She swiped tears with back of her hand, but more followed.
"Pity?" The bloodless hands were warm, but the voice was still cold and ruthlessly honest. "What pity? None was asked for, none was given. Outside this hut, I've seen life go on. I've seen compassion. I've seen love and friendship grow where nothing grew before. But I see no pity, no clinging to a past that's best forgotten."
"I don't want to forget. I want my life back. I wish life to be as it was before."
It was a foolish wish—life didn't go backward—but an honest one, and Akashia hoped Telhami would say something. She hoped Grandmother would reveal the words that would prevent Pavek and Ruari from leaving Quraite.
"Let them go, Kashi," Grandmother said instead. "Tear down the wall."
"It won't ever be the same as it was."
"It won't ever be different, either, unless you let go of what happened."
"I can't."
"Have you tried?"
She shook her head and released a stream of tears, not because she'd tried and failed but because it was so easy to forget, to live and laugh as if nothing had changed—until a word or gesture or a half-glimpsed shadow jarred her memory and she was staring at Escrissar's mask again.
"Laugh at him," Grandmother advised after the old spirit unwound her thoughts. "Run through your fields and flowers and if he appears—laugh at him. Show him that he has no more power over you. He'll go away, too."
More tears. Kashi took a deep breath and asked the most painful question of alclass="underline" "Why, Grandmother—why did you give your grove to him?"
"It was not mine to give," Telhami's spirit confessed. "Quraite chose its hero. And a wise choice it was, in the end. I'd made a mess of it, Kashi. Can you imagine the two of us grappling with all those toppled trees? We'd be at it forever—but Pavek! The man was born to move wood and rock through mud. You should see him!"
And for a moment, Kashi did, hip-deep in muck, cursing, swearing and earnestly setting the grove to rights again. She had to laugh, and the tears stopped.
"You're not alone," Grandmother said suddenly, which Akashia mistook for philosophy, then she heard footsteps outside the hut.
Telhami disappeared before Akashia could tell her midnight visitor to go away. Feeling betrayed and abandoned once again, Akashia plodded to her door where two of Quraite's farmers greeted her. One held a pottery lamp, the other, Mahtra's hand.
"She had a dream," the lampbearer said. "A nightmare. It scared us, too. Pavek said he'd be in the bachelor hut, but we thought..."
Some folk needed neither spellcraft nor mind-bending to convey their notions silently. The farmer's hollow-eyed, slack-jawed expression said everything that needed to be said.
"Yes, I understand." She made space in the doorway for Mahtra to pass. With her strange coloring and wide-set eyes—not to mention whatever the mask concealed—the white-skinned woman's face was almost unreadable. When Mahtra squeezed herself against the door jamb rather than brush against her, Akashia had the sense that they were equally uncomfortable with the situation. "She can stay here with me for the rest of the night. Pavek shouldn't have troubled you in the first place."
" 'Tweren't no trouble," the farmer insisted, though he was already retreating with his wife and his face belied every word.
Akashia stood in the doorway, watching them walk back to their hut, and all the while conscious of the stranger at her back. As soon as was polite, she shut the door and braced it with her body. She didn't know what to say. Mahtra solved her problem by speaking first.
"It was only a dream. I didn't know my dreams could frighten someone else. That has never happened before. You said I should go to the grove. What is a grove? Would my dreams frighten anyone there?"
"No." Akashia pushed herself away from the door with a sigh. "Not tonight. It's too late."
It was too late for the grove under any circumstance. Mahtra's voice wasn't natural. Her jaw scarcely moved as she formed the words and the tone was too deep and deliberate to come from her slender throat; yet listening to her now, Akashia believed Mahtra had lived in the world for only seven years. As much as she craved justice, Akashia couldn't send a seven-year-old to the grove.
"No, nothing, thank you."
Of course not, Akashia realized, feeling like a fool. Eating or drinking would have meant removing the mask. While ransacking Mahtra's memory, Akashia had found the white-skinned woman's self-image—what she thought she looked like. If it was halfway accurate, there was good reason for that mask, though appearances alone would not have bothered Akashia.
One thing that did bother her was the way that Mahtra chose to stand a step away from the touchstone patterns on the dirt floor. Grandmother had known what they were: mind-benders' mnemonics, makeshift symbols Akashia had used to push and poke her way through Mahtra's dreams. Akashia was the only one who could have deciphered their meaning, yet Mahtra stared at them as if they were a public text on a Urik wall.
Akashia strode across her hut. She stood in the center of the pattern, scuffing it thoroughly—she hoped—with her bare feet before she took Mahtra by a white wrist. "Please sit down." Akashia tugged her guest toward a wicker stool. "Tell me about your dream," she urged, as if she didn't already know.
Mahtra's narrow shoulders rose and fell, but she went where Akashia led her and sat down on the stool. "It was a dream I would not want to have again. I knew I was dreaming, but I couldn't wake up."
"Were you frightened?" Akashia sat cross-legged on her sleeping platform. It was wrong to ask these questions, but the damage was already done, and she was curious. Mind-benders rarely got a chance to study the results of their efforts.
The pale blue-green bird's-egg eyes blinked slowly. "Yes, frightened, but I don't know why. It was not the worst dream."
"You've had other dreams that frightened you more?"
"Worse memories make worse dreams, but they're still dreams. Father told me that dreams can't hurt me, so I shouldn't be frightened by them. Sometimes memories get worse while I'm dreaming about them. That happened tonight, but that wasn't what frightened me."
"What did frighten you?" Akashia found herself speaking in a small voice, as if she were talking to a child.
Mahtra stared at her with guileless but unreadable eyes.
"Near the end, when I couldn't stop dreaming, I remembered memories that weren't mine. They frightened me."
Akashia's blood ran cold. She thought of the touchstone pattern and the possibility that she was not as skilled with the Unseen Way as she believed, at least not with the mind of a child-woman who'd been made, not born. "What kind of memories?" she asked, curiosity getting the better of her again. "How do you know
they weren't your own?" For a long moment Mahtra stared at the ground, as she'd stared at the patterns. Perhaps she was simply searching for words.
"Father was killed in the cavern below Urik, but Father didn't die until after I found him and after he'd given me the memories that held his killer's face—Kakzim's face—so I could recognize it. Father was very wise and he was right to save his memories, but now I remember Kakzim and I remember being killed. In my dreams the memories are all confused. I want to save Father and the others, but I never can. It's only a dream, but it makes me sad, and frightened."
"And your dream earlier tonight—it was like that?"
Mantra's head bobbed once, but her eyes never left the dirt. "I remember what never happened, not to me, but to someone like Father. Someone who's been killed and holding on to memories, waiting to die. I don't think I'll go to sleep again while I'm here."