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.
“Sit down,” she suggested. She would have liked to accuse Grandmother of masterminding this encounter, but she had only herself and her own meddling to blame. “Are you hungry? Thirsty. We eat in common, but I could—”
“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