That was when she felt the vibration in the floor. Someone standing there. No door had opened. No one had heard the talking or the shouting, or if they heard, they didn’t want to intrude. So only one man in all the world could be standing here, though Anononei had no power to raise her head, no voice with which to speak, no strength to move.

“You killed her and then you burned for it. Justice.” Wad’s voice was quiet. She could feel the grief and rage. “Everything I love you take from me.” So he did love her. It was not just any-bed-when-the-need-comes-on.

And then she realized: He is talking to this dying body on the floor as if it were Bexoi and only Bexoi. He has no intention of healing her. He is going to watch her die.

Save her! Anonoei shouted through the bit of her ba that dwelt in Wad’s mind. She did not try to control him; she did not dare use more than this small bit of her attention, lest the distraction give Bexoi a chance to either slip away entirely, and die, or to wrest control of her body back again.

She could feel Wad’s torment as he wrestled against the impulse she was sending him.

I am Anonoei! Yet how could her wordless ba make such a strange thought clear in Wad’s mind? The ba dealt only in emotions and kinetic memories.

It was emotion, not identity that she needed to send into him. All her love for him.

The trouble was that she did not love him. Not so very much. Enough, yes, to share his bed. But he was also the torturer who had damaged her children. She had managed to thrust her rage into another compartment in her mind, to save it for another time, when it might more usefully be expressed. But it meant that she could not thrust into Wad her love for him because there wasn’t enough of it. Nor could she control him enough to remind him of his love for her, because she knew that he did not love her so very much, either.

But she loved her children. And she knew that he had loved his own child. And there was a living child—still, for one moment more—in the belly of this woman. A child who did not deserve to die, whatever the mother might have done.

Love of a child. Anonoei’s love for Eluik and Enopp. She also reached for his own memories of holding his son, Trick, of playing with him, talking to him. Anonoei had no idea what Wad had said to his son, but she knew that he had talked to him, and she could touch those memories and rekindle them. And she could make him think of the belly of the dying woman lying on the floor of Keel’s office.