“Hesaya didn’t notice, either,” she pointed out.
Did Jacen want to admit this out loud, to anyone? Of course not. But he was asking something terrible of Nines, which might well cost her life. He owed her nothing less than the truth.
And perhaps a part of him needed to say it, to hear the terrible truth aloud and make it real, so that—somehow—he might begin to make sense of it.
“I found something familiar,” Jacen admitted. “The psychic tether that opened the channel . . . I knew it when I saw it. I’d heard this sort of connection described but never thought I would . . .” He trailed off, shook his head.
Nines watched him, expectation tinged with dread.
“I think—” Jacen sniffed, wiped blood from under his nose. Hands in his robes, he looked past Nines at nothing in particular. “I think Tharanoth is my father.”
Jacen Kheris was, after all, an uncommonly gifted telepath. He’d been told that all his life and never thought twice about it. He had assumed it was because the gods favored him. Because he wasspecial.After a lifetime of wondering where he came from, now that he finally knew, he wanted to forget. More than anything, he wanted to drink, to drown it all out once more.
Nines cocked her head, as though to examine him from a different angle. She finally said, “When I first saw you, I just thought you were Dalish.”
Despite himself, Jacen barked out a laugh. “That’s what the Church hoped everyone would assume.”
Back in that cell below the Cathedral, Akkani had told Jacen she was the one who found him. She must have known and chose to spare him as a child. Was he the first, or had there been others? Had he appeared any less human, would he have been allowed to live?
With a shudder, he banished the questions from his mind. He did not have the time, and he didn’t want to know.
“I would appreciate,” he said to Nines, “if you didn’t share that with anyone.”
“I won’t,” she assured him. Then her face contorted, and she looked like she might cry again. “Turil said my parents hated me, too.”
“She didn’t sound like she knew for sure,” Jacen said gently. “I doubt she pays close attention to every individual in the peninsula.”
The emotion that overtook Nines, though, was not grief. Not anxiety. For the first time, it wasanger.Nines said, “She told me I’d always belong to the gods. She was wrong. I won’t be what they tried to make me.” Her eyes flicked up toward the ceiling, toward the library and whatever commotion transpired outside. “I won’t be anyone’s weapon. Not the Church’s, notNaxal’s”—she shuddered—“and not even yours. I won’t be a part of anything like that again.”
Her gaze bored through Jacen as she spoke into his mind, where one could not lie.They won’t do this to anyone else.
Jacen gave her a single nod.We’ll stop them.
She returned his nod, not exactly trusting, but determined. She followed the others upstairs.
Jacen lingered over Ogden’s body. When he was alone, he crouched and rifled through the old man’s robes. His fingers closed around a cold metal cube.
Even as he tried to bury them, the dead man’s words still echoed in his mind.
His skin prickled when he touched the cube, with an almost-physical aversion. He would not use it. Hewould not.But neither could he justify going into battle without it—if not as a weapon, as a bargaining chip.
Jacen forced himself to forget the potential consequences long enough to slip the cube into his own pocket. Though he did not yet know—did not quite dare imagine—that to which he spoke, he murmured a prayer.
He schooled his breathing into a steady pattern, steeled himself, and departed.
40
SACRAMENT
YSIRA
Ysira’s childhood home had burned to the ground when she was eight years old. Both her parents died that day, but her most vivid memory was of a Guardsman who’d pulled her from the rubble. When no one could overhear, he had spoken soothingly to her in Zal. In those days, when the language still came to her as easily as breathing, she understood his quiet prayer:
“A drop of water springs from the Source. It travels the deepriver to the ocean. It is only water. It is always water.”
Ysira still often heard it whispered over the sick and dying. Death, the Zal said, was an illusion. The nature of a soul might be unknowable, but it never changed. Whatever they were now, so they would always be.
She had found the thought a pleasant one. But she had also never suffered any great loss. She barely remembered her mother, she’d despised her father, and she had not mourned either of them. A part of her had long believed that by keeping the world at a distance, by loving no one and thus losingnothing, she might come through life unscathed. When had that changed? If only she could pinpoint the moment, whatevergods-forsakenmoment in which she had decided to care, maybe she could undo it. Because now grief tore a hole in her, and she was not prepared.
