Skirmish: A House War Novel (66 page)

The fire wasn’t moving quickly, but it never paused, and as she leaped clear of its low, wide flames, they wrapped themselves around the wagon instead, and the wagon began to burn. She didn’t wait to see how quickly the fire consumed it. Feet heavy, breath labored, she turned and made for the next wagon.

It was similar in shape and size to the Arkosan wagon, but it had a lower, wider platform at back on which at least four people might stand, if pressed together. The rails that surrounded that platform were half-height. They were also broken; the remnants of a rope ladder clung to spindles of aged wood. Jewel reached out for it anyway, and as she touched its coarse, dry strands, the wagon creaked, as if groaning beneath the whole of its ancient weight.

It fell. The impact raised clouds of dry dust; they looked, for a moment, like smoke—but only a moment; the real thing came when the fire crawled over its fallen shape, pausing there to feed.

Twice more she ran to the wagons that remained, and twice more she saw the symbols painted on their sides, their doors, as the black and lifeless corpses of living magic; twice more, the fire paused in its pursuit just long enough to consume what was left. Lyserra, Corrona, Havalla, Arkosa. The Voyani Matriarchs had clearly abandoned their ancient, moving seats; there was no safety to be found in any of them.

It was a dream, she thought, and began once again to run—almost to crawl, she was bent so low to the ground—toward the last of the wagons she’d seen at a distance. She should’ve come to this one first, because it was the only one that was visibly, obviously, in the air. But it was
high
in the damn air, and she hadn’t sprouted wings in the interim. She shouted, cupping her hands over her mouth, attempting to funnel sound in the dry air, the dry heat; that much she could do, the sound was on the edge of a scream.

The wagon’s distant driver must have heard her; it began to move, maneuvering in a way that was deliberate, toward her. She saw the trailing, twisting end-knot of a long, thick rope and cursed. She’d never been the world’s best rope climber. The thick, ungainly ladders, with their wooden, slat rungs, were her preference. But the fire was an argument she couldn’t win.

She jumped for the knotted rope as it swung above her upturned face. Wind blew it out of the grip of her trembling fingers. She cursed again—loudly, deliberately—all the while continuing to strain, arms uplifted; she could feel the fire at her back now, was aware that it was almost upon her.

It hurt. She thought it burned, the pain was so sudden, so pitched—but she smelled no singed flesh, felt no spreading heat. Whenever she’d accidentally courted flame before, the first thing to curl and blacken had always been her hair. She caught the rope on its third pass. The rope wasn’t her problem now; it was her weight, her hands, the strength of her shaking arms; she struggled to pull herself up off the ground, hand over hand; she kicked her boots off and thought she heard a brief hiss and pop as they landed.

“M
OVE! MOVE!” SHE SHOUTED toward the floating vessel as she clung. She twisted the end of her rope around her foot, using the large terminating knot as an awkward step. Chancing one downward glance, she saw the fire; it had spread. Each of the wagons was burning in its wake, but the flame hadn’t yet managed to reduce them to ash; she was certain that had she been caught in its folds she wouldn’t have been as lucky.

Her foot slipped; the rope itself was slippery with dry sand, dry dust. The wagon hadn’t budged an inch since she’d started to climb; it was as if she were ballast, anchor, something to hold it in place. The only solution that came to mind didn’t involve her survival. Her hands were slippery now; the fire was hotter, wider. It seemed to encompass more and more of the desert sand until all she could see were fields of orange, moving at the whim of different breezes.

Her hands slid. Her foot slipped. She strained against gravity.

“What are you
doing
, stupid girl?”

She’d never been so happy to hear Shadow’s voice, and felt almost certain she would never be so happy again. She was certain she would open her eyes—now—and see his, golden and faintly luminescent, in the darkness of her own room. But as she turned in the direction of the voice itself, she discovered she was wrong. She was still clinging helplessly to a stretch of old rope, still attached, very tentatively, to the side of a wagon that wouldn’t, without magic and blood, be airborne at all, and still suspended above a fire whose voice nonetheless seemed chill and cold.

Shadow’s ashgray wings were spread, tip to tip, almost motionless as he glided toward her. His ears were pointed up, toward the sun; his hackles had risen, his claws were extended. “Stupid,
stupid
girl!”

“Can you get beneath me and catch me when I let go?”

His familiar hiss was almost a comfort, as he tilted in air. His idea of remaining stationary wasn’t helpful, though, and in the end, when Jewel’s hands failed to obey her command to take the risk of missing his moving back, he snarled another few rounds of
stupid
, and flew up. She thought he might abandon her, but instead, he came in from above—and grabbed the back of her tunic in what she assumed was his jaws. She started to tell him she didn’t trust the strength of the cloth, but didn’t have the chance; he didn’t tell her to let go of the rope. Instead, he climbed, wings definitely flapping now as he gained height.

What had been an insurmountable distance by length of rope was achieved by dint of annoyed cat. He set her down on the platform that fronted the wagon; she stood with her back flush against the nearest standing surface, and looked down, her hands still bone-white and stuck in a death grip around the rope itself.

He didn’t join her, but flew in tight circles in the air above the front half of the wagon.

“Will you
stop
calling me stupid?” she finally said, when her arms had stopped their uncontrollable shudder.

“Maybe when you are
less
stupid. What are you
doing
here?”

“Pardon?”

“Why are you
here
? This is not a good place for you,
stupid girl
.”

Her jaw slackened; she slammed it shut in a teeth-rattling way. “This may come as a surprise to you, but it’s a
dream
, Shadow. I don’t normally get to choose.”

Shadow hissed. He landed to one side of her. His wings nearly knocked her off the flying wagon; she almost didn’t bother to get out of his way. If she fell, she’d wake up; she’d had that experience dozens of times, at a variety of ages. Age hadn’t improved it much. But dream or no, Jewel clung to survival; she always had. She thudded against the cabin as Shadow folded his wings, glaring at his back.

“Stupid.”

“You could at least use different words for variety’s sake.” She frowned as she looked at the minuscule deck beneath the cat’s paws—his claws were extended, and they weren’t a boon for the short wooden slats. This
was, of course, a dream—and those slats now extended, turning the ungainly, rectangular body of a wagon with largely motionless wheels into something that might have graced a small ship.

“Jewel,” Shadow finally said, his voice lowering into the beginning of a growl. “Where are we going?”

“Why are you asking me?”

“Because the wagon is
moving
.”

“Shadow—it’s moving on its own. I’m not steering, you’ll notice.”

“I
noticed
, yes. That’s why I’m
asking
.”

Resisting the urge to throttle the cat—largely because she suspected her hands wouldn’t actually fit around his throat—she said, “I’m not the captain. It’s a dream. I have no idea where we’re flying; I only know it’s better than being reduced to ash.”

“
Is
it?” he hissed.

She looked. The sky had lost its startling clarity in the space of a few sharp words; it was darkening, and not in a way that implied night. “Tell me that’s not a storm.”

He hissed again; water began to fall in large, cold splotches across the deck. Jewel turned instinctively for the door she knew was there; she found it, reached for it, and stopped before she touched its tarnished handle.

Her hand was bleeding.

Shadow’s hiss gave way to a far less comfortable rumbling growl, shorn of words, as her blood fell from her palm to the wooden flooring. She turned her hand over; it was pale, but uncut. Blood now fell from the back of her hand, instead. The skies darkened; the rain fell more heavily. Shadow’s fur flattened; so did Jewel’s hair. She turned toward the door again, and this time, the blood didn’t stop her from grabbing the handle.

It was locked. Thunder suppressed most of the words that followed this discovery. The door was thick and solid; sun had bleached its timbers, although the falling rain darkened them now. She rattled the handle, and then gave up, banging on the door until Shadow almost knocked her over. She heard another iteration of stupid and girl as she struggled back to her feet.

“It’s locked!”

His eyes became as round as coins. “Then
open
it!”

She remembered why she’d never been particularly fond of cats, even the small furry variety; if they could talk at all, she was certain they’d
sound just like Shadow. The rain wouldn’t have been so bad if the water hadn’t been so damn cold. Her hand was still bleeding, but the moving stream of water that now traveled across boards and over the edge of the ungainly, flying wagon thinned its vivid red, washing it clean.

Her hand was still uncut—it was a hell of a lot wetter, though.

Shadow was now making the type of gurgling sound associated with unhappy, wet children. Although she suspected he lived to be annoying, this was the first time she had ever seen him look pathetic. “If you were stone,” she told him, between the lulls in the storm’s roar, “the water wouldn’t bother you.”

He hissed. “If it were
Winter
, the water
wouldn’t matter
.” He roared back at the sky, and even bedraggled as he was, his voice was almost a match for the storm’s.

Frowning as his words tickled something she couldn’t quite remember, she said, “It
is
winter.”

His eyes grew round again, and this time, they shone.

“Shadow—are we
on
the hidden path? Now?” She turned toward the closed door of the wagon, and wondered if she would meet the wagon’s Matriarch on the other side of it. There didn’t seem to be much way to find out.

But staring, she remembered watching the Arkosan Matriarch painting symbols with her bowl of ink. She raised both of her hands. Margret of the Arkosan Voyani had labored for hours marking the exterior of the wagon with unfamiliar runes; Jewel had inferred only later that without the runes, the wagons themselves wouldn’t fly.

There were no runes here, and the wagon was demonstrably in the air. Jewel reached out with the flats of both palms and touched not the handle, but the door itself. She couldn’t remember the runes Margret had so carefully painted, and even if she had, the rain would have made repetition of the act impossible. But she remembered that she had given her blood to the ink that Margret had used—and at the moment, the blood that fell from no visible wounds was all the ink she had.

It’s a dream
, she thought.
It’s only a dream
. Finch and Teller had often found it strange that she could be aware of the fact she was dreaming while she was dreaming; they weren’t. Nor was she always aware in that fashion; sometimes she was so caught up in reacting to what she felt she’d no time to think. But she knew, tonight; she knew.

Her hands grew warm as she pressed them firmly into the door’s
wooden surface; her face grew cold. Wind had joined water in its bitter assault; she could hardly feel her cheeks at all. Shadow came to stand beside her—where beside meant practically on top—and leaned into as much of her as he could. He didn’t call her stupid, and he didn’t ask why she was taking so long. That should have been a sign.

But dreams had their own logic, their own shorthand, their own reality. Blood seeped from her palms, spreading visibly between her splayed fingers like slender, red filaments. These, however, the water didn’t wash away; they spread, like the finest of veins in autumn leaves, branching up and out in all directions. She had hoped—had meant—the blood to take the form of runes or sigils, but dreams were unpredictable. Like horses that knew she was nervous, they carried her where they wanted to go, and she stayed on for the ride—if she were lucky.

Today, instead of sigils, they gave her veins. No, she thought, watching as the thunder was joined, at last, by the white flash of lightning that momentarily changed all color, they had given her roots. What had her Oma told her, so long ago? Roots traveled into the ground seeking water. She remembered it clearly because at the time, it had made no sense. Dirt was solid. Water was not. The roots were
in
the dirt. She’d been young enough that she could argue with her Oma and not feel the sting of the older woman’s hand; she’d never been young enough to be spared the edge of her tongue.