Darid had made. There was pattern to it, and rhythm. She could feel Gavin through it. Not like a nagging doubt in the back of her head, but really feel him. If she wanted to, she could slip inside him like a suit of clothes. She didn’t want to. The empty room was a terrible place. The membrane there was sickly and blackened.
That extra bedroom of his—you want to hear about that?
Elban had killed people here, she suddenly knew. Tortured them, made them suffer, watched them die. What she saw was the remnants of their pain and fear and death. She didn’t think Gavin could feel it the way she could—or at least, she didn’t think he knew he was feeling it—but he knew the place was awful and he feared that he was awful and some part of him was making himself stand there and feel the horror as a punishment or a penance. For her? For Darid? He was a mess inside, Gavin. Knotted and snarled, packed with feelings that clashed like soldiers on a field.
She could fix him. Untangle him like a necklace. He would feel better. She reached out.
And felt herself restrained. Don’t.
It was the magus. Nate. In the ordinary world she had resisted calling him that, but thinking of him any other way in the Work would be like thinking of a chair as a dog. Without thinking, she slipped inside him, and he opened like a warm bed to let her in. In the tower she heard his body make a noise, but it was only his body, it was unimportant. She was radiant, hyper-alive. She was the center of his being. He was a hallway full of doors and she threw them open with reckless abandon; behind each one was a memory. She remembered flipping through the pages of Gavin’s mind, back in the study, to find the lie he’d told her about Darid; that had been nothing to this, that was peering into a shadowy room through half-closed eyes. In Nate’s memory, she heard the creaking wheels of a wagon in the sun, smelled green grass and horses and childhood and joy. His eyes showed her a woman with copper hair, braiding long fronds of some plant; a handsome young man with a bloody nose laughing and splashing his face with creek water; a girl with closed eyes and skin the color of sand after a rainstorm lying in the grass. When her eyes opened they were full of passion, and it was night. The air was clear and sweet and Nate had been young and full of mad soaring energy. He could remember. She remembered with him.
The memory made him sad. She could feel that, too. She tried another door. Behind this one was a towering woman with steel-gray hair, impossibly tall—no, it was Nate who was small, and Judah inside him. The woman was beating him. As blows rained down from her cane, he wept with pain and humiliation. The woman’s sigil shone from her like light from a lantern: Nate’s teacher. Judah didn’t understand her cruelty, but she understood beatings. She fled.
Another door. A village, dusty and worn, but somewhere in it gleamed someone who carried with them a power as bright as a star. Older now, more thoughtful, Nate was searching for that someone. It wasn’t a competition, but he wanted to be the one, he’d never been the one, and when he rounded a corner and saw that he’d found source of the power—a plain girl with a missing front tooth—triumph exploded out of him in a broad smile. Surprised, the plain girl smiled back.
Another. A narrow path carved into the edge of a cliff, hoary with ice, the howling wind tearing at his body.
A campfire, surrounded by singing and dancing and clapping. A drum, a flute. Comfort. Home.
A dingy kitchen, walls black with soot. A sad pile of blankets that didn’t keep the floor from being cold and hard. He didn’t want her to see that, for some reason.
Door after door, each one holding a moment of Nate’s life: she had lived her whole life inside the Wall and she was greedy for experience, starving for it. Perhaps there were more noises in her body’s ears and perhaps they were coming from his body, but she ignored them, throwing open one memory after another. Crowded taverns, singing musicians and bantering jugglers, groups of children chasing each other. Somebody’s baby. A drunken fight. A less drunken one.