“By birth,” he said. He sounded apologetic. Desperate. “But we moved to Srugna years ago, long before we wed. We were driven out from our village. Please, aunt. Don’t drive us away too.”
“What makes you think you’ll be welcome here?”
“Hope,” he said. “We’ve got no rot on us. I promise. Please.”
The woman told him, eventually, that they could sleep behind the house. The man thanked her.
She felt a shawl being drawn over her. Water at her lips. Hard ground at her back; something soft tucked beneath her head by warm hands. Then nothing, for a long time.
She drifted in and out of consciousness. Every time she rose out of the waters of sleep, she caught snatches of conversation, strange in her ears, tangles of nonsense.
“It’s a poor business.” The old woman’s anger was gone. Her voice held only pity. “Families split in two, parents separated from their children and their elderly by whatever evil has changed Ahiranya’s borders. Did you lose anyone?”
“Her brother and sister.” The familiar man’s voice. “I had no other family.”
A sigh. “Ahiranya is cursed. I am sorry for my caution, with you and your poor wife, but you understand—”
“I’m grateful.” A hand on her forehead. A thumb brushing back her sweat-damp hair. “Thank you.”
Sleep.
This time when she woke, the waters of her mind and her heart had settled around her. She’d been drowning, and now she was not. She could breathe. She wasn’t burning. She opened her eyes, which were gritty with sleep and sickness. It was night.
The man was sitting against the wall of the house, upright,legs crossed. He was asleep, a sword across his knees. She could hear his quiet breath. Inside the house a lamp was burning. In the grass and trees around them, she could hear a noise—a steady rhythmic dripping of water. She turned her head slowly.
There were people watching her. Water-drenched cloth was draped across their faces, tumbling in folds to the floor before them at their feet. They held bowls in their hands—bowls that streamed strange river water to the soil. Green water, gold, and red.
Their numbers shifted as she watched them—a dozen, then ten, then a blur of faces too vast for her to swiftly count. But she saw adults. Children.
“Who are you?” she whispered. Her voice came out a croak. She was thirsty, depleted.
Silence. Then, with a rustling sigh, one water-veiled girl stepped forward and kneeled. She held out her green bowl.
“Will you drink?”
She looked at that water. A strange sense came over her—a knowing. A part of her lay in the water swirling in that bowl: knowledge that her skull, already aching, storm-full, could not carry without help.
If she drank, she would know something huge and terrible.
She reached out a hand—and the man stirred behind her. The figures were gone.
“How do you feel?” he asked. “Do you need water? Food?”
She stared up at him. Dark hair, a sharp jaw beneath the shadow of stubble. He looked tired.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“I am Jeevan,” he said, voice low.
That wasn’t the name he had offered their helper.
“You are not my husband,” she said, lowering her voice to match his. She did not want to be overheard.
“No, my lady,” he said.
My lady.It jarred through her like a knock to the bone, so strange it barely resembled pain.
“If you have told these people you’re my husband, you must not call me that again,” she said. “What is my name?”
