Jace’s heart thumped. “You want to tell them what I’ve told you. About my travel beyond Ravnica, about the other worlds. But you can’t tell them that—it’s not something they’d be able to understand. They can’t know.”
“That is not what I’m asking,” she said, pressing her hands together. “You are correct that I can’t tell them that, Jace. They can never know. It would kill them to know. Just as it’s been killing me.”
Jace flinched and glanced away. The meaning of what she said took its time working its way through the walls of his mind. She had kept his secret close, but it was causing her pain. Of course it was. She was not meant to brood on secrets and conceal them with lies. His revelation dug into her like a splinter, and he was the one who had imposed it on her. His attempt to bare himself to her had only been another cruelty.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
“That’s why you have to help me,” she said.
When she said no more, he glanced back at her. Her face pleaded.
He realized what she wanted. “Absolutely not,” he said.
“You have to erase it from me, Jace. You don’t know what it’s like, keeping this from them. I can’t let them know it, and I don’t want to know it.”
“I’m not touching your memories.”
“You must. I can’t live this way. It’s too big to do nothing about. But I can’t do anything about it. It’s just there, in my mind.”
“But it’s the truth,” he said, the pleading tone creeping into his own voice. It was the truth, but it was more than that. It was his attempt to reach out to her. It was his gift to her that she had come to return, and in doing so she was showing him how unwelcome a gesture it had been.
“You have to put me back,” she said. “Back to where I didn’t know. As long as I know, I’ll never be able to be open with them. I’ll never be able to be Selesnya.”
Jace grabbed the hair on the back of his head, shielding his face with his elbows. He took a series of deliberate breaths, clenching his teeth against the urge to shout. He saw why she wanted this. He saw the good sense of preventing the spread of Multiverse knowledge among the planebound denizens of Ravnica, and he saw how the knowledge would eat away at her connection to her guild. But the thought of tearing into Emmara’s mind, excising the words he had told her—even if he only took a few minutes away from her, it would be a kind of goodbye. It would kill something that, right now, was a little bit alive.
“Please, Jace,” she said.
He nodded heavily. The spell wasn’t even that difficult to muster. He had such proficiency with it, like a rehearsed piece of music. He was present in her mind in the span of a few breaths, searching through flickering memories of Trostani and Exava and Calomir, brushing through her thoughts of him in his patterned blue cloak. Finally he narrowed the spell to focus on a moment in a storm when he showed her the truth of the man he really was.
He hovered there, with that memory cradled in his consciousness like a sip of water cupped in his hands.
She looked at him as he held the mind magic there, and her face was serene. “This is in case you need me,” she said, and she pressed a small wooden artifact into his hand. It was an intricate woodcarving in the shape of a leaf.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “You’re welcome here.”
He tightened his grasp, and the memory disintegrated. She embraced him as the spell ended, the polite end of a visit. She walked to the top of the stairs. He watched her descend out of sight, and then he turned to the window and looked out at the towers of Ravnica.