Therin had excused Alira by claiming she’d been unwell for some time but assured his family that all she needed was rest. He helped her mount and they set off shortly after.

“You want to talk about it now, or later?” He still had his soft voice, the one missing the personality and cheery teasing.

“Now is as good a time as any,” Alira grumbled. She had washed her mouth out with some water that Therin’s aunt had brought her but everytime she tried to go over what Henry had told her, she felt her nausea well and her heart race.

Why are you so upset by that? Henry asked her, incredulous. I can feel your body reject this truth. Why this particular truth out of all you’ve discovered?

She didn't answer him but she knew why. And him asking those questions had answered another one she herself had been wondering. Henry could not see all of her mind, hear all of her thoughts. She had a small walled off area of her mind that was hers. Whether she had carved it out over the time they’d spent together or it had been there all along she didn’t know. But it was in this limited private space that she turned over her thoughts on Galvyn.

“Well?” Therin prompted. Alira felt cold sweat dripping down her neck and looked around her before lowering the stifling hood, letting the warm summer breeze lift the two small loops on either side of her head and dry the sweat at her temples.

“What do you want to know?” Her voice was dead, resigned.

“Who was it I saw when I blessed you?” Alira jerked her head up and met his eye.

“You saw him?”

“Answer me,” Therin said flatly. He didn’t sound angry, but he was clearly done waiting for her to come around.

“His name is Henry. He is the boon the witches gifted my family when they took my mother.” Therin rode in silence, contemplating.

“So you’ve had him trapped inside you since you were younger?”

“No,” Alira sighed and with little emotion she launched into the story of her recent history, beginning when she had cut her hand on the blade. When she reached the part of Henry losing his mind and attacking her, she paused.

“When we got to my childhood home, I took my mother’s Witch Knife from her grave.” Therin whispered, blessing himself and closed his eyes at the mention of the grave robbery.

“At least it wasn’t consecrated ground,” he muttered. “Worse than ill-luck if you had opened a consecrated grave.” She waited for him to finish before continuing.

“Henry realised my mother had taken her stones out of her blade, hidden them, likely contained the fragments of her soul in them. And the betrayal drove him mad. He killed me.”

Therin reached out and took the reins from her hands and drew her horse to a stop beside his own.

“What do you mean he killed you?”

“I died. I know I did. The blood was everywhere…” she shuddered as she remembered the feel of the daggers scraping loudly against her bones. Therin took down his hood, meeting her sad eyes with his wide blue ones.

“Then how are you alive now?” Before she could reply he whispered something and pressed his hand to her flesh. Nothing happened and he sighed. “Not undead,” he explained. She shook her head and shrugged.

“I’m not sure, but I woke up quite some time later and he was gone. I discovered he was stuck inside me shortly after and realised something horrible must have happened.” She finished the story with her meeting Ohira Nunjuli and smiled a little at Therin’s surprised grin.

“I thought the Witch of the Wood was a story you told children to frighten them,”

Tell him that she has been around since before the church.

“Henry says she’s older than the church.”

“Does he talk to you often?” Therin asked, releasing her reins and leading his horse into a slow pace.

“Yes,” she said wearily and Henry hissed in annoyance.

“Who is Henry? What is he like?” Therin asked and Alira’s eye snagged on the back of his robe, the golden whorls catching the sun in a distracting way.

“The Son of Nature,” Alira murmured as her horse came alongside his. When he gave her a confused expression she merely shrugged and sighed. “I need that book.”

“Will it help you separate yourself from Henry?”

“That’s part of it,” she said.

She was weighing what she said carefully because she had purposely left out a major component to her story. She had not mentioned Ohira’s prediction that she was the avatar of the Unmaker, that a dark goddess’s power threatened to pull her apart every time she and Henry joined their gifts.

“And I need to find my mother’s soulstones. I think she had been working for a long time to do something horrible and a lot of people have already lost their lives because of her.”

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“What horrible thing?” Therin asked sharply. He had left his hood down and he was sounding more like himself the longer they talked.

“I don’t really know,” Alira danced around the truth. “I need the book to help me figure it out.” Therin nodded slowly, accepting her words.

“And at the farmhouse? What made you so sick?”

Alira thought of her reasons, the ones she kept tucked carefully hidden from Henry and chose to use the truth to season her reply.

“My mother has done a lot of damage. When I thought she had ruined your father’s life and somehow had a hand in ending Galyvn’s, it was bad enough. But to know that your father tried to stop it all, that she had wormed her way into Devan’s friend’s heart so deeply that she could not be excised…” A shudder chased a sob out of her. “I know there’s things Galvyn did for her that are worse than we realise. If Devan figured him too fallen to save, he let him go as his only act of mercy…” She let the unsaid words fill the space between them.

“What she did does not reflect on you,” Therin said wisely. “You weren’t even born yet—” he stopped himself, possibly lining things up for himself the way Henry had done for her.

He merely shook his head and lifted his hood. He gestured for her to do the same and they entered the small village proper, the sun just past its zenith and starting its slow descent.

They continued the journey to the inn in silence and Therin helped Alira down again. She was unsteady on her feet and swayed. He kept an arm around her shoulders and guided her up the stairs to their room and she noted that Halder had brought up the folding privacy screen that Therin had asked for.

When they had both changed, discarding the formal regalia, Alira sat on her bed and watched Therin read the small book he had brought from the monastery. His lips moved as he read, whispering things she could not hear. He had moved the screen after she had dressed and repositioned his own bed so it was closer to the door.

She lay down and curled up under the heavy wool blanket, her eyes heavy. As she closed her eyes she heard Therin’s bed creak and flicked them back open to see him sitting at the edge of his bed, his head in his hands. His fingers curled into his golden hair and he sighed heavily before scrubbing his face and looking up at her.

“Would you like to know what else Orin told me, after you left?” he asked suddenly. Alira blinked back the drowsiness that was pressing in on her and nodded.

“Yes,” she said but she stayed tucked into the small, comfy ball.

“It wasn’t much.” He stood and poured himself a cup of water from the pitcher that had been brought up shortly after they arrived. He drained it and gestured to the pitcher, offering her some. She shook her head.

“He amended his story to say that it wasn’t ever Devan in the library with her. It was always Galvyn showing her around, letting her handle their treasures and knowledge.”

The monk sat on his bed again and kicked off his boots, then lay down on the narrow bed, hands behind his head. He was quiet for a long time.

“It just so happened that Orin was on sentry duty the night when Erin and Galvyn left.” He turned his head to look at Alira and pursed his lips, clearly weighing something as he thought.

“Something he saw frightened him,” Alira said suddenly. The old man had carried something around with him, a weight that had not allowed him peace. Therin nodded.

“The entire time Erin was there, she was very subdued and quiet, apparently. She did that humming thing a lot, but other than that, she kept to herself. That night, when they left…” He looked back to the ceiling above him as he spoke.

“He said he saw two men killed. And he saw in Galvyn’s eyes and face the depths he had fallen because of her. He didn’t stop the murders of those men. He watched, passively, as they were killed and slipped into the night with Erin. They had not noticed Orin in the shadows.”

“It wasn’t Galvyn’s fault. I think she enchanted him.” Alira watched Therin take a few breaths before he answered.

“It made me think, Alira,” he said as he turned to face her. “Who’s to say I’ve not been duped the same?”

Her heart stopped and restarted at a rampant pace.

“What?” She sat up slowly, her body suddenly cold.

“You are her daughter, and she slipped into the same monastery and stole more than just a book of incalculable value.” When he looked at her again, his blue eyes shimmered with golden light.

“Therin,” Alira said, her hands up, pleading him. “I swear, I’m not–”

“Listen,” he said as he too sat up and swung his legs off the bed. He leaned on his thighs, his hands clasped together lightly.

“I’m not the same standard of man as Devan or even Galvyn. I’ll be the first to admit that.”

“Therin–” she began but he held up a hand to forestall her.

“But I’d like to think that I’m not stupid.”

Wrong. Henry said and Alira beat him back with an impatient flick inside her mind.

“Therin,” she said and took a deep breath to calm herself. “I don’t know how to get you to trust that I am not like her. I…” she searched for the words, tears springing into her eyes. Frustration and panic welling up and spilling out onto her cheeks.

“I want to talk to this spirit, to Henry.”

She blinked back her tears and gaped, her mouth open.

“Why?” she gasped. “What would that prove?”

“I know that he’s the reason you lose control over that darkness inside you. I could feel that you were…possessed…when we met. I could see that shadow inside that flickers when you lose yourself.”

If this idiot thinks he can just exorcise me, he’s going to be so very disappointed. And dead.

“You can’t help me, not like that,” she warned. “We are tangled in a complicated way.”

“I just want to ask him some questions but I’ll be honest, Alira. I don’t trust you to translate him for me. I want to hear from him myself.”

I’ll do it. Henry said and Alira shook her head. It was too risky, either letting Henry take her body or leave it and it accelerated her changes, making the wall between them thinner, permeable.

You’ve already allowed this fool too much truth, too much of our story to just say no. He’s got to trust us or he may kill us in his stupidity. If he tries to exorcise me while you’re not able to stop him, I fear it will cause irreversible damage and destroy any chance we have at stopping your mother. Henry’s argument was solid and Alira could not find a way to argue around it so she just reiterated her own fears: that by allowing Henry to use his powers it was weakening the delineation between them.

Alira, my lovely pet, you still have complete control over yourself. You aren’t in immediate danger.

“What does he say?” Therin asked, watching Alira have a conversation with herself. She opened her mouth to speak but Henry used her hesitation to slip from her skin, forming into a shadow of himself.

“Henry,” he said and bowed dramatically to Therin. “At your service, sir.”