Put it away, he told himself, taming the feeling that crouched, muttering, inside of him. At every point since he’d met her, Triste had been kind and generous. When events came to a head, when she fell into the hands of the Ishien, it had been Kaden who failed her, not the other way around. If she was a leach, she was a leach.

“It doesn’t change who you are,” he said, though as the words left his lips he remembered her pressing Matol up against the kenta, his hand at her throat, her lips pressed to his as she forced him struggling through the gate, remembered her standing, silhouetted, at the end of the corridor, her scream loud as the sun.

She raised her head. Firelight reflected in her streaked tears as though she were crying flame. “Who am I?” she whispered, eyes boring into him, both defiant and desperate.

Kaden shook his head helplessly, and for the first time, Kiel stepped forward, crouching a pace away from Triste, considering her carefully.

“Tell me everything,” he said. “Start at the start.”

“Why?”

“Because,” the Csestriim replied, “you want to learn the truth. I have lived a long time, and seen more than you know.”

Triste glanced at Kaden, then back at Kiel, and then the words were tumbling out of her, like water spilling over the lip of Umber’s Pool back in the Bone Mountains, falling too fast and far to recall, pulled by a force as old and strong as the earth itself. Kiel listened in silence, nodding when Triste faltered, his face still as stone, eyes intent as she recounted it all: the flight through the mountains, her reading of the script in Assare, her impossible passage through the kenta and killing of Ekhard Matol, right up through her utter destruction of Adiv’s guard.

“There’s something wrong with me,” she concluded finally, voice breaking. “Something awful and broken.” She had managed to dam up her terror and grief, but Kaden could hear them pressing behind her low voice, a massive weight barely restrained. “I know things,” she concluded. “Things I shouldn’t know. I can do things. . . .” She trailed off, staring out the window.

Kiel glanced at Kaden, then returned his gaze to the girl.

“A remarkable account,” he said. “Unique.”

“I’m a leach,” Triste said, circling back to where they began.

“Almost certainly,” Kiel replied. “It would explain your ability to match pace with Kaden and Tan in the mountains, not to mention the fact that you just held up a hundred tons of stone. You are not just a leach, but an extremely powerful one.”

Triste nodded helplessly, but Kiel pressed ahead.

“There is more.”

Kaden nodded slowly. “Just being a leach wouldn’t allow her to pass the kenta, would it?”