Chapter 27
twenty-seven
Isahn is on a mission.
The peaceful sounds of birdsong and a rolling stream—plus the buzzing of an inordinately loud insect near his left ear—woke Isahn from an already fitful sleep.
With bleary eyes and a sneer, he looked around the shitty room at the shoddy inn where he’d stayed the night with Hill.
His traveling companion leaned with her back against the closed door, picking her teeth with the tip of her knife.
“Please don’t do that,” he grumbled. “It’s scary and disgusting.”
Hill shrugged. “Up and at ’em. We need to get going if we’re going to stay ahead of your uncle and find somewhere to stay the night.”
“Fine. What time is it? Is the sun even up?”
Mel Hill shrugged again. “It’s a gray day. The weather really sucks the farther south we travel.”
“It’s springtime... right?” He still wasn’t entirely sure how much time he’d lost to the damned mindmages who’d jailed him.
“Mid-spring.”
“Well, that’s a shitty time in Selwas. I’m not surprised this part of Gramenia is about the same.”
“Get out of bed.”
“I’m coming, I’m coming.” Struggling to his feet, he rubbed sleep from his eyes. He’d been unbearably exhausted of late, like his mind was busy through the wee hours while he tossed and turned.
Last night’s dream was of a woman with ruddy skin and fine brown hair; she looked like that jailor who’d questioned him the night he escaped.
But she had strange eyes of deep umber that bored into his very soul.
Instead of a guard’s attire, she wore a pale gray dress with flowing sleeves.
Her voluptuous body didn’t match the fine-haired jailor’s head.
“You all right there?” Hill’s voice cut through Isahn’s thoughts.
“I’m good.” He swapped his dingy tunic for a replacement Hill found in town the night before and stuffed the spare in his new sack. Then they departed the inn for another long day of travel.
They reached the Newand Principality’s capital—their last stop in Gramenia—not long before midnight.
“Three days to Midlake,” Isahn commented offhandedly as they approached the town.
“Are you excited to get home?”
Isahn shrugged. “Sure, I suppose. I’ve been missing something, and I’m assuming it’s home.”
She looked at him askance, but he was too tired to explain the hollow feeling in his chest. It was like losing his parents all over again, that strange emptiness that plagued him.
“I’m looking forward to seeing my sister and this tapestry you’ve been telling me about,” he added, placating Hill.
“I’m only telling you about it because you were telling me about it.”
He groaned, rubbing his temples. “This whole thing is so confusing.”
Hill laughed sadly, exhaling through her nose.
She’d reacquainted Isahn with the information he’d apparently overheard and shared with her before being made to forget the past month of his life.
According to Mel Hill, he’d learned from sympathetic guards that his shady Uncle Peros was a spy for the King of Domos, sent from the northern kingdom back to Selwas in search of some sort of artifact.
Isahn wanted to beat him there and get to it first. Hill explained how Isahn told her he thought it was significant, related to something nefarious the king was up to.
It was such a bizarre story he figured she couldn’t be making it all up, or maybe she was, and was still planning to murder him in his sleep. But she hadn’t tried anything yet.
With a sigh, he studied the stars. Great swaths of sparkles speckled the sky over the foothills of the Dhegur Peaks.
A tilting sensation swept over him, and he tensed his thighs to stay seated on his mount.
The shadowy hillsides that gave way to the stars warped into a room, a deep blue wall with a ceiling depicting constellations in gold.
He’d never been much of an interior decorator himself and had certainly never been anywhere that looked like that.
With a shake of his head, Isahn followed his companion into town, where she picked their lodgings.
“This place is owned by a guy who was enslaved in Domos for a while, but he got away.”
“How do you know that?”
“I overheard it,” Hill explained as they pushed open the creaky door.
Once their few belongings were stashed in a tiny bed chamber, they went to the pitiful dining room for dinner.
“Looks like shit here, but they say the food’s good. I know I wanted to leave Domos, but Gramenian cooking has nothing on home.” The ex-legionary ordered for them: an appetizer and a few fusion dishes that combined the grain-heavy diet of Gramenia with the olive-loaded fare of Domos.
“What are these?” he asked, picking up a dark oblong item. Hill had already bitten into one, so he figured he was meant to eat it with his fingers.
“Dolmades,” she explained, finishing hers off.
“What’s in it, any strange surprises?”
“They’re stuffed grape leaves. Filled with rice, pine nuts, and herbs. Try it.”
Isahn bit into the food, and his senses flooded.
There was the strangest pull at the base of his brain.
Sudden nerves fluttered through his system, and he felt as though he was lying on his side despite sitting upright in a chair.
His hand morphed into that of a woman with bronzed skin and many rings.
Husky laughter tickled his ears, and his chest throbbed.
“Are you all right?” Hill’s concern punctured his confusion.
“No,” Isahn bit out, setting down the other half of his food. “I don’t know what’s happening.”
“Let me help you up to bed.”
He nodded, mute. A dinner unfolded before his eyes, low sofas stationed around a central table. The pregnant woman, that viceroy, there were others there too...
As they ascended, Isahn tripped slightly on one of the steps, stumbling forward.
“I’ve got you, come on. Almost there,” Mel Hill murmured as they ascended.
“Thanks, Hildy,” he replied.
In the morning, Isahn awoke alone in their room. Hill returned not long later, just as he finished readying himself for the day. She held a folded-up piece of parchment in her hand and smiled softly when she saw he was awake.
“Didn’t sleep well?”
“No.”
“Well, I have something that might help. Do you recall yesterday evening? When your... head was bothering you?”
Isahn squinted at the woman warily, picking back through his cluttered mind.
They’d been sitting at a table, downstairs, at this inn.
She’d ordered something for an appetizer.
Dolmades. Her description of the food, the flavors, had triggered him, and he’d been thrown to a different time and place.
“I think it was a memory, one of the ones that was erased. But I’m not certain. ”
“Do you—”
“Wait!” He froze, heart thundering as he formed an ice-knife in his hand. “Your name’s Hildy, not Hill. Who the fuck are you?”
“You do remember.” She unfolded the paper in her hands. “People call me Hil, that wasn’t a lie. Just with one L, not two.”
Isahn considered her skeptically.
“Listen, I’ll explain on the road today. But, I got a letter from Ge— some friends. They’re trying to see if it’s possible to fix what the mind magic did to you.”
“Why are they trying to help me?”
“They like you.”
“They’re the people from my memory? That dinner, with the weird low sofas.”
“Is that what you recalled?”
He nodded.
“What did the room look like?” Hildy prodded.
Isahn tried to dive back in, but the wisps had faded. “Why did you keep this from me?!”
Her eyes widened. “To protect you! We had no idea what to do here. What did the room look like, Isahn?”
Gritting his teeth, he replied, “It’s hard to say, but you were there, must’ve been, or I wouldn’t have remembered your name. A tall man with dark skin and long black locs, a stockier man with short curly hair, that pregnant woman, Domina Neninos, Viceroy Neninos, and...”
“And?”
Something about that other person felt sacred to Isahn, private, like he was supposed to keep her all to himself. “Someone else, not sure. It’s hazy.”
She sighed.
“We weren’t captives together?”
“No. Not really.”
Isahn squinted at her. “If you know where I’ve been and what I’ve done, why don’t you just tell me?”
“It’s not advised. It could cause you more trouble.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s not! Or we don’t think it is. According to my friends, the mindmolding works like building a wall around your true memories. If you can start to pull out the building blocks, you may be able to get to what’s hidden inside.”
Isahn pondered that for a moment, considering all of those weird feelings he’d been having over the past week of travel.
“So, if I have one true element of a memory, like the taste of those dolmades, it’s possible I can tap into the feelings associated with that memory, with other senses tied to it, and ‘tear down the walls’?
” He used air quotations around the final piece of his statement.
“I mean, maybe? It’s certainly better than doing nothing.”
“True.”
During yet another sleepless night, this time back in Selwas, in Turkhane, Isahn’s mind cracked open. He’d spent the night picking at bricks, as his new friend suggested he try. When the dust settled, sparkling in the morning light, he realized some things had not been quite as they’d seemed.
For starters, he knew Hildy had also gone by Melody as a code name when she and her friends had first, unintentionally, imprisoned him.
He didn’t remember everything, but he was pretty sure he’d broken through to a fair amount of the truth.
Things like being questioned in a basement in Sorhaven returned to his mind, riding in a blasted box on the back of a cart, being freed by a beautiful woman whose face and hair were ever-changing; he remembered those things quite clearly.
But Isahn encountered a few new issues. For starters, he was in love with the face-shifting woman.
His heart didn’t lie, and he could easily picture her many hair colors and textures, the different tones she effortlessly slipped over her skin.
The problem was, he wasn’t sure whether his feelings were based on any real-life relationship.
Had he fallen head over heels for someone who wasn’t interested?
Who was she? He longed to ask Hildy, but some things were too private.
It wasn’t like she would have any way of confirming that Isahn’s feelings were real.
“It’s less than six hours’ ride from here to Midlake,” he argued as they paused on their horses beside a branch in the road.
The turn to their left led to Napivol, an approximate midpoint between Turkhane and Midlake, but it would add at least two more hours to their damnably long journey, and that wasn’t even counting the extra, pointless overnight.
The way ahead went directly to Midlake, to home.
If they continued on, they’d make it before midnight.
That seemed reasonable to him. His arse already hurt, but with the insanity raging inside his mind, Isahn desperately wanted to get to someplace familiar.
“We can finish the journey today. Peros won’t be stopping. Why should we?”
“We’re stopping.”
“There’s no reason to add an overnight.”
“Yes, there is.”
“No, there’s not. Why!?”
“Because I said so,” Hildy replied.
“Beciss.” The strange word slipped out before Isahn could even process what he was saying.
He could have sworn Hildy smirked.
A new mudslide of memories rushed him. Gorgeous deep eyes, smooth dark skin, adorably frizzy black curls. A demanding attitude. Compassion beyond bounds.
“Oh my gods,” he gasped. George. Princess Georgetta Kastrumanos of Domos, who hated her full name. Isahn blinked rapidly, half as fast as his racing heart.
The tone of his mental onslaught shifted. He was creeping through darkened hallways, or was he inside the walls? A panel opened. A bearded man raging at his Uncle Peros. The woman he loved in pain. Humiliation. Wings. A scrap of paper. Prophecies.
He gagged, nearly vomiting on the road.
“Are you all right?”
“No! I’m not fucking all right. Why are you really traveling with me? What’s our mission?!” Panicked, Isahn kicked his horse into a canter, heading straight on toward Midlake. It didn’t matter what this Hildy woman wanted; Isahn wanted to go home.
She caught up to him in no time, urging him to slow his mount to a walk so they could talk. The legionary-turned-private-guard-to-the-princess capitulated to his silent demand. They’d ride into the night.
Soon, he’d be back at Staridge.
As their horses clomped along the hard-packed earth, Hildy told Isahn the long and sordid tale of the horrible King Gasparo, whose unparalleled magical abilities and unchallenged reign had gone to his head.
The terrible king, following in the footsteps of his forefathers, kept a great many enslaved in Domos using shackles powered by magic.
The woman’s words felt true enough, but there was something she wasn’t telling him, something she was skirting around. Isahn knew, because he remembered more than he’d admitted to. “Don’t talk in metaphors, Hildy. I remember Eanraig and the fae.”
“Oh, fuck.”