“I’ve never been a girl or an animal. I have a small fear of getting stuck: once I made a disguise that I was a man without a trace of Talent. What was supposed to be a quick, one-month disguise while I infiltrated the Chantry instead took me a decade to undo and cost me my chance to recover the silver ka’kari,” Durzo said. “Being stuck as a fat Modaini, bad. Being stuck as a woman, unthinkable.”

“So why are you changing now? And what into?”

“I’ll look like a fifty-year-old, rather affable Waeddryner count, who appears to have a small Talent that he’s never tapped. Because the reason I’m leaving the woman I love behind and going with you to the Chantry—not my favorite place—is that I want to meet my daughter. In fact, I’d appreciate your help getting the disguise right. I’d like her to look at me and say, ‘oh, I have his eyes.’”

But Kylar wasn’t interested in that yet. He paused. “Master? What does it mean? The Wolf called me Nameless. If I learn to do what you do, I’ll be faceless, too. If we can be anyone, who are we?”

Durzo smirked, and even in another face, that bemused smirk was Durzo Blint through and through. “The Wolf doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. I had a delusion once that every new life I started was new. Our gift doesn’t give us so much freedom—or terror. What we are is Night Angels, of an order ancient when I joined it. What it means to be a Night Angel is a harder question. Why do we see the coranti?” At Kylar’s questioning look, Durzo said, “The unclean. And seeing them isn’t a compulsion, it’s a sensitivity. There was a time when I could see a lie, but in the year before the black abandoned me, I could barely see a murderer. What does it mean? Why was I chosen?