#sifara

When grey turned to a soft rose-petal pink the sarnen woke them and laid them in a cart with crates of wares. They crossed an empty green, breaking the hush with the thud of great hooves on the earth and the groan of the wagon and the way the metal things in the crates struck each other.

Across the green there was a little one-cart track walking the edge of a dropoff. From over the slope came the noise of the river. For a second they could only feel their head pounding, they could only feel cold, but the second passed and so did the cold. They couldn’t say why their chest squeezed so hard and fast but they didn’t mind why. It just did.

The sarnen, it came to pass, was a woman by the name of Bon. When she said it their mouth opened and said “I’m Jalap.”

“Did you remember?” Bon asked, hopeful.

Jalap shook their head, but then they said “guess so.”

The next settlement up the path had no healer, either, and Bon walked on to evening before she got to a proper town. It was bright with lamps and loud with hostels, and the path brought them back through poor-man shacks into a square in the shadow of a great temple, an eel statue of Nyne out front.

Then Jalap could feel the familiarity coming back to them, like the shape of their name on their mouth, and then they saw their hair at the foot of the statue, and then they remembered. Just flashes, just moments, but enough to know.

It worked. They asked Nyne, and then they forgot. A god-granted wish not to remember. Remember what? The cold, deep inside their bones, the running sound of the water. They didn’t even have to plead to make the feeling go away this time.

They woke in a humid darkness, their chest searing, their throat aching. They had a cough trapped low in their neck, catching off their breath. They had a blanket of patches heavy on them, but still they felt cold.

They coughed.

Light came a moment later, light and sound, a big-shouldered sarnen holding their fire in a cage of fingers, stripped down to their underthings with a face all worry-bent. “I’m so glad you’re awake.” A rough voice, too many years of hard smoke. Smith, most like.

They tried to answer but there was no voice in them, only coughing. Everything went far-off and smeared orange while they coughed, until their weary stomach turned up bile and they could finally fall gasping against the floor. There was a dreadful throbbing but it wouldn’t take the shape of a body in their mind.

There was a warm hand soft on their shoulder, and they hated it, they pulled away until it stopped.

“I’m sorry,” said the sarnen’s voice, “I didn’t mean to scare you. Only we don’t got no healers out this way and my cow could turn a leg in the dark. We’ll go come first light, we’ll go where there’s a healer. You got to lay on your side til then, or the water’ll go back in your chest.”

The word water made them feel cold inside, a cold that was immeasurably vast, that filled their chest with terror. There was a strange eternal second, like a shout lining up to come out of their mouth and say please stop please stop -- but then the plea was answered and the cold faded and there they were, under a heavy blanket, heart pounding hard. They didn’t remember why.

“You all right?”

“Yeah,” their mouth said, the words pressing past the cough in their throat.

“You need aught? I’m not wanting for food, here, and you look like you could use it.”

“Yeah,” their mouth said, and this time at least they meant it. Was that what hurt in their belly? Hunger?

They had stew, rich stew, the kind that can sit a belly for days if it has to, the kind that makes a person wake early and strong. It was salty and a little bitter and hot. They ate a whole bowl before they felt the tired creeping through them, and half another before they finally slept.

“D’you have a name, then?” the sarnen asked while they ate.

They opened their mouth to answer but there was no answer in it. Of course they had a name. Of course they had. Only they couldn’t remember a name. They couldn’t remember clear the feeling of someone speaking to them.