The Emperor's Wolves (Wolves of Elantra #1) - Michelle Sagara Page 0,28
because she had been given exactly that when she had first heard his voice.
She reached for him again, and if Scoros could not be banished, neither could she.
She did not ask for his name, but pulled it quietly from the contact; he tried to push her away. Tried, and just as the Tha’alanari had, if for different reasons, he failed. He wanted what she had wanted and needed when she had run to her mother. How could she not know? How could any of them not know?
She threw figurative arms around him, and because they were the arms of her unfolding gift, they fit; they were large enough—more than large enough, they were strong. Stronger than her mother’s arms; stronger than her father’s; stronger than even Scoros. She accepted the dying man’s pain.
And his pain came to her. It became hers in its entirety.
She endured it. She endured it, murmuring the same endearments that her mother was even now, in the physical world, murmuring in her ears. She endured it because, as a child, she had believed that love had no bounds, no end to what it could and must endure.
Throughout it all, she held him. And when he wept, in the end, it was not from pain, but relief. Here, in Ybelline, he had found safety, and she cradled him in the figurative arms of her gift until he died.
* * *
The Tha’alanari had been upset, of course. Upset and afraid and awed. She was too young to be what they were. She was too young. But no one argued that she did not have the power or the strength, because she had, in that one action, proved herself.
They worried for her. It wasn’t necessary.
Ah, no.
In the dark of the now, on the edge of Severn Handred, she admitted that they had been right. She had taken the pain into herself, and she had held it. She had not shared it with her mother, her father, or even the Tha’alanari themselves—the men and women who endeavored to keep the Tha’alaan sane. She understood, even at that age, that pouring nothing but raw pain, raw rage, raw hurt into the Tha’alaan would help no one. Not the dead man. Not his family. Not her own family.
No one.
But in the absence of the Tha’alaan, in the absence of even her closest kin, the hatred that she had felt in the face of Willan’s death sank roots. It grew. She dreamed of finding the men whose faces she could still see every time she closed her eyes. She dreamed of cornering them—in their comfortable homes, in an alley, anywhere really—and forcing them to live through exactly what Willan had lived through. Except the end.
It was the first time in her life that she experienced what humans—what any other race—experienced daily. She could not speak of his death. Could not share the visions; they remained trapped inside her until they occupied the whole of her. Or so it felt.
Her parents were worried. She understood this. She tried to take what comfort she could from their kindness and their concern, but in truth, she could not. The memories, the truth, became a wall between Ybelline and the comfort and love, the constant warmth, of the Tha’alaan. Shared pain was lessened pain. But she could not share this. Even then.
And why?
Ah, perhaps all children were alike. She hated humans. She hated them. They had become, in the recesses of her mind, more monstrous than Dragons or Barrani or the monsters that hid under her parents’ bed—her own mattress sat on the floor. She did not want her parents, did not want the people who loved her best or most, to see that ugliness blooming within their daughter.
Hatred is normal, Severn said. He had spoken so little, reacted so little, that she had almost forgotten him.
Not for us, was her soft reply.
For anyone who witnessed what you witnessed or experienced what you experienced. It did not make you a terrible child. It does not make you a terrible person. It’s not what you feel—it’s what you do. That’s the only thing that counts.
Who told you that?
Silence. He didn’t answer with words. But she could see the faded image of a woman—a woman not much older than she was now. Her eyes were dark, her hair dark as well; her skin, except for the smudges across her cheeks, was unblemished.
Your mother?
Not my mother. Her mother.
This time it was Ybelline’s arms that tightened. Not yet, she thought.