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Sometimes, Ame spoke. The first time, Suvi had lunged for her notebook and written three paragraphs before she realized it was all nonsense. Still, she continued to carefully note each word, or transcribe the sounds when she couldn’t discern more. It was like painting with no sketch, and left her with little more than a smudgy impression of color and emotion.
It had been a month now, and despite the excellent doctors and the Citadel’s careful attention, Ame still slept. Though, Suvi thought, it felt less like sleeping with each passing day.
Suvi held her journal in her lap and stared out over the bed to the open window. An inlaid spell kept out the desert heat, but the white sunlight entered unhindered. It lay over Ame’s form like yet another sheet.
Suvi tapped her fingers, rolling over the last words Ame had spoken, four days ago now. They never formed sentences, and even if they had, what good would it have done? Suvi had no knowledge of any of it. Was strawflower a plant Suvi had never learned, or a new goat Suvi had never met? How many goats had Ame kept? Suvi didn’t even know how long they lived; maybe Ame had loved and mourned a dozen goats since Suvi had left home.
Suvi blinked. It had been a long time since she had used that word for the cottage. In the years just after her return, the Citadel had felt like a hazy dream from which she would soon wake, but the cottage had lived crystal-clear in her mind. Steel noticed, of course, and she did her best to convince her new charge that the Citadel was, indeed, home. Even without her…
Ame whined, and Suvi straightened, pen already in hand. The whine trailed into a whimper, and then silence. Always back to silence. Suvi dropped her pen onto a page full of gibberish and thumped back in her chair. What was the point, anyways? Ame’s speech was more and more inscrutable. It felt as if a veil lay over her, and each day she moved further and further behind the gossamer divide.
Her skin paled and paled, her veins dull blue and too-visible beneath the surface. Suvi had asked the doctors to move her closer to the window, and when they had said it wasn’t a good idea, Eursulon had moved the bed there himself.
Suvi would never say aloud, but she was certain that Ame’s little witch body was not well-suited to subsist on Wizard’s care, though it was the best in the world. Her muscles were built of deep-forest herbs and pill-bugs and stubbornness. To her, there probably wasn’t enough dirt in the wizard's food. Suvi put a hand over her mouth, hiding her smile. Her eyes slid to Ame’s face.
Ame’s brow was so furrowed it looked like it hurt. Suvi’s gaze trailed to Ame’s hands, expecting them to be clenched, but found them slack on the sheets. She grabbed one before she could stop herself. “What were you thinking?” she hissed. Her skin stuck to Ame’s clammy skin. “Going after Eursulon without me? Breaking the curse without Steel’s help?” She gripped her hands tight, glaring at Ame’s lifeless face. “Why did you leave me?”
“She hasn’t gone anywhere,” said a deep voice behind her.
Suvi caught her breath. She wiped hurriedly at her face with Ame’s fingers still tangled in hers.
Eursulon settled into the chair beside her with a low sigh. The fragrance of living oils and trees older than the Citadel enveloped her. Suvi turned to look at him, expecting reproach, but found only sorrow. It illuminated his face like the light from the window. “She’s walking among dreams, but she’s always done that,” he said. “Remember when she used to kick in her sleep?”
Suvi nodded, wincing at the memory of bruises long-since healed.
“And was she not with us, then?”
Suvi turned back to Ame. Her face had gentled somewhat. Perhaps she was remembering something more pleasant than before.
Eursulon sighed and smoothed a wrinkle in the cover over Ame’s legs. In the cottage, she had known him as a dappled, golden-eyed spirit. Now he wore her face, or the face of her kin. Another mask, obscuring something just beyond Suvi’s understanding. “Do you remember when we found that milk snake?” he asked suddenly.
Suvi smiled, just a little. “You mean when you knocked over a log and Ame grabbed that milk snake?”
Eursulon chuckled. Thunder from a summer storm. “If you wish to say it that way, then yes.”
“I remember. I was so happy because it was one of the few snakes from Grandma’s books that we hadn’t spotted yet.”
“Yes. That’s why Ame caught it for you, you know.”
Suvi hummed. She did know. There was no proof and no record, but she knew. “And you put the log back in place, but the snake just sat in front of it for ten minutes. Looking at us. Until–”
“Until the rain began, yes. Then it went home.” Eursulon smiled.
Rain. It had arrived slowly, tapping on their cheeks as if to say hurry! Hurry home! But nonetheless it had overtaken them on the hill down to the cottage. Ame had kicked her boots to Suvi before the mud could form, and then was immediately waylaid by the rivulets dancing through the grass. She danced barefoot with them, squealing as loud as the downpour. Eursulon stood with his arms wide, the droplets catching like precious stones on his plumage before soaking in.
The world smelled like waking up, as if the loam itself sighed and rolled its hills and turned leafy cheeks skywards. Suvi had raised her face too. Closed her eyes. When Ame grabbed her hand to dance in the puddles, Suvi steadied herself by Eursulon’s shoulder and leaned back all the further.
The hidden frogs rejoiced in a million voices, and Suvi felt the same voice in her throat. Ame and Eursulon whooped and laughed, their weights swaying her but balancing her, too. She knew her clothes were soaked, knew her hem was filthy, knew they would be late to chores, and that Ame would get sniffles, and that the flowers they had collected would be tattered to bits.
And the rain washed the knowing away.
In a distant desert, Suvi turned and looked at Eursulon. Eursulon’s eyes gleamed and his cheeks crinkled, and Suvi recognized him with a jolt. Here he was, the soft-feathered child with an untempered smile. Her mothers face had never moved just that way; her own face, perhaps, had never smiled so guilelessly. The light, though it was desert light, dappled golden over his form.
“Eursulon,” she said, just to get him to look at her. She had too much to say to say anything much, so when his eyes met hers, she simply looked back.
Some days Suvi felt like a veil lay over the entire world and kept her from the knowledge that she needed most. Most days the Citadel felt like the blade that would cut through the veil. Some days, some days though, the Citadel felt like a veil itself. A glass carefully dimmed. A sheet so clean and neat that it seemed no dirt could ever touch it. A desert so vast no rain would ever fall.
In the bed, Ame began to speak again, a pattering fall of words. Suvi closed her journal. She would listen to Ame, and tap her fingers, and remember the sound.
After all, one day she had understood the meaning of the rain. Perhaps one day she would understand it again.