On the second night in the Reach, rain found them—fine, needling rain that turned the forest floor to slick dark. Kael built a shelter of fallen boughs with a speed that spoke of long practice, leaving the driest hollow for Mara and Elias. He himself sat at the open side, a living wall against the wet and the dark.
"You don't have to," Mara said.
"I do," he answered. "Not because the Bond commands it. Because I choose it. There is a difference, and I have waited a long time to be able to say so."
Elias slept hot against her. Mara watched the rain silver Kael's fur and found herself asking, before she could stop the question, "What did you look like? Before."
Kael was quiet so long she thought he would not answer. Then: "Less tall. No horns. Hands that could hold a pen without splitting the shaft. My mother said I had her mouth and my father's stubbornness. I wore blue, sometimes. I liked blue. It is a color that does not apologize."
Mara looked down at her own blue dress, mud-spattered, rain-darkened. "I like blue too."
"I noticed."
The admission sat between them, oddly intimate. Mara cleared her throat. "When the Binding took you—did it hurt?"
"Yes." No embroidery. "It hurt like being rewritten. Like someone else's handwriting forced through your bones. Some of us went mad. Some of us became exactly what the mage-king wanted—hungry, wordless, easy to hate. I held onto language by reciting road-lists and my mother's flower names. Lavender. Heartsease. Thornapple. I recited them until the shape of the words became a rope I could climb back to myself."
"Thornapple is poison," Mara said softly.
"So is memory, in the wrong dose," Kael replied. "And medicine in the right one."