With a shock, I saw myself as he had first seen me on the farm, a pale, long-boned girl with a thick fall of black hair and dark green eyes, narrowed and wary under arched black brows. What had there been in my face and form that had struck such a deep and instant chord in him? His mind did not know and yet I felt the impact of that first meeting shudder through him and remembered that I had felt the same, though I had read my reaction as fear.

Suddenly I was enveloped by the memory of despair so black and choking and bottomless that I was afraid. I saw my face at the core of it and the strange purple and orange of a sky with a firestorm in it. This was how Rushton had felt when he had believed me dead after the fire in the White Valley that had killed Jik. The memory was replaced by another, in which I felt Rushton’s incredulous delight when I first told him that I loved him, following the Battlegames in Sador. I relived that first sweet kiss and saw the tiny seed of doubt planted in his mind by my evasions and the thin explanations I had offered of my long absence after the fire in the White Valley. I saw how the way my body healed itself and the things the futuretellers said or did not say about me had fed his doubt, confirming in his deepest consciousness that there was much about me that I had not revealed, despite my avowed love for him.

I saw a conversation between him and Alad about the way beasts called me Innle and greeted me with reverence and another conversation with Roland concerning the way my body healed, both of them wondering if it could be another kind of Talent that I alone possessed.

I experienced again with guilty anguish the torment Rushton had endured at the hands of Domick’s vile alter ego, Mika, when he had been Ariel’s captive. The doubts I had planted earlier had given the defective Misfit a tool with which to wound and manipulate Rushton. I watched, sickened at how, under Ariel’s malevolent influence, the seed of doubt had flourished. Just when my own guilt and despair were unbearable, I saw his memory of me, standing in the glass cell in the Beforetime complex on Norseland, trying to show him how to open it. I saw how understanding penetrated the fog of rage in his mind, even as he opened the door with eager hatred. Instead of cowering back as he had dimly expected me to do, I stepped toward him making no attempt to protect myself from the storm of terror and loathing that had made him nearly batter himself senseless against the glass trying to get at me.