other Wildren there, but then Dora turned up and convinced me Rel had misjudged Keshnu. Taslin said she could stop Rel. The next I heard was the following morning, when she was seen fleeing Vessit, carrying Rel. We guessed she'd come here."
Chag started to say something, but she scowled at him until he subsided, then turned her ire on the Separatists. "Now, what about my answers?"
"Why did you not return from Vessit immediately on Relvin Atcar's release, as instructed?"
Pevan gritted her teeth. "What. Will. The-"
"No." Chag cut across her, his tone altogether firmer, his beady eyes narrow. "Pevan, cooperate, please?" The appeal did not really sound like pleading. "None of us are ever going to get the answers we need if we can't compromise."
"I can't believe you're swallowing this." What was wrong with him? "Does what Taslin said really not bother you at all?"
His face darkened, and she could see him forcing himself to relax. "If the Separatists are right, she has a vested interest in the status quo. You can't deny she met us with outright hostility today."
"Gift-Givers don't lie." She folded her arms, then let them fall back to her sides and straightened up when she realised how childish she was starting to look.
"Yeah, except by omission." Chag spread his hands, palms up. "Or wasn't your brother just arguing that if they'd told him more, he could have made a better decision?"
She bit back a surge of anger, at least far enough that she could get her next sentence out squarely. "And 'the exact consequences are impossible to predict' doesn't sound like dodging the question to you?" She rounded on Ashtenzim. "Predict some not-so-exact consequences, dammit!"
"Please refrain from emotive rhetoric, Pevan Atcar." It took all Pevan's training not to hear mockery in the flat voice. "The Realmspace around us is beginning to be affected."
"Sorry, Ashtenzim." Chag had clearly snatched the moment to take a deep breath and calm down. He turned back to her, tucking his hands into his pockets, as if he was an interpreter, and the Separatists' maddening focus a forgotten language that needed translating. "Pevan, did Taslin say the Separation would be a disaster, or that it could be? Because if it's the latter, she could be being just as loose with the truth."
He cocked his head to one side, a picture of reasonableness. She gritted her teeth and stared past him at the torches. What had the Gift-Giver's exact words been? The confrontation had been fraught, and while Dora had certainly taken Taslin's warning for truth, Rel had said that Dora's judgement was impaired. That she was becoming a Wilder, or something. That could mean she was capable of telling whether Taslin was lying, but it could also mean she'd adopted whatever Taslin's motivation was for the deception.
Finally, she had to shrug. "I can't remember. That doesn't mean I'm happy to let the question rest."
"Can you at least let it rest until we've got through this report?" He took his hands out of his pockets to spread them again. "You still think the Separation's a good idea, right?"
Did she? If she remembered one thing from that jarring encounter by the Abyss, it was Dora saying, Are you prepared to give up your Gift? She'd woken with that question ringing in her ears the next morning. It felt like a long time since she'd used her Gate for more than getting from A to B, but she hadn't forgotten the sensation of floating that came from catapulting herself a hundred feet straight up and letting gravity net her short of the sky.
She looked down, scuffed her feet on the bare stone floor. "I don't know, Chag. I like being Gifted. I don't think I should be the one to make the decision."
His face fell. If he'd looked hollow-cheeked and half-starved before, he looked soulless now. Mouth hanging listlessly open, he turned to Ashtenzim. When he spoke, he did so in the muted, hopeless tones of a depressive. "We didn't return straight away because Keshnu sent search parties out after us. At least some of them could definitely feel Pevan's Gateways, and we feared that if we headed North they'd be able to pick up our trail and catch us up."
"They had no grounds on which to arrest you." In a way, Ashtenzim's voice - or Lienia's, if it made any difference - was like Chag's, expressionless and monotonous. But the Wilder sounded too inorganic, as if its vocal cords were steel wire rather than flesh. What had prompted the change in Chag? He knew she'd been having doubts about the Separation.
He droned on. "I wasn't sure whether they might have been able to seize me on grounds of human justice. I didn't think to ask before we left whether my exemption as your bearer of Talerssi would apply to purely First-Realm crimes." The little man's eyes never lifted from a point in the air just slightly in front of Ashtenzim's shifting form. Pevan might as well not have been there.
What had she said that was different? That she liked her Gift? She could see that upsetting a Witness, but he had to have known anyway, didn't he? She made no secret of it. And despite her best efforts to keep him at arm's length, they'd gotten to know each other pretty well over the past month. Maybe she'd put him in mind of his brother for a moment. Rissad was probably even keener on his Gift, and that couldn't have been easy on Chag, growing up.
Ashtenzim's voice - maybe it was easier just to think of it as the Separatists' voice - cut through her musing. "Your explanation earlier implied that you felt you could have returned, but Relvin Atcar insisted you stay. Why did you humour him instead of obeying your instructions?"
Did she really have to explain even that? Chag didn't seem to fancy trying. She said, "Rel identified a threat to the Realm. As Gifted, we were obliged to investigate and respond to the best of our understanding."
"You are not Gifted. You belong to the Separatists now."
"I don't belong to anybody." Again, heat filled her. Ashtenzim was not making it easy to be reasonable, and there was scant hope of any support from Chag. At least his head came up a little at the sharpness in her tone, but he didn't meet her eyes. "And I will not abandon my duty or my Gift. If the Separation is a good bet for my kind, I'll work with you, but I won't leave human beings suffering and the First Realm in danger to do so. Rel said there was a threat. I trust him. We stayed."
"His belief was incorrect. You should have returned."
She rolled her eyes. "Well yes, as Rel was trying to explain when you burst in, we had no way of knowing that. Knowing what we know now, I wish we had returned straight away, even if I do still want answers about the Separation. This should all be irrelevant. Do you still intend to pry Rel away from the Gift-Givers?"
"We must, to forestall Quilo's tactics if nothing else. However, we should not conduct further planning in the Court. Even if the Gift-Givers find no way to spy on us directly, we may leave impressions they can trace later." As the Separatists' voice paused, Pevan found herself checking the walls, looking for scratches or marks that hadn't been there before. A foolish idea. Ashtenzim finished, "You will return to the white cave with us."
The Wilder started to drift towards the door. It took Pevan a moment to realise that he meant they were going right now. "Stop!" she shouted, and when Ashtenzim did not, she moved to block his path. "You haven't answered my question."
For a moment, she thought Ashtenzim might actually walk into her. Her gut tightened and she braced for the agony of contact, but he stopped just short. With adrenaline coursing through her system, it was actually faintly sickening to peer so closely into his writhing, bronze-skinned form.
She shuffled backwards a step and managed to fight her breath back under control, using the few seconds that bought her to formulate her question precisely. "I want to know what kind of consequences the Separation is likely to cause in the First Realm."
A shudder ran through Ashtenzim, then seemed to spread out through Lienia as well. "There may be some Realmquakes and local physics disturbances."
Pevan felt as though someone had just thrown a bucket of cold water over her. Every muscle in her body tightened, until she felt like she'd implode under the strain. She forced air into her lungs and leaned slightly to look past Ashtenzim at Van Raighan. The thief's
face was hanging slack again, like a particularly stupid puppy's. At least he had the decency to look shocked, though she couldn't believe it was a surprise to him any more than it was to her.
She said, "Does that sound like another Realmcrash to you?"
"No, I..." His mouth opened and shut a few times, his hands tracing vague, meaningless gestures.
Pevan stepped around Ashtenzim, but the Separatist didn't resume its path to the door. Instead, like a parody of a child's mobile, it rotated on the spot to follow her movement. She ignored it, kept her attention on Chag. Her throat caught as she tried to speak, but she pressed on. "Ninety-nine out of every hundred people in the world died in the Realmcrash. You can't be happy with the idea of having that again."
The little man's voice squeaked as he answered. "It won't be anything like as bad. We don't depend on electronics the way pre-Crash society did. Lots of people died just because their machines didn't work anymore." He swallowed. "We just had two Realmquakes, and they weren't too bad, were they?"
"You didn't go into Vessit yesterday." The strength was coming back into her voice, but she knew she sounded cold. Well, Chag had earned it. If Wolpan had been here she'd probably have flayed him where he stood. "Don't you think I'd have brought more than starvation rations back if the town had them to spare?"
He
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