Relief rushed through her, so strong she thought she might weep. For twelve cycles, she’d thought of her last memory with her mother as a hallucination born out of the trauma of that day. It hadn’t been. Everything she’d thought of as impossibility was true. That her mother was—had something to do with—the practitioners of old. That she had died to protect a secret, to lock it inside Lan…and to suppress Lan’s connection to qì so the Elantian magicians would not find her.
