The sparse room was at least warm and clean, a fire blazing in the small hearth. The single, tiny bed had her pack and the bundle she had taken from Galvyn’s grave so she moved them to the floor and sat crossed legged in the middle. She let Therin take the small wooden stool that was under the sturdy but plain vanity. Even without the weight of his mail, the stool creaked under him.

She noticed that he did not carry anything with him, that his clothes, while not what he wore when she met him at the monastery, were plain and seemed new.

“Where are you staying?” she asked as she watched him lean forward, his arms rested on his knees.

“Here,” he said with a smile. “I’ve been here for two nights already.” Surprised, but pleased that he had taken her promise to return seriously, she nodded and gave him a weak smile.

“So,” she began and shrugged. “Hrulinar…”

“How do you make that noise?” he asked suddenly and she frowned. He imitated the sound, a squawk and hiss that made her laugh. She was still wiping tears from her eyes as the spirit in question emerged from her, his eyes sparkling.

“Here,” he said as a way of greeting. He waved his fingers and suddenly Therin’s eyes widened.

“Hrulinar,” he whispered. “How…”

“The Divine language isn’t for mortal mouths,” he said with a smirk. “You’re welcome.” The cocky princeling was back, his hackles raised around Therin.

“How are you?” The monk seemed genuinely curious, his face earnest and open.

“I’ve been better,” Hrulinar replied, looking at his nails, refusing to meet Therin’s eyes. “Shadesorrow is free and yet…” He crossed his arms and shrugged. “I’m not.”

“Did you expect to be?”

“No, but it seems a little unfair. I’m allowed to be petty. That isn’t a strictly human facet of life.”

“Of course,” Therin said, raising his hands in surrender. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” The spirit, somehow less transparent in the dim room, paced the room, his booted feet silent on the creaky floor.

“What have you found out since you left?”

Hrulinar stopped his pacing, spinning on a heel and nodding at Alira.

“She summed it up pretty well.” He resumed his pacing with a shrug.

“And yet,” Therin said with a patient smile. “I’d still like to hear your side.”

“There isn’t a side to tell. Alira and I are one.”

“Is that so?” The monk challenged him. “And how were you affected by Shadesorrow? Alira lost more weight, impossibly. Her hair is nearly white. Her eyes…” He let the sentence fall in the closed room, unfinished but she noticed the way he glanced at her.

“My eyes?” She prompted. She hadn’t realised there was something wrong with them. She saw Hrulinar cast an annoyed glance at Therin and clench his jaw. She got up and looked in the cracked mirror of the vanity, bracing herself with a hand on Therin’s broad, warm shoulder.

“Oh,” she said. Her eyes were alien to her now, wider set than before, tilted into a feline’s gaze. Their colour was no longer molten chocolate but darkest night rimmed in a silver-shot blue.

It wasn’t just her eyes, though, that had changed in her face. She looked more gaunt, her cheekbones sharp. The hollows around her eyes were still tinged purple but now they seemed to suit her, as though she had done it on purpose. Her once freckled skin was white, bloodless. Her lips, when she parted them, hid the two long pointed teeth that had remained. She touched one with her tongue and noted that they didn’t feel strange, that her ability to talk had not been changed by their appearance.

Memories of people staring at her, avoiding her, dancing out of her way during her wandering suddenly flooded her. She’d need to hide her face, the unsettling eyes until…

“That’s an unfortunate change,” Hrulinar admitted. He stopped in front of Alira, grabbing her hand and squeezing it. “But it is just surface deep. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“When?” she asked but she already knew. “When I unmade them.” He nodded and Therin cocked his head, curious. Hrulinar dropped her hand and wandered to the fire, bracing his hands on the small mantle and stared into the flickering flames.

“You’ll have to tell him now,” he said distantly. “Or curiosity will make him stupid.”

Ignoring the nettling, Alira sat back down and watched the way the fire danced in Hrulinar’s image, the way the light shone through him, casting a green hue.

“When I lost Shadesorrow, when the blades took me to find the stones,” she began and wished she had water, her mouth suddenly dry again. “She left behind…something.”

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She spoke of following Hrulinar’s bond, finding the camp, surrendering to Hrulinar’s gifts and letting him change their shared shape. She spoke of the immense power of being a bear, how she had not feared anything until that bolt had caught her in the shoulder.

When she told him of using the Light to heal herself, his eyes widened, the whisper of a smile creeping onto his lips. He nodded as she spoke of the way it felt to mend her own flesh, the healing like a searing heat.

“And this awakened in you when you tried to control Shadesorrow?” He asked excitedly. He leaned ever further forward, at the edge of the stool, eagerness painted broadly across his open features. She nodded her head and shrugged. She continued her story.

As she admitted to the lure of the darkness, she watched Therin slowly sit up, his fingers tightening on his knees as she spoke of the power she had felt rushing through her. She told him of how she had heard Shadesorrow whispering to her.

“It was as though she was offering me a way…” She stopped when she felt tears prickling. “Damn it,” she said and balled her hands into fists, pressing them angrily to her eyes. “I’m so sick of crying.”

A cool hand brushed her cheek and she looked up at Hrulinar.

“Cry as much as you need to. I saw what they did.” Somehow, his words made her tears stop, the angry pain abating long enough for her to take a shuddering breath and continue.

“Shadesorrow knew exactly what I wanted to do to those men.” Her voice was a whisper now. “And she guided me through it all. One after another, executed with precision. Unmade.”

His fists were tight now, held firmly in his lap but she could tell he was forcing himself into inaction.

“And now?” he asked quietly. “What does it feel like now?”

Alira looked at him and then at Hrulinar, who had wandered to the hearth again. He had his hands in his pockets, the picture of studied ease. He looked back at her and nodded once.

“Hrulinar hides it,” she said simply. “He keeps it safe from me.”

“What if he wasn’t there? What if you were separated?”

“That’s nothing to worry about,” the princeling said grimly. “I’m wholly dependent on her now. As she is to me…”

Therin eyed them both, and nodded slowly.

“But if it could be done…?”

“It can’t.” Alira put his questions to rest. “I need to keep him with me. Permanently.”

She caught the spirit's eye and he broke their gaze first, his mouth twisted in a bitter expression of defeat. Therin caught the exchange and said nothing.

“Shadesorrow keeps those that are unmade,” she said slowly. “What she reaps, she keeps.” She repeated the spirit's words to her just hours earlier.

“What does she do with them?” Therin asked but Alira merely shrugged.

“Nothing good,” she said but Hrulinar cleared his throat unnecessarily, drawing both of their attention.

“I think the most important concern right now isn’t what she does with the spirits. I think it’s gathering all of Erin’s soulstones, resurrecting her, and making her tell us what she knows. She’s what is tying us all together and I for one want a chance to ask her a few things.” His eyes gleamed.

“I agree,” Alira said and Therin nodded.

“And you said…he had one?” His refusal to say his brother’s name made her heart beat thickly, painfully.

“Noran has one, yes. And…” She weighed how to continue. “And I know where another one is.”

He raised his eyebrows in surprise, a hopeful expression on his face. She let her eyes fall on his ringed hand, nodding slowly. She could think of no tactful way to say it.

“You have one.”

The stunned silence was broken only by the fire popping, making Therin jump.

“Wh-What?” he stammered.

Hrulinar shrugged off from the mantle and wiggled the fingers of one hand at Therin.

“Your new shiny,” he said pointedly. “Where did you get it?”

Alira’s eyes landed on the ring she had noticed earlier. Therin turned his hand, looking at the thick gold band and dark stone. He removed it from his finger and held it out to Alira, leaning forward to drop it in her hand.

“Orin gave it to me.”

She turned the ring around on her thumb, noticing its amateur craftsmanship, the way the band had been scarred and notched over time. The dark red stone caught the essence of the fire in the room. It seemed to be alive as she tilted it.

“This is what I found out shortly after you left. I returned that morning, after reading your note. My uncle had seen more than he wanted to tell us. And after revealing what he had…” Therin watched her carefully turning the ring in her hands, noting how she seemed entranced.

“About my father,” she said softly, letting him know she was listening. “Go on.”

He swallowed and then nodded once.

“I realised that there was more to the story than he was comfortable sharing with a stranger. So I returned. He gave me this ring, saying that he found it in the library shortly after Galvyn and Erin had left.”

Hrulinar had paced closer, his eyes wide and stuck to the ring. Silently, he held his hand to Alira. She looked up but closed her hand around the ring, shaking her head. Frowning, the spirit sat before her and turned, letting his back rest against the bed. His eyes were vacant as he waited to hear the rest of Therin’s story.

“She had left the ring where the book had been. I suspect she was trying to taunt Devan. Orin took the ring and kept it, afraid of her intentions. But that’s not all Orin told me.” He swallowed again and Alira saw the apprehension in his eyes finally giving out to resigned defeat.

For an instant, Alira saw him how the blades had seen him: unkempt, sweaty, his face drawn in distraught disbelief, staring at something he cupped in his hands.

“The night Erin left with Galvyn, Orin said he saw something horrible. Something that he didn’t even tell Devan.” His hands were visibly shaking as he spoke. “But he told me.”

“Therin,” Alira began but he put up a hand and blinked at her, his face stony.

“It’s important.” He stood and took Hrulinar’s place by the fire, his own heavy boots making the floorboards creak as he tread on them. He scrubbed his face with both hands, groaning as he worked up his courage to continue.

“I don’t even know where to begin, honestly. There’s so much more than just Erin’s theft.”

“At the beginning, unless that’s going to take all night.” Hrulinar suggested with a trace of sardonic wryness. Therin nodded in agreement, though and stared into the fire.

“When I was a teenager,” he said and the spirit on the floor groaned in disappointment. Alira laid her hand on his shoulder, quieting him. Therin cast an annoyed glance over his broad shoulder before shaking his blond curls out of his eyes and turning back to the fire.