Battle: The House War: Book Five (50 page)

“No, but we were a harsher people.”

“You summoned me.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she said, exhaling, “I wanted to ascertain for myself whether or not I still could. I have long privileged pragmatism as a way of navigating the world, but I feel as if the pragmatic is at last unraveling, and everything I have struggled to build will crumble with it.

“Duvari came tonight.”

“For?”

“You.”

His gaze turned to the pipe he now lifted, and he frowned for a long, long moment. Sigurne had
never
liked the pipe, and although Meralonne had experimented with a variety of leaf over the decades, he had never found one that could change her mind. Yet watching him now, she was afraid—truly, viscerally afraid—that he would set that pipe aside and never return to it.

As if he could read the fear, he smiled; his lips touched the pipe’s stem, and his fingers delivered fire to the leaf the bowl contained. “Yes,” he said, exhaling familiar rings. “It is almost time, Sigurne.”

Folding her hands in her lap to keep them still and steady, she met his gaze. “I remember the first time I saw you.” It was not what she’d intended, but she had no easy way to address the words he had just spoken. “I did not know your name. I did not know that I would survive you; nothing else did.” She smiled as she spoke; every word was true, and it was true in a way that time had not changed. “I thought you so beautiful then: you were like the northern winds. I thought you were death.

“I remember that you arrived first, and at your back in the growing distance, the magi, straggling, hesitant, casting their protective shields and barriers. It is what I do now—but I thought, watching them, that they seemed so very frail, so very timid, in comparison.

“And I remember your sword, APhaniel, and your shield. I remember the way you leaped into the winds—and the way they carried you. You were, then, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.”

“In the North, beauty and deadliness are oft the same.”

“Beauty does not imply safety, comfort, or peace, no. But at that time, nothing in my life did. I thought I would die.”

“You were prepared to die. Perhaps if you had cried or pleaded, you would have.” His smile was slender, and watching it, she was aware that her youth and his were separated by so many years, and so many experiences, she barely touched the surface of his life.

“You did not kill me.”

“No, and where I would not kill, the others would not.” His smile deepened into a more familiar, vexing expression. “But I, too, remember. They are coming, Sigurne. Darranatos was the first, but in the end, not the most significant.” He lifted his head, and wind played in his hair, and it was a cold, cold wind.

“Duvari suspects,” she said softly.

“Duvari suspects his own shadow,” was the dismissive reply. “Do you know what Jewel ATerafin is creating?”

She almost corrected him, but knew it was pointless, and kept her peace. “No.”

“To me, she is like, and unlike, you in your youth. Every accepted rule we have been handed demands her death—but without her, what we face will be far, far worse.”

“How much worse? You know that I am fond of the girl, and in some ways protecting her is the only responsibility left me by—” she shook her head. “But she frightens Duvari, and the Exalted all but pale at the mention of her name. I would not be surprised to see another attempt on her life.” She considered discussing the Kings’ missive.

“It will fail.”

Considered it, and rejected it. “She must travel from her stronghold to
Avantari
on the morrow—which is fast approaching.”

“She will face danger and death soon enough, Sigurne. If it will comfort you, let that death be on another’s head.”

“What will you do if the Kings demand her execution?”

“What will you command?” he countered.

“I am a citizen of the Empire; I owe my allegiance to the Kings.”

“And I am a member of the Order of Knowledge.”

It was not an answer; she knew it. But Sigurne was watching the rise and fall of strands of his platinum hair. She was, she knew, afraid, and it was an odd fear. She knew that Meralonne APhaniel would never harm her unless it were necessary, and if it were necessary, he would kill her as quickly and as painlessly as she allowed. She was not afraid of death at his hands—just as she had not been afraid of death so very, very long ago on the edge of the Northern Wastes.

She was afraid, of course, of treachery. She was afraid that the coming night would transform him utterly. She turned toward the dresser, and toward the small jewelry box on its upper right corner. She touched the engraved surface of its lid in silence. “Meralonne—”

Words, written in luminescent orange light, began to trace themselves across the wall directly behind that dresser, and she watched it as if it were cloud or rain: a thing that was natural, and unwelcome, and no part of her. “APhaniel.”

“Sigurne.”

She could not turn to face him. Instead, she lifted the lid of the simple box. It wasn’t even hinged. “You have served us for so long,” she said, still unable to face him.

He said nothing.

“Was it always, and only, a cage?”

The chair protested as he abandoned it.

“I have told no one of my fears,” she continued. “But the Exalted know, and the Kings; they know what the gods know. What will you do?” She reached into the sparsely occupied box and pulled out one item: a ring, and it lay a moment in her palm, catching magelight and reflecting it. It seemed, at first, a simple ring; it was not heavy, and it had no signet; it had a single gem, embedded into the curved band. In the dim light of the room, it was not clear what the gemstone was; Sigurne had never asked.

“I will do what I have done. Wait,” he added, “for the coming of my enemy.”

“Meralonne—”

“It was not a cage, Sigurne.”

She turned to find him a foot away, his pipe in his hand. “I chose. I was offered the choice, and I might have chosen to sleep until the appointed moment. Instead, I chose to watch. To watch, to wait. It was—it has been—tedious, but there have been surprising glimpses of the ancient and the wild, even in the constraints of your world.” He glanced to the right, as if he were looking out a window; he was looking, instead, at solid stone.

Sigurne did not find this disconcerting; had she, she would have had difficulty with over half of the members of the Order of Knowledge. But in Meralonne’s case, she wanted to know what he saw. She had never been, even as a child, one who could ask.

Turning, she lifted the ring. He looked down at it for a long, long moment. “No,” he finally said. “Not yet. Not yet, Sigurne, but soon.”

“Will I know?”

“Do you not know already?” he countered softly. “Jewel has touched the slumbering wilderness, and it is waking at her call.”

“Jewel did not—”

“She did. She is not aware of
all
that she has touched, and she is not in control of most of it, but the ancient world feels twinges of her presence in its sleep.”

“How much will things change?” she asked, bracing herself for the answer.

“They are changing now, in subtle ways. Even the Order of Knowledge will not—cannot—remain unaffected.”

She stiffened.

“I will tell you what the gods will not: it is time—past time—for your mages and your magi to take remedial classes.”

“Pardon?”

“They will require them. The magics they have nurtured and honed until now was not a stream; it was a drip. That will change, Sigurne; it is changing. If they are not careful, it will devour them. They will make beginner’s mistakes—but the consequences of those mistakes will be large and unmistakable.

“Word must travel to the makers, to the bards.”

“And the healer-born?”

He was silent for a long moment. “Word will travel to the healers.”

“Meralonne—”

He smiled. “I will attend you on the morrow in the Hall of Wise Counsel, at the side of The Terafin. I do not think you face the danger you fear to name yet; but it is coming, and when the Lord of the Hells stands outside of the city’s walls—and they
will
be walls, Sigurne, not the scattered, broken demi-walls that suggest its outline to the dim and the foreign—it will be full time, and the questions of the ages will be answered.”

She closed her eyes. Eyes closed, she asked the question she had avoided asking even herself. “Meralonne, what of the Sleepers?”

When she opened her eyes, he was gone. She put the ring back in the jewelry box, and prepared for a sleep that would elude her for some time yet. In the morning, she would begin the onerous and ugly fighting that remedial classes would no doubt involve. No, she thought, sliding between the sheets, in the
afternoon
, she would begin. The morning involved gods, wary Kings, the Exalted, The Terafin, and
Avantari
.

The afternoon, only fractious, bitter, aggrieved mages. The thought gave her some comfort; given the tedium of the afternoon, the morning seemed less dire in comparison.

10th of Fabril, 428 A.A. Terafin Manse, Averalaan Aramarelas

Jewel woke to the gray of early dawn; the sun had not yet crested the horizon. If, she thought, sun did in these rooms.

The Chosen had advised—strongly—that she repair to other quarters in the manse. It was advice she herself would have given had she been in their position; it was advice she could not take. “It’s not about Carver and Ellerson,” she told them softly. “Word has traveled. I can’t now flee in terror from the rooms I was meant to occupy.”

“You chose not to occupy them for almost three months,” Torvan pointed out. The words were sharp.

“Yes. And had I never entered these rooms at all, I—” Carver would not be lost. She inhaled. “I would have that option. I have, and I do not have it now. I will,” she added, as he opened his mouth again, “allow the Chosen to stand guard
in
the room in which I sleep. That is the only compromise I can offer.”

It was also, they both knew, necessary. Had she forbidden it, they would be in this room regardless. She knew Torvan was angry, because Arrendas joined him shortly after their return to lend his voice to their argument in progress. Arrendas, however, was silent; he observed for fifteen minutes, and then turned to Torvan and said, “Shall I work out the guard details?”

When Torvan failed to reply, he continued. “She is right, as are you. But she is The Terafin.”

“She is taking an unnecessary risk.”

“She is taking a risk she feels is necessary.”

The other Chosen were content to let their captains speak in their stead—but their stance and expressions made clear that they were in agreement with their captains.

“We are not The Terafin; we serve her. If she is committed—and Torvan, she is—we put our energy into minimizing the risks she feels it necessary to take.”

Torvan opened his mouth, but this time he closed it without ejecting further words. He then left the room with Arrendas, and after forty-five minutes, four Chosen entered the room and took up their positions around the mouth of the splintered closet. Jewel had forbidden its removal, although she feared the way would never be open again—not through that door.

It was not as hard to sleep in a room full of armed guards as she feared it might be; they were hers, after all, and she had spent half her life sleeping in far more crowded rooms.

Shadow, however, was not amused to see them, and made it known.

* * *

Avandar was waiting, and at Avandar’s side, one of the servants, an older woman whose name escaped the fragmented memory dreams left in their wake. Shadow was on the bed. He wasn’t precisely sitting on her, but he was sitting on the counterpane, and she couldn’t easily move. It was a blessing.

It was a blessing she couldn’t afford.

“Shadow,” Avandar said.

Shadow nonchalantly climbed down. He did not, however, stray far from Jewel’s side as she slid out from beneath the covers and into the waking world. The closet door—the door Avandar had splintered in his haste to make room for the Chosen—and himself—to follow her into the darkness, had not yet been replaced; its splintered ruins were a reminder she didn’t need.

Four of the Chosen were standing in front of it.

“It is a closet,” he told her quietly. “No more.”

She stiffened. She stiffened, but did not immediately run to the closet. Instead, she put herself into the hands of a woman who was not Ellerson, understanding what Avandar did not say: she was to meet with the Kings and the Exalted this morn, and if by some small miracle her death was not instantly demanded, she would spend the rest of the day fencing with The Ten.

Carver
.

She inhaled. Exhaled. She moved to the dresser where the servant was waiting in a starched silence not even Ellerson could maintain. She put her appearance into the hands of a stranger as Avandar laid out the layers of clothing she was expected, as Terafin, to wear.

The knock at the door surprised her; the Chosen answered.