A startling possibility occurs to me—what if my parents are in the Valley? The thought is alarming. If they are, I don’t want to know. They gave me up when I was a child, and I returned the favor a long time ago.

“And your eyes,” Theyen continues.

“Well, they’re obvious now.”

“What color were they prior to changing?”

“Gray.”

His smile is patronizing. “All shamans are born with gray eyes.”

I’d known that shamans weren’t born with jewel-colored eyes, but I hadn’t known they were all gray before changing. I rub my fingers over the raised lettering of the book cover in my hands. The signs were there all along. I just hadn’t known what to look for. Hadn’t known to look at all.

“It’s a common-enough color in Evewyn,” he says, flipping a page. “But for all those born of shamanic blood, they possess gray eyes until they obtain their first familiar. When the bond is formed, they awaken their magic and learn which Calling they’ve been gifted.”

By which color their eyes turn. Nuvali customs aren’t taught at the Company nor in any Evewynian school, I suspect. And after Evewyn’s shamanborn were imprisoned at the Valley of Cranes, no one dared mention them beyond mumbled reiterations of the queen’s hatred. Threat of retribution silenced those who remembered their shamanborn friends and relatives, but for everyone else? The ignorance bred fear.

The Scholars point to the Nuvalyn Empire as proof of the shamans’ violent nature. The Empire’s history is fraught with blood and death at their attempts to conquer the continent. But how much of what we’ve been taught is based in fact, and how much is the invention of a fearmonger’s hatred?

He reaches for the book in my hands. “That one is outside your level of comprehension.”

I move it out of his reach. The book’s title is in Kazal, the letters embossed in gold. Beautiful metal rivets decorate the corners. Lifting my chin, I angle the book so that the candlelight illuminates the cover. I read in Kazal, “Beasts of Earth and Wing: Twelfth Edition.”

Theyen’s eyebrows rise. He runs his fingers, the color of pale ash, through his snowy hair. “You speak almost as well as a Kazan.”

“I have an ear for languages.” I return the book to its pile.

He makes a pensive sound and then lifts his own book, showing me the cover, which depicts a man wearing a crown so heavy that he stoops.

“Myths and Legends of Thiy,” I read. “History or fiction?”