The Emperor's Wolves (Wolves of Elantra #1) - Michelle Sagara Page 0,27

and every person who was part of the Tha’alaan who could hear the dying.

It was how she had discovered the existence of the Tha’alanari. The dying, the pain had suddenly ebbed; enough that she could hear her thoughts again. She had run to her mother in primal terror, and her mother had been waiting, as if understanding that every child in the Tha’alaan would be seeking the physical comfort, the physical safety, of their closest protector.

But Ybelline, in the safety of those familiar arms, had stiffened. “He’s gone.”

Her mother wordlessly told her to hush; she could remember her mother’s hands in her hair, across her back.

“He’s gone. He’s—He can’t go! He’s alone!”

“He’s not alone,” her mother said.

But she couldn’t and didn’t believe it, and so she had—at six years of age—gone searching. She’d gone searching for a dying, terrified man in the Tha’alaan. No entreaties from her mother could stop her; no entreaties from her aunts or her uncles could stop her either. Because she was searching, because her search grew increasingly desperate, she found the wall. The wall was, of course, metaphorical; it was not a wall in any sense of the word. It was a type of silence, and had she not been looking, she might never have seen it, never have heard it.

But she did hear it. And listening, she began to climb that figurative wall. Ybelline, at six years of age, had discovered the Tha’alanari.

Her mother’s arms were around her. She was surrounded by a familiar touch and familiar scent, by the safety of home. And because she was, she could climb down the other side of that metaphorical wall. She could hear voices on that side of the wall. Her people.

And she could hear—oh, she could hear—the pain of the dying man, because his torture, his mutilation, was not yet done, not yet over. The first thing he had lost—to knives, to cudgels—were his antennae. But the Tha’alani did not require them to reach the Tha’alaan. It would have been a mercy to the Tha’alaan, perhaps, if they had—but not the man.

Ybelline was not aware of the men and women whose voices she could hear so clearly; she was not aware of anything but the physical presence of her mother. She was frozen in place by the terror of the man himself—but she was no longer terrified. She understood that his pain was not her pain; that his death was not her death.

And that he was alone and mad with it. She knew what happened to those who lost the Tha’alaan. Every small child did. Every adult, too. It was the fate they most feared.

She could do nothing for this man. She was not as large as her mother, nor as strong as her father. She knew nothing about fighting, nothing about combat. But she knew how to hug someone, how to hold someone.

She passed through the wall of adult voices because they weren’t a wall; they were noise now. And she reached for the man. Reached for him, reaching into him, reaching into the core of his pain, the injuries he had sustained, the things that would kill him. She hated humans, then. Hated them.

But that was not what he needed. Hatred was not comfort. It was not shelter.

Child, no!

Scoros’s voice, even then.

Ybelline ignored him. She ignored the other voices that attempted to throw her out, to push her back through the wall. There was only one voice she needed to hear, because there was only one man who needed to know that in his final moments, he was not alone.

She could give him that. When he whimpered, she caught his attention. She demanded it. And she was a Tha’alani child; he turned in the instant of that pain to see her. To understand that she was reaching for him. To turn the whole of his fear toward her, in the process changing its focus.

She wasn’t the one who was dying. She wasn’t the one who was trapped, who had no way to return home. She did not need or want him to be afraid for her.

No, child, Scoros said. He needs that fear, now. It is the only thread of sanity he has left. He did not tell her that she should not be here; he’d already tried. Perhaps because she was young, perhaps because she’d had that arrogance of a childhood that had yet to be fully tested, she disagreed. She was certain, however, that she could give him what he needed