No. I can’t explain how you breathe, either, if that helps.
Are you afraid?
Yes. But this is a minor fear.
She was surprised. He sensed it immediately. He sensed everything immediately; they were entwined now. If she needed secrets, this was not the place to keep them. It was unusual, however; most of the people who were exposed to the Tha’alani were so busy attempting to fortify their defenses and hide their secrets that they didn’t look in the other direction. Drawing breath, she said,Let me show you my life. Let me show you my fears. Let me do this first.
You don’t have to.
I think, if I do, you’ll understand.
Some things, it’s not safe to know. People kill you if you know too much.
Almost bitterly, she said,We know. But if you’re Tha’alanari, they kill you because there’s a possibility that youcan. You don’t have to do anything. Just exist. Why do you think the Tha’alanari quarter exists behind walls? That almost none of our kin choose to live beyond them?She had started, and could not now stop.Even with the walls, we’ve lost people. And we’ve lost children to kidnappers, and children to the ambitious who somehow think they can cage those children and use their powerwithoutalerting—
His hands tightened.Something happened today.
Yes.She swallowed.Garadin was probably right. I shouldn’t have come. But Helmat was right as well, I think. Let me tell you about me.She was glad, then, of the privacy that humans so prized; she was certain that the Tha’alanari would not have approved. But they weren’t here; they couldn’t hear or see what she could. They couldn’t offer advice, or the strength they felt she needed, couldn’t evaluate the choice she had made, and was making.
What she could have forced from Severn, she now offered him, instead.
Helmat saw Severn stiffen; the young man’s shoulders curved in, his head bent, as if he were attempting to protect himself from blows he couldn’t otherwise avoid. His hands, however, did not tighten around Ybelline’s. Ybelline’s did; her knuckles were white. The Wolflord moved, and moved again; Ybelline was crying.
Severn was not.
To Helmat’s surprise, Severn extracted his hands, although his eyes remained closed. He then shifted his position and his weight, and brought both of his arms around Ybelline, maintaining forehead contact; he pulled her in and held her as if she were a child.
She showed him the first murder she had experienced. The victim had been Tha’alani. She had been six years old, and the whole of the Tha’alaan had shuddered at the death, and the dying. Terror, pain, all of these were etched there permanently—it was as if she herself had died. She, and every person who was part of the Tha’alaan who could hear the dying.
It was how she had discovered the existence of the Tha’alanari. The dying, thepainhad suddenly ebbed; enough that she could hear her thoughts again. She had run to her mother in primal terror, and her mother had been waiting, as if understanding that every child in the Tha’alaan would be seeking the physical comfort, the physical safety, of their closest protector.
But Ybelline, in the safety of those familiar arms, had stiffened. “He’s gone.”
Her mother wordlessly told her to hush; she could remember her mother’s hands in her hair, across her back.
“He’s gone. He’s—Hecan’t go! He’salone!”
“He’s not alone,” her mother said.
But she couldn’t and didn’t believe it, and so she had—at six years of age—gone searching. She’d gone searching for a dying, terrified man in the Tha’alaan. No entreaties from her mother could stop her; no entreaties from her aunts or her uncles could stop her either. Because she was searching, because her search grew increasingly desperate, she found the wall. The wall was, of course, metaphorical; it was not a wall in any sense of the word. It was a type of silence, and had she not been looking, she might never have seen it, never have heard it.
But shedidhear it. And listening, she began to climb that figurative wall. Ybelline, at six years of age, had discovered the Tha’alanari.
Her mother’s arms were around her. She was surrounded by a familiar touch and familiar scent, by the safety of home. And because she was, she could climb down the other side of that metaphorical wall. She could hear voices on that side of the wall. Her people.
And she could hear—oh, she could hear—the pain of the dying man, because his torture, his mutilation, was not yet done, not yet over. The first thing he had lost—to knives, to cudgels—were his antennae. But the Tha’alani did not require them to reach the Tha’alaan. It would have been a mercy to the Tha’alaan, perhaps, if they had—but not the man.
Ybelline was not aware of the men and women whose voices she could hear so clearly; she was not aware of anything but the physical presence of her mother. She was frozen in place by the terror of the man himself—but she was no longer terrified. She understood that his pain was not her pain; that his death was not her death.
And that he was alone and mad with it. She knew what happened to those who lost the Tha’alaan. Every small child did. Every adult, too. It was the fate they most feared.
She could do nothing for this man. She was not as large as her mother, nor as strong as her father. She knew nothing about fighting, nothing about combat. But she knew how to hug someone, how to hold someone.
She passed through the wall of adult voices because they weren’t a wall; they were noise now. And she reached for the man. Reached for him, reachingintohim, reaching into the core of his pain, the injuries he had sustained, the things that would kill him. She hated humans, then.Hatedthem.
But that was not what he needed. Hatred was not comfort. It was not shelter.
Child, no!