“Yes. But I do not see what you see; I see it only because you do.” His tone was odd; the words seemed to crackle.

Terrano stood facing this Barrani woman of long ago. “I’m going to start,” he told them, without turning to look at them. To the Avatar, he said, “Don’t let any of these touch anything,” his words a biting bark of sound.

Kaylin didn’t argue. There was something about the ebon vines that screamed hunger and death; she felt the air drop in temperature as he worked. She would have thought this fanciful had her breath not become visible, just as it was on winter patrols when the day was cold.

“I have them,” the Avatar said. “They will not touch your friends.”

“You didn’t even see them!” Terrano snapped.

“Kaylin has her familiar, and Teela is standing with her,” Serralyn said, in her most reasonable tone.

“You’re not.”

“No. But you need me here.”

Terrano didn’t argue. They were physically almost one thing, which was disturbing in a different way—and why, given she’d seen them as literal splashes of angry color in Helen’s training room, she couldn’t say.

“I apologize for the temperature,” the Avatar said. “But it is necessary. Ah, please do not be alarmed.”

Kaylin meant to tell him that cold didn’t alarm her, but she had no time to utter the words; the ground cracked in front of her feet. Hope squawked.

“Yes, but I have asked him for his aid.”

Something dark and distinctly shadowy rose through the fissures created by that cracking.

“Please don’t tell me that he called the Adversary here.”

“That is not what we now call him, and yes, I did.”

Shadow filled the hall.

The cold no longer bothered Kaylin; the Shadow did. She knew that the Shadow was no longer under the control of whatever lived in Ravellon—if lived was even the right word—but everything in her tensed at the sight of it. It had killed so many of the Barrani who had come to face it during the Test of Name. Killed them and yet kept them locked in torment as ghosts—ghosts who wept and pleaded, continuously, for freedom, for an end to pain and torment.

She understood that he had been enslaved, that he had had no will—but even so, he carried out the orders he was given with anger, with malice.

He is not what he was.

But he’d done those things; she’d witnessed them briefly but they remained with her, as did the unsettling pain of the damned.

They are not damned now, Hope continued. They have returned to their source. He contains or entraps nothing. But...containment and entrapment was his sole activity for a long time; the Avatar has asked for his aid for a reason.

She wished she had gone with the Consort.