LYAH STUMBLED into the darkness and tripped over Carin, who knelt almost prostrate just outside the cave. She landed hard on one knee next to her friend. The Quicken Moon shone down upon them, her sister at her side, full and plump and cheery.

The moonlight lit tracks of tears down Carin’s face.

Lyah crawled to Carin and took her in her arms, and the two of them wept.

A scraping behind them brought Ryd from the cave, his eyes showing bright in the moonlight.

“What did we see?” Ryd asked, his voice hoarse and grating with pain. He sounded as if he were asking the question of the night.

The cool darkness was a balm on Lyah’s eyes, and she hugged Carin tight to her chest, her fingers grasping the soft wool of Carin’s cloak.

No one answered Ryd for a long time.

When finally Carin pulled away, leaving Lyah to sit in the grass while Carin slowly gathered twigs and tinder and built a fire, Lyah scooted close to the flames.

“Did Jenin say anything more to you?” Lyah looked at both Ryd and Carin, hoping for some clue as to how they felt. When neither of them answered, she rolled her next words around in her head, wondering if she wanted to give them voice.

“Sy told me our names were as much choice as they were discovery,” she said finally.

Ryd’s head snapped up, and Lyah thought she heard a whisper in her mind. Ryhad.

Her heart gave a thump, and her breath fought the bellows of her chest as she tried to inhale. Had she just heard his name? Motes danced in front of Lyah’s eyes, like sparks in front of the fire. She looked at Carin, but saw nothing. Lyah had heard that last breath before the cave expelled her into the night, from brightness to the still darkness of the Hidden Vale. She had heard the name Lysiu and felt it sink deep within her. But she knew even then as she watched her oldest friend and heard no whisper that Lysiu was not Lyah’s own true name; Lyari was the name that came upon the tide of magic in the cave. Lyari was who Lyah would become when she returned to Haveranth as Merin’s apprentice.

The thought struck her dumb. Merin knew all their names. Lyah was Merin’s apprentice. She looked at Ryd and saw Ryhad there. She stared so long at his face that she didn’t hear him speak.

“I’m sorry,” Lyah said. She stood by the fire and brushed grass and dirt from her breeches. “What did you say?”

Ryd watched her closely. “I asked what you meant, about our names being choice.”

Carin did not speak, but her eyes were just as intent, and the light of the fire danced against the deep sapphire blue of her irises.

“I don’t know what sy meant,” Lyah admitted.

She could still smell the stink of the gob of green the child had coughed onto the ground in the cave. It smelled of death, and from the depths of her memory of Merin’s lessons, she drew forth a word. Illness. The child had illness. Something twisted inside hyr body that made hys lungs seize up and try to expel poison. Illness and hunger and thirst—that was what existed outside the Hearthland. What their ancestors had saved them from and cast a spell to ensure their safety for all the coming generations.

“What did we see?” This time Carin asked the question, and her words fell like shards of glass through the air, as shattered as a broken vase.

“We saw the history of our people,” Lyah told her. “How we came to be here.”

“Did you know this?” Carin drew a ragged breath and spat into the fire. Her saliva hissed and jumped on a rock, then burned away into nothing.

“No,” said Lyah. One cycle of the moons past, if Carin had been angry or hurt, Lyah would have reached out and drawn her into the circle of her arms. They would have gone to the Bemin and hurled stones into its depth until their muscles ached and the upset was gone. They had done it a cycle past, when Dyava was on his Journeying and Carin’s loneliness for the lack of his company had made her short tempered and uneasy. And now Dyava might be dead and it was their own Journeying. Moments before Lyah had held Carin close to her, felt her breathing in rhythm with her own. Fyahiul. They had shared their pillows and their hurts both for seventeen harvests. And now, the fire between them felt like they were instead standing on two mountaintops, leagues apart, their bodies cold and uncomforted.

Her mouth sour and dry, Lyah shook her head violently. “I didn’t know any of this.”

“I thought we were only coming here to find our names.” Ryd sat with his legs pulled up to his chest, his arms tucked tightly beneath the crook of his knees.

“As did I,” Lyah said.

“You’re sure that is our history?” Carin’s body was as still as the pond on Jenin’s farm at first light. “Our ancestors did this thing?”

“This thing?”

“They starved the land to feed themselves. They starved people.”

Lyah started. Her fingers trembled at the question. “You saw the same as I did. They were treated like unruly goats. Worse. Beaten and abused. They found something that could save them from depending on harsh masters.”

“By becoming those same masters?” Carin’s shoulders shook now, and she licked her lips, the firelight glinting on the sheen left by her tongue. “By becoming worse than abusers and beaters? By…”

Carin’s mouth moved as if her tongue tried to find the right words but could not.

“By becoming the sort who would end life to take for themselves,” Carin said at last. “Taking what was not theirs. Taking and not sharing.”

Ryd looked back and forth between the two of them, his mouth agape. “Carin,” he said.

“Everything,” she trailed off, and her lips drew together.

Lyah knew the gesture. She’d seen it countless times growing up. Carin would speak her mind no more, but keep her thoughts locked within her.

“I want to go home,” Ryd said suddenly.

“Merin knows magic.”

Again, Lyah felt surprise at Carin’s words. She nodded mutely, feeling as though the bond between her and Carin had been sliced with one of Rina’s blades still hot from the forge.

“Do you?” Carin plucked a pebble from the ground. “If I threw this in the air, could you stop it from landing?”

“No. I don’t know.” The words sounded hollow even to Lyah’s ears, and her heart pounded the sides of her head like a stick against a drumskin. Over and over. Over and over. Over and over. She wasn’t supposed to reveal what she was taught in her apprenticeship. Her eyes darted to Ryd, but he stared straight ahead, not looking at either of them anymore.

“But you know some magic.” Carin pressed. “You know some.”

“Some little, yes.”

“You never told me.”

There was a heaviness in the air like one of the neighboring mountains had decided to lean forward over them, and Lyah felt as though it were leaning specifically on her.

“I couldn’t. Merin said—”

“Tell me what you know.”

So fierce was the light in Carin’s eyes that Lyah couldn’t help but respond. She would rebuild the bridge across this sudden rift between them, and if it took sharing this knowledge, what little bit she knew, Lyah would do it or rot.