No, walls stayed still. They didn’t adjust to my every movement as if trying to cushion me better. Walls didn’t expand and contract in time with the breath ghosting across my face and neck.

Words were spoken, words I didn’t understand but in a language I was sure I’d heard somewhere before. There must have been a second person, because only a few of the words I heard came from the voice I knew, and each time I heard that voice, the living not-wall at my back vibrated.

A chest.

The new and unfamiliar voice said something else, then what sounded like clicking footsteps expanded in my ears, getting closer, before retracting into little points of sound that eventually disappeared. I tried to pry my eyes open, but I was too fucking weak. I let out a small moan of complaint. Like the sound I’d made had exerted some sort of electrical current, the hands on my shoulders and the chest at my back and whatever breathed against my neck all twitched in unison. Fingers slid down my arms, then my hands were taken in two larger ones and held together in my lap.

I was being hugged from behind. By... someone. Someone big, someone with a voice that conjured up fever-distorted images of rivers and rocks and fangs.

“Who are you?”

I wasn’t sure if I managed to whisper it or I only asked it inside my own head. When the other person answered, they didn’t tell me their own name. They simply said mine.

Over and over and over again.

Like an anthem. Like a prayer.

The echoed repetition of my name wrapped in that deep, river-rock voice followed me as I slipped into sleep.

The next time I woke, I didn’t just feel sick. I felt like I was on fire. My feet, specifically, though the agony made my entire body burn and spasm. I tried to move, had to move, but someone was holding my legs. Someone was forcing me to stay still while they held my feet in a fucking fire.

I’m being tortured.

My head arched back as I bucked, eyes flying open. At first, nothing but white filled my vision, and I panicked more, thinking I’d gone blind. But the white was not vague or cloudy or uniform. I could see details within it. Threads, and torn areas. It was fabric.

I was staring down at fabric stretched over... a mattress?

The sheets on the ship were grey. The sheets in my bedroom back home had been blue.

So where the fuck am I where the fuck am I where the fuck am I?

I couldn’t puzzle it out. Didn’t have the brain space for it. Every ounce of my energy and mind was occupied with pain, and the drive to get myself out of that pain obliterated everything else.

I groaned, putting everything I had (which admittedly wasn’t much) into pulling against the holds on my legs. Someone said something sharply from near my feet, and the hold on me tightened. I tried another tactic. Instead of simply pulling my legs, I tried flopping down on the bed and rolling over so that maybe I could twist out of the other person’s grasp. But as soon as I lay fully down on my stomach again, a hand – a new one, a third one – came down firmly against my back before I could roll anywhere. The hand on my back was huge, spanning my shoulder blades and pinning me in place. I wrenched my head to the side and finally saw something other than white.

Green and gold filled my vision. At first, I thought I was looking at some sort of jewellery, or maybe a piece of armour, like a helmet, inlaid with gems. But then the emeralds and shimmering gold took on a more familiar shape.

The shape of a brutal face with a gouged-out eye and a snout that I’d once seen making words I didn’t recognize in a voice that I did.

A snout I could picture smiling.

“Help me,” I begged him, feeling instinctively that he was the sort of person who would help me if he could. I knew he’d done things to help me before, though I couldn’t think of any examples as agony burned holes in my brain.

Maybe someone was holding his feet in the fire, too, because his snout tightened and his brow contracted in what looked like raw, devastating pain.

Whether he couldn’t help me or wouldn’t, he didn’t. He just stayed where he was with his hand on my back holding me down and looking like it hurt him to do it. His other hand sank into my hair, massaging my scalp with tense and twitchy fingers, like he was barely holding himself back from pressing harder and puncturing my skull. He muttered unintelligible strings of words at me, his voice scraping and low.

“Who are you?” I sobbed.

Had I already asked him that once? Twice?

Maybe I had asked him ten times. A hundred times.

I could ask a hundred more and I would never get an answer.

I closed my eyes and screamed.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Skallagrim

The next few days passed in a painful haze of Suvi sleeping, then being awoken by the bright torment of the Mother’s Light on her feet. Seeing her that agonized and being so helpless to do anything to stop it changed something inside me, though I could not quite say what. I only knew, as I knelt and held myself back from smashing the light and Jolakaia and everything else in this city, that I would not be quite the same man as I had been before.

Not that I even knew who he was.

No new memories came to the surface of the river. I didn’t even bother reaching for them. All I cared about, thought about, in those first blurred and breathless days was Suvi.

I grew to love and loathe the Mother’s Light contraption, because though it caused Suvi immense pain, it seemed to be working. Every day, Suvi’s wounds healed a little more, the brutal redness in her flesh receding. At the end of the third day in the temple, Jolakaia jerked her snout in satisfaction and declared that Suvi would not lose her legs. A hard fist in my chest that I did not even realize had been clenched this entire time instantly let go.

“Thank you,” I said, standing but placing a palm on Suvi’s bed, overtaken by the unfamiliar and debilitating sensation that I was about to fall over for no discernable reason.

Jolakaia jerked her snout down and to the left.

“Thank the Mother,” she replied. “Her cotton staunches all wounds.”

I grunted, turning my attention back to Suvi. At the door, the two pointless guards (always there, and always two, though the guards were not always the same ones each day) straightened and muttered, “Honoured Eye.”

Koltar, as he had done several times over the past few days, came to hover obnoxiously in the doorway. The first time he’d done that was during one of Suvi’s Mother’s Light sessions, and my nerves had been so ragged that I’d snapped open my wings, starmap blazing, and bellowed at him to GET OUT. He had eventually left, but without any sort of hurry or fear in his eyes and that had bothered me even more than the original intrusion.

Jolakaia turned and greeted him respectfully.

I glowered and growled, “What?”

“I come merely to see how she fares under our Mother’s care,” he said smoothly. “And to ensure that you remain wrapped in cotton while you’re here.”

At first, I thought he meant literally. I gestured impatiently down at myself. Sometime on the second day, I’d been relieved of my tattered curtain sash and had been given my own robes. Since I occupied no real station in the temple and had no official role besides some hostile combination of guest and conqueror, my robes were undyed white cotton—the colour that children wore.

But Koltar just jerked his snout no. “Not your clothing, Skallagrim.”

Ah. More of this “wrap your metal in cotton” nonsense.

“I have maintained peace,” I muttered, eye narrowing. Barely even aware I did it, I took a step to position myself between Suvi’s bed and Koltar’s gaze. “If I were not cottony enough for your liking, you would not need to come all the way down here to discover it. You’d know it by the sounds of falling walls and snapping bones.”