the Winter Queen . . .”
“Yes.”
“Mordanant came for his brother. He called Celleriant his kin.”
“So do you call Teller and Finch yours.”
“It’s not the same.”
“Is it not? There is only Ariane. There is no other. We are not mortal, Jewel. We are not born as you are born; we do not age as you age. Nor do we die. We do not perform acts of glory for the faint hope of a random woman’s love; we do not—as your kind does—marry and bear young. We are the Arianni. We serve no other.”
“Celleriant serves me.”
Meralonne did not reply. After a pause in which he obviously discarded her comment as unworthy of note, he asked, “What will you do with the book?”
Jewel exhaled. “I’ll read it, of course.”
His eyes rounded. She almost laughed; she hadn’t seen that particular expression since the early months of her life in the manse. “Viandaran.”
“I counsel, of course, that the book be disarmed or destroyed, but she is The Terafin. She is the master I have chosen to serve.”
“She is little more than a mortal child. Had Sigurne been a tenth as foolish in her youth, she would not now be the guildmaster; she would be a footnote, if that, in the annals of the Order’s history.”
“I don’t require your permission or approval,” Jewel told him firmly. “Either of you. If you’re materially afraid of the outcome of such a reading, I suggest you return to the manse; you will be unlikely to feel any ill effects at that distance. If what I understand about my personal library is true, I’m the one person in the manse the book can’t affect without permission. To me, the script is Weston. It’s a familiar Weston, at that; it’s not stiff and it’s not formal.”
“The risk is yours to take,” Meralonne replied.
She nodded. She considered sending the Chosen away, but grimaced and accepted the risk to their safety; they wouldn’t leave her. Not when Meralonne had already drawn a sword; not when he had implied that this book and its inexplicable contents were a threat.
Reaching out, she touched the page. It felt like dry paper; dry and slightly brittle. It looked new. Her hand shook as she turned the page. It froze in the act of turning, the page on which Adam was painted curled but not yet flattened. Beneath the leaf which contained his image was another painted figure.
Carver.
Just Carver.
Avandar was by her side before she could move. She heard two words leave his lips; she understood neither. They were a curse in a dialect that she had never heard him speak. Nor did she ask.
Carver crouched, back against a wall, his face slightly lifted. He was gaunt, and she could see a small trail of blood from the corner of lips that looked cracked. His eyes were ringed with darkness, although she could only see one; his hair covered the other. His hands were streaked red, and in one, he held a dagger.
It was not a familiar dagger. It was not a Terafin dagger.
Beyond the edge of the wall she could see white, some hint of snow—but the wall implied city; it looked like an exterior wall.
“Carver.” The word was barely a whisper. She had drawn no breath to utter it, and she choked as she tried to say more—or tried to stop herself from saying more. She was The Terafin; she could not lose control here.
But she didn’t know how to keep it. She wanted to scream at the book. To scream at the person who had delivered it. She wanted to scream at Teller for hiding it in his study for six weeks, because she had no idea when this had happened.
Breathe. Breathe. She had no idea if this had happened. It was a painting of Carver. Carver, with his patrician nose, its line less perfect than it had been the first night she’d laid eyes on it. His hair was still a drape across one eye. He didn’t look any older to Jewel than he had the last time she’d seen him; he looked exhausted.
But he would be. He was nowhere near any of the homes he had known. Were there streets, where he crouched, hidden? Was there food? She whispered his name again, and this time, as the page trembled in her nerveless fingers, the image shifted. Carver looked up. He looked up, out of the page, and his eyes rounded as they met hers.
She was transfixed. She saw nothing, heard nothing, beneath the amethyst skies; not Avandar, not Meralonne, not the Chosen. She reached out to touch him and felt paper. Paper. Her hand could not dip below the surface to reach Carver.
But Carver could see her gesture. He didn’t speak. He didn’t try. Instead, he lifted a hand in den-sign, his lips curved in a tired, steady smile. He forced exhaustion from his face as he met and held her gaze.
Can’t speak, he signed. Need silence.
She lifted her hands. She didn’t know if he could hear a word she spoke, but he could see her. Where are you? How long?
He shrugged. Two hours. Maybe. Two hours. It had been four days, here. She needed no further proof that Carver was lost on the wild roads.
They had no gesture in den-sign that meant Ellerson. They had small signs for each other, but none for the domicis. She wanted to ask. She mouthed the old man’s name.
Carver shook his head. She couldn’t read his expression—but she tried. She tried harder than she’d ever tried to read written l
anguage. Where are you?
Don’t know.
You’re lying.
He grimaced. Jay, don’t come. Don’t follow.
She bent the whole of her will, the whole of her desire, toward her den-kin. It had been more than a decade since she had tried to deliberately invoke her stubborn, intermittent gift. She tried now. She tried, straining against every failure she’d ever had before. It didn’t help. She did not know where Carver was, and she could not see it.
But she knew it was Carver. She knew. He was still alive. He was somewhere cold, somewhere dangerous; he was in the shadows and on the run—but he was alive. She wanted to know where he was. She wanted to find him. He was, in that moment, the only thing she cared about.
She reached. She reached with both of her hands, letting the picture of Adam fall flat, face down, to one side. Carver’s eyes widened in utter silence. He gestured in frantic den-sign, but she couldn’t read it, couldn’t take it in. He was right there, and that was where she wanted to be.
And then the book fell away, as did the table; the ground moved—or her feet did. She heard a snarling hiss of outraged fury as Shadow literally knocked her off her feet by landing on her.
“What are you doing? Stupid, stupid girl!”
She had landed on her side; Shadow’s paws were flat against her skirt. She turned to rise, but found it difficult to move. “Get off me,” she told him, voice low. It was almost as feral as the cat’s.
Shadow hissed. “You are foolish. Why are you reading that book? What are you doing? You will wake them if you make that much noise.” Without waiting for a response, he turned his massive head and said, “What were you doing?”
Avandar did not deign to reply.
“And you, what were you thinking?”
Meralonne raised a brow. Instead of answering the cat, he walked to the table and bent over the open book. Shadow moved, allowing Jewel to scrabble gracelessly to her feet. There was gray fur down the length of her skirt; she left it. She’d never particularly cared for this dress anyway. She approached the mage. Avandar was on his other side.