When I come for him before dawn, Trystan emerges from his room wearing the Vo’lon prayer necklace comprised of thirteen stone prayer beads, one stone for each of the twelve image manifestations of the Goddess Vo, the ivory stone in the center symbolizing the dragon goddess in her unified form. There’s a small white bird, symbolic of Vo’s Ahxhil sentinels, hanging from the central ivory bead.

I catch Trystan’s eye and hold his steady gaze. Neither of us speaks as my magic churns and the nightmares that woke me again and again last night crowd my mind.

The chaos of the Zonor River.

Children crying out for their parents, the parents for their children.

The dead mother.

Then the image of Trystan dropping his wand and being pushed into the churning Zonor. My arms around him as his eyes met mine under the water, blazing with a green fire that had all of his lightning crackling in it, shot through with a lifetime of pain.

“Wyn Juun has invited me to the Vo’lon service at dawn,” he says.

Concern lights. I know the reaction Trystan is likely to get when apprentices and soldiers spot the sacred Vo’lon necklace around his neck.

Stop, I want to caution him. You’ll be hated even more if you go out there wearing the Vo’lon necklace.

And I don’t want you to be hated any more.

But then another image surfaces, crowding out all the others.

Trystan emerging from the waters, the baby in his arms.

I know that Wyn Juun helped Trystan in some vital, mysterious way last night. And that the Vo necklace is symbolic of it somehow. I think of my own Vo’lon necklace, pushed in the back of a drawer. Fished out for religious festivals and high holy days. The prayers said by rote with each worn-down bead. This religion has been mine all my life, and yet not mine in this powerful way. And it’s of no solid help to me right now. My sleep-deprived mind struggles to understand Trystan’s draw to it, my emotions a turbulent mess.

Trystan holds my gaze, as if waiting for me. Waiting for something I can’t give, because I’m lost in unfamiliar waters with no solid purchase anywhere.

His eyes narrow slightly, as if seeing something in me that pains him, a disturbance rippling through the power he’s keeping firmly back from me, a small frisson of lightning shuddering through it.

He looks away and starts down the hall.

We walk into the Vo temple to find about twenty soldiers and apprentices already there, Priest Wyn Juun among them. The apprentices are seated cross-legged around the central pillar-statue of Vo, the dragon goddess’s ivory form twined around the column. Bas-relief starlight birds emerge from the goddess’s head to fan out across the domed ceiling. The twelve manifestations of Vo mark the sectioned stone floor.