Page 107 of To Touch A Silent Fury

He clasped his hands together. “It is not so rare.”

“But your topic, the pursuit you were granted. She was rare.”

Theollan nodded, studying me with lessening curiosity. “One of a kind, as far as we know.”

My hand shook at my side. “Do you have a theory?”

He barked out a dismissive laugh, and I jumped. “On Tanidwen Treleftir? A theory implies a chance of truth, of testing something until you are proven incorrect. If I had the truth, my Fate would be complete. All I have are loose ends.”

I gazed up at him. “Have you given up, then?”

“No,” he replied without hesitation. He was growing tired of me and my questions already.

“What is there left to study?”

Theollan frowned, irritation leaking across his expression. “I used to be looking to the long past, but now I am considering the recent past, and whether or not she is still alive. It seems she made her way to Unger Lift after the events at the Laithcart Games, so I was making inquiries in Manniston.”

My chest tightened. I didn’t expect he was trying to find me, rather that he had long dismissed me as some unexplainable magic, like the Moontouch itself. “You are seeking her out? Why would that help you to explain why she was touched by the moon?”

He sighed, rubbing at his forehead and staring out again across the gardens. “Why should I tell you that? I mean no disrespect, since you are a guest of the Triad. You offer some bargain, and yet I cannot fathom what you could offer that I would need. I am an advisor to a prince, and you are a young woman with limited prospects.” The scholar unbuttoned the top of his shirt and pulled his scarf down, a small sheen of sweat at his brow. He looked back down at me again, clearly uncomfortable. “If this is merely to satisfy an outsider’s whim and felicitation, I cannot see the academic value in it.”

I smiled. There was something about him, his awkwardness or his care for his work, that reeked of Eavenfold’s rigid instruction. It was nostalgic in a way, to remember the place through the rote poor socialisation of its men. So, I would give him something familiar, and make it a test. “I will tell you what I have to offer, if you could answer a question for me.”

He thought about this, then nodded. “One question.”

I breathed out, steadying my mind and my body in stillness. “What do you truly think of her? Of Tanidwen Treleftir. Not the whys of her existence, or the nature of her life and deeds. What is your impression of her?”

Theollan blinked several times. He clasped his hands behind his back and looked out to the pillars for inspiration. “I pity her.”

I was glad to have grounded myself like a tree in a storm. It was only Yvon’s teachings that kept me from letting out a noise.

Instead, I waited, frozen as a deer. Pity. He pitied me.

Theollan continued to stare into the distance. “I spent a lot of time frustrated by my Fate. I was annoyed that my life's work as a scholar would be reduced to finding what mischief had caused one girl to be born. I’ll admit I resented the posting.” He shrugged, speaking the words to the breeze and not me, unknowingly thinking out loud to his unwanted muse. “Then I arrived in the Touchlands. Met her parents, travelled to Andiz.”

I let myself take the smallest of breaths then, the only sign of my hearing the words. By the Twins, I missed them. Eavenfold had tried to beat it out of us. Hate it though they might like, homesickness was one of the things that weallshared, unbound alike. I was just as alone as the rest of them, but at least my peers had each other. I’d had no one, until Seth.

Now, their faces were fuzzy. I remembered my mother’s warm smile, so wide and often stained with the gorhh berries clinging to the edge of the near orchard. And my father’s eyes, crinkling at the edges when he spun me around in the air. They were happy. I hoped they still were.

Unaware of my spiralling thoughts, Theollan rambled on, and I forced myself to pay attention. “It was somewhere I never would have been without my Fate, and my path gave me invaluable insight into their people, their customs, their ways. I spent over a span there, trying to find the answer when I could, but more than that, researching and living amongst them,” he said. Then he flicked his head to me. “Anyway, that was not your question. The girl.”

I almost interrupted then. Corrected my one question, forced him to speak about my parents again instead.

But then his eyes turned cold, and his voice shortened. “When I heard what happened to her… A Marriage Fate, and then Broken in the most barbaric and bloody of ways not a fortnight after. I pitied her.”

Theollan glanced at me as if expecting some challenge.

I only stared back, knowing there was more to come.

He pulled his braid over his shoulder, touching it. “As much as it irritated me to have not found the answer, you must understand that Tanidwen Treleftir had become my life. The sole female Brother of Eavenfold, and a woman who could have been so much more but for ill luck… how couldsheof all people be given the most mundane Fate of all? Someone’s wife. And she wasn’t even allowed to have that,” he muttered scathingly. “Pity is too soft a word.”

I had never been thus summarised in my life. The injustices were spoken with the speed of a chronicler concocting his tale of a life, and it was one of woe. For a Scentlander, he had seen through to me with such horrid ease. My throat closed as tears welled in my eyes.

He looked down at me. “Was that a thorough enough answer for you?”

I could only blink, and a telltale tear fell down my face.

Theollan’s brow rose, and he patted his chest for a handkerchief. He held the white fabric out to me, his palm proffered. I sniffed and reached for it.