“I don’t know a great deal about vampires,” she said, sounding surprised that I did. “But no, the fey can’t read minds—most fey. Not in the sense you mean.”

“But in some sense?”

“Their consciousnesses are able to access the Common, a fund of knowledge compiled over many generations, for the use of all. Information is constantly being added, and they can retrieve that, but it isn’t true mind reading.”

“Okay, I don’t get it,” I told her honestly and opened my eyes.

I deliberately didn’t look at the little group across the terrace. I faced the telepath instead, and the small garden over her shoulder, which was just starting to put out fresh, green shoots. It made me feel better, although having my back to Aeslinn was giving me hives.

“Say that one person from a clan has been to an area before,” she explained slowly, as if trying to put into words something that she’d never had to think much about. “Another fey from their house could visit the same place and know how to navigate it. He wouldn’t have his family member’s exact thoughts, although he might get flashes from time to time—sights, smells, a snippet of conversation. But he likely would be able to trace his relative’s footsteps and find his way. Even an ancestor’s footsteps, although the terrain may have changed, in that case.”

I blinked at her. “An ancestor? You mean the memories don’t fade, even after someone… passes on?”

“It isn’t memory. This is a memory,” she gestured around. “An event from long ago, imprinted onto a prized possession. A previous imprint showed me the fey’s father making a quiver full of arrows for his son, along with the quiver itself. The son had been holding onto the last one since he heard of his father’s death, as a sort of keepsake. He must have fired it in error, as I cannot imagine him letting it go otherwise—”

“Okay, I get that,” I said, trying not to sound impatient, because I already knew how imprints worked. “But this Common thing… you’re saying it’s like a library? A bunch of information about Faerie that anyone can access?”

Because something like that could be really helpful. Something like that could be game-changing! Which made me wonder why I hadn’t heard about it before.

The war council had been getting briefed on Faerie a lot lately, to the point that I was pretty sure I’d deserve a degree, after this. I’d sat through long lectures on everything from politics and culture, to history and geography. And yet nobody had thought to mention a fey library in the cloud that they uploaded information to, about all sorts of things?

Seemed like a big damned oversight!