Battle: The House War: Book Five (32 page)

* * *

“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 size.”

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.

The cats, bickering and whining about how
unfair
Jewel was, fell instantly silent; they turned—as one, which was always disturbing—toward Evayne. Evayne, however, did not effect to notice their presence. Had she been anyone else, this would have been a poor choice—but there was something about this woman, with her raven hair and its one shock of white, her strong chin, her piercing gaze, that kept even the cats at bay.

Evayne rose. “My apologies,” she said. “It has been some time since I have seen this place.”

“It’s new, to me. New, now,” she added.

“And The Terafin’s death is also still fresh.”

Jewel swallowed and nodded. The desire to cry at the sight of the unexpected familiarity of a simple table and four chairs vanished; she could at least be grateful for that.

“Why are you here?”

Evayne frowned. “What is the date?”

“It’s the—” she glanced back at Avandar.

“It is the ninth day of Fabril, in the year four hundred and twenty-eight.”

Two days had passed in a landscape that allowed for no natural passage of time. Evayne nodded. “Terafin.” She offered Jewel a very correct bow. It felt wrong; Evayne had always seemed above the strictly procedural forms of etiquette, to Jewel. “Your surroundings have changed.”

“You noticed. Have you seen this room before?”

“I have seen the manse, both before and after. I am here, I believe, to ask your permission to cross your borders.”

Jewel blinked, and the older seer smiled.

“Is it required?”

“It will make my passage simpler, yes. At the moment, your borders are tenuous; they are ill-defined. It is not the gravest threat you will face—but the threat you will face is one I cannot clearly see.” As she spoke, she drew the orb from her robes. It rested in her hands like a luminous, crystal heart. “There are only two possible reasons that the path is so difficult to see or trace. The first is positive, the second, markedly less so.”

“Tell me about the second.”

Evayne lifted a brow. “That was—and is—your way; you dwell on the darkness.”

“I don’t. But if those are the two outcomes you sense, it’s the bad one I have to worry about. Or avoid.”

“Do you understand what has happened here?” She glanced at the distant shelves, made of living trees, as she spoke.

“Yes and no. I understand that I’m connected to these lands; that they’re mine in some visceral way.” She fell silent for a moment, gazing at the surface of a sturdy, fine table that was nonetheless untouched in all ways by the magic of transformation. “I had to wake up—and there was only one way
I
could see to do that at the time.”

“An interesting approach,” Evayne replied. “This table—”

“Yes. It’s real. It’s solid. I’ve seen it used for over a decade—but it’s been
in
use for far longer. Whatever I build here requires the real at its heart; it’s what everything else is rooted in.”

Evayne raised a brow. “You have been speaking,” she said, after a long pause, “with the Warden of Dreams.”

“Both of them.”

“He has told you more than he generally volunteers.”

“He didn’t volunteer it in so many words; he relied on my intuition. I’m seer-born; intuition comes almost naturally.”

Shadow coughed. Loudly.

Evayne glanced at Shadow. She seemed entirely unaffected by the cats, and they seemed, in turn, entirely disinterested in her. Since they were only disinterested when they were trying to make a point, this implied that they, at least, had some inkling of who she was.

“Do you know my cats?”

Evayne did not reply, not directly. Instead, she said, “It is an unusual choice.”

“Pardon?”

“To allow them this freedom of form; they are almost entirely unbound, here. Do you understand how dangerous they are?”