Skirmish: A House War Novel (33 page)

Avandar, however, nodded.

Celleriant straightened. As he did, his hair rippled and fell down his back like a cape—a cape the color of the Winter King’s fur. He carried neither sword nor shield, and his clothing was dark and supple; he wasn’t armored for battle. To Avandar, he said, “I apologize, Viandaran. I am…grateful…for the disturbance.” To Jewel, however, he said nothing.

She had one chance to walk away. It was now. She knew it as strongly as she had ever known anything: the coming death of her father. The future death of Rath. But her fear felt stupid. She wasn’t wielding a sword; she wasn’t leading an army or a host. She wasn’t commanding the power of the magi. She was standing at the edge of a hollow tree trunk, surrounded by people who—for the most part—meant her no harm; some of them even loved her. She carried leaves out of children’s stories in her hands; that was all.

But children’s stories came from somewhere. Forests composed of strange trees. Trees of silver, gold, and diamond. Flowers that could cause sleep; flowers that could cause death. In the heart of that forest, a castle surrounded by thorns; a beast in his cave; a magic well.

And yet, wasn’t she already walking in that forest, in those stories? To her left stood the Winter King, the stag who had once been man—and King—before he had caught the attention of the Winter Queen. Beside him, Lord Celleriant, one of the immortals who rode in the host of that Queen, part of the Wild Hunt. A little to one side of him, a man who had lived for so long, death was his only dream. Not immortal, no—but not mortal, either.

Add the wizards—the magi—and the knights—the Chosen. How was this any more real than those stories? She was the child who had come to the forest’s edge, whether through starvation or flight; she was the one to whom the dark and hidden paths lay open, promising—mostly—death.

She lifted the leaves and she approached that path into the forest. The companions who had followed her this far fell away; only one remained. She turned and smiled; it was a nervous smile, but that was fine. Arann had seen her at her absolute worst, after all. That smile would be nothing. His was steadier, and, as it usually was, silent. But it wasn’t a nervous silence. Arann trusted her.

Trusted her, she thought, remembering Lefty. She stumbled; he caught her before she could fall, and he held her arm until she was steady again. The smile she offered the second time did make him wince, because he was Arann, and he knew why. He shook his head. “Do what you have to do,” he told her. “I’ll be here.”

He didn’t even ask her what she was going to do. He wouldn’t. He figured she’d tell him if it was important—to him. To the den. She didn’t feel as if she deserved that—but she also knew she relied on it. Needed it. So she offered a third smile—this one was like den-sign.

She reached out. There was one tree in the darkness, almost in the center of the path she had seen—and could still see, which, given where she actually was, was disturbing. It was a slender tree; younger, she thought, than the rest, because the rest towered into the shadows of night, becoming one with the moonless sky above them.

She touched bark; it was cool and rough. Then she glanced at the leaves she’d carried. Taking a breath, she lifted the silver leaf from the pile in her left hand, and raised its stem toward the trunk. It didn’t even surprise her when the trunk grew a branch just to reach that leaf. It was a slender branch, new growth, but even as Jewel watched, it silvered, until it was the color of the leaf itself. It then grew, carrying the leaf with it, until both branch and leaf were completely beyond her reach.

But the branch grew over the dim path; it grew above their upturned faces.

“It’s like a story,” Arann said quietly. She was surprised that he’d spoken at all, and glanced at his face.

“Here,” she told him. She handed him the gold leaf and he hesitated for just a second before he took it. It might have been a butterfly, he held it with such care; his hands were shaking.

“Jay?”

She nodded and he lifted the gold leaf, just as she’d done, toward the slender tree. He held it higher because he was taller and he waited until the tree once again reached out with a branch toward the leaf’s stem. That branch became gold as they joined, and even in the darkness of forest night it was a warm, solid gold that spoke of wealth. No, Jewel thought, knowing that this branch and this tree could never be sundered. It spoke of the dreams of wealth, and of the beauty of those dreams.

The reality was of course profoundly different; she’d had both dream and reality. In dreams, you didn’t suffer consequences, and your enemies—if you bothered with them at all—were there to offer you victories or vindication.

She waited until the branch stopped its sudden upward growth, and then very carefully held out the leaf of diamond. Its veins shone white in the forest, although the night was dark. Yet light burned in the heart of the diamond branch that the tree now grew, and it flared where the two met: leaf and branch. This growth was the slowest and it seemed the most deliberate, but the branch hung lowest; Jewel could reach up and touch it if she stood on her toes; Arann didn’t need that much of a stretch.

“One more,” Jewel whispered, as she lifted the leaf of ruby. It was a deep, dark red, and in the dim light, it seemed more liquid than gem, but calling it the leaf of blood was disturbing. She hesitated. As she did, the tree rustled, touched by a breeze that touched nothing else, as if it were attempting to converse.

This tree had once been a normal tree. It had had no voice, no shadows, no leaves other than the ones that budded in spring and fell in a farewell display of color in the autumn. It had been the oldest and the largest of the trees in The Terafin’s estates, and it had been respected for its age and its size, inasmuch as trees were ever granted respect.

But this, this last leaf, had come from this tree. She was certain it was the same tree, although it looked younger and slimmer, dwarfed by the old forest in which it had taken root. Celleriant had said it was somehow rooted in a dream world—not a daydream world, that would be too comfortable, too safe.

She turned the leaf over in her palm. Not all dreams were ugly. Not all dreams were bitter. Not all dreams of death led to death—not Jewel’s dreams. Her eyes widened. She turned to Arann, who stood in silence,
waiting for her to take one action or the other: lift the leaf and return it to the tree, or discard it.

“I dream,” she told him softly because he was there and she wanted the kitchen.

Arann nodded, aware of the nature of some of her dreams—and aware, as well, that she woke from them screaming and terrified, and found her way back only in the steady presence of her watchful den-kin.

“I dream,” she repeated. “Sometimes I dream of death. I can’t control them. The dreams.”

He nodded again.

“Can you remember what I tell you now?” she asked, aware that he wasn’t Teller, and aware, sharply, that Teller wasn’t here.

“Yes.”

It was her turn to nod, to draw breath. “I can’t control the dreams, but sometimes I can control the deaths that occur in them. They come with me—the dreams—and they drive me in the waking world. It’s not perfect,” she added, thinking, with sharp pain, of The Terafin, “but sometimes it works.

“The dreams come to me. I don’t control them. I don’t know where they come from or why. But they’re my dreams, Arann. Mine.” She lifted her face to the leaves that rustled above them both, as if they were her audience. Their voices were tinkling, metallic, like oddly shaped chimes. “Sometimes I dream of gods.”

She lifted the last leaf, the red leaf, and the whole of the tree trunk shivered. Bark grew around it, hardening, darkening; this time when it reached for the leaf, it didn’t reach with one branch, but with many—and they were tree branches, and familiar ones at that.

“What do you dream of?” she asked the tree softly.

Trees didn’t talk. Not even here. But the branches lifted this single leaf, and instead of raising it to join the others, it drew the leaf in, toward its trunk. A small gap opened in the bark; the leaf vanished as if swallowed. As if, Jewel thought, she had returned its heart.

She waited, breath held; the leaves she had taken from the forest that had surrounded the glass castle in the Stone Deepings did not vanish; nor did their branches become the living branches of a tree of bark. They remained as they had grown, and as she watched, they grew larger, higher, smaller shoots unfurling and adding new leaves that were kin to the ones she had offered.

Silver. Gold. Diamond.

She wasn’t surprised when one of each of these new leaves fell toward her upturned face. She caught them, gathering them as they hardened. But the ruby leaf did not return; nor did ruby leaves grow again from branches that had shed them once before. Instead, above, leaves grew.

These leaves, she recognized with a shock: they were the leaves of the trees that girded the Common, and those trees and this one were in no way the same. Large, green, almost the shape of giant’s hands, they budded and unfurled, and they rose as the tree gained in height and width, until the roots reached above the dark earth and surrounded their feet.

Arann stared in wonder, a half smile on his face.

One of these leaves also dropped; it was Arann who caught it; Arann who turned it over and over in his hand, the smile deepening. Jewel’s answering smile came from a place as hidden as the tree’s heart; she reached out, touched the leaf that rested in Arann’s hand; it was soft, supple, its edges ivory, its heart green. As a child, she’d gathered the leaves when they’d fallen in the Common; it was forbidden by law to “interfere” with the trees in the Common, but it wasn’t illegal to gather what they shed. And, to be fair, it was also almost impossible to interfere with those ancient trees—you could carve your initials in the bark if you were patient and strong, but that would take more than enough time for the magisterians to arrive on patrol, and then you’d suffer—the branches for the most part were too high.

The gathered, fallen leaves had graced her home; they’d graced her Oma’s window ledge when her Oma had been sick enough to stay abed for hours at a time; only death had stopped her from entering her kitchen. Jewel had carried them, sometimes in handfuls, as if they were flowers, and her Oma had smiled, smoking her pipe, and twirling the stems reflexively between her fingers before she set them aside.

Those trees were the forest of her childhood, the forest of her youth.

She left the leaf in Arann’s hands and walked to the girth of the trunk; there, she spread her arms, as she might have done as a small child in the Common—her father still alive and shadowing her steps—and wrapped them around the tree. They didn’t extend far enough, of course.

The tree grew small branches in a place where branches generally didn’t grow, and she recognized these as well, but they weren’t as comforting a memory: they were like vines or tendrils, and they had thorns for teeth.
One curled around her left wrist, its movement slow and almost gentle; thorns pressed against her skin lightly.

Arann drew his sword. “Jay?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“…maybe.” She clenched teeth and nodded, her chin scraping bark. The vines tightened suddenly; the thorns broke skin in a rush. She swore in rough Torra, but kept it as quiet as she could. “Don’t,” she told Arann, although he hadn’t moved. “It’s—I’m fine. I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to chop anything off this tree.” The pain, in any case, had stopped; it was already on its way to memory, except for the dull pulsing throb.

The vine loosened, withdrew, and Jewel slowly stepped away from the trunk. As she did, she saw that the thorns were now dark with her blood. She watched as her blood brightened, reddened, and spread. The thorns burst open in a rush, as if they were, and had always been, buds, and the leaves that grew from them were red, red leaves.

Hers. Of her.

But their shape—oh, their shape. Edged in ivory, heart of crimson, they were the leaves of autumn in the Common, the leaves that she had laid on her Oma’s blanket while she slept.

“Oh, look, look!
There
she is!”

Jewel froze. “Arann, please tell me you didn’t hear that.”

Arann, however, was now squinting into the darkness that surrounded them. Jewel cringed.

“Where have you been, stuuupid girl?”

She heard the flapping of wings above the newly grown branches, and the cringe deepened.

“Stupid girl?” Arann shook his head.

“What is this?
Who
is this? Where is the
ugly
one?”

“Jay—”

“The leaves weren’t the only things I saw in that forest,” she muttered. “Maybe if we leave quickly, we can lose them.”

“I
heard
that.” Jewel, in turn, heard the thump of something heavy landing. To Arann she said, “They’re mostly harmless.”

“
Harmless? Harmlesssss?
”

Above the branches of the renewed tree, in the light the tree itself shed, there appeared three very large, winged cats. Even in the dim glow, they
were instantly familiar: one was white, one was gray, and one was black. The white cat and the black one had their mouths open, and words were spilling out.

“This is just what I need.”

Arann gestured in den-sign with the hand that wasn’t on the hilt of the sword.

“No. What are you three doing here?”

The white cat hissed in a gurgling way; it was the winged cat version of laughter. “We were
bored
.”

“Believe that there’s nothing interesting here. At all.”

“I don’t think she missed us,” it said, speaking to the gray cat. The gray cat was the cat Jewel disliked the least, mostly because it spoke less often.

“I couldn’t. I couldn’t see you to aim.”

Another hiss, this from the black cat. He rolled over in midair, and began to rub his left shoulder against the underside of a diamond branch. Even to Jewel, not known for her ability to express appropriate respect, this seemed beyond rude.

The gray cat hissed. It was a very different sound. Jewel stiffened. “Don’t you know why we’re here, little human?”