She was much like Records, but better; he didn’t have to remember the exact commands in order to shift the scene or the flow of information. When he focused—and he couldn’t help but focus here, there were no other distractions—the images that she showed him brightened, darkened, or faded away without any conscious effort to remember new commands on his part.
She didn’t show him faces; didn’t caption any of the memories she had brought forth with names, verbal or printed; she didn’t bring him clear, sharp vignettes. He was depositedintothe life of the Tha’alani whose memories she thought might offer some hint, some way forward into the grimmest of the memories the Tha’alaan held.
In one way, the filtered recall was more difficult than Records, and that was the collation of information; he couldn’t simply freeze and hold a single image, adding it to a magical stack that could be recalled with a few words. That work, Ybelline had to do on her own, separating strands of lived lives into flattened sections.
Severn focused not on the deaths—the unsuspicious, natural deaths—of the men and women brought forward for his perusal, but on the lives they had lived near those deaths. Had they left the Tha’alani quarter? Yes? No? Had they ever left the quarter?
Those for whom the answer could safely be said to beno, he discarded—but there were precious few of those; Ybelline, understanding on some level what he’d been looking for when he made this request, had already filtered out most of them.
Even filtered, there were a surprisingly large number of people, or people’s memories, in the samples she’d chosen.
We were not as afraid of the city streets. We learned.
It’s not that—it’s just the number. It’s the number of people. It seems high.
For a moment he felt a piercing grief and an abiding anger. No, not anger, rage. It startled him enough that he moved, his hands falling to his weapons reflexively, his eyes opening.
She stood, her eyes hazel—not the green the emotions suggested—watching him; she hadn’t moved at all. “Did you believe,” she asked verbally, “that I am without anger?”
He nodded. He saw no point in lying to a woman who would once again return him to the state of communion in which all truths were laid bare.
Her smile was odd, more sorrowful than any smile had the right to be. “We are all people,” she said, her voice, like her smile, soft. “We know anger, fear, pain. The difference between us is that the anger, fear, and pain do not become the focus of our existence, influencing and coloring all of the choices we make from the point it takes hold.”
He swallowed. His hands remained free of weapons; the tension ebbed slowly from the line of his shoulders, his jaw. He met, and held, her gaze. “There were three,” he finally said.
She knew which three.
“They were young in the memories you showed me; young when they died. I want to see the memories they shared with each other.”
“We all share—”
“No,shareis the wrong word. Sorry. They shared more than just memories; they shared events. One of them once led the others through the hills and around the walls.”
Her eyes widened slightly. “I don’t believe—”
“He thought of it. It embarrassed and amused him. There were three—a girl, two boys. Can you find those memories?”
“Of course. I didn’t—” She exhaled. “Of course.” She leaned forward, but Severn, prepared, leaned toward her as well.
He had no words for the childhood of these three. And that was for the best. He’d long since accepted that the life he’d led in the fiefs was his life, for better or worse; that others—across the Ablayne—led safer, happier lives; that Ferals didn’t hunt there. That parents didn’t disappear.
But the sting of an envy he thought long dead touched him anyway. He let the envy be; he didn’t try to suppress it. There was no point. Ybelline would see it, know it. It would become just another guilty secret.
Or not; when he reacted, she’d already begun to show him other memories, other lives, small glimpses of similar envies, similar sadnesses, all from the viewpoints of children. She didn’t tell him he wasn’t alone, because she didn’t need to tell him that. She let him feel it, know it, experience it.
And he took, from those experiences, dropped so casually into his thoughts, what she’d intended—or perhaps what her own young kin took, time and again: that it was natural to feel envy, that it didn’t make him somehow a terrible person. It was just one of many feelings in a stream of feelings, some better than others.
He had always desired privacy. Had always kept his thoughts to himself when sharing them served no greater purpose. In the Tha’alaan, there was no privacy, ever. He wondered again what it might be like to grow up with no privacy. Where there was no privacy, it seemed that there was no judgment.
He righted himself with her silent help, and she once again returned to the three children. They weren’t fearless, but the giddy daring that characterized the young and secure brought them a measure of joy and pride; they looked over their shoulders as they walked away from the Tha’alani quarter, muting their thoughts, highlighting their emotions.
Everyone who belongs to the Tha’alaan has access to every other person. We know we can keep no secrets, she told him.But we, too, must turn our thoughts towards those secrets. We must pay attention. It is different from the way you guard your children, but not so different.
It was very different.
Secrecy for our young involves the ability to whisper, not to shout. These children, these three, were clever—they focused on each other, and on their delight in the escapade. They did not focus on their fear of getting caught. Those who minded them—and they were not so young that a minder was required—would not be alerted if their attention was elsewhere. Not in time, she added ruefully.I am certain harsher words were spoken when it was too late to stop them.
He saw the city streets as they had seen them thirty years ago. Forty, perhaps. The shape of the streets hadn’t changed, nor had the cobbled stones, the buildings that stood on either side of open road. There were wagons; he could smell the passage of horses. But if Elantra was his home, it hadn’t always been his home. He had to make the effort to orient himself to understand where they were.