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“Tarelay?” I whispered under my breath. I could scarcely wrap my mind around seeing a legend with my own eyes.

“I was a bird, and then I was not.” Tarelay said to Karema. He turned to Kalcedon. “Come meet your kin.”

“What?” Kalcedon frowned and blinking at the human woman in front of him. “I don’t know you, either.”

Karema gave him a once over, lips tight. I wasn’t sure what she thought of having a gray half-faerie for a brother, but at last she nodded to him. I felt oddly jealous of her. They could have a clean start. She had only gained. I had only lost.

I could not help it. Everything was too much.

I burst into tears.

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.