An’Sennarin nodded without surprise. “She spoke to me. I heard her.”
“She did touch you.”
“Not then—but yes. She wanted me to understand that there was no fear in sharing. No fear in being known. She wanted me to see—” He closed his eyes. “And I did see.”
Severn, listening, understood. Tessa was not a threat to An’Sennarin. She would never have become a threat—he had seen the thoughts she had never tried to withhold. He had not killed Tessa or her friends. Would never, Severn thought, have tried.
“You were discovered.”
“My association with Tessa was discovered, yes. It was forbidden, and I understood, by then, what forbidden meant. I didn’t have to see her in person to bespeak her. I could continue the interaction.” He swallowed. “Tessa helped me to pass the Test of the Tower. She swallowed my fear; she told me what I was looking at when I could barely see. She...hated the Barrani, for a while, because this test was what they forced on their children or their family.” He lifted his head. “Do you understand? I could notbeAn’Sennarin were it not for her.
“But it was passing the Test that caused the attitude of the ruler of Sennarin to change. I was going to be useful now. I was significant. I had, in an attempt to allay his suspicions, stopped leaving the High Halls; I went to the Arcanum and agreed to be tested. I understood what the tests entailed. I could have failed them comfortably, but it seemed prudent to keep An’Sennarin happy.”
Ybelline was watching him carefully.
“I was despised by his heir. I was disliked and feared by the woman who stood in the ruler’s shadow, waiting her chance to step over his corpse to stand closer to the throne of Sennarin. This was not unknown in the West March among the significant families, but ours was not considered significant enough. My brother and sister—I had both—never cared for me as Tessa’s family cared for her, but they would never have considered murder.
“I did try. In the end, I discovered—from Tessa—that I could summon the water in a different way. And I created a small fountain in the Sennarin halls. It was considered a risk, but it was also considered a display of Sennarin’s power; it was the first such fountain to be created in centuries. I could hear the water when I was in need of retreat, of peace.”
“Tessa told you how to do this?”
He nodded. “She was worried for me, I think. And I grew worried for her, because the interest in the Tha’alani grew.” He closed his eyes. “And I should have known. I should have known, then, what that interest would mean.
“I was sitting in a suite of rooms, granted me when I passed the Test. Had I not been seated I would have fallen, I think—but regardless, they knew. They knew that I knew the instant she died.”
“Did they ask?”
“No. They knew, but they did not acknowledge it; it would be acknowledging my weakness. It would make me a target, and if I were a target, my power would become a threat, a liability. It was my fault that she died; my fault that her death was considered necessary. My fault, in the end, that the deaths that followed were considered necessary as well.”
“They were not your fault,” Ybelline said. “They were never your fault. Tessa continued to want what she wanted the day she first met Random: to open up the world in which she lived; to understand the people who could not share in it. If anyone is to blame it is the Tha’alani. We did not keep her safe enough as a child. Had we been then what we are now, she would not have met Random. She would not have learned...what she learned.
“You did not kill her. You did not kill the rest of my kin.” Ybelline rose.
An’Sennarin reached out and caught her by the hand. “Adellos asks you to stay.”
“Adellos may speak to me in person.” Her tone implied that she would not speak to him in any other way.
“He asks that you listen.”
“What you say now is not something relevant to the Tha’alani,” she replied, the words brusque, her eyes green. “I am satisfied that you had no part to play in the long-ago murders, and I am unwilling to revisit them now if it is not necessary. I am unwilling to force the Tha’alanari to revisit them; one unguarded rediscovery damaged two of them.”
“Adellos commands you to listen,” he said.
“Adellos cannot command me.”
“He is castelord, Ybelline.”
“Not in any way that now matters. By our standards—the standards of our caste court, our people—he is too broken to continue to shepherd us. The Tha’alanari will not follow him.”
“Then Adellosasks. I did tell him,” he added, chagrined, “that asking would be better. But he said he can’t ask when there is only one acceptable answer. It’s too much like a lie.”
Silence. Ybelline’s hand—the free hand—bunched into fist before she once again sat at the table.
“I did not know about the Tha’alani murders. I knew, by this point, that the Tha’alani were feared. I did not know that they were being murdered in the city streets. Not until Adellos spoke my name. My True Name.”
Ybelline closed her eyes.
“He understood, better than Tessa, why those names must never be shared. I had not given him my name; Random had not given him my name, although he did meet with her in person. But Adellos understood what had happened, and Adellos found the memories and excised them. Tessa had hidden them—”