“This isn’t about their grief, but ours,” Seru insisted, her voice growing firm. Whether pregnancy or a blissful Choice, something had brought out the strength Aryl had known lay in her cousin. “You can reach that far, Aryl. You can tell us who lives. Then we’ll know who to mourn.”
No one had asked this of her. Not even Enris, who looked at her with sudden hope.
An Om’ray who left his Clan was as if dead to that Clan. It had always been so. UnChosen took Passage to find Choice and a new home, or die in the attempt. The family and friends they had in the past never spoke of them again. It was the way of the world.
A way her Talent could change forever. Aryl swallowed. Is this what you want?
Not for myself. His eyes fixed on hers. I have my new life. But for Worin’s sake. For the others. They didn’t choose to leave their families. They should know what became of them.
Aryl’s fingers strayed to the metal bracelet she wore, turned it on her wrist, explored the smooth ripples that mirrored a mountain stream. It was of Tuana; Enris had made it there before he’d left. Before they’d met. “Stay with me,” she said out loud, then closed her eyes.
She relaxed, let herself be attracted to the glow of other Om’ray, moved past Sona’s cluster of life to touch Grona’s, moved farther and ignored all between, until . . .
Tuana.
Having reached the here-I-am, she relaxed further to allow each glow to become who-I-am . . . Names filled her mind . . . more than names. Identities, full and rich and connected one to the other. No Om’ray existed alone, whole or Lost. Their bonds were threads of light through the darkness.
Too few.
Enris. With her. She shared her awareness of Tuana’s Om’ray; in return, she couldn’t escape his despair and anguish. She took his pain into herself, soothed it, helped him past it. Showed him.
There. Mendolar. A connection that stretched, however tenuous, to him and back. Other names. Serona. S’udlaat. Edut. Licor. Annk. Other connections. Faint, too faint. But real.
If she let herself, she could trace them between every living Om’ray, see the world’s shape as it truly was, know her place in it.
With an effort, Aryl shrank her awareness to her own body and opened her eyes.
“Dama Mendolar,” Enris said wonderingly. “I should have known. My grandmother,” he clarified for the rest of them. “It’s not the first reshaping she’s survived.”
“Could you—?” Aryl found herself unable to say it.
Enris seemed to fill the room as he rose to his feet. Only his uncle, Galen sud Serona, rivaled him in size. “I have the names of the living. I’ll tell the rest.” Then he paused to gaze down at Seru. “But there aren’t enough bells for the dead.”
In the end, Sona’s bells were silent. Instead, when everyone had gathered within the Cloisters’ Council Chamber, dressed in their finest—or at least cleanest—clothes, the Tuana stepped upon the raised dais. Murmurs and sendings stopped. The dark of truenight pressed above the gray dirt piled outside the windows. It reflected the glowstrip that banded the ceiling, so rivers of light appeared beyond the Tuana, meeting at some unimaginable distance.
Enris stood in the midst of his new Clan, at the center of his old, the focus of all eyes. He was magnificent, Aryl thought, holding in a rush of pride that had no place here and now. Straight-shouldered, serious, with a lift to his head that gathered attention and kept it. Nothing of uncertainty or youth. Everything of strength.
“This truenight, we will give our names to Sona. So doing, in the way of our people, we become Sona and leave our past Clans behind.” His deep voice carried through the room. Through their bones. “Yet we need not.”
Naryn stepped forward. Though freed, her glorious red hair cloaked her shoulders in calm, obedient waves. In her hands was a stack of the metal plates Adepts used for their records. Enris gestured. “Here are the names of those who died in the reshaping of Tuana. We who remember them as the living ask that they be given to Sona with ours. We ask that they not be forgotten with our deaths, but remain here to touch the future. Forever real.”
To keep the past. A concept he’d learned from the Human.
The others hadn’t expected this. Aryl lowered her shields and tasted their puzzlement. They weren’t unwilling; they simply didn’t understand. How could the past stay real?
Something was rising in the M’hir. Could the others feel it? Aryl wondered. Surely they must.
Then . . . like a flood . . . memories burst into her mind. Vivid, crisp.
... A roadway. Buildings of wood and colored metal and a kind of block that wasn’t stone. Strong, sturdy, elegant shapes. A Meeting Hall with stairlike benches that rose to the ceiling.
Faces. Voices. Om’ray she’d never met or known. Hands busy at work. Metal melting and flowing into shapes. Fields that stretched to the horizon. Immense machines, blades slicing through stalks.
Voices. Faces.
The smell of baking. Something sweet and fragrant. Her mouth watered.
Laughter, ease. A life so different from that of Yena she felt unmade. Stars overhead. Glows in a tunnel. Ramps and twists and beams of heavy wood.
Everywhere, life. People. Connected and whole. They had names . . .
Names she could hear because all around her they were being spoken aloud, as if in greeting. Her mouth was moving, too.
The memories faded . . . the echoes died.
The Om’ray of Sona stared at one another, then at Enris.
There was a sheen of sweat on his face. The sharing had come with effort. Beko Serona wept silently beside him. Stryn Licor’s daughters supported their mother. The Tuana were shaken, if triumphant.
Naryn started, then smiled as the metal plates lifted from her hands, rose into the air over their heads, then came to the outstretched hands of Fon Kessa’at. The unChosen hugged them to his chest, as if relieved by his own control. His friend, Cader Sarc, squeezed his shoulder, looking askance at Veca and Tilip, Fon’s parents. They merely smiled at him. So, Aryl thought with approval, the younger generation understood.
“We’ll enter them into the record,” Oran said quietly. Aryl.
Ah, yes. The original reason for the clothes and clean hair, for the rokly cakes cooling on the tables of rough wood they’d had to bring with them, for the tables themselves. She took her place on the dais, the Tuana quietly stepping aside. When Enris would have gone with them, she captured his hand in hers but didn’t look at him.
“This truenight,” Aryl told her people, consciously following the pattern he’d set, “we give our names to Sona.” Smiles. A sense of relaxation. This, they’d expected. “Each and every one of you will be shown how to open the Cloisters’ doors.”
Not expected. She hadn’t prepared the rest for this.
A few exchanged looks. Husni’s mouth hung open. Haxel spoke. “Only Adepts open a Cloisters. We’re not Adepts.”
“You don’t need to be.” Hoyon’s face was impassive, but Oswa flinched. Aryl paused to frown at him. “Secrets,” she said pointedly, “have no value here. We are too few, too far from any other safety. Sona’s Cloisters must open for anyone. The outer doors are a simple trick of Power, easily done by anyone whose name is recorded here.”
Or by an unknown bearing a child conceived in Sona, if she had Power enough to impress the Cloisters; a less-than-tactful speculation of Oran’s Aryl preferred not to mention.