Page 57 of Daughter of No Worlds

At all once, a wall of steam burst from the surface of the water, temporarily blinding me in warm grey. Slowly, the cloud dissipated, and it took me a moment to realize what I was looking at: a massive serpent carved from cloudy mist. It rose and rose and rose, and I craned my neck to follow its ghostlike face, transfixed.

And then, it lunged for me, circling around my body in wet, warm heat before launching into the sky. It was nearly enveloped by the clouds when, at last, it dissipated into — and here, I could not help but smile — hundreds and hundreds of little butterflies. It must have been visible for miles.

When I looked back to Max, sweat glistened over his skin. He dunked his head beneath the water and came up pushing his hair away from his face.

“That’s it?” I said, casually. “Is very… performative.”

Fine. I was impressed.

“Throwing all kinds of words back at me today.” He looked pleased with himself, even if he was trying to hide it. “I don’t recall saying you could stop.”

I managed a butterfly with wings so finely crafted that they were translucent and smiled at myself.

“Good,” Max said, giving a little nod of approval. Then his voice grew slightly more serious as he said, “You’re feeling better today?”

I’d managed to distract myself enough to forget about yesterday’s events, at least for a few minutes. At the thought of it, self-consciousness burned at my cheeks. “Yes.”

“You were having a hard time.”

It wasn’t a question. And— of course it wasn’t. It had to have been obvious, how much the emotions of it all had overwhelmed me. Drowned me.

“I felt very much yesterday,” I said, quietly. “The thoughts of the crowd. The Lord. The Queen. Very much.”

Even that small admission of vulnerability nearly stuck to my tongue.

But Max’s face softened, and his voice was surprisingly gentle as he asked, “Do you often struggle in large crowds of people?”

I thought of the day I first saw Serel, when I had choked beneath the emotions of the slaves in that pit. Torture. Absolute torture. “Sometimes,” I admitted.

“It’s a common problem for Valtain,” he said. “There’s another reason why I brought you here. I wasn’t sure, at first, how I was going to help you with this. Totally unfamiliar to me, after all.” His fingers skimmed over the surface, releasing tiny waves. “But as a Valtain, you’re sensitive to what other people’s minds release into the world. All of those… ripples.”

A realization clicked into place as I watched his hands move over the surface of the pond. “Like water.”

“Right.” He gave me a faint smile. “The nature or degree to which individual Valtain feel and interpret them is very different, as I’m sure you’re well aware, but we know how you feel them.”

“Emotions,” I said.

“Generally mild, as far as Valtain mental abilities go. And when it’s just a few, there’s nothing to be concerned about.” As if to demonstrate, he dipped his fingertips into the water, releasing delicate circles across its surface. “But when you’re looking at a big disruption…”

I lifted my hands and brought them down in a violent splash, spattering myself and Max in water.

He winced. “Exactly.” He gestured to the surface, now shuddering with hundreds of indistinguishable ripples.

Right. It was simplytoo much, all of those waves of feeling clashing together until my mind was as disrupted as this water was. And that was almost exactly what it felt like: like everything that had once been clear and smooth, defined waves and circles, had become a tangled mass of movement.

“In Ara, it’s a universal and necessary skill to learn how to shield your own thoughts as much as possible,” Max said. “There are a lot of Valtain around, and no one, Wielder or no, wants them poking around their thoughts. I’ve always thought of it like putting up a wall… or, if we want to keep this metaphor going, a dam.”

He gestured to the other end of the pond, where an old stone barrier extended towards the center, crumbling. Maybe once it had created a reservoir of some kind, though by the looks of it those days were long gone.

I thought of the one time I had attempted to so much as brush Max’s thoughts. Whatever he did, it worked.

“But,” he went on, “you’d probably require something a bit more… sophisticated. You need to cull what comes in, and what goes out.”

An old memory whispered through my mind — my mother and I, kneeling beside a muddy stream, thirst clawing at my throat. She held a swath of thin, delicate fabric in her hands, and together we ran the water through it until it came back clear.

“Like filtering cloth,” I murmured.

A small smile. “Like filtering cloth.”

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