Skirmish: A House War Novel (67 page)

But Rath had explained it differently, or perhaps, having lost everything that made the world make any sense at all, she’d given up on sense; the tree would die if the roots sought water; they’d drown. These roots were attempting to find their earth. Shadow rubbed his nose against the side of her tunic as they spread across the whole of the door’s surface and finally slid beyond it through the seams of its frame. Leaving her left hand on the door, she grasped its handle with her right, and this time, the door opened; she could feel its mechanism click, but couldn’t actually hear it over the storm.

Lightning, which had continued its startling white monologue, remained suspended in the sky for a long time, as if it wanted to see what lay beyond the wagon’s door. So did Jewel, and she stood suspended for far longer, her hand falling away from the handle to rest on Shadow’s head.

“I don’t understand,” she said. The rain was falling only on one side of the door, but it had become momentarily insignificant. What lay on the other side was nothing small enough—or dark enough, lamps notwithstanding—
to grace a wagon. She knew; she’d been in similar wagons before, confined by the cramped and very narrowly spaced walls, the small windows—always latched—the thick air, the lack of sky.

But she’d been in the room that waited on the other side of the open door as well: It was The Terafin’s library. Her personal library. Even from this angle, Jewel could see the night sky through the oval glass windows laid into the ceiling at its height.

Shadow, who clearly hated the water, strained toward the threshold—but her hand was an anchor; he didn’t cross it. More significantly, he didn’t ask her what she was waiting for. The room appeared to be unoccupied, and it looked exactly as Jewel remembered it—books whose titles she couldn’t read were stacked in their familiar, slightly unkempt piles, with one or two lying open beneath the glow of magelight. All that was missing was The Terafin herself.

The rain was cold, the cat was loud, the thunder louder still. Jewel stood in the doorway for another long breath, and then she came in, as it were, out of the rain. Only when she had one foot firmly across the threshold did Shadow join her—but he moved faster.

She cringed as he shook himself dry, and opened her mouth to shout at him; water in the quantities they currently carried in either drenched clothing or fur was
not
good for books. No words came; before they could, the door to the library opened. She didn’t see it, because she was facing the doors visitors—the few The Terafin chose to invite into her inner sanctum—would have used. But she heard it and turned, dripping water, hair hanging loose and wet in her eyes.

The Terafin entered her library carrying, of all things, a sword. It was a long sword—far too long for either The Terafin’s use, or Jewel’s. Jewel recognized it almost instantly, although it had been well over a decade since she had seen it last, and longer still since she’d seen it used. It was Rath’s sword. Rath had left his wealthy family, his Isle home, and his inheritance; the only thing he had kept for himself—besides the very rare use of his name—was this sword. It had been a gift, Jewel remembered, although she couldn’t remember from who.

Jewel had taken it with her on the day she left his final home in the thirty-fifth holding—or perhaps the day after; memory was dim and she’d never been good with numbers of any kind.

Nor did it matter, because she did remember how The Terafin had
come by it: it had also been a gift, this time from Jewel, the only other person in the House who could speak Rath’s name, and then, only in the perfect privacy of The Terafin’s rooms.

This is a dream
, Jewel thought, because Amarais walked past her, past Shadow, without comment; she paused at the table upon which her books had been momentarily abandoned. Her color, in the magelight was poor, and her expression caused Jewel to flinch and turn away.

“Who is
she
?” Shadow whispered.

“The Terafin,” Jewel replied. She didn’t bother to whisper; she
knew
that The Terafin wouldn’t hear her speak. Nor did she. The door opened again, and The Terafin straightened shoulders, her face once again settling into a far more familiar expression. Morretz joined her. He held out a great cape, settling its weight around her shoulders. He also pinned it, because she didn’t put the sword down.

“Will you do this?” he asked her back. He looked as weary as The Terafin, although Jewel couldn’t clearly pinpoint why; she had never completely understood Morretz, although she’d never questioned his devotion to his Lord. The Terafin moved instead of answering, the sword now cradled in her arms, the cloak briefly concealing it. He followed her toward the doors.

Shadow’s eyes were luminescent now. So were Jewel’s, briefly. She waited until Morretz had cleared the door’s frame, and then followed them into the hall. There, by the door, were Torvan and Arrendas, unseeing as they so often were when they were on duty. She resisted the urge to touch them or wave a hand in front of their faces, in part because she saw what their stiff and unmoving faces somehow still revealed as they watched The Terafin walk down the hall, her domicis in her wake.

She wanted to turn, to ask them—no, to demand to know—what day it was, what date, what time. They watched her as if they knew what she knew: that she would die soon; that it couldn’t, in spite of their guard, her domicis, and her planning, be prevented.

“She is not like your den,” Shadow whispered. “I’m not sure I
like
her.”

“No,” Jewel replied. “You probably wouldn’t have. She’s dead now.”

The cat hissed. “She doesn’t
look
dead.”

“It’s a dream, Shadow.”

A dream that led them, at last, to one of the fountains that graced the terrace that preceded the gardens to which visitors and dignitaries of import were taken during warmer months. It was not, by the way Amarais
drew her cloak more tightly around her shoulders, warm now. Nor was it day; it was night; the moons were bright, the stars cutting and clear, like points of the needles she so disliked.

Jewel couldn’t feel the cold, although she still squelched water at every step. Shadow, however, was dry.

The fountain was enchanted in such a way that its water never froze. The water itself was probably a lot warmer than either the air or The Terafin. To Jewel’s surprise, The Terafin nodded and Morretz began to gesture; his hands were enveloped by soft, gray light. Were it not so dark, she might have missed it.

But had she, she wouldn’t have missed what followed: The Terafin took a step up, and the air held her. She took another step, lifted the folds of her simple skirts to take the third; she now stood above the fountain’s low and very simple basin. Morretz held his hands out, palm up, as if he were carrying the whole of her weight.

“Thank you,” she said. She didn’t look back, or down, to see him. Instead, she walked across air, as if a floor of glass had been erected beneath her feet. Jewel frowned. There was a small statuary at the center of the fountain, with three deliberately featureless women, hands joined, facing outward in a very small circle. Their fingers were not distinct, and their hair was an incline of stone that seemed to drift in one mass down their equally indistinct shoulders. They were of a height, and at least in this light, of a color; in the brighter light of day, there were variances in the stone itself. Jewel had never loved this fountain, but many of the visitors did.

The Terafin reached the first of these figures; she stood, feet at the height of their knees. “Morretz?”

He nodded; Jewel saw his grimace; The Terafin did not. She rose, this time discarding the artifice of steps; only when she had cleared the shoulders of these stone women did she halt. Her cloak and her skirts trailed over their faces, the representation of their hair, veiling them until she was clear. When she stood in their center—and it was not a large space—she called to Morretz again, and this time, she descended.

She still carried the sword, but not for much longer; she set it down, tip first, as if even now she would change her mind. But that was not The Terafin that Jewel knew, and no matter how diminished she might be or become, Amarais Handernesse ATerafin would never be that woman; she had made her decision.

Her breath was sharp, singular, but she released the sword. It stood, on point, at the very center of the fountain; it didn’t fall. When her hands were free and clear, she began to rise again as Morretz gestured. But she commanded him to stop when she was once again at the height of the statues’ shoulders, and when she did she knelt, her knees touching air and stone as she lifted her hands—shaking hands—to her neck. In the moonlight, she lifted something over her head—a chain, or something similarly slender and weighted. She draped this, knotting its links, around the hilt of the abandoned sword, and then she lowered her face for a long, long moment.

When she rose, she turned toward Morretz, for she’d knelt with her back to him. Even now, Jewel thought, she guarded all expression of pain or sorrow. But Morretz knew. The Chosen knew. And Jewel, watching, knew as well. It was possible to think of, to acknowledge the fact of, The Terafin’s loss, her sorrow—but it was almost always an entirely intellectual exercise. It was impossible to think of her as frightened.

Nor was she as she walked across air toward the man who supported the whole of her weight. She began to descend as she reached him, her fingers shifting the cloak’s clasp.

“It is done,” she told her domicis.

He said nothing; there was usually nothing one could say to The Terafin when she was like this. She asked for no comfort, accepted no advice, looked for no dream of hope with which she could deny reality. And yet, when she was like this, Jewel
wanted
to give her all these things.

Wanted, Jewel thought, remembering. The Terafin would never be like this again. She was gone, now. The floor of Mandaros’ Hall was beneath her feet. Mandaros was god of Judgment, not Justice, and the gods had always said that the dead who waited could choose the moment they approached his throne, bowed head, and surrendered themselves to that judgment.

Duster would take forever, if she ever approached that throne; she might linger on the banks of the river on death’s side of the bridge, watching and waiting for her den-kin to join her.

But not The Terafin. For The Terafin, all decisions were action, even the decision to remain inactive. Jewel couldn’t imagine that she would sit idle, by those banks, watching for the dead. Maybe, she thought, Rath was waiting there. Maybe The Terafin would finally—finally—be reconciled with the brother she had abandoned.

Or perhaps she had nothing left to wait for; Morretz was also dead. Morretz, whose hands, trembling with the effort of his silent spell, now readjusted the fall of her cloak before he let those hands fall away. He then walked to the fountain, where the sword waited. This time, his spell was more complicated; the colors of the light that left his hands in slender, binding threads varied in brightness and depth of hue.

Jewel watched as the sword grew slowly translucent, becoming a ghost of itself, as insubstantial as the rest of the ghosts that had, and would always, haunt her.

She reached out—for what, she wasn’t certain—as the blade vanished, and Morretz’s oddly graceful motions of hand and light through air came to a close. His arms dropped; they were trembling. Neither he nor the Lord he served appeared to notice. He bowed to her; she inclined her head, regal as a Queen. A weary, heartbroken Queen, who had at last acknowledged what was lost to her. She had never been young in Jewel’s eyes—but she had been young once, and the only physical links to that youth had been broken here. Jewel knew it not because she was seer-born, although that was both her gift and her curse, but because she could see it so clearly in The Terafin’s face.

“Amarais,” she said, voice breaking between the second and third syllables. The Terafin didn’t turn, didn’t glance toward her.

“Why are you crying?” Shadow whispered.

She woke, tears trailing down the sides of her face; they were silent; she could do that much. The ceiling above was familiar; it was her bedroom’s. She rose. Avandar, contours of his face made sharper by the light that shone in his hands, opened his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, and shut it as her expression became clear. He offered her no words, made no attempt to comfort. He had never before reminded her of Morretz; the two could hardly have been more different.

But in his patient silence this eve, he did. Even Shadow’s habitual whining voice did not break the quiet. She dressed in the partial light, choosing clothing that required no aid to don. Avandar stood and retrieved only her jacket and her cloak. The former, he handed her; the latter, he held up. She turned her back and he slid it over her shoulders, but he didn’t touch the clasp.

While she fastened it, he opened her bedroom door.

Torvan and Corrin were standing to either side of its frame. New to the West Wing was the expensive conceit of magelights, which now adorned the walls in even intervals along the hall. Torvan didn’t look at her; nor did he speak. But when she turned and walked down the hall toward the exit, he fell in behind her, as natural as shadow, although admittedly more noisy. The other Shadow allowed the captain this much without comment.

They picked up Gordon and Marave when they left the den’s rooms. As Torvan, they were silent; their armor made all of the sound they allowed themselves. But where she went, they followed. She didn’t want them, but the burden of arguing with Torvan was too costly this eve.

They didn’t ask her where she was going. Had they, she might not have gone at all; she might have turned back, crawled under both covers and cat, and attempted to sleep out the night. But they gave her the space she needed, and she came, at last, to the terrace and its famed fountain.

In the darkness, the statues lost the harsh definition of their building materials, and perhaps this was why their sculptor had given them such soft, ill defined lines: they seemed delicate, almost alive, in the evening. The moons were not quite full, but waning, they shed their distant silver light across everything: across the fountain and its constantly moving water; across the gardens and their towering new trees; across the manse, its gates, and the streets beyond which it stood, remote and unapproachable. Although she couldn’t see them, she knew the hundred holdings, even the poorest, saw the moonlight in the same way; what the moon saw was different. But people, rich and poor, slept; people, rich and poor, dreamed. People, rich and poor, were being born while the moons watched. They were also undoubtedly dying.