The Emperor's Wolves (Wolves of Elantra #1) - Michelle Sagara Page 0,90

thought, something he tucked away for consideration, should more information come to light. She could hear it. She could hear it all.

Yes. That’s why we’re hated and feared by your kind. What they don’t understand is that we hear it all, all the time; to us it’s natural. The reason it’s difficult for me is that I have a task. I have to operate in the confines of that given task, with all of the necessary security precautions. It’s much easier to separate our own thoughts from the Tha’alaan than it is to separate our thoughts from someone we’re in contact with.

Severn stilled.

What are you doing?

He didn’t answer. He could feel a curiosity tainted by fear, but it was distant now.

After a silent pause, Ybelline began.

* * *

She was much like Records, but better; he didn’t have to remember the exact commands in order to shift the scene or the flow of information. When he focused—and he couldn’t help but focus here, there were no other distractions—the images that she showed him brightened, darkened, or faded away without any conscious effort to remember new commands on his part.

She didn’t show him faces; didn’t caption any of the memories she had brought forth with names, verbal or printed; she didn’t bring him clear, sharp vignettes. He was deposited into the life of the Tha’alani whose memories she thought might offer some hint, some way forward into the grimmest of the memories the Tha’alaan held.

In one way, the filtered recall was more difficult than Records, and that was the collation of information; he couldn’t simply freeze and hold a single image, adding it to a magical stack that could be recalled with a few words. That work, Ybelline had to do on her own, separating strands of lived lives into flattened sections.

Severn focused not on the deaths—the unsuspicious, natural deaths—of the men and women brought forward for his perusal, but on the lives they had lived near those deaths. Had they left the Tha’alani quarter? Yes? No? Had they ever left the quarter?

Those for whom the answer could safely be said to be no, he discarded—but there were precious few of those; Ybelline, understanding on some level what he’d been looking for when he made this request, had already filtered out most of them.

Even filtered, there were a surprisingly large number of people, or people’s memories, in the samples she’d chosen.

We were not as afraid of the city streets. We learned.

It’s not that—it’s just the number. It’s the number of people. It seems high.

For a moment he felt a piercing grief and an abiding anger. No, not anger, rage. It startled him enough that he moved, his hands falling to his weapons reflexively, his eyes opening.

She stood, her eyes hazel—not the green the emotions suggested—watching him; she hadn’t moved at all. “Did you believe,” she asked verbally, “that I am without anger?”

He nodded. He saw no point in lying to a woman who would once again return him to the state of communion in which all truths were laid bare.

Her smile was odd, more sorrowful than any smile had the right to be. “We are all people,” she said, her voice, like her smile, soft. “We know anger, fear, pain. The difference between us is that the anger, fear, and pain do not become the focus of our existence, influencing and coloring all of the choices we make from the point it takes hold.”

He swallowed. His hands remained free of weapons; the tension ebbed slowly from the line of his shoulders, his jaw. He met, and held, her gaze. “There were three,” he finally said.

She knew which three.

“They were young in the memories you showed me; young when they died. I want to see the memories they shared with each other.”

“We all share—”

“No, share is the wrong word. Sorry. They shared more than just memories; they shared events. One of them once led the others through the hills and around the walls.”

Her eyes widened slightly. “I don’t believe—”

“He thought of it. It embarrassed and amused him. There were three—a girl, two boys. Can you find those memories?”

“Of course. I didn’t—” She exhaled. “Of course.” She leaned forward, but Severn, prepared, leaned toward her as well.

* * *

He had no words for the childhood of these three. And that was for the best. He’d long since accepted that the life he’d led in the fiefs was his life, for better or worse; that others—across the Ablayne—led safer, happier lives; that Ferals didn’t hunt