Hell's Gate

He looked down at her, his eyes still hooded, still suspicious, and her temper snapped.

"Gods' mercy, Jasak! Why else do you think I was able to trust you that day? To let you touch me? To not jerk back in horror every time you even looked at me? You've talked about how frightening our weapons were to you?what about your weapons to us? You'd just butchered my dearest friends?burned them alive, curse you! My gods, I'd never seen anything so barbaric in my life! You claim to be civilized people, but you build weapons designed to roast an enemy alive!

"You can't possibly know what you did to me that day! What you're still doing to me, every single day I spend trapped in a room with guards staring at me if I even try to look out a window. I can't go for walks in the moonlight anymore. I can't go for walks anywhere! I can't even take a bath by myself, without having to ask Gadrial to order some musclebound guard not to shoot before I step outside that cabin door without permission!"

She stood glaring at him, bosom heaving with emotion she could barely contain. She wanted to scream, wanted to hit him with her fists to make him see what he'd done to them, what he was still doing to them. And buried in her anger, making it burn even fiercer, was the knowledge that he did know. That he understood, and deeply regretted it. That he would have done anything to undo it … and that he was still unflinchingly determined to do whatever his "duty" required of him. That unless she could convince him their Talents did not present some deadly danger to his nation and the men in his army, he would take whatever steps seemed necessary to eliminate that danger.

"It was my Talent?the Talent you're so worried about right now?that let me understand what you were feeling. I wanted to hate you. Gods, I wanted to kill you! I was in deep shock, and the shocks just kept coming and coming, and it was all your fault. I didn't want you to touch me, not then, not ever, but you did.

"And because you did, and because I'm Talented, I knew you hadn't wanted it to happen. I knew how terribly you regretted it, and how determined you were to protect me from still more harm. And when that happened, I couldn't keep hating you. I couldn't. I'm a Voice?I was born to understand people. I can't help understanding people. Even," she sobbed in rage, "when I don't want to!

"I wanted to hate you, and my Talent wouldn't let me. I'm not a weapon?I'm a Voice. A bridge between people. A living tool to help people communicate and understand one another. It's in my blood, my bones, my very skin. It you would just stop holding onto your suspicion with both fists and all your teeth, you'd see the truth, Jasak Olderhan."

She drew a deep breath, scrubbed the angry tears from her face, then shook her head.

"I can't prove to you that my Talent is no danger to you," she said quietly, almost softly. "But if it were, don't you think I'd already be using it? All I've done is use it to learn your language. If there were something I could do to strike back at you after all of the agony, fear, humiliation, and helplessness your people have inflicted on us, you can be certain that I would." She met his eyes levelly, challengingly. "You'd deserve that, and I'm sure you'd expect it. But there isn't, and I can't, and you're not a Voice, don't have a scrap of telepathy. So words are all I have to convince you I'm telling you the truth."

He continued to gaze down at her, then turned to look at Jathmar again, and she wanted?more than she'd ever wanted anything in her life before?to touch him. To see what emotions were streaming through him behind that expressionless mask of a face. But that was the last thing she could do, and so she simply stood, waiting.

Jasak looked at the tiny woman standing in front of him. Looked at the face of that woman's husband and read Jathmar's desperate fear for Shaylar, and the horrible, debilitating knowledge that there was no way he could protect her from whatever Jasak decided to do.

And that was the crux of the problem, wasn't it? Jasak had to decide what to do, and Shaylar was right. He had no 'Talent" of the mind, no yardstick to measure the truth of what she'd said, or to sense what her true emotions might be. He had to choose whether or not to take her unsupported word for it.

Despite all she'd just said, it was entirely possible that she could be?and had been?subtly influencing his judgments, his decisions, his very thoughts. The very passion with which she'd presented her argument had only driven home the fact that he had no way of knowing what other hidden abilities lurked within her. Not only had she admitted that she could sense the emotions of others, but the way she'd described herself?as a 'Voice'?had told him exactly how they'd gotten a message back to their own side. And she'd forgotten to try to disguise her fluency in Andaran. Jathmar's progress in learning Jasak's language had been phenomenal enough, but the command of it which Shaylar had just demonstrated was little short of terrifying.

Yet that was the entire point, wasn't it? Should it be terrifying, or did it simply feel that way because he didn't understand? Because it was a simple, everyday ability of her people which simply lay so far outside his own experience that he couldn't recognize it as such?

"Sit down, Shaylar. Please," he said finally.

She stared at him for a few more seconds, then stepped back behind Jathmar and settled gingerly on the foot of Gadrial's bed. Jasak waited until she'd seated herself, then pulled the straight-back chair back away from the small desk in the cabin's corner and placed it for Gadrial. He waited until the magister was seated, as well, then drew a deep breath.

"First," he said quietly, "I acknowledge that I was in command of the troops who killed your companions and wounded the two of you. That's a significant point, which I'll return to in a moment."

Jathmar was watching his face even more intently than Shaylar. Now he reached out and took his wife's hand once more, and Jasak realized he was also clinging to that 'marriage bond' Shaylar had mentioned. That he was using it to help himself follow what Jasak was saying with his own, more limited Andaran.

"Second," he continued, "whatever concerns I might have over the threat your 'Talents' might or might not pose to the other people on this ship, or to the Union of Arcana as a whole, I wouldn't blame you for using them any way you could. Indeed, I'd expect no less out of you, just as I would expect no less out of Gadrial and her Gift under similar circumstances.

"And, third, I believe you." He saw both of his prisoners' taut spines relax ever so slightly, and shook his head. "I believe what you've told me is the truth. That doesn't mean I believe you've told me the entire truth."

They stiffened again, but he continued calmly.

"In your places, I certainly wouldn't tell my captors anything which would help them against my people unless I absolutely had to. I've seen enough of both of you by now to realize you won't, either. But you're also both highly intelligent. That means you know that sooner or later you're going to be very thoroughly questioned. Questioned by professional interrogators who know how to put bits and pieces together and learn things you never even realized you were telling them. For the moment, however, and speaking for myself, I'm going to operate on two assumptions. First, that what you've told me up to this point is true. Secondly, that I have your parole."

Not even Shaylar recognized the last word, and he smiled crookedly.

"Your 'parole' is your word?your promise?that you won't attempt to escape, that you won't hurt anyone else except in direct self-defense, and that you will refrain from hostile actions so long as you're treated humanely and with respect. And?" he continued, looking directly into Jathmar's eyes as the Sharonian stiffened with an expression of borning outrage "?I believe that if you're honest with yourselves, you have no choice but to acknowledge that you have been treated both humanely?and with respect?by both Gadrial and myself. I can't undo what happened that day in the forest, but I've done the very best I could to see to it that you were treated well afterward."