Wolfsbane Winter by Jane Fletcher

door. But she could have crawled. She would have done anything to get out of the room and away.
    Abruptly, Orrin was standing before her, with one of the items from the table in his hands. Alana had not seen him move. Had she passed out briefly? She tried to focus on the candles, to see how far they had burned down, but her vision was distorted. Light and color were smeared. Her heartbeat thundered in her ears. Sweat trickled down her back and sides, soaking into the waistband of her pants.
    Orrin came closer. Alana’s eyesight cleared briefly, enough for her to see that the item he held looked like a small steel club, no more than a foot in length. One end was engraved with cross-hatching, either as decoration or to provide a secure grip. Bands of green light danced up and down a flattened surface along the other end. What sort of weapon was it?
    As if in answer to her thought, Orrin spoke. “This device was brought back from the wastelands some years ago by a band of Iron Wolf mercenaries. It’s lain in the king’s armory since then. Nobody knew what it was. In fact, I still can’t give you a name for it, but I know what its purpose is. You can think of it as a sort of lens, if you like. It sharpens up thoughts, and it’s going to assist me in focusing my talent on you. It will give me the keen edge to cut through the barriers you’ve built around your mind.”
    Wielding the metal bar as if it were indeed a carving knife, Orrin sliced through the air. The flattened section swept by Alana’s face, passing a scant inch from her cheek. She flinched although the device did not touch her, and despite the absence of physical contact, some part of Alana was severed. Like taking peel off an orange, a strip of the casing around her mind was cut away.
    The universe flowed in. Had the gag not been in her mouth, Alana would have screamed, from shock rather than pain. An avalanche of emotion overwhelmed her. Anger, love, regret, pride, amusement, disgust. Any consciousness that she might have claimed as her own was lost in the torrent from outside.
    Again the bar passed before Alana’s eyes. Another gap in her head opened up and more emotions flooded in. Orrin’s smug triumph. Her mother’s excited hopes. Reyna’s optimistic concern. The disappointment of the stable boy in the yard outside. The boredom of a guard on sentry duty. A courtier’s irritation. A lover’s desire. A thief’s greed. A widow’s grief. The whole of Ellaye was streaming into her head. Alana could not pick her own thoughts clear from the confusion.
    Still Orrin sliced with his bar. How much more was there to the world? The arcane device was flaying her mind, laying her soul exposed and utterly vulnerable. She no longer knew herself. She no longer existed. The onslaught obliterated and overwrote everything that she could call Alana.
    With relief, she embraced the dark jaws of unconsciousness that consumed her.

    *

    For the merest instant upon waking, Alana wondered what was going on, before the tumult of the world ripped all coherent thought to shreds. Stabs of anger and dismay filled her head, filtered through a choking web of terror. Further away, the thunderous roar of love and hate seethed around nodes of other emotions. Her identity was lost amid the chaos.
    Desperately, Alana clawed at her senses, trying to use whatever they could tell her as building blocks to construct some self-awareness. Soft pressure along her back revealed that she was lying on a bed or couch. The acrid bite of smelling salts defined her nose. Sunlight glowed red through her closed eyelids. Someone was whimpering softly, while other voices talked in the background.
    “He ought to have known.”
    “But what are we going to do?”
    “What can we do?”
    Alana tried to concentrate on the words and ignore the way they sparked new bursts of irritation, but another emotion was strengthening. Anxious satisfaction was getting closer, and then Alana heard a door open. The bitter