Page 135 of The Cradle of Ice

—learning how to repair a net, sitting on the knee of his father, the salt bright on a breeze off the sea.

—shivering in his mother’s embrace as a lone raash’ke screamed over the village.

—feeling the tiny fingers of Henna wrapping around his thumb, her giggling breath smelling of milk, and the ache of love in his heart for his sister.

—fumbling in the dark with a woman’s bare breasts, then a moment later, a streak of humiliation, a shame buried deep.

—seeing Nyx on the beach for the first time, watching her come toward him, her hands up to reassure him. Awe and fear tremble through him.

The images began to quicken, flowing ever faster, backward and forward through his life. Eventually it trimmed down to just snippets of emotion or sensation. Still, it all blurred into one overwhelming sense: of Daal’s warmheartedness and honorable spirit.

Finally, it all faded away. She was allowed to settle back into her own skin. She couldn’t tell if a day had passed or a heartbeat. She let her fingers fall from Daal’s shoulder, but her gaze never left him, seeing him in a whole new light.

Yet not truly.

Down deep, she had already known who he was.

As Daal stared at her, his eyes looked as huge as hers felt. Had he also experienced the same shuffling and sharing of memories?

She finally had to look away, feeling naked, but also not regretting any of it. She focused instead on why she had traveled down here and risked so much. She closed her eyelids and pictured Daal on Iskar’s plaza. She heard his words again, about how the Dreamers knew more about the history of the Crèche, and more importantly about the raash’ke. She also relived Daal’s shame, remembering his description of his first encounter with the Dreamers.

They touch me. Then throw me away. Not worthy.

Maybe it was his acute pain that pierced through to the Oshkapeers the strongest. To address it, to explain it, images flowed into her from many eyes.

She briefly became a multitude.

—she thrashes her mighty body amidst bloody waves, her body pierced by scores of spears.

—she swims, flicking fin and tail, driven by an unslakable bloodlust toward a figure struggling in the dark, dragged deeper by an orkso.

—she continues following the hunt, hopping from one body to another.

Nyx knew what this was.

A recounting of Daal’s chase from six months ago.

But similar to sensing the entirety of the young man next to her, she divined a meaning behind the blur of energy and purpose. She felt the huge kefta being lured into the deepwater seas near the Dreamers, driven to strike a tail across a certain skiff. She saw how the sharks were equally drawn, like pieces on a board of Knights n’ Knaves.

A dawning realization grew. It wasn’t an accident that Daal had ended up with the Dreamers. They had herded him here.

A question coalesced inside her.

Why?

Though unspoken, it was answered.

An image filled her head from Daal’s past, from his first encounter with the Dreamers. He again hung in the embrace of an Oshkapeer, shrouded in tendrils.

While still imbued with those foreign senses, Nyx watched that glow inside him be changed. Tendrils cast weaves of silvery energy into him, molding his fire, enriching it brighter, tamping it into his bones and blood. It turned him into a great storehouse, far stronger than before.

She struggled to accept what she was being shown, both awed and horrified.

They had drawn Daal down here to fortify his gift, forging him like hot steel, hardening him into a sword.

She flashed to a moment ago, when she had gripped Daal’s shoulder, drawing his fire into her. Certainty firmed in her. She suddenly understood why the Dreamers had changed him into a great font of power.

To ready him—for me.