55. Fifty-Five
Chapter 55
They built a camp in the lee of the mountain. Karema had not struck me as kind before, or soft. But as her people celebrated and Tarelay told Kalcedon about his domain and the lands that bordered Sorrow, she wordlessly offered me the privacy of the furthest tent.
I took it without hesitation. From inside the canvas walls, I could hear the revelry. Somebody, perhaps Tonen, tuned an instrument. A loud laugh sounded like Oraik’s—he had come to but was still too weak to move. I was selfishly glad for that since it meant I could escape. I was in no mood to be cheered.
I wrapped a blanket tight around my shoulders and curled on the floor. I’d known better than to let myself care. And yet I had. Now my whole chest ached so bitterly I thought it might kill me.
A beam of golden light angled across my legs as somebody drew the tent-flap open. Then familiar power, warmer than the sun’s dying light, spilled over my body. I drew a breath so sudden it ached, and squeezed my eyes shut. Kalcedon.
“Why did it hurt?” Kalcedon asked, his voice low.
I didn’t want to talk to him if things wouldn’t go back to how they’d been. But nor could I bear to push him away. I opened my eyes again. I didn’t look at him, instead staring blankly at the dust motes suspended in the light.
“Why did what hurt?” I whispered. I’d been crying too much. My throat burned.
“I woke to a nightmare,” he answered, taking one step into the tent, then another. The flap fell shut, blocking the light. The dust motes vanished back into darkness. “But you—when I saw you were dying. That’s when it started to hurt. That’s when something in me broke. Who are you, Meda?”
My lips trembled. For a moment I let myself look at Kalcedon, at the intensity in his dark eyes, his mess of hair framing his angular face.
“Someone told you my name.”
“No. I remembered it.” He hesitated, wetting his lips. “When I think, I can… find bits and pieces of who I was.”
“Hah,” I said, the word a sharp exhale. “Pieces. Isn’t that a blessing.”
The tent was small and unornamented, its walls plain fabric that afternoon light seeped through in a soft glow. My bag rested in a corner. The blankets I’d wrapped myself in were the only decoration. There was nowhere to look, really, apart from Kalcedon. As if I could have looked away, when he commanded every fiber of me.
Pieces, he’d been left with. Pieces of who he was. And I was one of those pieces; I was at least a name, and a hurt in his chest. It was something. But it was so much less than I wanted. What was the point of living when it was so easy to lose everything?
“You’re mad I don’t remember more,” Kalcedon guessed awkwardly. He looked uncomfortable.
“…Not at you,” I admitted. It was the world I was mad at; the Cachian god playing games with our lives. The Sorrowing Lord, treating people like puppets and taking away everything that mattered. Slowly I pushed myself up off the floor, the blanket still draped around my shoulders. The new Sorrowing Lord— Kalcedon —crouched near the entrance to the tent, only a few feet away. His mouth was tight; severe. He watched me cautiously.
I felt my hands tremble as I drew a deep breath. “What else do you remember?”
He frowned, and rubbed the back of his neck, looking down.
“About you….?”
“Yes. About us.”
“I have to think,” he said. He closed his eyes for a long moment. “I can remember us, standing outside a tower. Your arms were full. You stuck out a hand to shake mine, and your book fell. You gasped like you’d been hit.”
“That was the day we met,” I told him. “You remember the day we met?”
Kalcedon smiled, looking at me.
“Yes. I remember the moment I saw you. I thought you were…” He shook his head. “Well. You were different. I don’t know from what. I just remember thinking it. Liking it about you.”
“What else?” I asked hungrily.
“I remember you laughing. So hard you couldn’t breathe. We were by a cliff, that time. You’d brought three books in your bag, even though we weren’t going to be there long…”
I thought for a moment, wrapping my arms around my knees and resting my chin on them.
“The day you wanted to pick rock samphire,” I told him as quickly as it came to me. “You couldn’t remember Xandi of Koraica’s name. You kept guessing wrong. I don’t know why you’d remember that memory when you couldn’t even remember Xandi’s principals. What kind of witch are you?”
He shrugged. “I was so happy it hurt. That’s why, maybe. A strong memory.”
“Tell me more. What else?”
He closed his eyes, brow furrowed. It looked like he was thinking. A long moment passed, and I braced myself for him to say nothing, I can’t remember anything else. His eyes opened. The ease was gone from his expression, replaced by a grim solemnity.
“You, in a wooden room. A ship. On the floor. I came in and you were…”
“Dying again,” I supplied, when he stopped talking. “That was only a few days ago.”
“And a roof,” Kalcedon continued. “I remember us. On a roof.”
“The tower? On Nis?”
“No. In a city. At night.” He was looking at me now with a fierce and hungry question in his eyes. I bit my lip, heart pounding.
“What do you remember about that?”
“How you felt beneath me. How much I loved you.” His voice was hoarse.
I silently formed my lips around the word loved . The history of it. The way it sounded like an ending.
Kalcedon studied his hands, then looked back to me.
“I know there’s more, I can feel it. But it just—it keeps slipping. Like I’m walking through fog, trying to make out shapes.”
“Maybe you’ll remember more,” I told him, through a throat choked with pain and hope.
“Tarelay thinks I will. Some of it, at least. But Meda?”
“Yes?”
“Will you tell me the rest?” The words tumbled from his lips. “Will you tell me all of it? I know I shouldn’t ask, when you’re aching or maybe angry, but I can feel it all, what you mean to me, and I don’t want to wait for it to come to me. I want to know…” he paused and studied me, then continued, haltingly, his words slower now. “Unless… you don’t… feel that way, anymore, about me…”
“I do,” I said, and patted the ground beside me. Kalcedon kneed over to me, and as I lay back down onto the tent’s floor he slowly lowered himself beside me, his dark eyes never leaving my face. “Tell me what you want to know.”
“Our story,” he told me. “All of it. Everything you’re willing to tell.”
“Alright,” I whispered, and wetted my lips, and wondered where I was supposed to begin with a task so large.
“It started three years ago, in a tower by the sea-cliffs of Nis-Illous. I’d have given my right hand for the great seer Eudoria—” Kalcedon’s eyes widened, as he recalled a new pain “—to take me as an apprentice. But she already had a student…”