had never been here before I brought you.
You had, he said. A bit wry, even in the Work. Having her wandering the halls of his brain was uncomfortable for him but he let her do it anyway. He said it was fine, that what mattered was that she was learning—and she was. She could open his memories, unfold them to see things in them that he’d never noticed and couldn’t consciously remember. She could even change them, if she wanted. There was a girl he’d been with, Anneka, his memory of her strong because—Judah thought—she had been his first and they had been young and it had happened during the time the magus thought of as Before, When Things Were Easy. The memory was easy to manipulate. Her changes were subtle at first, the weather or the smells or the feel of the ground under Nate’s hands. Then she changed the color of Anneka’s dress, made her older, gave her a scar. The young magus still kissed her throat and told her she was beautiful. The memory seemed to rest not just in the girl, but in his younger self with the girl: Did his feelings for Anneka stay the same no matter what Judah changed, or was he simply unable to remember himself acting any way other than he actually had?
Then one day, she went back to Nate’s memory of his night with Anneka, and—it didn’t feel right. Was it like a piece of paper that had been folded? A pillow that smelled like somebody else’s head? Eventually she decided that it was like the patch of silk on the parlor wall that they’d scraped off accidentally. Elly had brought out her paints and tried her hardest to match the color, and they’d all agreed that she’d come very close, but Judah knew the spot was there, and her eye was always drawn to it. The inside of Nate’s head felt like that: patched. And as soon as she realized it, she suddenly saw patches everywhere inside Nate. Patches, and seams, and places where memories were just sort of...crammed together, awkwardly, in no particular order. All of the things that he’d said to her about how the Work could damage a person’s mind came back to her: somebody had been Working in Nate’s mind, and the somebody had been very powerful and very careless. She wondered if she could fix the tattered places, but she didn’t quite dare try.
Then one day, he brought her to a Slonimi campfire, a circle of wooden wagons on a great soft plain that smelled of lavender. Somebody played a pipe, someone else played a harp. All sorts of faces gathered around the fire, different skins and eyes and hair, more difference than Judah had ever seen in her life; and as strange as they were to her, they were also familiar, because this was the magus’s caravan. These were people he’d known all his life. He didn’t think of them as cousin or aunt or sister. They were simply his family.
Except for his mother, Caterina. Who was a beautiful woman, still, for all that she must easily have been Elban’s age, her long hair in its many braids shot through with gray. There were lines at the corners of her eyes, and more next to her mouth, but her smile was easy. Judah particularly liked the way she moved. She seemed entirely comfortable in herself. Her expressions were sometimes comical or odd because she felt comical or odd, and she had clearly never seen a reason for her face and feelings not to match.
You must love her very much, Judah said the first time he’d shown Caterina to her. She’s ten times brighter than everyone else.
Nate had laughed. I do love her, but that’s just the way she is.
And maybe it was. In Nate’s memory of the bonfire, she watched Caterina pulled to her feet by a brawny man with a beard. They danced for a scant three bars and all eyes were on her, not because she was beautiful, but because she was herself. They enjoyed seeing her dance, all the people around the fire. They laughed when she swatted playfully at the bearded man and sat back down. She seemed wise, unflappable. Watching her, Judah wished she could talk to the woman, to ask her about the tattered places. Then she thought, well, why not; found a soft place in Nate’s memory of Caterina, and slipped inside it.
Suddenly she stood inside