A thrill of anticipation rippled through her. What other languages might she gain access to? If some of her incarnations were very old they might remember the Saintstongue as it used to be. They might even know scraps of the Builder’s tongue that had been lost with the Annihilation of Rüul.

She could not tell where Isabelle ended and Sigsimondo began. She had been a father. She had lost a son. Yet Sigsimondo remained in the past, like the child she had once been. She owned his pain and his anger and his mistakes, his bloody-handed revenge. Yet that rage was like the stink of ash after a fire, bitter and cold.

We are Isabelle. She trembled with exhaustion, but Sigsimondo could not tell her about her fever or her hallucinations; not much of him had remained. She had a horrible feeling she was going to be stuck not with the memories her ancestors chose to keep, but all of the anger and trauma they could not forget.

While she had worked, the ache in Isabelle’s head intensified, as if someone were squeezing her skull in a vise. Her fever was hot enough to raise blisters. Breathing hurt.

She turned her weary attention to the rest of the circling ancestors. There must be a hundred at least, not that many generations, but aunts and uncles and siblings, all of whom had traded vitera and shared memories. There was no way she could absorb them all, not in her current state. She had to find one who might rescue her from fever and hallucination.

She posed the question to Sigsimondo. He might not know anything himself, but he had shared a mind with all her other selves and might point someone out to her.

With a nudge on the edge of her attention, Sigsimondo shifted her gaze to a black fragment that was only visible by a bruised, throbbing light that clung to its edges. Unlike all the others it made no response to her call, but tumbled in its orbit as lifeless as a moon.

Isabelle’s stomach tightened with dread, for she knew who that must be. Brunela was Isabelle’s half sister. She had been a doctor. She had also been tortured so severely that her mind had withdrawn and shut down, seeking oblivion as the only refuge from pain. Worse, Isabelle knew how she had been tortured, a ritual so hideous that the mere thought of it made her want to vomit. She’d been eaten alive by flensing worms. Her Fenice sorcery had saved her, but at the cost of turning her into a bone queen, a husk as dry as the parchwinds and barren as the Ashlands.

Sigsimondo’s natural grief had nearly whelmed Isabelle’s mind, but now she must pry poor Brunela from her crypt, endure her pain, and make it part of her.