He turned from the main avenue, away from the towering buildings, down a more modest street. These structures were homes, she found she knew. She tried to imagine a family requiring more than one door, and sometimes a second or even third story. There were balconies on some of them, and some had flat roofs with railings around the edges. Thymara had grown up in tiny structures built high in trees. If she stood and stretched out her arms in her bedchamber in her father’s house in Trehaug, she could touch both walls. And the ceiling. How could people need or use so much space?
Rapskal turned a corner, and she hastened beside him as he followed an uphill boulevard. The paved road was wide; she had never seen such a wide path. The houses here were staggered, looking out over one another toward the river. Gigantic pots held the skeletons of long-dead trees. Troughs of earth by doorways had once been small gardens. Dry bowls had cupped fountains.
She knew these things. Knew them as if someone had whispered them into her ear the moment she wondered. The gleaming stone, black with sparkling veins or sometimes gleaming white threaded with silver, spoke to her. They tugged at her with memories. She shook her head and focused herself on what Rapskal was saying to her.
“But then I found these two, and I listened to him for a while and I thought, Yes, that’s what I want to know and who I want to be. And she was right there next to him, and he told me all about her and I thought, Well, that’s almost like Thymara, and she could be her. And once we both take all that, then we’ll know more, to make the city work and maybe help the dragons.”
She was losing her breath as she trotted alongside him. “I still don’t understand, Rapskal.”
“We’re here. They can explain a lot better than I can. See? What do you think?”
She stared where he pointed and saw nothing unusual. The street ended in a cul-de-sac on the top of the hill. The entrance to the house at the top was framed by a series of open arches supported by stone pillars that glistened black and silver in the winter sunlight, marching in pairs toward the entry. To the left, they were marked with smiling suns. Those on the right each bore a gleaming silver medallion of a full moon smiling with a woman’s features.
“Let me show you. It’s so much easier than talking about it.” Rapskal pulled her forward. When they reached the first arch, he halted.
Thymara looked around. There were urns full of earth by each arch. “Vines,” she said, and abruptly she remembered them, the glossy dark leaves and the multitudes of tiny white flowers in clusters. They had bloomed in the heat of summer every year, and their sweet fragrance had scented every room in the house. There had been a fruit that followed, tiny clusters of bright orange berries that had no name in her language but were “gillary,” and every autumn, they had made a wine from them, one that kept the orange hue of the berries. It had been potent and sweet.
She swayed a little on her feet as she blinked her way back into her own life. She tried to take a few steps backward, but Rapskal tightened his grip on her hand. “Not like that,” he told her. “Well, you can, but then it’s all in pieces. Like coming up to a storyteller at a trunk market when he’s in the middle of telling the tale and only getting a part of the story. That’s not how they saved it for us. It’s all here, in order, in the pillars. We should start with the first ones. The moon ones are for you.”
“How do you know?” She still felt disoriented. For a time, long or short, she could not tell, she had been in another time. More than that, she realized. She had been another person. She pulled her hand free of his and took two steps back. “Drowning in memories! That’s what they meant. Rapskal, this is dangerous. My father warned me about stones like this! They pull you in and fill your mind with stories and you forget how to come back and be yourself. After a while, you’re just lost, not in that life and not in this one. How can you even think of doing this? You’re a Rain Wilder! You know better than this. What is the matter with you?”
She was horrified. It was bad enough that he would indulge in such a dangerous pastime. And monstrous that he had tried to drag her into it.
“No,” he said. “It’s not like that.”
She turned away from him.
“Thymara, please, just listen to me. Everything you know about memory stone and drowning in it is wrong. Because the people you learned it from, well, this wasn’t for them. It’s for us, for Elderlings. Look around the city and see how much there is of it. You’ve heard the whispers; I know you have. Would they have put this stone everywhere if it was so dangerous? No. They put it here because, to Elderlings, it’s not dangerous. It’s important. We need these stones. We need to use them to become who we are meant to be.”
