Page 128 of Daughter of No Worlds

“You shouldn’t be here,” I told him. My voice was raspy.

He barely acknowledged me. Barely even looked at me. Instead he sat at the edge of the bed, placed his hand on my sweaty forehead, and practically interrogated me about how I was feeling. (Headache? Tolerable. Chills? No. Nausea? Moderate. Fever? Mild — on, and on.)

I answered him with increasingly curt responses. Then I ran my tongue over dry lips and whispered, “Why did you come back?”

He looked away. “Your energy needs to be on taking care of yourself. That’s where you need to focus all of that relentless brute force, because you’re going to need every bit of it.”

A small part of me sank into the faint affection of the way he said, “relentless brute force,” distant as it was. But that was quickly drowned out as a knot formed in my stomach.

“Max—“

“It took over last night,” he said, abruptly. “Briefly. Just for a minute, while you were sleeping. But you need to be aware of it.”

He said this all with strained, level factuality that I knew he had to force.

I felt like my stomach dropped through the floor.

“What— whatisit?” I whispered.

But Max just said, “Can you feel it now? In your head?”

I started to shake my head, but he continued. “Don’t answer so quickly. Reallyfeelfor it. Quiet yourself. Listen.”

I paused. Closed my eyes. And, slowly, a glow simmered to life within me — my own mind, lighting up like a map, just as the souls in the tower of Tairn had that day of the battle.

I ran my fingers across all of it, every cluster of shadows. And I did find Reshaye — folded up in a corner, completely dark, completely silent. A… presence.

“It is as if it’s sleeping,” I murmured.

“It is as sick and weak in the beginning as you are. What it did last night took away all of its energy.”

“The memories or—” I couldn’t even figure out how to word it.

“Both. All of it.” I opened my eyes, and Max was regarding me quietly, sharply. “Pay attention to how it reacts to these things, and always,always, know where it is. Your gifts should make it easier for you than it was for me.” The“I hope”was unspoken, but we both heard it. “Now we’re going to take this opportunity to learn how to shut it out. It should be easy for you right now.”

My head still pounded, but compared to how I had been feeling since receiving Reshaye, I felt ready to swim the Aran seas. Certainly more than well enough to throw myself into Max’s instruction as he described how to bind Reshaye into its own little room, secluded in a separate corner of my mind. His, he told me, had been like a closet — a door he could imagine closing, then bolting shut. A rudimentary, simple image for a Solarie who had only limited grasp of mental magic.

But I saw things differently. My mind was not a maze, but a web — spools and spools of thoughts that grew more complicated the more I looked at them, my attention lighting up threads like clusters of fireflies. It was dark where Reshaye was, as if it had inhaled the threads down its throat. I imagined wrapping it in a series of bindings, shackling it, locked with a key that I hid within the recesses of my own thoughts.

But still, this seemed so… weak. I did not voice this, but Max must have seen my apprehension anyway. “Some of it might be a crutch,” he said. “And no, this probably won’t work forever. That’s why you always have to be looking for it.Always. But it’s a start.”

A start. That was something. It had to be.

For a moment, we stared at each other. Something tightened in my chest as I took in the shadows beneath Max’s beautiful eyes.

He held my gaze only for a moment before looking down at his hands, fidgeting.

“Max—” I started, but he turned away, reaching into his pockets and placing a series of rattling bottles on the desk.

“This one is for the headaches.” Each sentence was punctuated by another pang of glass against the wood. “This is for the nausea.” He continued down the line — for the chills, for the lack of concentration, to force a dreamless sleep. Then he paused before the two final bottles. “This one will knock you out in seconds.”

He did not need to tell me why I might need such a thing.

“And this one will render your magic nonexistent for anywhere from minutes to hours depending on how much you take.”

I strangled a gasp. I didn’t even know such a thing was possible.

And then he just stood there, gaze drawn to the ground.

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