Everything was red.

Chayand opened her eyes, blinking, squinting. The red light was so bright it hurt to see.

“Ow,” the boy next to her said. He drew back from the light as well, shielding his eyes.

It took a moment for Chayand to get her bearings. She was in the Blackstone, in the crystal chamber. I was… was I dreaming…? It seemed beyond odd, the likelihood of her falling asleep while staring into a crystal shard.

She glanced about the small chamber; the room was barely larger than her sleeping cell, but with slightly better amenities. Six cushions made for kneeling circled a large, odd bowl set in the center of the room. The glowing piece of crystal that floated above it—magically, as crystals seemed to do here—was all that lit the room, bathing everything in the color of blood. Unlike the green crystal Malacai had produced, this one was much larger and remained unmoving, merely suspended in the air.

Except it was glowing much brighter now.

“What did you do to it?” Wentin asked, his voice shrill.

“Shut up,” Chayand muttered. She and Wentin had gotten on well enough… until he’d introduced himself by name and started talking. She had never met a boy so equally demanding and terrified. Or fat, she silently added. Wentin was nearly the size of one of Furman Jesset’s prize hogs and had in fact already surpassed Furm’s wife (a girthy beauty who went by the unfortunate nickname of “Pudding”) who had, without recorded complaint, pushed out Furm’s twelve children. Chayand sincerely doubted Wentin was with child, but the tugo he wore was still at least two sizes too small for his waist; his pale belly had pushed the hem of his robe open most of the way, and even now hung out over his belt. His voice was the sort that made Chayand’s head hurt three words into a sentence, one-part nasal and two parts shrill, and every word he spoke seemed to double the intensity of the headache she still had.

“Make it dim again,” Wentin mewled. “Do something. Use the psi.”

Chayand threw a glare at the boy. He’d only heard the word “psi” after Mindmaster Kamul had mentioned it as their “shared energy”, though clearly Wentin still had no idea what that was. (She was not entirely sure herself.) Though there clearly was a reason they had sent him in here with her. Maybe he was like her. Maybe we share the same talent. Chayand eyed the boy again. It was a little hard to believe.

“Turn into blue crystal again,” Wentin continued, undaunted by her glares. “See if it responds to another crystal. Can you move at all when you’re crystal? Does it feel weird? Is it painful? Probably not as much as hitting it.” He laughed what seemed a nervous, sycophantic laugh. When he talked, which was often, one sentence seemed to follow the next with nary a pause, though he did occasionally pause to giggle nervously. “That was great. The ring fight, I mean. Breaking her hand like that. I was hoping you would win. That was funny when you lost your robe top. You’re very… um, pretty. Well, I mean, you’re interesting-looking.” He reached for her hair. “Can I touch—”

“No!” She smacked his chubby fingers away. “And will you please shut up. I’m trying to concentrate.”

Wentin’s eyes got wide, and tears began to well up. Not again, she groaned inwardly. She wanted to kick him in the leg and give him a real reason to cry. The idea that he might burst into tears for what seemed the fifth time today astounded her. And Bree calls me a bawlbaby.

He certainly wasn’t helping her guilt. Chayand was trying not to think about Roen. She had hoped to be the athletic girl’s friend, but any expectations of that flew away once they squared off in the ring—doubly so when Chayand began to realize she couldn’t beat her. I panicked, she reasoned, though deep down she knew that the real fear had set in deep, long before she’d stepped into the sand pit. She’d seen what happened to children who lost—saw the beating little Sunny took. She wasn’t going to let Roen just throttle her.

She had never willingly used the blue—had never purposefully become crystal. But somehow, she knew it would work. It just…

Something clicked, in her head. It was like a gate had opened. Instead of the blue coming to her, she went into it.

And none of it still made any sense to her. It almost felt like living a separate life inside her own body… but shut off and guarded from the rest of the world. Chayand could still see things when she was in her crystal form, though like her dreams it was all in shades of azure. She could hear, though sounds came to her in oddly sharp crystalline notes. She could not breathe, which was why she had held her breath before channeling—but a part of her knew, weirdly, that she did not even have to breathe…

…Which was crazy. People needed to breathe. If there hadn’t been so many witnesses to the deed, she might think she was going mad.

Chayand eyed the red shard. It was the largest single piece of crystal—or any fancy colored stone for that matter—that she had ever seen, and it floated, suspended and unmoving in mid-air, a half-pace above a rune etched bowl of strangely-colored metal that sat in the center of the room.

“Red irisite,” the Mindmaster had intoned when he sat them down before it, indicating the glowing crystal with a lazy gesture. Kamul was an odd-looking man—foreign to the Ten Kings, to be sure. He had a slight, dusky-skinned frame, and a bald head that seemed a size too large for his body. A teardrop of red crystal sat embedded in his brow, and it seemed to glimmer oddly with a light of its own, at times.

“The purest point of psionic connection between capable minds.” The Mindmaster’s hand had touched the shard of red irisite almost lovingly. “Astral subterrania, a gift given in years long past by a race long removed from this world.” He smiled an odd sort of smile. “We are the masters now.”

“You will become one with the shard.” She remembered his voice seemed to echo the word. Shard… shard… It seemed to bounce around in her skull. “You will learn from it. It will teach you, as will I, as I was commanded.” Despite his words, Kamul seemed to think very little of his role as teacher. The twitch of his lip showed a hint of his disdain.

Commanded. They were all Malacai’s puppets. Even Threll. She wondered if Vheret knew.

She reached for the red shard again. Her fingertips brushed it and held. She closed her eyes and channeled…

She did not turn to crystal. Again, as before, she entered the dream. The shard was showing her how.

And this one was different. She took a different path, and she wasn’t fooled into thinking it was her blue world, not for one moment.

Red light flashed. Someone was screaming at her, though the name the voice called was not her own, and the language was one she did not know. She was swimming, arms and legs trying to pull her through churlish waves, but the tide was too strong. She saw her husband’s hands reaching in vain for her as red water pulled at her legs, yanking her down… down and away… drowning…

Red flashed. A man hovered over her, his hands about her throat. She felt the bitter sting of betrayal, that he could so easily kiss and then kill her. Red fury dissolved into red fear as her life was choked from her, the world slowly turning…

Red. She crossed swords with another man, insults spitting from her lips. He was well in hand, but a smaller, quicker one got inside her guard and buried a blade deep between her ribs. Red blood spurted between her fingers as she tried to back away, spattering the red stone floor beneath her feet…

Red. She wept as the baby was taken from her shaking, dying hands, red blood on red cotton sheets. “My son,” she tried to sob but could only choke. My son…

Red. The wall above her was hit and exploded outward, stone raining down. By the time her senses cleared she could not avoid the rest of the crumbling wall as it—

Red. She died. Red. She died again in a different way. Red, red, red, red—

“Hey,” Wentin said, poking her for what she realized was the fourth time. “Hey, are you going to do anything? It’s just flashing now.” He poked her a fifth time, right on the cheek, then looked at his finger, quizzical—perhaps to see if her strangely dark skin had gotten it dirty. Chayand stared at him for a long moment and then slapped him across the face.

Wentin began to shake. His eyes widened and filled with tears.

“Are you going to cry again?” she snapped. Chayand was sick of Wentin and his tears.

“No,” he whispered, and his weepy eyes narrowed to slits.

He’s channeling, she realized with sudden, sharp dread, almost too late. She tried to call the blue, to protect herself from—

Her dread spiraled into mindless terror, shattering her concentration. Chayand scrambled back as a new wash of wordless despair drove her from her seat and backed her against the chamber’s bare black wall. Her crystal form could not protect her—she somehow knew the boy’s power would shatter it with a glance. She could already see in her mind’s eye her broken crystalline body reverting to flesh, her snapped bones, jagged and sharp, lancing up through the bloody tears in her flesh. She could feel, so very sharply, the excruciating agony of it—

“Cease,” a voice said. The pain did cease, immediately, as did the phantom fear that had caused it.

Chayand slowly struggled back to her feet, shaking, her knees wobbling so badly she needed the cold wall for support. What… was that…? Her stomach lurched. She didn’t know she could feel such fear. It still echoed within her in the aftermath, fluttering against her heart, like a shadowy moth.

Malacai was there, short and slight and silhouetted in the doorway. Chayand hazarded a glance at Wentin; the fat boy was cowering, mumbling apologies to the Master, but Malacai paid him no mind. Tears spilled down Chayand’s cheeks before she knew they were there. Who’s the bawlbaby now? her own voice taunted, though in parts it sounded like Wentin’s.

Malacai ignored them both, turning to address the boy who had accompanied him. “You will learn, as they learn,” he told the boy quietly. “Know the shard.”

The boy was Vheret. He looked as exhausted as she had ever seen him before, though… he also looked oddly relieved. He nodded. Malacai’s black gaze flicked across Chayand before he turned and was gone.

Vheret went to kneel on a cushion, glancing at the red shard a moment before looking to Chayand. His lavender eyes finally, and seemingly reluctantly, met hers.

And she knew, and her heart suddenly soared, awash with relief.

I knew it. I did, I knew it all along. He has a talent.

Vheret was just like her.