Page 108 of Guardian of Exile
He started to answer her, then looked around them. “I guess we should probably take a walk.”
She took that as a hopeful sign, since a simple no wouldn’t require the privacy afforded by the Station’s grounds. But it clearly wasn’t a simple yes for the same reason.
“You’re thinking about it?” she guessed when they finally crossed back onto Kaliaris’s grounds.
“If you explain how you plan to handle the fallout of the Stations disappearing, and if I buy it, then I’ll do this.”
She blew out a breath. She had a lot of work to do. But she had a chance now. “I thought you didn’t want to rejoin the Congregation.”
“I didn’t.” A pause. “I still don’t. They serve an important function. They keep us from getting lost in the lives we save. They take the memories and feelings of others from us, so we can just be who we are.
“But I’ve had to learn to separate that for myself, and though it’s hard and I don’t like it, I can. I don’t need them. So even if they could reintegrate me—and I’ve seen what they want to try and I’m not convinced it will work—I won’t do it. I won’t put my life in their hands again.
“I’m free. I’m the only Shaman in the universe who is.” He exhaled heavily. “And if anyone outside the Congregation and the Shamans ever discovers that, I’ll be hunted down and killed. So I figure it’s probably a good idea if I stick close to all of the people who also have vested interests in not being discovered for who or what they are.”
“That makes sense,” Nyx said slowly. “But you don’t have to help us to hang out with us. You may not be aware of this, but I’m somewhat known as a collector of lost causes. Just tell me you have nowhere else to go, and I’ll let you keep your room.”
He snorted as they reached the Station’s front porch and stopped. Nyx leaned against a support beam and Tristen shoved his hands in his pockets.
“I’ll take the room, but as for the other…when Shamans heal someone, we don’t just get glimpses of who they are. For the time we’re connected, we understand who they are. Completely. It’s why some people would rather die than be healed by one of us, and why before the Council developed their internal Shamanic corp, it wasn’t uncommon for some people to attempt to kill us after we saved their lives. Others are so prejudiced against races they view as lesser that if a Shaman heals someone from that race, some people view them as tainted.”
Nyx remembered when Kalvar had broken his ankle on Arkadia, and how he’d tried to stop Tobi from healing him. Not because he had a problem with Shamans, but because he’d been certain that healing him would ruin Tobi’s life.
“For most Shamans, that knowledge isn’t as long-lived as people suspect. It flows through them and the Congregation takes it, and so long as they don’t keep healing the same person over and over, that sense of connection fades.
“I don’t have the Congregation. What I feel and what I learn, it lingers with me and I have to bury it or force it out. I remember you and Kaliaris and Griff.”
Nyx couldn’t lie to herself and say that the thought of someone knowing her when she hadn’t chosen for them to do so didn’t disconcert her. She understood now why Jevryn had refused Tristen’s help. But she also understood that Tristen hadn’t chosen this burden for himself.
“I understand what Kaliaris and Griff have been through. Which means I understand what all of the Stations and Avatars have been through. And I understand that Guardians, when they become so, are chosen from the desperate, so that they will never think to look past their good fortune to ask what makes their life possible.
“I understand what it’s like to be beholden to something you didn’t choose. So I’ll do this.”
“Thank you.” She didn’t know what else to say.
He smiled and opened the Station’s front door. “Don’t thank me yet. You still have to wow me with logistics.”
“Right,” she muttered. Bryn Morrigan was just going to love it when Nyx showed up on her doorstep. But that was a problem for another day.
