After a moment Isabelle added, “I have a whole head full of distant and opinionated relatives. I suppose the best thing is, I can tell them apart now, keep their hands off the rudder. I’m still me, but I remember them, and when I remember what they did, especially when it comes on me while I’m facing the present world, it’s like I’m the one living their lives, thinking them, feeling them. I have to remind myself it’s not me, that I didn’t really do some of the awful things I remember doing.”

She kept turning the hat around in her hand like some sort of talisman. “The nice thing is that my ancestors all used the power of the ancestral chorus, and so they know how the power works and what it can do, which means now I know too. I can either step into the everdream and look at their memories and talk to them, or I can pull them out of the everdream and wear them like a sort of cloak, in which case I gain their skills, but I also have to deal with their personalities.”

“That sounds very useful,” Bitterlich said.

“Very,” Isabelle said. “Although there are some caveats. My mind may know how to do a backflip, but my body doesn’t. I’ll need to practice.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Bitterlich said.

“It’s a shortcut to new skills,” Isabelle said, “but with as many lives as I’ve lived, even the best shortcut won’t let me absorb them all. I run the risk of spending the rest of my life trying to become who I was in past lives.”

“Is that what your other past lives did?” Bitterlich asked. That might explain why forward-facing Isabelle was afraid of the idea.

“Oh yes. They all worshiped their ancestors, craved the legendary skills, the unbeatable warrior, the ultimate strategist, the most cunning merchant, and the most passionate lover. You name it and there was someone in the past who did it better.”

Bitterlich dusted nonexistent lint off his cuffs. “Better mathematician?”

Isabelle snorted. “No, thank the saints. None of them were ever interested in math outside counting coins, soldiers, and bedposts.”

“So that’s something you can keep for yourself,” Bitterlich said.

Isabelle bestowed him a thankful smile. “Yes, but that’s only a fraction of it.”

“I see what you did there,” Bitterlich said.

Isabelle actually laughed, sort of a raspy croak, but he’d take it.

She went on, “When I pull on my ancestral cloak to practice these skills, there’s no way to avoid absorbing a bit of the personalities that go with them, becoming a little more like them, and most of them were murderous bastards, swindlers, slavers, rapists, and worse.”

“I see,” Bitterlich said.