Skirmish: A House War Novel (68 page)

“ATerafin,” Avandar said, as she walked across the terrace, rather than toward the steps.

She glanced at him; he was the only man present who spoke, although she was certain the Chosen were equally confused; when she left her rooms at this time of night, it was for the shrine, not the fountain. Shadow glanced at her, and as the Chosen fanned out at her back, he pressed himself into her left side. It was not coincidentally the side that Avandar generally occupied.

“Are you certain this is wise?” he asked.

She failed to hear him; at the moment it took almost no effort. The statues were tall enough and tightly enough entwined that she could get
to the small space in their center without climbing up and over their shoulders or arms. Their arms were lower, but much thinner, and if she somehow managed to break or damage them, she wouldn’t have to worry about something as inconsequential as a House War; she’d be on the run from the Master Gardener for the rest of her natural life.

“Allow me,” Avandar said, from her right. She turned to look at him at the exact moment she began to rise. Given almost no warning, she lost her balance and fell flat out in the middle of the air. He caught her. For Avandar, he was even gentle. The Terafin hadn’t lost her balance, and now that Jewel was moving in the same way, she was impressed. Avandar wasn’t making air solid beneath her feet, so it wasn’t as if she was standing on a platform. No—it was as if he’d gripped both of her ankles in either of his hands, and had hoisted her into the air. What grace or balance she managed to achieve was entirely up to her.

She didn’t manage a lot of it, but it didn’t matter; her audience was Torvan and the Chosen she’d known since her arrival at the manse. They’d certainly seen her with much less dignity. She paused for just a moment, and glanced at the four, wondering if the night had changed things between them—if they now expected that her dignity did matter. They’d never say anything, of course—but their dignity was never, and had never, been in question.

She would have to live up to the Chosen. Funny, how that hadn’t even been a thought when she stood at the House shrine, demanding their oaths upon the altar.

She managed to stay upright as Avandar carried her over the heads of the three stone women. She felt the hint of his curiosity, no more. He didn’t know what she sought here, but knew it was of significance to her.

Yes, Jewel
, he said. She startled, windmilled, and managed not to fall again. He seldom used that voice, and never when she wasn’t in danger or he wasn’t annoyed. Shadow, who had the good sense to have wings, pushed himself off the ground; his leap carried him far above her head. To reach her height he had to dive, sweep, and hover.

Avandar set her down as gently as he could. Jewel frowned as she reached out, and her hand passed through air.

“Well?” Shadow asked, from a safe distance above her head.

She shook her head. “It was real,” she told him. “I know it.” But real or no, her hand still passed through air. Closing her eyes, she cursed her memory; it had felt so real, but she could barely recall what she’d seen.
Morretz had spoken, yes; his voice had been soft enough that she hadn’t caught the words. Nor did she expect that the syllables themselves would help her here; they were magic foci, and she was not a mage. But…a nimbus of pale light had surrounded his hands: gray, blue, violet.

The gray had been the strongest. Gray was…was teleportation, it was motion, lifting at a distance. Blue was water or air, but both of those were beyond Morretz, beyond the merely mortal; what did blue mean? Vision, she thought. Sight. Violet she knew as the casement of illusion. Had there been other colors?

She opened her eyes, let her hands drop to her sides, and looked, once again, at the moonlight.

“It’s too early,” she said quietly. “The moons aren’t at the right height.”

Too early?

She nodded. “It’s not far off the right time.”

She felt Avandar’s sudden surprise; it was followed by chagrin. He gave voice to neither. She was not feeling particularly generous, and did. “You didn’t think he had this in him?”

“If what you imply is true,” Avandar replied, raising voice instead of enforcing privacy, “I admit I did not. He was seldom concerned with this particular type of almost theoretical magery.”

“He looked…tired, after he’d finished.”

“That does not surprise me, ATerafin.” He joined her in the small space, leaping as gracefully and powerfully from the stone terrace as Shadow had, but landing instead. There wasn’t a lot of room, but Jewel attempted to make space for him, pressing up against the cold stone of one statue’s back. He gestured, but it was brief, controlled; in the moonlight, she saw no change at all in his expression. “How long,” he finally asked, “must you wait?”

She glanced at the moons. “Not long,” she replied.

“What do you hope to find?”

She shrugged; the gesture was her shield.

A quarter of an hour passed. To Jewel, the night sky looked the same; there was a breeze, but no wind, and few clouds to alter or veil the light. But in the narrow space left between her and her domicis, the air began to change.

“Can you see it?” she asked softly.

His silence was his answer: No. After a moment, he asked “What do you see, ATerafin?”

“Light,” was her response. “Light. It’s pale; gray, blue, a hint of violet.”

His frown was now visible. He passed both hands through the empty air, and light eddied around them as if it were smoke; it didn’t cling. “I am impressed. I do not think that any save you will find what was placed here. Was it significant?”

“No. The significant things, she left with Arann and me.” As she said it, she loathed the words. What had been left
was
significant; it just wasn’t political.

“This was not Morretz’s idea, then.”

“Does it matter?” she asked, irritation sharpening the edge of her voice.

It was Avandar’s turn to shrug. “Not, clearly, to either you or the person who placed it here.”

She might have said more, but the colors in the air suddenly brightened enough that she had to squint or be momentarily blinded. “I’d move your hands if I were you,” she told him.

He did, but with reluctance—as if he wished to test himself against whatever magics Morretz had set in place. If Carver had done the same, it wouldn’t have surprised her. She apparently expected more from a man who was, to all intents and purposes, immortal.

He raised a brow, glancing at her; his smile was brief and bitter. “I am a mortal,” he said softly. “My inability to die does not change that fact.”

“It does, by strict definition.”

“And you have now become the arbiter of definition?”

“Of my own, and I hadn’t noticed you were speaking to anyone else at the moment.”

He chuckled; his hands fell at once to his sides. “Indeed.”

“He’s dead, Avandar,” she added, in a quieter tone of voice.

“So, too, is The Terafin—but you are measured against her, regardless.”

“You were never measured against Morretz.”

“In my role as domicis, ATerafin, I have never been measured against anyone else in this House.”

Her brows rose. “And you cared?”

He chuckled again. “No, ATerafin. No, and yes.”

He meant it, which surprised her. “What’s the yes part?”

“I am domicis for a reason. If I succeed in learning whatever this position is meant to teach me, I might at last know a measure of peace.”

“And if you fail?”

His smile was once again bitter, but it was less brief. Looking up, for a moment, at the moons’ faces, he replied. “I will live forever.”

The desire for immortality was often what drove the mage-born into the folly of service to the demon Lords and their god; she wondered if knowledge of Avandar’s experience could change that desire at all. Given the mage-born and their peculiar focus and arrogance, she doubted it. “And Morretz was a success.”

“As domicis? Yes.”

“But not as a mage.”

“In this age, in this diminished, impoverished age, he would perhaps not be considered a failure. As a mage, however, he had nothing at all to teach me; an infant does not teach a man to run.”

“No—but maybe how to crawl, if it comes to that.”

“That was my thought.”

“I know. Morretz deserves better than that.”

He surprised her. “Perhaps.”

But she had no more time for surprise, no more time for this conversation—which would continue, she thought, for months or years, unfinished. The light was sharp and harsh, the shape defined: she saw Rath’s sword suspended an inch or less above the ground. It shone, as if it were a vessel for Morretz’s magic; she reached out with both hands and wrapped them around the hilt.

It wasn’t cold. It was hand-warm, as if it had just been released. She lifted it, and it gained weight and substance as she did, the light that surrounded the whole of its blade dimming as she watched. She saw that a necklace had indeed been wrapped around the sword’s hilt, and that something hung from it, clinking against the sheath. But she waited for the light to dim. Only when it was done did she turn to Avandar, her arms wrapped around the sword as if it were a slender, heavy child.

“Get us out of here.”

He nodded.

She did not examine the sword until she was once again in her rooms; instead she covered it awkwardly with the folds of her cloak as she made her way through the night halls of the Terafin manse. Magelights and oil lamps could be seen no matter where she looked, and everywhere light gathered, so too the servants, a small army of determined men and women. The Master of the Household Staff was in evidence; in the gentle
ambient light, the iron gray of her hair looked as if it had finally surrendered to white. This did not, however, make her appear to be in any way fragile, and it certainly didn’t soften her voice.

Jewel’s walk slowed as she watched the Terafin servants at work. No speck of dust or dirt would dare show itself, when the guests were welcomed into the foyer; no button on uniform would be left unpolished, no hair would be out of place.

They did this, Jewel thought, for Amarais Handernesse ATerafin. She was dead, but dead, she commanded this last, singular gesture of respect. If she was gone, the House she had built remained, and the House would not expose her reign to ridicule or question. Jewel wanted, for one ridiculous moment, to pick up a cloth and join them as they worked—it was work that had to be done, and it was simple, if hard.

But the Master of the Household Staff took a very, very dim view of such interference, and in truth, Jewel would not do nearly as good a job, because it wasn’t hers. She therefore picked up speed again, and reached the relative safety of her wing. At the outer doors, two of the four guards once again took up their positions. Ellerson was awake and waiting when she cleared those doors; he offered her, of all things, warm milk and silence.

She accepted both with gratitude and entered her rooms. Shadow stepped on her cloak. She kicked him, and he hissed—mostly in amusement. “It’s not a very good sword,” he said, as she set it on the bed. Avandar gestured and the room was lit, harshly and brightly, by his magic.

“It’s what passes for a good sword among the patriciate,” Jewel told him, “and if you use it as a chew toy, I will—”

“Yesss?”

“Think of something horrible to do. Make you eat Carver’s cooking.”

Shadow hissed again, and bounded onto the bed, where he deposited himself more or less dead center and began to clean his wings.

Jewel lifted the chain that was wrapped around the sword’s pommel; it had, in the way of slender gold chains everywhere, tangled into small, linked knots and she had to work to disentangle them. But she did the work, because she could clearly see what lay at its end: a ring.
A large ring,
she thought;
a Lord’s ring.
It was heavy, solid gold, into which an H had been deeply, and elegantly, engraved. At the end points of each of the vertical bars that comprised the letter was a ruby of moderate size. One of the four was cracked or chipped. She opened the chain’s clasp and slid the ring off it, where it sat with authority in the palm of her hand.

“It’s the Handernesse family crest,” she finally said, her voice tailing up at the end.

Avandar examined it—without touching it or taking it from her—and nodded. “It is.”

“And Rath’s sword. The sword his grandfather gave him when he was younger and still a member of the House.” She closed her eyes and leaned against the bed’s edge, lowering her head. “She left them for me.”

“It appears that way, yes. I am uncertain as to why she felt it necessary to go to such extremes to see the items in your hand; were I The Terafin, I would have simply given them into Gabriel’s keeping.”

Jewel opened her eyes. “I know why.”

“Ah.”

She lifted the sword from the bed and handed it to Avandar; she slid the chain around her own neck. The ring, however, she slid over her thumb. It was a tight fit—but at least it didn’t fall off the way it had when she’d tried it on any of the fingers.

“Let me adjust it, ATerafin,” Avandar offered.

“I don’t think we have time—oh. You mean magically.”

“I do.”

She shook her head. “Maybe later.”

“You don’t intend to wear it for the funeral rites?”

She turned toward the bed, and lifted the scabbard of Rath’s sword. After a moment’s hesitation, she knelt by her bedside and very carefully placed the sword beneath it. It was what Rath had done with it, after all—for decades.

“Jewel.”

She rose, shedding cloak and clothing with care. “I’m wearing it.”

“The Terafin did not.”

“Not where everyone could see it, no.”

“Then may I suggest that you follow her example? She left you the necklace.”

“I’ll keep it for later,” she replied. She set the clothing in a clump on the nearest chair. “Tomorrow, I want to wear it.”

His voice softened. “Jewel, she can’t see it.”

“We don’t know what the dead can—or can’t—see. Tomorrow, if she’s somehow watching, I want her to see the ring.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she said, grunting as she attempted to push Shadow to the
left side of the bed, “She left it. For
me
. I can’t wear the sword—I would, if I could think of a way to do it that didn’t cause Gabriel headaches—but I
can
wear the ring.”