He hesitated, then shook his head. “No. Not that I’ve ever heard of.” He turned to Triste. “How did you feel when you stepped through the gate?”

She frowned. “Terrified. Every single time. Confused and terrified.”

Kiel nodded. “It should have destroyed you.”

“And then there’s the languages,” Kaden said. “You didn’t learn them in the temple.”

Triste shook her head weakly. “I wanted to believe that, but . . . no.” She paused, gazing out at the blank sky, eyes wide and lambent as the moon. “It’s like there’s . . . someone else.”

Kaden narrowed his eyes. “Someone else?”

She grimaced, wrestling with the unspoken words. “Someone else . . . inside me. She could read the writing in Assare. . . .”

“She was the one who spoke after breaking Matol’s hand back in the Heart,” Kaden said. He summoned to mind the girl’s words. “ ‘Stoppered to your cries will be my ears, and dried to dust the wide lake of my mercy.’ ”

Triste shuddered.

“Do you remember saying that?” he pressed.

“I don’t . . .” She hesitated. “I’m not sure. It’s like something I dreamed and then forgot.”

“It doesn’t sound like you,” Kiel observed. “Different syntax. Different idiom.”

Triste looked from Kaden to Kiel, then back again. “What does it mean?” she asked. “How can I not be myself?”

Kaden shook his head. The Shin would have torn apart the question as predicated on incoherence. The very words I and self were mired in error, referring to nothing more than illusion, a shifting amalgamation of senses and perceptions with no core, no foundation, no indivisible essence. And yet, the thing that made the illusion so deceptive, so persuasive, was its very coherence. For Triste’s self to shift, to shatter . . . the monks had never spoken of such a thing.

“This other . . . aspect,” Kiel said carefully, “she seems to emerge only under certain conditions.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “The flight through the mountains. The attack in Assare. Your assault on Matol. Conditions of extreme stress.”

“Like my mind is broken,” she said. “Like something broke it.”

Kiel nodded, but Kaden shook his head.

“Broken suggests two halves from a shattered whole,” he said, then indicated her with a vague hand, “but there’s nothing missing from you now. You’re a whole person. And what Kiel’s calling the other aspect doesn’t seem like an aspect. She’s confident, angry. She seems to have a memory of her own, abilities of her own. There might be some bleeding between the two of you, but you both seem whole, distinct. Like another soul was somehow planted in your body.”

The whole thing seemed impossible if Kaden paused to consider it, but Triste’s eyes blazed.

“Who is she?”

Kiel shook his head. “It doesn’t seem like you can know. There may be some . . . seepage between the two of you, but not enough for you to remember or understand.”

Triste’s lips tightened. “Ask her.”