Oracle: The House War: Book Six (51 page)

Jewel started to answer, although she wasn’t certain the words would actually go anywhere, when Angel stopped walking. She clipped the back of his boot with the front of hers and drew to a stop. The stone-slab floor beneath their feet ended, not in a doorway or a t-junction or any of the normal, architectural cues that denoted change.

They simply stopped. Jewel turned; the floor beneath her feet—and behind them—was solid. The floor three yards ahead was not. As if the hall itself had been cut in two by the blow of an impossibly large ax, it led into . . . nothing.

 • • • 

Celleriant was armed by the time Jewel reached the sharp edge of cut stone. Beyond it, all that could be seen was a kind of dull gray. It didn’t look like fog; fog had shape and variations of color that this gray did not possess.

“Lord?”

“Do you see what I see? Gray?”

He lifted a brow, but nodded.

“Angel?”

“Same.”

Winter King?

There is no path that I can see.

But you’ve said you can travel
any
path that Ariane has traveled.

Yes.

“Terafin,” Evayne said, stepping forward. “Perhaps I can help.” She carried a crystal cupped in her palms; the light it shed traveled up the underside of her chin, emphasizing her bones and facial structure in a way that made her seem forbidding.

Jewel glanced out at the nothing that waited.

Shianne said, “Perhaps I can be of aid. There is a path.”

Evayne’s hands stiffened; her expression froze. She otherwise said—and did—nothing.

“I am not certain that I can walk it any longer,” Shianne continued. “I have not tried. But it is an old path, and it was not meant for use by any who were not servant to the White Lady.” She looked at Jewel’s wrist.

“Where does it lead?” Jewel asked.

Shianne frowned. She turned to Celleriant and spoke briefly.

Celleriant responded in kind. If he spoke in a tongue that Jewel had never learned, her ignorance in this case was not an impediment; his response was cold and as emphatic as it could be. Only a battle cry would have been more obvious.

Shianne nodded in quiet assent.

Jewel, however, did not.

“Terafin,” Evayne said.

Jewel ignored her. She walked past the seer, whose heart was so obviously exposed, and toward the two Arianni. She stopped once at the sound of falling rock; it was distant. It wasn’t distant enough. “Celleriant.”

He was grim and silent; Jewel was almost surprised that he condescended to acknowledge her at all. That should have been enough of a warning. In some ways, it was. She turned to Shianne. “Tell me,” she said, speaking as if to the leader of one of The Ten. “Where will you lead us, if you lead us to an exit?”

“These halls,” Shianne said, “are ancient. They are older than I; they are not older than the White Lady.”

“Did she not create them?”

“I cannot say. I do not recall ever asking. It was,” she added softly, “my home. We rode out from these halls into fair weather and into storm; we were safe when the earth was angered, and safe, as well, when the water and the air raged. We saw sunset, between the eastern pillars; sunrise, between the western. We looked seldom to the North.

“What was in the north?”

“If you must ask openly, do so here—but even in these halls, safety is not guaranteed. I will not answer, not now. If we find ourselves, against all odds, in the Hidden Court, ask again; I will answer there, willingly.” She glanced at Celleriant. “It is to the South that we travel, if you rely on my knowledge.” She turned back the way they had come.

“I counsel against, lord,” Celleriant said.

Jewel looked, pointedly, at the total absence of anything an inch from the end of floor.

“The seer believes she can give you the information you require to traverse it.”

Terafin
, the Winter King said, choosing the formal title, as he was wont to do when the matter was weighty.
Take what the seer offers
.

Jewel reached up and pushed her hair out of her eyes. “You believe I can forge a path out of this place, starting here. And you also believe that it is the preferable option. What do you think we will face, if we follow Shianne?”

“The Oracle’s test,” Evayne replied.

“But it’s to
take
that test that I’ve come.”

“Is it?”

Jewel’s words were the truth. But they were not all of the truth.

“You are strong in ways that I never was,” Evayne said, when Jewel did not reply. “But it is the strength of diamond, of crystal. The right blow—or the wrong one—will shatter you. Absent that, there is almost nothing that you cannot endure if you but choose to endure it; nothing that you cannot accept if you choose to accept it.”

“That’s true of anyone.”

Evayne ignored this. “You are in the high wilderness, although you cannot recognize it. You are in the cradle of the ancient world. I cannot build the path on which you must walk—but walk it from here, and you will, regardless, face the Oracle. You will not leave this place if you cannot.” She held out the seer’s crystal again, cupped in both palms. “Terafin, there are some choices—as you have said—that you could never make.”

“And it’s to avoid offering me that choice that you’ve come.”

“No. I do not choose the timing of my arrival. I could not know, until I arrived, that you would be here. Or that I would. But we
are
here.” Her voice had dropped. “We are here. I did not walk these halls when I went to the Oracle the first—and only—time.”

“Then you don’t know what I’m facing.”

“No.”

She was lying. Jewel
knew
it. She turned to Shianne. “Lead,” she said quietly. “Lead, and I’ll follow.”

Shianne nodded, although she cast one narrow glance at Evayne. Celleriant was, for the moment, invisible to her, as was the Winter King. “The risk,” she said, “is to Jewel, and no one else?”

“She risks all by simply being here,” Evayne replied. “Even you.”

“She cannot harm me more than I have harmed myself, and she will not—ever—harm the child. If I understand what I have seen, she is meant to reach the White Lady. If the child survives to reach the court, everything I have done—everything, no matter how bitter—will be with cause.”

“But if you perish, you will never see the White Lady again.”

“And that, perhaps, would be a kindness,” Shianne replied, her voice soft, her expression neutral. “For I am not as I was; I have cast aside the better part of her for reasons she would never accept while she drew breath. But if I am part of her—if I was—I was not all of her, nor she all of me; the choice, as the Oracle said, was mine to make, the consequences, mine to bear.”

“Jewel,” the seer said, as Jewel straightened her shoulders. “You do not understand where you will walk if you follow her lead.”

Jewel pushed hair out of her eyes again. She felt that she had aged ten years in the space of minutes. “You’re wrong,” was her quiet reply.

Angel lifted a hand in den-sign.

Jewel mirrored the gesture.

Carver
.

 • • • 

The seer, to Jewel’s surprise, smiled. It was not a mirthful smile; there was no joy in it. It aged her face—but age never weakened Evayne. It made her more powerful; it made her more dangerous. “I do not pity you,” she said, voice soft. “Remember that. I could not make the choices I now believe you will make; there is too much for which I am responsible.

“You have always been both more and less ambitious, Terafin. I believe I hear your cats; if you are to be away, you must move quickly. The gray one is particularly sullen.”

“Why did you offer me the choice, then?” Jewel asked, as Evayne fell in beside her. Without the cats to contest ownership of Jewel’s personal space, Evayne’s presence caused no comment.

“All choices made out of hope and desperation are evil,” the seer replied. “And all, necessary. I had hoped to spare you pain.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It is, nonetheless, true. Understand that your pain, and its effects, will be profound if you cannot control it, unless you intend to remain absent from your home, your den, and your city.”

“I can’t.”

“Not if you wish any of them to survive, no.” Evayne’s crystal had once again vanished into her robes; midnight blue rustled as she walked, folds billowing in a breeze that touched nothing else. “Jewel—” she exhaled.

I believe it would be wisest,
Avandar said,
to accept Evayne’s initial offer.

I know.

Jewel.
He had seen her brief gesture. He had seen Angel’s.

She did not answer.

 • • • 

“What do you fear?” Shianne asked Jewel. Jewel had paused to check Adam as they skirted the edge of the great hall, moving, at last, to the South. Adam had not woken.

Jewel looked to Evayne.

Evayne shook her head. “I will not take him from here.”

“You’ve done it before.”

“Yes. At need, and at great cost. I will not take him now. Where you go, he must go. I believe you will need him, Terafin.” She looked at his sleeping face. For a moment, they all did.

Adam was, in sleep, painfully young. He was not yet sixteen, but he had reached the age of majority among the Voyani.

“You are not horrified at what you faced when you were his age.”

“I don’t think I was ever his age.”

“You were. If you will not trust your own impressions, trust mine. What you did then, only you could do. What he must do, only he can do. Age is not a shield. We are at war, Terafin.”

Jewel said, “Not yet.” But her mouth and lips were dry.

“Understand that you are not making this decision for him; no more am I. He chose to come, and I believe, in the end, he will understand that choice far better than even you.” She lifted her hands and raised her hood. “I will not leave you while I have choice; I believe I know where you will walk.” She hesitated again, and then said, “There is another way.”

But Jewel shook her head. “There is
no
other way. I came to take the Oracle’s test because I had hope that
if
I passed it, I would be able to find my kin.”

“Jewel,” was the soft reply, “if you travel this way, he will
be
your test. It is not necessary; choose—make—a different path.”

But Jewel shook her head. She smiled; it was a wan smile. “Help me strategize, Evayne—or go away. If I could build a path of my own, if I could forge one out of nothing the way I could in the dreaming, this
is
where I would go.”

 • • • 

Celleriant and Shianne spoke quietly and at length as Shianne once again took the lead; before they had finished they were forced, by the hissing fury of flying cats, to raise their voices. Jewel couldn’t see the three, and felt guilty at having left them behind. That guilt troubled no one else, not even Angel.

Kallandras joined Jewel; Avandar ceded the position to Jewel’s left. Her domicis was silent in all possible ways. He offered no advice, no opinion, no argument.

The Winter King listened to the two Arianni. He was likewise silent—but his disapproval grew. Jewel felt the weight of it.

Understand what it is that you do.

I understand what I risk,
she replied.
But I am
taking
that risk.

 • • • 

Once or twice Shianne’s voice rose in obvious anger or dismay; Celleriant’s did not likewise join hers. Jewel let them speak; the world in which Shianne now walked was not the world she had left, and she needed to know what some of the differences were.

She needed to know, Jewel thought, if she was going to answer any of the questions they had.

Meralonne had seemed almost certain that to find Carver was to alert the Sleepers, whose sleep, so necessary to the survival of her city, was now so tenuous. He had been certain that if he traveled to where Carver now stood,
he
would wake the sleepers. They would be aware of him—but he would not be in danger.

She was not certain how they traveled. She had never pressed Celleriant on the issue, and the Winter King’s explanations left much to be desired. But she needed that information, now.

And if Meralonne was not here, Shianne was.

“Jewel,” Avandar said.

She turned.

Whatever he had intended to say when he caught her attention, he kept to himself; he met her gaze, held it, and then slowly inclined his head, no more.
I ask for one thing, if we are to continue down this path.

Jewel waited.

Accept the consequences as they occur. Do not mire yourself in pointless regret. Do what you must do, and continue.

She nodded.

I will remind you, Jewel. Where you go, I am now committed to go. I will walk your path while you live. It is a consequence of one rash decision,
he added,
on my part. I accept it.

 • • • 

Shianne was waiting for Jewel, or so it seemed. Celleriant stepped, without comment, to the left to allow Jewel to walk between them. They spoke in their mother tongue; she found the spoken language hypnotic and beautiful, even absent obvious meaning. It was like song; like bardic song.

And it was not what she needed now, but it pained her to interrupt. “You knew Illaraphaniel, whom we call Meralonne.”

Shianne nodded. Both of her hands rested upon her belly as she walked.

“Did you know the other three?”

“Yes. Lord Celleriant has informed me of much that has passed in my absence.”

Given Celleriant’s expression, the information hadn’t gone only one way. “You understand, then, that the White Lady ordered these four to accompany a mortal to kill a god—and in the end, they failed.”

“They chose to fail,” was her reply. “But, Jewel, so have I.” She glanced at her hands, and at what lay beneath them.

Jewel shook her head, frowning. “Why can you speak my tongue?”

It was Shianne’s turn to frown. “I do not understand.”

She speaks,
the Winter King said,
as she speaks. What you hear is dependent on her, but it is not deliberate on her part; thus speak the firstborn and their offspring. Thus, the Kialli.