He took my face in his hands. My eyes locked to his, terrified, full of wordless pleading. “Shh, shh. Ariah, hey, Ariah, shh,” he said. In minute increments, my throat unlocked. I took a breath. He nodded; he smiled. “Hey, see? Ariah, you’re all right. You’re all right, Ariah.” One by one, my muscles unclenched. My heart slowed. Sorcha studied me, took stock of me. “Ariah, I’m here. You’re all right.”

I held his forearm, just above the wrist. I took a deep breath. I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the wall. “Thank you.” It came out a wounded croak.

He sighed with relief. His hands drifted to my shoulders, then away from me completely. He sat next to me. “What was that?” he asked.

I took some time to catch my breath. My shirt was plastered to me; my face was slick with sweat. “I don’t know. Thank you.”

“It’s this damned training,” he said. “That damned man, he don’t know what he’s doing.”

“No, he’s…he’s right,” I said. “I need it. It’s just, it’s all a lot to unlearn, and this…this is such a hard place to unlearn it in.” My thoughts turned again to the charms, the strange apartments, the awful stinging tension in the throne room between Dor and his mother. I remembered again the irritation Vathorem had, and the way the gift took it and welded it to my heart, the way I felt his irritation and my terror at the same time, doubled and redoubled like an image reflected in mirrors facing one another. It all came unbidden. It all came, and my body tore against itself as if it was trying to smother my thoughts without regard to the fact that doing so smothered my body along with them.

“Ariah! Ariah, hey!”

Hands on my hands.

“I’m here, I got you.”

Someone else’s smell in my nose.

“I’m here. Ariah, I’m here.”

Another’s body pressed to mine, arms around my back, and a slow, steady heart beating against my chest. My heart found it, clung to it, and started to slow.

“Ariah. Ariah, shh.”

And the relentless panic was dammed up again. Sorcha took my chin in his hand. He looked me over, inspecting me like he could see straight through my skin to the psychic wounds below.

“You all right?”

“For now.”

“What happened?”

“I was thinking.”

“Well, stop! Don’t think no more.”

I laughed and rested my head on his shoulder. “I wish I knew how to do that.”

He was silent a second. “I know how,” he said. He stood up and crossed the room. He returned with a pipe packed with herb.

“I can’t.”

“The hell you can’t. You tell him you’re like this?”

“He knows.”