The sunshine was warm on the top of my head and the back of my neck as I ran my hands over the leaves of my plants—and felt nothing except the slight stickiness of drying dew on my fingertips. Tiny plops of moisture dotted the soil, but it leaked from my eyes, not the cloudless sky.
I sensed my sister coming toward me. As she drew closer, I could hear her hesitant steps on the earth, but I didn’t look up. Perhaps she wouldn’t notice my wet cheeks if I continued to let my hair fall forward to curtain my face.
“Inara?” Her voice was soft, tremulous.
I stared at my plants that were still thriving without me—for now. But once the weather turned for the worse … then what? Would the other healers still be here? Would they make our food grow instead? Hopelessness tore the wound inside me even wider. A gaping maw that swirled with a darkness so deep, I was afraid to look into it, fearing I would sink and never emerge.
“I’m worried about you,” she continued when I didn’t respond.
“I’m fine,” I lied.
“Inara … when I helped Raidyn heal you, something … happened.” Zuhra spoke haltingly, her words coming out stiff and strange. She was never awkward with me, unlike everyone else. But everything else had changed; I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that even our relationship—something I’d thought indestructible—would too. “You healed Halvor, right?”
Her sudden change of subject, painful as it was, took me by such surprise. I nodded before I could think better of admitting it.
“Afterward, could you … feel things? Especially when you were close by him? Like … his emotions, maybe?”
I finally looked up. “Yes.”
She smiled at me, a soft, gentle smile of understanding—and concern. “That’s called sanaulus. It’s what happens after an intense healing. That’s why you could feel his emotions. Sometimes, even the one who was healed will be able to sense some of your emotions as well—though not as strongly as for the Paladin who did the healing.”
“I didn’t know that,” I admitted, though it suddenly shed a new light on so many things. But I wondered if that, too, was gone now that my power was. I hadn’t been near him most of last night, and this morning I’d been too absorbed in my own desolation to take note of whether I could still sense Halvor’s feelings.
“That’s why I know how … unhappy … you are right now,” Zuhra continued carefully. “Why I’m so worried about you.”
Oh.
Oh, no.
She could feel the darkness in me? The grasping, sucking despair that continued to grow stronger and stronger?
“I only wish I knew how to help.” Zuhra stood close enough to reach out to me, but though her hand twitched at her side as if she wanted to, it remained by her side.
Can you get my power back?
There’s nothing you can do.
Please go away.
Don’t leave me alone.
I shrugged. “I probably just need time … to get used to it.”
Zuhra’s eyebrows knit together, and I realized even if I were the best liar in the world—which I most certainly was not—she would know I was lying because she knew what I was feeling. She knew just how deep the “unhappiness,” as she’d kindly called it, burrowed into my heart, even my soul.
In an effort to deflect her focus, I blurted the first question that came to mind. “So, you’re an enhancer?”
She blinked. “Yes, that’s what Adel—er, Father—said.”
For some reason, it was a little bit comforting that she stumbled over the word “father” even though she’d been with him the whole time we’d been apart, getting to know him.
“Then why aren’t your eyes like mi—theirs?” Mine no longer glowed. They never would again.
“I … I actually don’t know. There hasn’t really been a good time to ask yet.” Zuhra finally reached out, but to my plants, instead of me. She picked a ripe green bean from one stalk and rolled it between her fingers. “There’s so much I still don’t understand.”
“What was it like there?” Even though it smarted to ask, I had to know. “How did you survive after…”
She stared down at the bean, a peculiarly sad, almost wistful look on her face. For Visimperum? Or something else? “The rakasa was trying to drag me away—to finish what it started. But the flare of power at the gateway drew the garrison on patrol to it, and thankfully they got to me in time.” She finally looked up at me. “It was Adelric’s garrison. I still can’t believe it, but the first person I saw in Visimperum was our father.”
While the rakasa in the citadel had nearly killed me and Halvor, while I was healing myself and then him, she was being rescued by our father. “So, he healed you?”
“No, actually. He killed the rakasa that attacked me—so he didn’t have enough power left to heal wounds of my magnitude. He asked Raidyn to do it.”
“Oh.” I glanced past her to the citadel that was now inhabited by so many strangers, including Raidyn—the one who looked at her with eyes that burned with far more than just Paladin fire. The one who healed me—with her help. “Wait—the san … sana…”
“Sanaulus,” she repeated.
“Does he have that with me too?”
She paused just long enough for me to know the answer even before she nodded. “But don’t worry—he’s been trained not to use it to invade your privacy or anything like that. And he says he knows how to keep from getting confused about his emotions for anyone he has healed.”
I could only stare at her, hot embarrassment rising up my neck. So not only could my sister feel everything I felt—which I wasn’t thrilled about, but at least it was my sister—now her … whatever he was to Zuhra … could too? And then the second part of what she’d said sank in.
“Wait … sanaulus can make you confused about how you feel about someone?”
“That’s what I’ve been told. It creates such a strong emotional bond between the person who was healed and the healer, that without proper training, it can be mistaken for a, ah, different kind of bond.”
A fist of doubt pushed past my lungs to clutch my heart, compressing it to the point of pain. A sudden dizziness made my head swim. “How can you tell the difference? How do I know if what I think I feel for Halvor is … if it’s real?”
Zuhra frowned. “I’m not sure. I … I think when it’s real, it’s more than just that connection. All I know is the difference between what I thought I felt for—a, um—different person, and Raidyn.” She stumbled over her words, uncharacteristically hesitant. Who else had she believed herself to have feelings for? “With the, uh, first one, I was fascinated by him. Meeting him, talking to him, was exciting and different and I thought that meant … We’d read all those stories as girls but had never met any boys before, until—” She broke off, eyes lowering, and realization dawned on me with awful, sinking clarity.
Halvor.
She had believed herself to care for Halvor?
“But with Raidyn,” she barreled on, while I tried to assimilate my shock, “it’s so much more. I’m not just fascinated by the fact that he’s a boy, I’m fascinated by him. Everything about him. I want to know him the way I know you—the way I can tell if you’re upset or calm from a mere expression you make or the way you move your hands. I want to feel completely comfortable with him, the way I can share anything with you. With the other boy, I was … curious. But when I’m with Raidyn, my heart … it … it just races—like the feeling the moment right after a gryphon takes off and I’m terrified and exhilarated all at once. I want to be with him, all the time. And when he’s gone, I wonder when and how I’ll see him again. I want to have him hold me, to want me, the way I want him. I dream of him k—”
Zuhra stopped abruptly, eyes bright, the skin just below her ear flushed red—one of the only spots where I could see her blush because of her tanned, olive skin.
I stared at my sister. “Oh,” was all I said.
Had she kissed Raidyn? Was that how she knew this? I enjoyed being with Halvor, I’d even kissed him, but it hadn’t felt like that. Well, except for the whole blasting him to the ground with my power, which I supposed I no longer needed to worry about. But as for heart racing and wanting to be with him as much as possible … I couldn’t understand that. Halvor comforted and calmed me. I was curious to kiss him again, to see what it felt like, especially with the threat of my power gone. But a part of my heart sank at the difference between what she’d described and what I felt. Was it just different for me and Halvor? Or was I confusing the effects of sanaulus with how I felt for him?
“Nara, I can’t pretend to understand what you’re going through.” Zuhra finally put the tortured bean down and reached for me, thankfully changing the subject. Her fingers wove between mine and I found myself clutching her hand. She’d always been my lifeline, my anchor. No matter how much my world had changed, she was still the one steady thing to cling to, to stay afloat. “I want you to know you’re not alone. I will always be here for you—no matter what. And at least we will always be able to talk to each other now.”
“That’s true.” I looked down at my plants. The roar was never coming back—I would never be lost in it again. I should have been glad. Instead, new dots of moisture began to speckle the dry soil.
Zuhra stepped closer to me, so that we stood shoulder to shoulder, our clasped hands pressed between us. “I’m sorry, Nara. I’m so sorry.”
We stood side by side, the sun bathing us in light and warmth, while I cried. A torrent of grief and fear released at last, with my sister as the only witness.
But then, right in the middle of the onslaught of tears, darkness crashed into me—so hard and fast, it felt like an actual, physical thing—as though Zuhra had shoved me in the chest, knocking me back. I stumbled away from her, my vision tunneling into black before a barrage of images flashed through my mind.
A boy staring up into the glowing blue eyes of an old man ensconced in a large armchair, his jowls heavy with a graying beard. “Our worlds were never meant to be separated like this. We were born to rule. Those who chose to create the divide were weak—and wrong.”
A young man, consumed with grief, alone and supremely unhappy, stumbling into a large library to escape a deluge common for the area.
“You’re late, Barloc,” a stern voice came from the desk directly ahead; a tall, austere man stared down his long, beaked nose at him. The sorrow that consumed his every waking moment was pushed behind the crushing hatred that surged, as it did every time he had to make himself subservient to the cruel old man.
“I apologize, sir. My grandfather died and—”
“That was last week. You may no longer use that excuse. You will be on time, or you will be dismissed from the library.”
“Yes, sir. Of course, sir. It won’t happen again.” And someday, I will never have to demean myself to worthless people like you again, he added silently as he tromped toward his much smaller desk and the stack of books that needed sorting.
A forest, bathed in shadow, only flickers of dappled sunlight glimmering between the leaves and branches above him. He stretched out his hand and loosed a blast of blue flame, consuming a huge bush entirely in moments, just because he could. Burning, heady, intoxicating power searing through his veins—at long, long last.
“Inara!”
I slammed back into myself with a jerk of Zuhra’s hands on my shoulders, her voice nearly a shout. I was gasping for air, the emptiness inside me pulsing hot and painful.
“Inara—what happened? Are you all right?”
I blinked and looked at my sister, disoriented and terrified. “I’m … I’m fine,” I finally managed. “I’m sorry … I just … I’m so tired,” I added, aware of how absurd it sounded to claim it was only exhaustion.
“Are you sure?” Zuhra clearly didn’t believe me, but she didn’t press when I shook my head. “Perhaps we should go back inside. Lie down for a bit. Or go see what the others are doing.”
“All right,” I agreed, allowing her to thread our fingers together and walk hand in hand back toward the citadel. The sun was warm on our backs, but nothing could dispel the bone-deep cold from what I’d seen—and what it meant.