You still have us, the young woman said.You still have me.
No. Your parents are the High Lord and his Lady.
But I’m not them. We’re not them. I’m Ellorinel. You’re Calarnenne. You don’t have to change. You don’t have to be a different person. I won’t, either.
Kaylin had a terrible feeling, a premonition of doom.
When healing, she accepted the blending of memories as part of the process. She had never consciously attempted to separate or distance herself from the person she was healing. She touched their memories; she was certain they touched hers. This was not a memory she wanted to touch, to know.
Calarnenne, look at me. Look. I trust you. I trust you as much as I trust my brothers.
You shouldn’t.But even as he spoke the words, she felt an odd glow, a terrible relief; it wasn’t without fear, without dread—but it was almost as strong.
She forgot the damage done to him by the poison—the organs that were near to failure, the odd way blood flowed throughout his body. She’d been correcting them, rebuilding damaged connections. Had he been human, had he been mortal, she’d have been examining him in the morgue.
You should not do this, he said.
Kaylin screamed the same phrase silently, trying to separate herself from his memory. Trying to preserve her ignorance—to leave it in the realm of suspicion. This younger Nightshade wasn’t a person she knew. He had a home, a family he disliked, and at least one friend.
One friend, eyes green; Kaylin could see her pale hair, could see the strength of determination in her expression. It contained eternity. And she saw the woman’s eyes shift from green to the lambent gold that was Barrani surprise. The surprise faded as green overcame it. The woman laughed, delight in the sound.
He had offered her the truth of his name—a truth it was never safe to offer, as if to forestall her, as if to make his escape before she could offer him the same truth, the same vulnerability.
Annarion would have made this choice.
I would not take this risk, the young Barrani woman said,if you were not who you are. Time changes all things. I know it does. I cannot see the future. I cannot see where our lives will diverge. But the person you are now is worth preserving. Do not become what your parents tell you you must become. Do not surrender your kin without a fight.
By kin, she meant Annarion.
By risk, she meant her name. Her True Name.
Ynpharion would kill Kaylin if he knew that she knew it;the Lady had never taken that risk with Kaylin and never would. But absent choice, the consequences were profound. Kaylin didn’t want to know.
She healed by instinct; she’d never had to work at healing the way she’d had to work at lighting a candle. She just did what she did; it came naturally. When she reached out to heal, she held the whole person in her hands. The barriers that separated two individuals vanished.
She’d healed Bellusdeo before; had seen parts of Bellusdeo’s history. She hadn’t chosen which parts. She hadn’t searched for memories. Some came to her, as if life was a stream; as a healer, she had to stand in that stream. She couldn’t avoid seeing something, but there was no reason, no choice, in what she saw.
That had to change.
That had to change now, because her entire body reverberated not with Nightshade’s True Name—which she already knew—but the Consort’s. She heard the Consort’s True Name. She felt it as a blow, as a warmth, as a sudden door that opened into endless possibility, endlesstrust.
She knew the names of other Barrani. She knew Nightshade’s name. But she had never felt, in the gaining of that knowledge, what Nightshade felt in that long-ago past.
She wondered if this was what the cohort had felt when they, as a group, had chosen to take the same risk. As if the world had, for a moment, opened up into endless warmth, endless trust. She had never felt that way about the names she’d been given—maybe because those who’d allowed her that glimpse were so certain of their own power, they did so without fear, without a true sense of risk.
Ynpharion was the lone exception; he hadn’t offered. He’d hated her with an intensity she hadn’t experienced before, even in occasionally heated office politics. That hatred had been whittled down to grudging resentment, until the moment he had offered the Consort his name. He understood that he wasthe link between Kaylin and the Lady he would have died in a heartbeat to save.
She wondered if Severn had felt the way Nightshade did when she had casually offered him the name she had taken from the Lake for herself.
And she wondered all of this while she worked to fix the things that were broken in Nightshade. The invasive, inimical magic was so faint that, were it not for the damage it had caused, she wouldn’t have noticed it as foreign. She removed it, eradicating it as she repaired the injuries it had caused.
Wondering, as she did, what it might have been like to be the Consort, to be the source of so much joy, however brief the moment in their lives.
The Consort had never stopped trusting Nightshade. She had never stopped believing in what she had seen, what she had known, that day. He hadn’t seen her since the moment he was ejected from the High Court—not until theregalia. And she had been the same woman, when they had at last crossed paths, that she had been on the day she had offered him the knowledge of her name.
Nightshade could hide his own thoughts. There was almost nothing she could read that he would not allow. But this knowledge was poison to the Lady. If it were known, it would damage her in far too many ways. He did not speak to her through the namebond. He isolated the bond, and the truth of the bond, moving further away from the naivete and idealism of distant youth.
What she had given him he could not keep. But he could never keep it, in the end: she was the heir to the Lake. If not Consort, she was the Lady, as her mother had been. Her mother, who had not prevented the children from being sacrificed to the green.