Gaelen, who stood at the perimeter of the room along with the other members of the three shei'dalins' respective quintets, gave a humorless laugh. "When has lack of experience ever stopped you from weaving great magic, kem’falla?”

"But wouldn't I have known? Wouldn't you"—she glanced at Rain and her quintet—"have known? That weave they spun took no small amount of magic."

"When several shei’dalins spin, Feyreisa, even strong threads can hide among the others." Narena, the elder of the two sisters, offered the possibility. "You must have analyzed our pattern and added your own threads to our weave shortly after we began. It is a common way to learn a new weave."

If she had, she'd done it purely without conscious thought.

"May I ask what made you search the Mage's mind for memories of his mother?" she asked the vol Oros sisters. "Is that something you usually do when you Truthspeak a Mage—tap into the emotions he felt as a child in order to enter his mind?"

Surprise flickered in dark eyes. The sisters exchanged a look. "We made no such search, Feyreisa,'' Narena said slowly.

Ellysetta frowned. "But you did. You discovered his name, and his memories of his mother, and used those to probe deeper into his thoughts."

The sisters continued to look at her as if she were some unexpected—and disconcerting—-surprise discovered beneath a scientist's close-viewing glass. Ellysetta's hand rose to her throat. "But surely you heard him? Surely I wasn't the only one to see the memories of his childhood? How he became a Mage ... how he rose in rank and came to know the High Mage"—she swallowed and forced herself to say the name— "Vadim Maur?”

Faerah moistened her lips. "Did he ... tell you all that, Feyreisa?" Horror and curiosity mingled in equal parts on her lovely face.

"I..." Ellysetta's cheeks began to burn and her hands went clammy. She hated when she did things like this. Hated when her gift—or curse, as often seemed more the case—made her seem such a strange, odd misfit of a person. She hated the way it made people look at her—as if they couldn't decide whether she was Fey or foe, magic or monster.

Most of all, she hated how it made her wonder the same thing.

Rain's hand closed around hers, the broad strength of his fingers squeezing gently, and with that simple handclasp came the rush of emotion she needed most: love. Utter devotion and unswerving acceptance. He was the unyielding haven in the center of her storm. «Breathe, shei'tani. It's all right. Everything will be all right.

She took a shuddering breath and nodded as she fought to control her racing heart. So long as Rain was at her side, she could get through all of the oddities of her existence, even the parts that shot terror through her soul

"What did the Mage tell you, Feyreisa?" Narena echoed her younger sister's query.

"He told me about his life... well, 'told' isn't exactly the right word. It was more like he let me live his memories with him...." She glanced at Rain. "Almost the way tairen do when they sing."

"You mean you heard his song?”

"Yes." His horrified expression made her flush and begin to stammer. "No. Oh, I don't know, Rain. 1 don't know what I did, or how he shared what he shared. I only know it was the truth," She squeezed his hands. "I know it was the truth. His name was Torvan Zon. His father was a Primage, and his mother was an umagi concubine."

She also knew that Torvan Zon had loved his mother. Even after he'd woven so much dark magic that he was no longer capable of love, he couldn't erase the part of him that belonged to her before it belonged to the Mages. By then, however, he had learned to consider love—or any form of emotional attachment—a weakness, and so he had hidden it away deep inside his mind, a shameful secret never to be revealed.

"Rain, Zon knew Vadim Maur—before he was the High Mage. He was Vadim's …" She hesitated. "Friend" wasn't the right word. Mages didn't have friends. They reviled all emotional attachments. She finally settled on: "He was one of Vadim Maur's inner circle."

She pressed her hands to her temples as she paced the room. She could still remember everything so vividly ... as if some part of the Mage had become part of her... or rather as if his memories had become her own. She remembered the slow decline, from the child warm in his mother's arms to the Mage who had, without a twinge of conscience, enslaved another person's soul for his own use. She knew exactly how triumphant—almost godlike—he'd felt when he'd completed the claiming of his first umagi and then forced that umagi to do his bidding. She knew the euphoric rush of exultant power that had flooded the Mage's body. That rush—that feeling of greatness and invincible power—was the drug, the addiction, that kept Mages pursuing ever-greater, ever-darker magic. She could still sense it, even now. And some part of her liked the taste of it. Her stomach lurched. She stopped pacing and put her head down in an attempt to quell the nausea. Oh, gods. What had she done? Had she opened her soul to Torvan? Had she inadvertently admitted some part of his evil Eld darkness into her own soul—or, worse still, released the darkness that had existed in her own nature all along?

"Shei’tani?" Rain was there in an instant, searching her face in concern as he pulled her into his arms. "What is it?"

She leaned against him for a moment, closing her eyes and letting herself shelter in his strength. When he held her like this, when his soul reached for hers as it was doing now, he almost made her fears melt away, almost made her believe that she truly was as bright and shining as he claimed.