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“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…”

Chapter 56

I rose just before dawn the next morning to walk along the river. Tarelay had cast a simple ward around our camp, but it was gone now. He was the only other one awake. He nodded in my direction, then turned to face the wind.

I stared after him for a while. How strange to think this legend still walked the world, or that he was now sworn to Kalcedon through the workings of an ancient Obeisance to the court of Sorrow. I had a million questions I wanted to ask him, but he was fae, and he looked occupied. I dared not risk disturbing him or rousing his anger.

The sky was pearly and gray, tinged with a faint pink. A low fog hung over the landscape. I could feel currents of warmth on the air, magic prickling my skin. As I walked, I tried to imagine what kind of life I could build in a place like this. I made it a mile out, then turned and headed back towards the camp.