Every time I turned the stone toward someone, I asked it to show the truth to me. Bastien. Jorax. Orso. A guard outside a door. In every case a single mind opened and its truth came to me alone. Early on I had assumed that was the entire operation of the stone, one subject, one destination. Yet the incident with the corridor demonstrated there was more to it. I had only ever triggered that side once, by accident, screaming a question instead of asking it.
I had been thinking about that night wrong for weeks. Two guards, both exposed, both aware of what the other now knew. If I wanted five hundred delegates to know something, on that model, I would need something like five hundred test subjects, all broadcast to at once. This was so far past anything I had tested that it frightened me even to consider attempting it.
If I were to do further experiments with this second mode, I would need a test subject.
Bastien came in not long after with water.
"I need to ask you something, and I need you to feel free to say no," I said.
He set the jug down slowly. "That's not usually how you start good news."
"It isn't news," I said quietly. "Not the first part. It's a confession."
I couldn't look at him but I showed him the Truth Stone.
"I've used this on you twice."
Silence settled between us.
"The first time was during our march, the night you were checking the wagons after dark. I'd come to believe you might be working against the mission. I never thought it was intentional, but some part of you pulling for it to fail, so you could go home with your honor intact instead of failing some other way. I told myself I had a duty to know for certain. So I read you.
"I didn't stop there. I used what I found. I caught up to you and talked you into staying the course instead of turning back. It worked. We kept moving. For a long time I told myself the outcome justified that. I'm less sure of it now."
"The second time..." I looked down at the stone. "The second time I almost didn't."
"After that first night, I swore to myself I wouldn't use it on you again. For a while that held. You slept. The mission moved."
I let out a slow breath.
"Then, weeks on, it started again."
"You stopped sleeping. You went back over the same ground long after it had already been checked. You were driving yourself into exhaustion, and with you went the discipline of the whole expedition. I watched. I asked questions. I tested every explanation I could think of. I told myself I didn't need a magic stone to understand my friend. Every explanation I tested failed."
I met his eyes.
"When I finally reached for the stone again, it wasn't because I doubted your loyalty. It was because I told myself I was responsible for everyone in that caravan. I had a duty to all the men's lives to know."
I finally looked up.
"So I reached for the stone."
Bastien's face never changed.
"I learned what I needed to know. And I learned something about myself."
My hand closed around the stone.
"For a long time I told myself necessity made the choice clean. It doesn't. Necessary is just necessary."
I shook my head.
"If those same lives depended on it again... I don't know that I'd choose differently."
The admission was bitter as ash.
"But I will not pretend that doing what is necessary means I had the right."
I took a slow breath.
"You trusted me more than anyone has ever trusted me. I answered that trust by deciding your thoughts belonged to me."
I set the stone on the table between us.
"I can't ask you to forgive that. I only owe you the truth."
He did not move for a long time.
"You could have just asked me if I was hiding something."
"I could have. I didn't trust the answer the way I trusted the stone. That's mine to sit with, not yours to forgive."
"What did you see," he said finally. Not whether. What. I understood he meant the first time.
"A house. A wife. A daughter, waiting on you to come home to her."
Something crossed his face.
"Now I need to try something similar. Not on you. But this time I need you beside me for it instead."
"Beside you for what."
I looked past him, through the open door. A Helot woman had passed by sweeping and I heard her continuing down the hall. Dozens of people walked past my door every day. Nobody wondered what she intended. "Her. I want to read her the way I've read anyone, and send what I find to both of us at once instead of keeping it to myself."
Bastien followed my eyes out the door, then back to me. "You're about to do to her exactly what you just spent this whole conversation confessing you did to me."
"Yes." I hesitated. "I don't have a way around that part of it. She can't consent to this any more than you could, that night by the wagons. All I can actually offer you now is that this is also necessary. And you won't have to carry it alone."
"That's not the same as asking her."
"No." I held the stone. "But Ruvuk doesn't know about this stone, and it has to stay that way."
"What will it feel like?"
"I don't fully know. It might be nothing at all. The only thing I know for certain is that it will feel like your own thought, arriving from somewhere that isn't you."
He looked at her through the doorway a moment longer. Then, quietly: "Do it."
I didn't hesitate lest I change my mind. I asked of her the same question that I asked of all those before her: what is your purpose, right now? Then I tried to do the one thing I had never once managed on purpose: keep the answer from coming to rest in me alone.
I did not know how. That was the truth of it. The only time it had ever gone wide was in the corridor, and in the corridor I had not been aiming at all. I had been past aiming, past thought, screaming a question I no longer had the composure to ask quietly. There was no rage in me now to break with. I had only the memory of what breaking had felt like, and no map back to that place from a standing start.
I pushed. My hand was rigid around the stone. My jaw ached with the voiceless effort of it. If the effort fell short of whatever was required, nothing would happen.
For a long moment there was only the ordinary sound of a broom moving over stone, and I thought I had spent everything I had asking for a thing the stone was not going to give me.
Then it arrived, in both of us at once, and whatever I had been straining against let go so suddenly I nearly lost my footing.
She wasn't looking for escape or weapons or vengeance for having her life taken away from her. Underneath the sweeping, underneath the count of her own strokes, she was doing something with her attention that had nothing to do with the broom at all. She was saying her name to herself. Not the name the Hegemony gave her. Not the one she answered to here, but the one from before, the one no one in this land had spoken aloud to her in countless years of serving the Hegemony. She wasn't looking to reclaim it. She was simply doing, stroke after stroke, the one thing still left that she could do about it: making certain, in the one place no one could enter to take it from her, that she still knew what it had been.
Bastien's hand found the doorframe.
He did not say anything for a long time. When he finally spoke, his voice had gone quiet and careful.
"That's all," he said finally.
"That's all," I agreed.
It had worked. I did not yet know whether that cost grew steadily with each added receiver or grew faster than the numbers did. Changing the mode had not required rage, just the same willingness to do an unfair thing that I had just spent an hour confessing to.
I still did not know what five hundred men in the Grand Assembly Hall would do with the same truth about someone most of them had never had reason to doubt. I did not know if the effort would keep scaling the way it just had, one receiver at a time, or would break somewhere past a number I had no way to test for lack of four hundred and ninety-eight more strangers passing through a hallway. What I knew now was that it was something I could do on purpose.
"Thank you for telling me," Bastien said, in the same flat voice he used for everything, which was somehow worse than if he had raised it.
"I should have told you the first time."
"Yes." He picked the jug back up. "You should have."
He did not say it would be fine. He did not say he forgave me. He filled the cup, set it within my reach, and went back to whatever he had been doing. This was part of his answer, and that I would need to live with it being the only one I got.