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‘While you were gone, I could almost recall… something else. Like wind in my face, only stronger. Moving so swiftly, of my own free will. I could almost recall being… someone… who was not a Vestrit at all. Someone separate from all I have known in this life. It was very frightening.
‘What is it?’ he echoed her earlier question. ‘It is She Who Remembers,’ Maulkin said in reverent awe. ‘Come. We must seek her.’
‘This is a lure and a cheat! Her fragrance is that of She Who Remembers, and yet she is not of our kind. And that one speaks to her, and yet not to her, for she does not answer, and it was promised, forever promised, that she would always answer one who petitioned her. It is not right!’
Move this tub along. If a seagull farts near us, I want the wind from it caught.’
‘We are quarrelling,’ she observed in a sort of wonder. ‘We are at odds.’ She nodded to herself, seeming almost pleased. ‘If I can disagree with you, then I am not you.’
‘But as I recall, the name you went by wasn’t Brashen Trell of Bingtown.’ He rubbed his reddened nose, considering. ‘I bin trine to member,’ he slurred. He leaned heavily on the table, then set his head down on one of his arms. ‘Can’t remember what you say’d it was. But I recall what we called you.’ Again the thick finger lifted, just from the table top, to wag at Brashen. ‘Weasel. Cuz you was so skinny and so fast.’
An extremely strange look had come over the pirate’s face. Kennit stared down at him in a sort of fascination. For an instant, he seemed to recognize him, and Wintrow, too, felt an uncanny sense of having been here, done this and spoken these words before. There was something compelling in Kennit’s gaze, something that demanded to be acknowledged. The silence between them seemed to bind them together.
But no one must know of the words the charm had spoken when the boy looked so deeply into his eyes. No one must know of the bond forged between them in that instant, a bond that frightened Kennit as much as it intrigued him.
‘After the first birth, we were Masters. We grew, we learned, we experienced. And all that we learned, we shared with one another, so that wisdom ever grew greater. But no bodies are made to last for ever. So the time of mating came, and essences were exchanged and mixed and deposited. Our old bodies we lay down knowing we would take up new ones, as new beings. And we did. Small and new we emerged. We fed, we shed, and we grew. But we did not all remember. Only some. Some guarded for us the memories of all. And when the time was right, those who remembered called to us with their fragrances.
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‘Cycle after cycle, we have survived. But this last time of shedding and growing… has not it been the longest ever? Do not more and more of us forget that we are meant to be Masters? I fear we decline, my tangle.
‘Remember this, then, above all else. That we must continue to seek She Who Remembers.’
