Page 70 of The Crown's Awakening
I turn to Syle, studying him properly for the first time as I speak aloud. “I do not understand what this is. Can you read my mind?”
“No,” he answers, the words forming clearly in my head. “I can hear what you say in it.”
“You both are speaking mind to mind?” Uralish asks.
“Yes.”
He looks at Syle with something like recognition sharpened by surprise. “He does not speak,” he says. “Not with his voice. It is not a flaw. It is a gift. He was a born a Wisper.”
“A what?”
He gestures to Syle. “Show her.”
Syle inclines his head. Light moves through him, not outward but upward, and from that light another figure appears, standing where he stands and yet separate from him entirely. The figure is close to his age, though different in every way that matters, darker, sharper, carrying something older in the way he holds himself.
“I am Enovar,” he says. “From the Florivar line, centuries ago.”
I stare at him. “So you are not Syle?"
“No,” he answers. “Wispers don’t have a voice of their own,” he says. “Not out loud. That’s why I'm here.” He says it as though the answer is obvious.
"I died too young," he adds.
The explanation does not help. Uralish waves his hand dismissively, and the figure dissolves back into Syle as though it had never fully separated. “Dead ancestors,” he says. “Sometimes they do not stay gone. In our line, sometimes they return.”
“That is a terrible gift,” I say.
“It has its uses,” Syle answers quietly in my mind. "One day I will show you."
I don't quite understand the benefit of sharing a body with a dead ancestor, but I keep that to myself.
“Now I am confused. If Syle can only speak through him, then why can he speak to me in his head without him?”
Uralish exhales. "Those born with golden eyes in the same bloodline can sometimes reach each other like this. You’re not unique. Korvis speaks with him the same way."
I pause, considering it. Korvis has golden eyes as well. I wondered if this was the case in all families or just House Floravar.
“I do not mind it,” Syle says in my head.
“Now that I know you are not reading everything I think,” I reply, “neither do I.”
Syle chuckles.
Uralish shakes his head slightly. “This is not why I brought you out here. It was not for history lessons."
He stops walking. “You cannot give birth here,” he says.
“Why?”
“Because if your child is born on Alarnan soil, it will be bound to the same system you are. The bond will follow them. Their life will be shaped by it whether you accept it or not.”
I feel the weight of that press somewhere deeper than thought.
“So I was born here?"
“Yes.”
“I am not accepting the bond.”
