T he woman hugged me, and I just stood there, not sure what to do.
I bowed my head and was struck with the overwhelming scent of
citrus. With that scent came the ghost of a thousand other memories. It smelled like home. I wanted to fold my arms around her, bury my face in her hair, hold it in my lungs like smoke from fine tobacco. This stranger.
Instead I settled for that single hand laid gently between her shoulder blades.
My eyes flicked up and landed on Sammerin’s face. He was looking at me like something was wrong.
Eventually, the woman went stiff and still, as if the same realization had fallen over her. When she stepped away, I resisted the sudden urge to pull her back again.
She looked up at me.
Ascended fucking above, she was stunning. Her eyes were mismatched, one silver and one amber-green. Moonlight pooled in the silver iris.
“Max?”
The way she said my name made me stop breathing for a moment. Two syllables, spoken like a melody.
“I don’t…”
I don’t remember you.
No. That wasn’t right. Not really. I didn’t know this woman’s name, or how I met her. I held no memories of her. But I knew her. I knew her somewhere intrinsic, deeper than flesh. That part of my past called to me, and fuck, I wanted to reach for it—but even that instinctual drive for my
past was met with a wall and a sudden spike of pain through the back of my skull.
I was bad with words at the best of times, let alone now, as I struggled to explain something I didn’t even understand myself.
“There’s a lot that I don’t remember,” I said, at last.
A wrinkle deepened between the woman’s eyebrows. “Like… what?”
“I remember my childhood, mostly. But anything after seventeen or so… it’s just… gone.”
Even that didn’t describe all of it. The way I felt the imprint of the past but couldn’t recall the details that made it that way.
“Gone?” she repeated. “I don’t understand.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it, increasingly frustrated with everything I couldn’t put into words. “What’s your name?”
For a split second, the woman’s face just collapsed—first in shock, and then in devastation. She took two steps backwards, and I closed the distance again without thinking.
“You are not asking me that,” she choked out.
She quickly forced her face back into neutrality, but I could still see her heart breaking, and the sight of it made mine ache, too.
I stepped closer again. I wanted her to say something more, but her mouth was now tightly closed, like she feared whatever might slip out.
“But before, he remembered nothing at all,” Brayan added. “This is an improvement already.”
Sammerin let out a small breath. “So your memory is coming back.”
“Maybe.” I didn’t think that was necessarily true, even if I hoped it was. I still couldn’t take my eyes off that woman, who now stood with her arms crossed tight over her chest, as if shielding herself.
“I have so many questions.” Sammerin rubbed his temple. “How did you get out of Ilyzath? We’ve been trying to break you out for months.”
They had?
If explaining my memory loss was difficult, explaining the bizarre circumstances of my escape seemed downright impossible. “That answer is… complicated.”
A wrinkle deepened between his brow. “Did Nura do that to you? The memory loss?”
He was a friend, I thought. A good friend. I could feel the imprint of that too, even though the details, again, remained locked behind a wall I
couldn’t breach. Even if I hadn’t felt the echo of that relationship, then the slight, restrained anger in his voice at Nura’s name would have betrayed it.
The winged Fey came closer. His stare made me uncomfortable—that ageless bright gold seemed to pick me apart. My gaze lingered on the points of his ears. He was clearly an ally to these two, but I knew Fey only as the creatures that I watched tear Ara to shreds over the last months.
“May I?” he asked and took my wrist before I had the chance to answer, pushing my sleeve up my arm.
“Excuse you,” I muttered.
He ignored me as he examined the tattoos. The ones on my wrists and hands blistered fiercely.
“What are these?” the Fey asked. “Human magic?”
“Stratagrams,” Sammerin offered. “Visual manifestations of magic to help Wielders execute complex spells.” His eyes flicked to me. “Did she put these here to bind your magic? I’ve never seen so many on one person.”
I nodded as I pulled my arm away, oddly self-conscious.
The Fey looked dissatisfied with this answer. “But you used your magic in the battle.”
“I can, sometimes. Only for a few minutes at most. Seemingly at random. I don’t know how or why.”
What I didn’t say is that when I came here, when I fought beside this stranger, my magic felt more alive than it had in months. I still paid for it, and it was still unpredictable, but it wasn’t even that hard for me to slip Nura’s chains.
“Interesting,” the Fey murmured.
Sammerin’s fingers lingered at his chin, deep in thought. “And your mind… the Stratagrams did that?”
“I don’t think so. That came—” “Before.”
The woman looked at me with wide eyes, then broke my stare and went silent.
I cleared my throat, awkwardly. “Maybe. I don’t— it’s hard for me to say.”
“But your magic… it’s not gone. Only locked.” Sammerin surveyed the tattoos.
“Yes.”
“You drew from a deeper level tonight,” the Fey said. “That is why you were able to use it. You drew from it before, and that magic does not obey the rules of your human—”
“Wait.” I held up my hand. “I could draw from it before? What does that mean?”
The Fey went silent. He looked to Sammerin, then the girl. “You and Tisaanah are capable of drawing from these streams of magic.”
Tisaanah.
The sound of her name just… fit. I glanced up at her. She was silent, her arms crossed around herself.
“Why?” I asked.
A tiny whisper in the back of my head:
Do not ask questions you do not want to answer. Sammerin and Tisaanah exchanged a heavy glance. “That is a very long story,” Sammerin said, at last.
“I don’t care,” I said, but that sharp pain was building in my skull, like a knife held with steadily increasing pressure. I blinked and saw a burning girl, saw a closed set of gates with a lion at their arch.
There is a door you cannot open. A place you do not wish to return.
I gritted my teeth and tried to ignore it. “And what, then, are the three of you doing? What does it have to do with me?”
Tisaanah made a small, breathless noise, a sort of strangled laugh. “You are familiar with the war,” Ishqa said.
“Of course,” I said. “I spent enough time on Nura’s table because of it.”
A wince flitted across Tisaanah’s face, and she turned away again, as if she couldn’t stand to look at me. That made my chest ache for reasons I didn’t understand.
“We have an opportunity to stop this war before it results in the genocide of either of our peoples,” Ishqa said. “But the only chance we have of doing that is with the magic that you, Tisaanah, and precious few others have access to.”
Ascended above.
Of their own accord, my fingers pressed to my temple. The pain had gotten so intense that it had become difficult to focus on anything else, let alone anything as unbelievable as what these people were telling me.
“Before we go anywhere else, we must help him.” Tisaanah looked pointedly at Ishqa. “Do you know anyone who could do that?”
Ishqa looked hesitant.
“You want me to find and harness the Lejaras?” She thrust out her palm, and in a ray of moonlight I caught a glimpse of gold splashed across it, like metal etched into her skin. My eyebrows arched, my fingers going to the strange symbol on my own hand—the one Ilyzath had given me. “I cannot do it without him. So if we are to do this, then we need to help him first.”
“I have only one idea,” Ishqa said, after a long moment. “I know of someone who may be able to help in Zagos.”
“Zagos?” Brayan let out a scoff. “You know it?” Ishqa said.
“It doesn’t exist.”
“It very much does exist.”
“Then I can’t imagine we’re going to find anything good there.” “What is Zagos?” Tisaanah asked.
“It’s a mythical fugitive city,” Brayan said. “I can’t count how many times I’d been hired to go apprehend some criminal or another that was claimed to be in Zagos.”
Ah, now I understood Brayan’s attitude. He was just bitter that if the place existed, he hadn’t been able to find it.
“It is… an interesting place. But it is on our route north anyway. Besides…” A wry smile tugged at Ishqa’s mouth. “Where does one go to find forgotten things? The place where people go to be forgotten.”
A distant commotion rang out, echoing through the forest. The sound was loud enough to jar us from the depths of our conversation. We all looked around and seemed to simultaneously remember that we were standing in the middle of a field, Ascended-knew-where, and that no doubt there was a small army—potentially, soon to become a large army— searching for us.
“We shouldn’t linger.” Tisaanah was the first to turn, pointing north. “If we will find help in Zagos, then we will go to Zagos.”
She was soft spoken, but every sentence had an air of finality to it— enough finality to send Sammerin and Ishqa following.
As the rest of the group departed, Brayan held me back.
“We can just go to Besrith on our own,” he said, voice low. “Just like we planned. There is nothing forcing us to stay with them.”
I almost laughed in his face. Perhaps I didn’t remember these people, but something stronger, deeper, than memory tied me to them. Leaving
seemed incomprehensible. “Of course I’m going.”
“Nura will never stop hunting you if you stay with them.” “Nura will never stop hunting me anyway,” I said.
My eyes fell to Tisaanah. She was at the head of the group. Moonlight dripped down her white hair, tracing her silhouette. Once I found her, I couldn’t look away.
It didn’t even feel like a decision. Just a simple fact. “We’re going,” I said.
