Oracle: The House War: Book Six (94 page)

“And time, you do not have.”

“And you?”

“I see all things when I look. I see all possibilities.”

Jewel continued to follow where the Oracle led; the hall had narrowed, but the lights that girded it were warm and golden. “I don’t understand.”

“No?”

“You choose possibilities.”

“Yes. But to arrive at those is work. Think of it as cloth. I might make a hat, a dress, a jacket; I might make, instead, a blanket or a tablecloth. But everything begins somewhere, and ends somewhere. If I wish to see one future over another, I begin at a place you cannot see; I end at a place such as this, with Jewel Markess by my side.

“Even so, there are possibilities and probabilities. I have chosen to invite you into my domain, asking you first to
reach
it. But there are choices you can make. I can see them all; I can weight those choices—but I cannot dictate them. I do not know what you
will
do. I know what you are
likely
to do.

“If I had summoned you earlier, you would have failed. If I waited, the likelihood that you survived was vanishingly small. Not every seer who has walked the path you have walked has survived. Not every seer who has faced the choices her life demands has made the correct choice. Some choices break some minds. If I offered you the choice that destroyed those who have come before, you may well have passed that test. You are Jewel. Your life defines you; you are built from every experience you have undergone.”

“Could you not have chosen paths that didn’t break those who walked them?”

“I did my best. Sometimes, Terafin, our best is not enough. We can weep or rage or surrender—or we can continue to move forward.”

“What are you trying to build?”

“That is the wrong question. In the end, I build nothing. I nudge. I advise—where advice will be taken. I plan, and I succeed; I plan, and I fail. There is no life lived without hope—but hope is its own peril, and leads oft to despair. It is the ability to survive that despair that guides us, in the end—both the supplicant, and the Oracle.”

“And only that?”

“Of course not. You have goals. You have plans. You have duties and responsibilities. They define you. Lose sight of them, and anything you gain from me will be without value.”

“And what, in the end, will you give me? What have I come this way for?”

“Knowledge. The visions that come to you randomly now, you will retain. You will be able to look at them, to test them, to see them from different angles. You will be able to almost walk
in
them. That in itself would be a gift—but perhaps it would not repay what you believe I have taken from you.

“But you will, with effort, be able to choose where you look. With practice, you will be able to choose
when
you see. I cannot, of course, practice for you. The ability to look—and see clearly—is built. Mortals become numb, in the end, to fear; they become numb to horror. I have seen a day, Jewel Markess, when you will be able to look upon the true face of gods and feel only an echo of longing.

“But that day is not this one.” The Oracle came to a stop at the end of the hall. A door—small and rough-hewn in appearance, stood closed before them. “And it is not by becoming jaded that you will achieve this.” She opened the door—by the handle. It led into darkness; there was, in the distance, the flicker of candlelight, and the sharp gleam of something Jewel couldn’t identify.

“I cannot lead you farther,” the Oracle said.

Jewel’s feet were frozen in the hall.

“Yes. Every instinct you have screams against this room. I will not force you to enter.”

“What—what am I supposed to do in that room? Why is there no light?”

“You carry light with you,” the Oracle replied. “Although I do not think it primitive enough to illuminate the room. There are magics great and small within my abode. In the room ahead, there is only one.”

“How many people have died in this room?”

The Oracle did not answer.

“May I ask,” Jewel continued, when the Oracle did not speak, “for the gift of one vision?”

The Oracle nodded. She reached into her chest—which was infinitely more disturbing when her body was not made of stone—and withdrew from it a crystal that sat perfectly between her cupped palms. “You do not need to speak the question aloud.”

“Will you know it, if I don’t?”

“It is my heart, Jewel. I see all manner of the things that pass through it. Yes. I will know.”

Had the crystal been glass, she would have seen her own reflection in its rounded surface. She thought she might see herself as the clouds cleared; she lifted a hand, and then lowered it. She had once touched Evayne’s crystal. She did not think she would weather touching the Oracle’s nearly so gracefully.

The Oracle didn’t tell her to meditate on the question; she didn’t give instructions that implied the opening of mystical curtains over the veil of past or future. She stood, waiting, the folds of lowered hood gathered beneath her expressionless face. She might have been a statue. She might have been a window.

 • • • 

What will happen if I walk away from this room?

It was such a pathetic question. It was such an immediate one. Jewel’s gift had always preserved her life—but the preservation required no thought, no fear: it happened. Her body
moved
. Her hand froze when she touched a fork or a knife. Her feet stopped moving in the lee of a doorway. In any of those situations, she had had no time for fear, or even thought: those came later, if they came at all.

She had never been forced to move against instinct, against the visceral mandate of self-preservation.

She should have asked a different question. But thought had become a very, very narrow corridor. She was afraid. She therefore asked the only question that mattered in the moment.

Beneath her eyes, the Oracle’s heart answered.

Jewel looked into a future that did not involve a dark room with a small flame and the glint of something that looked edged and flat. She looked as far ahead as she could bear, but in the end it wasn’t that far.

What—

She saw the ruins of a city that might once have been home; it was hard, at first glance, to recognize it.

But this vision, unlike all other visions, was not like looking at a moving painting. She stepped
into
it. She stepped into the ruined landscape. She smelled burning wood and flesh and cloth; she felt the cracked and ruined streets beneath her feet—streets that ended in gaping holes. She saw bodies—but more, saw the dying. Death came to everyone, in the end; it had no respect for hierarchy, wealth, power. Nor did it respect age or youth.

She could not help the dying—but she tried.

And in the Oracle’s heart, she
could
try. She could touch. She could feel heat and blood and the ice of shock in the hands or arms she gripped. She could see the glaze of stunned incomprehension, the mania of fear, the resignation—and the panic.

She was too close to recognize the city for what it was—but she was seer-born. She knew Averalaan in its dying throes, the skyline broken, the spires of the distant cathedrals missing.

The only mercy—the
only
mercy—granted her in the harsh glare of future truth was her location. She was nowhere near the Terafin manse. These dead, these dying, were not hers. But it was a small mercy—and for someone like Jewel, it was so slender, it was hard to recognize.

She circled the ruins of everything that made her life worth fighting—and even dying—for, and then she walked back into the now. She could not ask a different question, but asked, instead, subtle variations of it: she changed parameters. She inserted herself, and her future actions, into the fear, giving it shape.

The only thing she could not change was the fact that she had walked away from the room—and from the end of the Oracle’s test. She then moved forward again.

And again.

And again.

And she thought, as she did, that to be the Oracle, one had to have a heart, not of glass, but of crystal: something cold and hard and illuminating. Something that would not, could not easily,
break
.

She had asked the wrong question, but did not know how to ask the one she should have asked, the one that would have given her a glimpse of the future that unfolded if she entered the room—and left it alive. The future in which she might find something hopeful, something to work toward, something to hold that did not cut and cut and cut.

And yet, she thought, as she stepped away from the Oracle, maybe that was wrong. She had asked to see what would happen if she did not enter the room. She had not entered it yet—but she would, because walking away offered no hope at all. Maybe in the other future, the one she had not asked to see, there would be death and loss enough to break the heart. Maybe choosing the one over the other made no difference.

What she wanted, now, was hope. The vision she had asked to see had offered none.

What she understood as she looked into the Oracle’s heart, was that hope was what the Oracle wanted as well. Any hope, no matter how slender. Any light in the darkness, no matter how small or sharp. And in the future in which Jewel Markess ATerafin did not cross the threshold of this room, in which she allowed the instinct that had both ruled—and saved—her life to decide her actions, the Oracle could find none.

Jewel could not even believe that it existed and that it was hidden from her by the Oracle for her own mysterious purposes. She saw, and she understood, and she turned, once again, to the open door.

“It was,” the Oracle said, “the right question. It is the only question that any of you—children of my heart, all—have thought to ask when they stand, as you stand now. I am sorry.”

Jewel’s feet would not move.

 • • • 

She had never mastered the gift. It had always mastered her. She understood that now, because for one long, silent moment she
could not
move her feet. She wondered if Evallen of the Arkosan Voyani had faced the same locked immobility before she had at last walked to her death—a death that would save her daughter and her clan in a way that none of them could have predicted.

Evallen had not walked the Oracle’s path. Evallen had known that she would die. Jewel did not know it. The fear of it, the certainty of it, were strong but she did
not
know
it. She hadn’t seen it.

She swallowed. Her feet wouldn’t move.

And then, an inch at a time, they did. She couldn’t lift her left foot, and didn’t, after a moment, try; she shuffled it across the stone floor until it rested on the other side of the line marked by door and hall. She was surprised when it carried her weight; she was not surprised when she had to struggle just as hard to move her right foot.

This is ridiculous
, she told herself. She reached for her Oma’s voice, wrapped around the homilies that had driven her through much of her adult life, and found silence and emptiness in its place. And it wasn’t easier to walk. Having entered the room, her feet still clung to floor, as if by remaining there she might extend her life by seconds or minutes.

Ridiculous or no, she struggled. As the flame she had seen from the doorway grew closer, she felt that she had climbed mountains or run marathons, simply by crossing the flat, solid floor of a room. Inching her way across, she found no dips, no sudden pits, no shaky planks. It didn’t matter. What gripped her now was fear; it was primal.

It was pointless.

She was
going
to cross this room. It didn’t
matter
if every instinct she had ever had was screaming at her to stop. She wasn’t surprised when her knees finally buckled; her legs were shaking so badly. She had no sense at all of how much distance she had left to cover; she lowered her head and began to crawl.

 • • • 

The small flame was, as it had seemed from a distance, candlelight. It glinted off the flat of a knife.

Of course it did.

Jewel embarrassed herself once by throwing up. Her legs and arms were shuddering when she forced herself to stand; she wasn’t certain her legs would bear her weight. She thought—in that moment—that she had never known fear before. Not like this. It was almost impossible to draw breath.

Think. Think, Jewel
. She would have welcomed any interruptions. There were none.
Think
.

There was, the Oracle had said, only one source of magic in the room. Jewel guessed it was not the floor, not the candle, not the stone shelf on which the candle stood, dripping dark wax. It had to be the knife.

She had forced herself across enough of the floor that she could almost touch it; it was small, the blade pristine, its handle ivory or bone. In the dim light, it was hard to tell, and she dwelled on details because observation was easier than interaction. Entering the room had been almost impossible; crossing the floor had been an act of will.

She was therefore surprised when she reached for the knife and her arm moved naturally. The moment she held it in her hand—her right hand—the immobilizing fear dissipated. She turned toward the open door, and wasn’t surprised to note it had vanished. The room—if it was a single room—was all that remained: the room, the candle, the knife, and Jewel herself.

 • • • 

The candle was made of yellowing ivory wax, its shape lost to slow melting. It sat atop stone. An altar. The knife had, until Jewel lifted it, rested just beneath the candle’s small flame in the altar’s center.

The knife’s handle was hand-warm, as if someone else had just put it down.

Now
what?
But even thinking it, she
knew
. What had she said of the crystal in the hands of Evayne a’Nolan, half a lifetime ago? It was her heart. She could not remember Evayne reaching into her own chest to remove it and expose it to light—not the way the Oracle always did, but she had seen and understood that it was
of
Evayne.

That every time Evayne a’Nolan deliberately used the talent with which she’d been born, she exposed that heart. It had never occurred to Jewel to wonder what would happen to the seer if the crystal was destroyed.