“Thanks, Hildy,” he replied.
Inthemorning,Isahnawoke alone in their room. Hill returned not long later, just as he finished readying himself for the day. She held a folded-up piece of parchment in her hand and smiled softly when she saw he was awake.
“Didn’t sleep well?”
“No.”
“Well, I have something that might help. Do you recall yesterday evening? When your... head was bothering you?”
Isahn squinted at the woman warily, picking back through his cluttered mind. They’d been sitting at a table, downstairs, at this inn. She’d ordered something for an appetizer.Dolmades. Her description of the food, the flavors, had triggered him, and he’d been thrown to a different time and place. “I think it was a memory, one of the ones that was erased. But I’m not certain.”
“Do you—”
“Wait!” He froze, heart thundering as he formed an ice-knife in his hand. “Your name’s Hildy, not Hill. Who thefuckare you?”
“You do remember.” She unfolded the paper in her hands. “People call me Hil, that wasn’t a lie. Just with one L, not two.”
Isahn considered her skeptically.
“Listen, I’ll explain on the road today. But, I got a letter from Ge— some friends. They’re trying to see if it’s possible to fix what the mind magic did to you.”
“Why are they trying to help me?”
“They like you.”
“They’re the people from my memory? That dinner, with the weird low sofas.”
“Is that what you recalled?”
He nodded.
“What did the room look like?” Hildy prodded.
Isahn tried to dive back in, but the wisps had faded. “Why did you keep this from me?!”
Her eyes widened. “To protect you! We had no idea what to do here.Whatdid the room look like, Isahn?”
Gritting his teeth, he replied, “It’s hard to say, but you were there, must’ve been, or I wouldn’t have remembered yourname. A tall man with dark skin and long black locs, a stockier man with short curly hair, that pregnant woman, Domina Neninos, Viceroy Neninos, and...”
“And?”
Something about that other person felt sacred to Isahn, private, like he was supposed to keep her all to himself. “Someone else, not sure. It’s hazy.”
She sighed.
“We weren’t captives together?”
“No. Not really.”
Isahn squinted at her. “If you know where I’ve been and what I’ve done, why don’t you just tell me?”
“It’s not advised. It could cause you more trouble.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s not! Or we don’t think it is. According to my friends, the mindmolding works like building a wall around your true memories. If you can start to pull out the building blocks, youmaybe able to get to what’s hidden inside.”
Isahn pondered that for a moment, considering all of those weird feelings he’d been having over the past week of travel. “So, if I have one true element of a memory, like the taste of those dolmades, it’s possible I can tap into the feelings associated with that memory, with other senses tied to it, and ‘tear down the walls’?” He used air quotations around the final piece of his statement.
