15. SIN #3
“I did it to protect you.” Now Akkani’s voice was soft, soothing.
“Did you know I’m the one who found you and brought you to the Church?
Of all my students over the years, I’ve seen the most of myself in you.
The Council wanted to execute you after Elyas’s fall, but I stayed their hand.
I know you’ve always been loyal; you were once our Order’s finest. You are capable of grasping what must be done.
” She paused. “Prove me right, Jacen. Show me you’re capable of redeeming yourself. ”
Her words cracked something vital inside him.
“I have only ever done what I must,” Akkani said. “And now it’s your turn. Who else have you told?”
She had asked such a question before, just a few days prior in the High Lord’s audience chamber.
“I already know you’re working with Ged,” Akkani said. “And the Dalishman, of course. If there’s meddling in this city, he’s usually involved. Did you tell your novitiate? Or Seth Semira? I know the two of you were close, once.”
Jacen felt his reaction flit across his face before he could suppress it. “They don’t know anything.”
“I cannot let this get out.” Akkani was almost apologetic. “I need to know who you’ve told, what you’ve told them, and what Ged is planning. I need the truth, do you understand? By any means. Help me stop whatever you’ve unleashed before it destroys everything we hold dear.”
He considered what might happen should he tell Akkani everything. Sickness pooled in his stomach. If he talked, he proved he was nothing more than a murderer and a coward. A servant of a cause he’d exhumed and found utterly hollow.
He closed his eyes, seeing the truth of himself at last in that infinite dark.
Who would you be without us? But it was never his post that Jacen truly feared to lose—no status or power, but something far less tangible, over which no man or Church had purview. A strange calm settled over him.
“No,” he said.
He was grasping in the void for some greater purpose, just as he always had, and perhaps he would never find it. But for now, he could stand for this. He would not give this lying, monstrous person what she wanted—not without making her hurt for it, too.
“Pity.” Akkani tilted her head. “I was wrong about you.” She stepped forward, holding out a hand. “I’m sorry, Jacen.”
Pale fingers curled toward him, reaching.
He took an involuntary step back and toppled into the cell. Landed flat on his back, gasping for air. His efforts to defend himself crumbled. She knew him too well; he’d given her too much.
Her mind slid inside his. A shudder wracked his body.
He tried to scream but could not, because his mouth no longer belonged to him.
She delved deeper, shredding through his defenses until his entire being was laid bare.
She flayed his mind open and prodded at it like an expanse of bruised flesh, homing in on every tender place.
She ripped those painful memories up, dragging them to the surface inch by bloody inch.
He could not stop her, and soon, she knew everything.
Not just the answers she’d come for—an inquisitor left no stone unturned. Even as the barrier between their minds blurred and she felt his pain and humiliation as her own, she endured it. She took everything.
His guilt over Elyas. His complicated hatred of Brother Marez.
His longing for a home he could not remember, his passion for his work, his crisis of faith, his guilt, his guilt, his guilt .
. . Every time he’d nudged someone’s mind because he was tired or irritated or simply lazy.
The day he stole from an elderly confessor to afford his liquor.
All the heartbreaking stories of poverty, sickness, and strife with which his congregants trusted him, all those struggles he could do nothing about but pray, and pray to what?
Every vow he’d been tempted to break. Every odd and embarrassing thing he’d ever fantasized about.
The time he’d kissed Hesaya and they’d both hated it.
Lying in the sand after Ysira knocked him flat on his back.
His feelings for Seth, deep enough to drown in.
Every terrible thought he’d ever had that made him wonder if he was a madman or a degenerate or a monster.
Everything he would never have admitted to another soul, because surely no decent person could have a mind like this.
When Akkani gave him back control of his body, Jacen crawled to his knees on the filthy floor. Tears soaked his cheeks. A horrible sound escaped him. He vomited until there was nothing left in his stomach. Hugged his shoulders in a vain attempt to stop their violent shaking.
“Someday,” said Akkani, “I hope you understand you gave me no choice. This is for the good of all our people—and for you.”
She believed that. As she’d ripped through his mind, Jacen had felt the depth of her conviction—that she had done something necessary to him, something he would one day even thank her for. And he could not make sense of it. What he would have given, to claw his way out of his own skin.
She left him alone, catatonic in his cell. The guards returned to shut the metal slab overhead, and his world became unbearably small. He huddled there in silence, old wounds ripped open, the contents of his mind strewn about in disarray like the shattered pieces of his life.