Battle: The House War: Book Five (94 page)

“Have you been letting my pest of a husband bully you again?” She turned and Jewel’s eyes widened. She was ten, maybe twenty, years younger. “You need to assert yourself. He’ll walk all over you if you don’t.” As she spoke, she set her hands on her hips. It was like and unlike the gesture that had defined Jewel’s Oma at her most irritable.

“I—”

“Don’t make excuses. I love him, but he’ll take a mile if you give him an inch.” She frowned. “What, exactly, were you apologizing for?”

“Haval hasn’t been bullying me.”

“Hah. He does it all the time. You don’t notice because he doesn’t shout. And don’t think I notice you didn’t answer my question.”

Jewel glanced at Adam, but no help came from that quarter. Adam was, in some ways, in his element here: he was accompanied by two opinionated women, both of whose age and position gave them easy authority over him. He was expected to make no decisions or choices. Here, the floor was either Jewel’s or Hannerle’s; it would never become his.

Hannerle frowned. “Adam?”

He smiled. “You look well, Hannerle.”

“I do.” She smiled back. It was the smile one gave to a precocious child. “I’m happy to see you. Have you been given a tour of the front?”

“No.”

“I should do that, then. Unless you’re still hungry?” She looked pointedly at the empty plates in front of her two guests. They had not been there when Jewel had first opened her eyes, but dreams were like that, and both of the guests accepted their appearance as if this were expected and natural.

Hannerle headed to the kitchen door and called for her husband.

Jewel tensed, but no dreaming image of Haval answered her call. Hannerle was silent in the door for a long moment. When she turned to face them again, she had aged into the appearance Jewel was now familiar with. “That’s right,” she said, her voice shorn suddenly of all certainty. “He’s not home.”

Jewel rose. She rose instantly and closed the distance between that door and the woman who stood framed by it, reaching out with both of her hands to take Hannerle’s into her own. She wanted to apologize again. She wanted to tell Hannerle that her husband would be home—and
stay
there—the minute she woke.

But what she said instead was, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Hannerle.”

Hannerle’s hands tightened. “Why are you apologizing? You’re just a child. Haval is a man; he makes his own decisions. He always has.”

Jewel shook her head. “Do you know what Haval did before he became a dressmaker?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t. I don’t exactly know. I’ve asked,” she added, “but he’s never answered.”

“I should hope not.” This was said with more asperity. “He had no business doing what he did; he has no business teaching you any of it.” She withdrew her hands. “Adam?”

Adam rose more slowly than Jewel had, and he glanced at Jewel, his fingers slipping into surprisingly confident den-sign. Jewel hadn’t taught him that; she wondered who had.

Jester
, he signed.

Jewel was surprised. He signed something Jewel didn’t recognize. Two things. “My name,” he told her. “And Ariel’s.”

She blinked. But Adam was older than any of the den had been when they had first come together. He was, in many ways, more competent than any of them had been, as well. He was as calm as Finch or Teller at their best, but clear-eyed and compassionate in a way that almost no one in the den had been when it came to outsiders. He was watching Hannerle now.

She reached out for one of his hands, as if he were in fact a child. He accepted the gesture without a trace of self-consciousness. “I promised I’d show him the store,” she said to Jewel, by way of explanation. “Do you want to join us?”

Jewel nodded. She almost took Hannerle’s free hand, but she would have felt extremely self-conscious.
You are not a child
, she told herself. It had been so long since she’d missed her mother.

Adam followed Hannerle, as he was attached; Jewel trailed behind them, gathering her words, preparing them. She realized that she wasn’t comfortable in the store, although it looked—to her eye—very like the store that she had visited infrequently in her youth. Dreams had a way of shifting geography, but if this was the geography dictated by Hannerle, it was solid. It did not, had not, changed.

Hannerle, who often left Haval to his work, showed Adam the pride of her collection: the silks colored in the most expensive of dyes. One or two were a shade of blue that Jewel had never seen; she didn’t think this was because Hannerle was dreaming, but couldn’t be certain. Hannerle spoke of only one or two customers by House—but, of course, the most significant of these was Terafin.

Adam said, “Jewel is The Terafin,” and Hannerle stopped, arrested. She turned to Jewel, and Jewel felt her clothing shift as Hannerle examined it. It was not comfortable to be a passenger in another person’s dreams.

“Why, so she is. Haval has been making dresses for her, hasn’t he?” She frowned. Hannerle, always pragmatic, shook her head as if to clear it. “He’s been working for you.” The shift in tone was wrong.

Jewel swallowed. “Hannerle.”

“What have you asked him to make for you?” Her knuckles were white around Adam’s hands.

“Dresses,” Jewel replied. “As always. But it isn’t just me he designs for; it’s Finch and Teller.”

Hannerle closed her eyes. Jewel was afraid the store would vanish around them; it faded, becoming momentarily transparent. But before Hannerle opened her eyes, it reasserted itself. This was Hannerle’s home. This was what she had built. She was not about to let it go.

And Jewel had taken Haval from its heart, and she did not intend to relinquish him. For herself, yes. She could forgo his often caustic advice and guidance. She trusted the gift with which she’d been born to preserve her own life; it was the lives of everyone else it might fail.

She understood, as she waited for Hannerle, what Haval had understood in the intimate environs of her private dining room: She held Hannerle
here
because she did not wish to let Haval go. Haval did not lie to Hannerle. Haval had promised her that when she woke on her own, he would leave Terafin and return to their life at the shop.

“Hannerle,” she said.

Hannerle opened her eyes and met Jewel’s gaze. “Terafin.”

Jewel didn’t flinch. It took effort. “Haval will come home if you ask him.”

Hannerle’s lips turned up in a strange, bitter smile. “Will he?”

The question robbed Jewel of an easy answer. She thought, in that moment, Hannerle knew everything. Jewel was accustomed to this from her husband, but not from Hannerle herself. “Yes. You must know that.”

“I know that I keep him here, yes. But some days I feel as if I built this. Me. I’m like a cage, Jewel. Beyond my bars, he is what he always was.”

Everything. “He loves you.”

“Yes.”

“He always has. The only part of his past he’ll speak about is you.”

“I’m the only part of his past that’s unlikely to kill him,” was the gruff reply.

Jewel laughed; she couldn’t help it. “You’re the only part of his past he wouldn’t stop, if you demanded his death.”

“You think he’s been staying with you because of me,” Hannerle said, releasing Adam’s hand and getting, at last, down to business. “He tells you that. You tell yourself that. Do you actually believe it?”

Jewel’s automatic response was yes. She bit it back. Hannerle was not asking a rhetorical question. “I did.”

“I don’t.”

“But—but why, Hannerle? He’s run this shop since before I met him. He’s good at what he does, and he’s never seemed unhappy.”

Hannerle snorted. “He seems to be whatever’s convenient for him at the time. He could, if he wanted, treat the shop with active loathing and you’d believe it just as readily.”

“I wouldn’t. If he loathed this store, he wouldn’t be in it. Nothing holds Haval down unless he wants to be pinned.”

Hannerle folded her arms across her chest. “So. You understand.”

And she did.

“What do you want from my husband? I’ve known you for over half your life. You haven’t asked him to kill for you.”

How much did Hannerle know?

“No.”

“I could kill Rath myself,” Hannerle continued. “But not you. I never approved of Rath; I never approved of your association with him. But you’re The Terafin now; maybe I misjudged him.”

Jewel shook her head. “You didn’t. But if it weren’t for Rath, I wouldn’t be Terafin now.” She exhaled. “I don’t need your husband for my sake. I have my Chosen, and others besides. Inasmuch as every demon discovered in the city in the past few months has been discovered while trying to kill me, I’m safer than I’ve ever been.”

“But?”

“It’s not his advice, Hannerle. If he left the manse and returned here, I’d still commission dresses from him, and I’d still talk to him about my daily life. He takes Terafin money for his work, but it’s not the money that he wants; he wants the gossip. He wants to know what happens in Houses of power.

“He’d probably be happier if he didn’t have to live sequestered in the West Wing. It’s much harder for him to gather information when he’s not in this store, being visited by patrons of power and note from time to time.”

Hannerle snorted again. “If you think he hasn’t been gathering information while tucked away in the Terafin manse, you do not know my husband.”

“No,” Jewel agreed. “I don’t. I know as much about him as he wants me to know.” She hesitated. “That’s unfair. I know that he’s observant.”

Hannerle snorted.

“I need him to be where he is.”

“Why?” The single word was the sharpest word Hannerle had yet spoken.

But Jewel understood women like Hannerle. They were part of her history, her childhood, her sense of what people
were
. She was The Terafin, yes; The Terafin was meant to define autocratic. It was not, however, as Terafin that she confronted Haval’s wife now. She wished, briefly, that her clothing would shift into something more appropriate, but realized as she thought this that there was nothing else she could wear.

“Because I won’t be where he is for much longer.”

Hannerle waited, lips compressed in a tighter line.

“I need to leave Terafin, and I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. I’m Terafin, yes—but I’m also the only person who can undertake this journey. I can’t order someone else to take it—unless you happen to know another seer.” Jewel turned to examine the bolts of cloth that Hannerle had shown Adam with such pride. “I wouldn’t leave, Hannerle. Terafin is my home. The only family I have left is in Terafin. They can’t come with me, and I wouldn’t take them even if it was possible.

“You’ve seen my cats,” she said, lifting the edge of a bolt of blue silk and letting light play across its fabric. “I don’t know if you’ve seen my forest.”

“Of course I have,” she replied, in an entirely different tone of voice.

Jewel turned. The store had not melted away, but Hannerle drew her—and Adam, who remained silent and watchful throughout their discussion—toward the store windows. Outside of those windows the familiar streets of the Common no longer existed; instead, there were trees of silver, of gold, and of diamond.

“I find it beautiful,” Hannerle said, her voice softer. “I find your cats beautiful—but I’m glad they’re yours, not mine; I think their constant whining would make me box their ears. I couldn’t own a forest like this one,” she added softly. “I’d forget how to live and work, I think. I’d wander through those trees looking for—for gods only know what. I’d be searching for the heart of those lands. I’d feel my own life too small and too dismal, too gray.

“Too mortal,” she added. “You will not take Haval to your forest.”

“No. Haval doesn’t belong in it. I don’t know what he’d do if he had to learn all the rules that govern and guide the wilderness; I don’t think rules really exist. But I can’t take my kin, either. I don’t want to put them at risk there. So I leave them at risk
here
.”

Hannerle turned away from the window. “Here?”

“In this city, where demons still hide and idiots still try to assassinate me.
I’ll
survive,” she added bitterly. “I always have. But they won’t. I’ve lost my kin before. I’ve lost—” she stopped as Hannerle put an arm around her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “But I need Haval in my House while I’m gone. Finch will need him. And Teller.

“But if I don’t go—if I don’t go—”

Hannerle’s arm tightened, although she didn’t speak.

“I know—I know you don’t want to lose him.”

“No,” Hannerle said, “I don’t. I’ve never liked the games he played. I didn’t like what it did to him, what it made of him. I saw what he could become if he walked away—but I wanted to see that, and we both know Haval’s good at controlling what people see. I don’t want him to be devoured by what he was. And Jewel? He played games that only men of power play. He had no obvious power. He survived.

“Sometimes he barely survived. Tell me where you must go.”

“I—” She almost told Hannerle that she couldn’t speak about it, that the Kings were already so close to demanding the separation of her head from her shoulders. She didn’t. “How much has Haval told you about me?”