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slender neck. Her eyes were the honey-brown of that hair, but they were ringed with gray circles. She looked exhausted.
    Exhaustion did not stop her from opening her arms, stepping forward and hugging Kaylin. And nothing in the world would have stopped Kaylin from returning that hug. Nothing.
    “Tell me,” she whispered, her lips beside Ybelline’s ear. She knew she should have introduced Rennick, but it had been Severn’s idea to drag him here, and he was therefore, for the moment, Severn’s problem.
    The slender stalks, which were the most obvious racial trait of all the Tha’alani, brushed strands of Kaylin’s hair from her forehead, and then settled gently against skin. They were so delicate, the touch so light, they could hardly be felt at all.
    But Ybelline could be—and more, she could be clearly heard. Could clearly
hear.
With this much contact, she could, if she wanted to, peruse every memory Kaylin had, including ones she wasn’t aware of herself. All the hidden things could be revealed, every bad or stupid or humiliating thing Kaylin had ever done.
    And Kaylin, knowing this, didn’t care.
    But she wasn’t prepared for Ybelline’s voice when it came. It was raw and, at first, there were no words—just the sense of things that might have become words with enough distance and effort. With too much distance and effort.
    But she saw what Ybelline meant her to see in the brief glimpse of steel and blood and the bodies of the fallen, all interposed, all flashing over and over again in quick succession in front of Kaylin’s eyes. Except that her eyes were closed.
    Help me.
Just that, two words.
    Kaylin rolled up her sleeves and, without even looking at her wrist, pressed the gems on the bracer in the sequence that would open it: white, blue, white, blue, red, red, red. She dropped it on the ground as if it were garbage—but she could. If she’d tossed it on a garbage heap, it would find its way back to her. She’d only tried that once. Maybe twice.
    This was magic’s cage. And without it, she was free to do whatever she could. For this reason it was technically against orders to remove it.
    Her hands were tingling. “Ybelline,” she said, and then,
Ybelline.
    Ybelline, you have to let go of me.
    The Tha’alani castelord did as Kaylin bid; she let go, withdrew her arms, her stalks. With them went the wild taste of fear—Ybelline’s fear. She kept it from the Tha’alaan, and therefore from her people, but she was
exhausted.
And Kaylin understood the exhaustion; it was hard for any Tha’alani to live alone, on the inside of their thoughts, the way humans did.
    The way humans
needed
to.
    The Tha’alani who had followed Ybelline out of the longhouse had come bearing stretchers. Four stretchers. Four men. They might once have worn armor—had, Kaylin thought, remembering the brief flash of images that had emerged from her contact with Ybelline.
    But they weren’t dead. They weren’t dead yet.
    “Put them down,” Kaylin said, easing her voice into the command that came naturally when she was on the beat. There were no children here; she had time to notice their absence, to be grateful for it. No more.
    The crowd stepped back. The bodies lay on stretchers. Someone had dressed wounds, had cleaned burns—burns!—had done what they could to preserve life. Freed of the constraints that the ancient bracer placed on her magic, Kaylin knelt between two of these stretchers and touched two foreheads with her right and left palms. She was gentle, although she didn’t have to be—the men here were in no danger of regaining consciousness anytime soon. They had that gray-white pallor that spoke of loss of blood. She was surprised that they hadn’t succumbed to the wounds they had taken. Many of those wounds weren’t clean cuts; they had been caused by people who weren’t used to handling weapons.
    Kaylin grimaced. “Severn?”
    She saw his shadow. Knew he was listening.
    “Get water,” she told him.