The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) by Melissa McPhail Page A

share.”
    “Yara?” 
    Alyneri heard the man’s voice just before she heard the outer door close, and her breath caught in her throat. She’d recognized something in it, and yet…
    Footsteps crossed the distance, and then, as if he stood in the doorway: “Were you talking to me just then, Yara?”
    “Ama-Kai’alil, friend of my heart,” Yara said, still using the desert tongue, “she’s awake.” Alyneri heard a great sense of relief in this pronouncement and realized how scared for her the old woman had really been.
    “Yes, I’m—” he hesitated. “Well…uh, welcome back, I guess,” he said in the common tongue, and she heard the smile in his voice.
    “Thank you,” she managed in the like, giving him a smile that she hoped he would see in return. It was disconcerting being blind to the world, trusting only lesser-used perceptions to provide the images her eyes were denied. “And thank you for saving me. Yara told me you risked your life to save mine.”
    He grunted derisively but with humor. “It was the least I could do.”
    Yara stood and walked across the room, announcing in the desert tongue, “I’m off to see to dinner. Soraya, you make him stay here now and tell you his tale.”
    “Wait, you—” he said, surprised, “you speak the desert tongue?”
    “My father was Kandori,” Alyneri explained. “I hope—I mean…that doesn’t bother you, does it?”
    “Far from it!”  She could hear the happiness in his voice this time, and it thrilled her to know she had pleased him. His voice was at once resonant and soft, and the more Alyneri heard it the more she was reminded of the deep Gandrel and its glorious groves of emerald sunlight. It was familiar and yet not so much that she could put any face to it. Yet his voice warmed her, such that she wanted only to hear him speaking more. “You speak the Kandori dialect well,” he said then. “Which language do you prefer?”
    “I…I am pleased to use the language of my father…if it pleases you,” she added, feeling herself blushing for no good reason at all. She heard him sit down beside her then and become still. His was a quiet yet forceful presence that made her feel strangely…safe. “Yara said,” Alyneri began, hesitant to disturb the sudden sense of peace that had descended upon her by just being near him, “…she said there was a story to your name?”
    “Yes, she likes to imagine greater things of me than I ever have hope of becoming.”
    “Greatness is as greatness does, Ama-Kai’alil,” Yara admonished from the other room.
    He chuckled. “But I would know of you , azizam , and then I must share some news—though I hope…well, we shall cross that bridge soon enough.”
    Alyneri felt at once thrilled and anxious; thrilled to have his attentions— azizam meant ‘darling one’—and anxious that such attentions came at a time when she could not have been more vulnerable. “All right,” she said after a moment, catching her lip between her teeth and wishing she had a clue what she looked like to him—then deciding it was best that she didn’t know. “What would you learn of me?”
    “What if we started with your name?”
    His tone was so kind, his voice so melodic and soft, it at once put her at ease. “I am Alyneri,” she managed. “ Alyneri d’Giverny .”  She felt a silence descend, felt him grow tense at her side, and became immediately dismayed. What had she done? What could she have done? “Is…is something wrong?”
    “I’m sorry,” he sounded almost breathless. “Sometimes…I will explain at some point, I promise you, it’s only that sometimes certain words bring on memories that were long buried. Sometimes the memories are very…powerful.”
    Alyneri waited, unsure how to proceed.
    “Your name,” he said after a moment. “I know it somehow. I don’t know how I know it.” In the silence that followed, she felt him growing distant again.
    “I’m a Healer,” she offered to fill the