“I needed to tell her something of how we knew one another. Would you have preferred for me to tell her of my vision?” Lorna snapped back with a sharp whisper.
“She already knows the veil is torn. She did it herself.”
“As did you when you brought her back, according to her. What were you thinking?”
Aya wrapped her fingers around the chain between her shackles to keep them from Lorna’s neck.
“I was thinking that my kingdom was about to fall to Kakos, and my queen had a knife in my best friend’s chest, and there was no way to save innocent people withouthelp.” She nearly spat the words, bitterness punching through each of the vowels as it purged itself from her throat.
Lorna fixed her with a grim smile. “You care too deeply.”
Aya shook her head once as she let another truth fall. “Not anymore.”
A muscle in Lorna’s jaw twitched, but she pressed her lips in a firm line as she considered her.
“They believe I have knowledge of the veil,” she finally murmured, her voice hardly a whisper. “Knowledge that willhelp them in their endeavor to destroy it entirely, so that they might kill the gods.”
Aya could hear the way her own teeth ground in her frustration. She’d forgotten how the Saj were never ones to get to the point.
“I don’t know how your vision will aid them in such a thing.”
“I know that now,” Lorna admitted. “Which is why I have already told them what I have seen.”
Aya jerked back. “Then what?”
“The Diaforaté cannot summon the veil without severely taxing themselves.”
Aya froze. That couldn’t be possible. Could it? “But…they’ve siphoned my power. I thought the experiments were working.”
“In a sense,” Lorna agreed. “They are no longer rotting away. But there are still limits to their abilities. I suspect the Vaguer will help there.”
Surely Evie did not expect the Diaforaté to rival her own power. The saint was too smart to create an army that could so easily defeat her. But Aya had wondered, in those days spent wrapped in darkness in her cell…
Would the same limits that Viviane had experienced with Aya’s power exist in the Diaforaté as well?
Would it matter?
Apparently, it did.
The realization did not come with any sense of hope. If it was simply a matter of not being able to generate enough power to summon the veil, then surely the Vaguer could help in that regard.
They had, after all, been the ones to tell Aya the inner workings of the original art of the Decachiré. Thetruepractitioners—the ones who had eliminated the bounds of their wells so that they might bestow powers onto humans—had yielded to the darkness of their souls.
But…
“The experiments on humans,” Aya breathed. “They’ve…they’ve worked, haven’t they?”
Had she dreamt of the screams of the prisoners receiving their Visya power?
Lorna grimaced. “The saint alluded to inconsistencies.” She fixed Aya with a look that she couldn’t parse. “There has never been one simple truth when it comes to magic. But now…we are wading into elements of the affinities that the gods never intended for us to know. It is not so simple as strength and depth.”
Aya frowned. She glanced at the door, her voice lowering as far as it could go. “Do you know why they can’t summon the veil?”
Lorna shook her head. “But I have my theories.”
“And?”
The Saj looked to the door, her meaning clear. She would not share them with the risk of listening ears. Before Aya could argue, Lorna was facing her once more, her gaze falling to her shackles before flicking back to Aya’s face.
