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Sonea remembered learning the skill of mental communication, and learning to think of her mind as a house whose doors could be locked or left open, brought into being or turned into walls.
She remembered learning, first, the divisions that would allow a fellow magician to speak to her without learning information neither of them wished shared; then the control that ensured she could hold her secrets safe against an interrogator of roughly equal skill.
There had been no possible defence against Akkarin, when first he had demanded to review her thoughts.
The defences of her mind were built on ideas, and to her chagrin, that one had persisted in its original shape. She had never since been able to convince herself that she could keep Akkarin out of her mind.
So it did not surprise her that when she toured the rooms of her own mind, performing the housekeeping any sensible magician should do, she found him there. She imagined a gallery of paintings, each image something striking that she had seen, and found him inadvertently included: a figure inspecting something on the far side of the room. She imagined a room of secrets, stone walls surrounding a secret hollow in sheer rock, with no entry possible at all except for magicians, and there she found him sleeping, making the stone floor look like a comfortable bed and the darkness a respite, as perhaps it might have been at oppressive and vexing points while he yet lived.
For he lived in memory now, and yet, when a magician said that phrase, could it mean something different than it did in the ordinary way?
Are you here, Akkarin? She had been with him when he died. Could souls leap?
Have I trapped you here? Perhaps she should fear for herself, and not for him, but that was not how it was with them. She had feared him once, and after that fear had turned to other things, she did not think she could ever have feared him again.
Behind her closed eyelids, his smile glowed, sharp and ironic. If he did not know what he could say that she would believe... that, perhaps, made two of them.