Now and again, she would hear her brother calling to her from a long way off. She recognized Bek’s voice, even though it was a grown-up’s voice and she knew he was only two years old and should not be able to speak more than a few words. Sometimes, he sang to her, songs of childhood and home. She wanted to call out to him, to tell him where she was, but she was afraid. If she spoke even one word, made even a single sound, the things in the darkness would know where she was and come for her.
She had no sense of time or place. She had no sense of the world beyond where she hid. Everything real was gone, and only her memories remained. She clung to them like threads of gold, shining bright and precious in the dark.
Once, Bek managed to find her, breaking through the darkness with tears that washed away her hunters. A path opened for her, created out of his need, a need so strong that not even the black things could withstand it. She took the path out of her hiding place and found him again, his heart breaking as he watched his little dog lying injured beside him. She told him she was back, that she would not leave him again, and she used her magic to heal his puppy. But the black things were still waiting for her, and when she felt his need for her begin to wane and the path it had opened begin to close, she was forced to flee back into her hiding place. Without his need to sustain her with its healing power, she could not stay.
So she hid once more. The path she had taken to him was closed and gone, and she did not know what she could do to open it again. Bek must open it, she believed. He had done so once, he must do so again. But Bek was only a baby, and he didn’t understand what had happened to her. He didn’t realize why she was hiding and how dangerous the black things were. He didn’t know that she was trapped and that he was the only one who could free her.
“But when you told me you forgave me for leaving you, I felt everything begin to change,” she told him. “When you told me how much you needed me, how by not coming back to you I was leaving you again, I felt the darkness begin to recede and the black things—the truths I couldn’t bear to face—begin to fade. I heard you singing, and I felt the magic break through and wrap me like a soft blanket. I thought that if you could forgive me, after how I had failed you, then I could face what I had done beyond that, all of it, every bad thing.”
They were sitting in the darkness where this had all begun, tucked away in a corner of Redden Alt Mer’s Captain’s quarters, whispering so as not to wake the sleeping Quentin Leah. Shadows draped their faces and masked some of what their eyes would have otherwise revealed, but Bek knew what his sister was thinking. She was thinking he had known what he was doing when he found a way to reach her through the magic of the wishsong. Yet it was mostly chance that he had done so. Or perhaps perseverance, if he was to be charitable about it. He had thought it would take forgiveness to bring her awake. He had been wrong. It had taken her sensing the depth of his need.
“I just wanted to give you a chance to be yourself again,” he said. “I didn’t want you to stay locked away inside, whatever the consequences of coming out might be.”
“They won’t be good ones, Bek,” she told him, reaching over to touch his cheek. “They might be very bad.” She was quiet for a moment, staring at him. “I can’t believe I’ve really found you again.”
“I can’t believe it either. But then I can’t believe hardly anything of what’s happened. Especially to me. I’m not so different from you. Everything I thought true about myself was a lie, too.”