Magic's Memories

Chapter Forty

"You can't leave me!"

"You told me you were done with that life!"

Reiden groaned into his pillow. A faint click sounded from the direction of the door.

"Please, just listen. I had a debt to pay. I'm done now, it's all over. Please, Laryssa," he whispered her name with a reverence he'd never before used with anyone else. "Meet me tonight and everything will be just like I promised."

Another click. His dream shifted.

"Don't you leave me!" his brother cried. "Don't you dare leave. Please, brother, please. I'm sorry and I—I don't want to be alone."

Light from the hall hit his eyes.

He snapped awake, jerking against the cuffs on his wrist. A silhouette stood in the doorway. The form was small, female, but there was something...

The light hit her face as she stepped inside and he knew her. The woman's hair was cut short and her compassionate gaze that he remembered now appeared deadened inside her tired eyes. Still, a hundred years wasn't enough time to forget who had been there when he'd woken up nameless and forgotten.

"You," he said, somehow knowing she would know what he meant.

She did not step further in the room. Those tired eyes fell to his cuffs and something like embarrassment made him want to tuck his wrist under the blanket.

"Who are you?" she asked.

He opened his mouth to answer, but the words from his dreams choked out his own. "I'm not sure anymore..."

Her lips thinned. "Who do you want to be?"

He licked his dry lips. Who did he want to be? At first, he'd wanted to stay Reiden, the simple dockworker who could daydream about a family or a lover without fear they would be unreal. Then he'd wanted to be Dormaeus, the man who loved Laryssa and had a—a brother. Someone who had missed him.

The pain-drenched cry of that healer when Desden had blasted him reverberated through his head.

"You're a wizard... And you're going to act like a wizard." Desden had said that. He'd tried to go along with it, but now the image of that healer's burnt leg stood against those words, a warning of what path he was walking down.

"I'm not sure about that either," he answered finally.

The woman let out a puff of air. "Do you want to stay locked up with the healers, or...?"

"I thought you were a healer."

"No," she corrected through grit teeth before slowly releasing the fist that had coiled at her side. "I'm not. And I'm not a mage either." A noise echoed down the hall and her head snapped to it. "Look, if you stay here, they're going to wipe your memories again. Do you want that?"

"No!" he answered quickly. That was maybe the only thing he did know. After everything that had happened, he couldn't just go back to how he'd been living before. He couldn't go back to forgetting and being forgotten. And he couldn't risk forgetting her.

"Then you need to come with me now," she said, venturing a glance down the hall. "Your brother's going to end up hurting a lot more people if someone doesn't stop him and I need your help to do that." She held out a hand.

"I... I remember knowing a woman. Laryssa. Desden promised that he could help me find her. You have to do the same." He rose to his full height, now towering above the small woman.

She wavered, hesitating. Another noise came from down the hall. "I'll do what I can." She extended her hand again and he put his own bound ones into it. The cuffs clicked open and the woman tucked them into a pouch at her waist. "We need to hurry."