bok 1616567600 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub

Unknown

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THEY HAD entire conversations in which she didn’t say a word. For Po could sense when Katsa desired to talk to him, and if there was a thing she wanted him to know, his Grace could capture that thing. It seemed a useful ability for them to practice. And Katsa found that the more comfortable she grew with opening her mind to him, the more practiced she became with closing it as well. It was never entirely satisfying, closing her mind, because whenever she closed her feelings from him she must also close them from herself. But it was something.

They found it was easier for him to pick up her thoughts than it was for her to formulate them. She thought things to him word by word at first, as if she were speaking, but silently. Do you want to stop and rest? Shall I catch us some dinner? I’ve run out of water. “Of course I understand you when you’re that precise,” he said. “But you don’t need to try so hard. I can understand images, too, or feelings, or thoughts in unformed sentences.”

This was also hard for her at first. She was afraid of being misunderstood, and she formulated her images as carefully as she’d formulated her words. Fish roasting over their fire. A stream. The herbs, the seabane, that she must eat with dinner.

“If you only open a thought to me, Katsa, I’ll see it—no matter how you think it. If you intend me to know it, I will.”

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But what did it mean to open a thought to him? To intend for him to know it? She tried simply reaching out to his mind whenever she wanted him to know something. Po. And then leaving it to him to collect the essence of the thought.

It seemed to work. She practiced constantly, both communicating with him and closing him out. Slowly, the tightness of her mind loosened.

Beside the fire one night, protected from the rain by a shelter of branches she’d built, she asked to see his rings. He placed his hands into hers. She counted. Six plain gold rings, of varying widths, on his right hand. On his left, one plain gold; one thin with an inlaid gray stone running through the middle; one wide and heavy with a sharp, glittery white stone—this the one that must have scratched her that night beside the archery range; and one plain and gold like the first, but engraved all around with a design she recognized, from the markings on his arms. It was this ring that made her wonder if the rings had meaning.

“Yes,” he said. “Every ring worn by a Lienid means something. This with the engraving is the ring of the king’s seventh son. It’s the ring of my castle and my princehood. My inheritance.”

Do your brothers have a different ring, and markings on their arms that are different from yours?

“They do.”

She fingered the great, heavy ring with the jagged white stone. This is the ring of a king.

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