He made a non-committal sound deep in his throat then remarked, “The four you’ve injured are doing well, by the way. The bones have been set and the other Mother’s Hands say the breaks should heal in time. Though Nakib may have a permanent limp.”

I rather savagely hoped that Nakib was that first, most annoying guard who’d tried to keep us out at the gate.

I wondered if Koltar could guess at my lack of contrition. He stared at me with green eyes in a blue-scaled skull, as if waiting for an apology and already knowing that he would not receive one.

“I suppose that is all I will get from you today,” he finally said. “That is fine. You calmed under the Mother’s influence at the broken gate, and that satisfies me for now.”

I gave him a questioning look, and he jerked his snout towards Jolakaia.

“You only calmed when she put her hands on you and prayed. Proof of our Mother’s infinite benevolence.”

Jolakaia suddenly made herself very busy checking on Suvi’s feet, avoiding my gaze. After another long, vastly irritating stare, Koltar departed, taking the two guards with him out into the hall to speak with them about some other matter.

I turned to look at Jolakaia even as she staunchly kept her eyes turned away.

“I did not become calm because you prayed and your goddess answered. I forced down my rage because of the logic of your argument – that only being calm and entering the temple would help Suvi.”

“Yes. I know.”

“So, all that putting your hand on my shoulder and begging the Mother...?”

“It wasn’t just for Koltar’s benefit,” she said quickly. “I pray all the time. But... often I pray inside my own head. The words do not need to be spoken aloud.”

I hissed out a low laugh. Clever. She knew I was reining in my anger and violence already, but having that happen during her prayer would make it look more real, more reliable to their leader, if it appeared to be the result of prayer and the Mother’s intervention instead of my own control. It made me look more like one of them.

“Is fooling your Honoured Eye part of your holy life? Surely lying is not part of the way of cotton.”

Her snout tensed.

“No, it is not,” she said slowly. “But I am one of the newest followers to the way of cotton and I humble myself before the Mother as one imperfect and often lost.” Then, rather tersely, she added, “Besides, it worked, so maybe you should spend less time questioning me and more time thanking me.”

I laughed again, louder this time, just as the two guards returned to their posts. Suvi stirred in an apparent reaction to my voice, and I sobered instantly, crouching beside her bed and brushing damp tendrils of hair away from her face. Her temperature had returned to something a little less disastrously feverish, though she was still weak. Without opening her eyes, she said something I did not understand, then appeared to fall back to sleep.

“Why can I not understand her?” I wasn’t asking the question of anyone in particular, but Jolakaia answered from behind me.

“I can’t understand her either. She’s not speaking the Bohnebregg language.”

“That’s why I can understand you and Koltar and the others, then,” I said without turning to look back at her. I was too absorbed in watching the way Suvi’s skin changed from pale at her brow to pink at her cheeks, like the blush of light warming the horizon at sunrise. “This is the language I’ve spoken all my life.”

“Yes. That and, I imagine, your father’s language. The stone sky tongue. Although...”

The rolling of wheels and clacking of metal told me Jolakaia was rearranging things in the room somewhere behind me. I did not rise to help her. I simply watched the way Suvi’s silver-brown eyelashes rested in the hollows above her cheeks.

Were those hollows too hollow? I frowned, leaning so close my snout nearly touched her tiny nose. Her face looked more drawn than before, and my frown deepened. Getting food into her was nearly impossible. The best we’d been able to do was get her to take sips of rich broth cooked in the temple’s kitchens.

“Although,” Jolakaia was saying as I tied myself into knots wondering how long Suvi could go without eating solid, chewable food. I did not want any of her softness – the heavy roundness of her breasts, the gentle padding at her hips and stomach – receding in hunger.

I did not want her taking up less space. It felt too much like disappearing.

“I am surprised you do not understand her. I thought you’d be able to.”

That had me finally turning around. I kept my knuckles firmly anchored against Suvi’s cheek but cast my attention back to Jolakaia. She was polishing that hateful saviour, the Mother’s Light ring, with a spare bit of clean cotton.

“Aeshyr can understand any language he runs into. I assumed it would be the same for you.”

Aeshyr...

The name meant nothing to me. Not even the vaguest sense of recognition rippling through the river.

“Who is Aeshyr?”

“You do not know him? He is another stone sky god. Like you.”

“No, I do not know him,” I muttered, rather testily. “I barely even know myself and had to rely on you, a near stranger, to tell me my own mother’s name. Why in the depths of the river should I know him?” I snapped up to my feet. “Wait. How do you know him? Is he here?”

If he was here, maybe he could tell me more about myself, more about what had happened and where I’d been. More about who I’d been before...

But Jolakaia shut down that frantic line of thought with a sharp jerk down and to the left with her snout.

“No, he is not here. He hails from the world of Riverdark and only comes here when he wants to trade. Apparently our metal is useful to him. It’s his spell that hides Callabarra.”

Riverdark...

Now there was a word that rippled through me with recognition. Riverdark. Mages warlords blood magic alchemy...

Still, I was fairly certain that I did not know this Aeshyr. I did not think he was the man I remembered with the snow-white hair and the starmap bluer than the river we’d both stood in once.

I supposed it did not matter if Aeshyr was not even here to begin with.

“Anyway, he has something that allows him to understand all language,” Jolakaia said. “He gave a piece of it to Koltar, so that they can speak more easily when they trade. I assumed it was a stone sky invention. But perhaps it is something from Riverdark instead.”

I grunted, her words prickling familiarity in the most irritating of ways.

Nearly remembering something was like hovering on the edge of orgasm. Constantly reaching, stretching, aching for something right there but out of reach.

Bloody unbearable.

I ground my fangs together.

“How often does he come to trade?”

Jolakaia put down her cotton square on a tray before lifting her hands in a sort of I don’t know gesture. “He is immortal. With such a stretch of time before him, he uses it differently than we do. There is no regularity to his visits. He has only come here once since I have been at Callabarra, and I have been here nearly six full strides of the Mother now.”

“Strides of the...”

“One stride is four hundred and eighteen days.”

“Right,” I said. “Four hundred and eighteen. I knew that... But...”

“Children of the metal call them years. That is probably what you’d remember.”

What a useless collection of junk my memory was turning out to be. Remembering that a Bohnebregg year was four hundred and eighteen days but not remembering how many of those years I’d spent in darkness.

At least that darkness had not yet come back for me. Being near Suvi was still sustaining me for whatever reason, and I brushed my knuckles once again over the impossibly silken curve of her cheek in silent thanks and wretched self-loathing. I stole her, I saved myself and perhaps a thousand other worlds, but now she was starving and fevered and weakened and I could do nothing about it but stand here and stare and watch her waste away.