Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

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The first thing he felt was warmth.

That was wrong. He remembered cold wind, and a long stretch of nothing, and then not remembering at all, which he had been perfectly fine with. So he lay still with his eyes shut and waited for the part where it made sense.

It didn’t come. Something soft was under him, a blanket, rough but clean, smelling of dried herbs and woodsmoke. A pencil scratched somewhere close by, slow and steady. Farther off, so faint he almost missed it, wind moved through long grass, and under that a single bell clinked once and went quiet.

A bell. Out here?

He opened his eyes.

Dark wooden beams crossed the ceiling above him. There were no hospital lights. No beeping. No sharp smell of antiseptic at the back of his throat.

So someone found me. I got pulled out.

The anger came before he could finish the thought, hot and tired, and drained away almost at once, because even anger took more effort than he had. Of course. Even that didn’t work.

He tried to sit up, and everything hurt.

He barely moved at all. He turned his head a few centimeters on the pillow, and the ache that followed was so heavy it felt like his skull had been packed with wet sand. He stopped, chin against his shoulder, and breathed through his teeth until the room settled.

Okay. Don’t do that again.

It was a small room. The plaster walls were uneven, and the window was set deep into them, with thin, faded curtains hemmed in careful hand-stitching. A wooden chest stood at the foot of the bed with a folded jacket on top. A shelf crowded with small things ran along one wall: carved animals, a cracked mug, a bundle of dried flowers hanging upside down from a string. Everything looked old and worn and looked after.

This isn’t a hospital.

He kept circling that thought.

Where are the machines? The wires? Who lives like this?

Slowly, because moving hurt, he looked down at himself.

A small hand lay on the blanket, bandaged to the wrist.

He stared at it. He lifted it, and it lifted. He turned it over. It was pale and thin, with scabbed knuckles, and whoever had wrapped it had done so with a lot of patience and a lot of practice.

It was a child’s hand.

That’s not mine.

The thought was calm, because there was no room in his head for anything louder yet.

That’s not mine. Where’s my…

He lifted the other hand. Also small, also wrapped. His eyes followed the arm up to the sleeve of a nightshirt much too big for the shoulders, then down the short, flat shape of the body under the blanket. It barely made a ripple. There was almost nothing there.

His heart started to climb. It was a fast, thin thump he could feel in his throat, and it set the ache in his skull throbbing in time.

The scratching stopped.

He turned his head toward the sound, slowly, like moving through water. A girl sat in a wooden chair beside the window with a sketchbook on her knee. 

She looked sixteen or seventeen. Her hair was dyed a bright, deliberate green and pulled into a messy braid over one shoulder, and there was a smear of graphite across her cheek where she had pushed a strand back with a dirty hand. Her pencil had stopped halfway across the page.

They looked at each other.

He had no idea what his own face was doing. Hers was doing about six things at once. Her mouth opened and closed. Her eyes went wide and then wet. The sketchbook slid off her knee and hit the floorboards, and neither of them looked at it.

It was the silence of two people who had been told for a long time to expect something and had stopped believing it would happen.

“...Hi,” he tried to say.

What came out was a dry croak, high and small and cracked, and it frightened him more than the hand had.

That’s not my voice.

He couldn’t have said what his voice was supposed to sound like. Only that it wasn’t this.

“You’re—” Her own voice broke. She stood so fast the chair scraped. “You’re awake. You’re actually... oh my god. You’re awake.”

Who is she? Why is she looking at me like that?

He didn’t know her. Not her face, not her voice, not the green of her hair. But she looked at him as if she knew him very well, as if she had been waiting a long time, and the relief in her face was so raw he almost had to look away.

She didn’t come closer. She stood with her hands half raised and trembling, as though he might break if she touched him, or vanish if she moved too fast. Her eyes kept dropping to the bandages and flicking back to his face, checking that both were still there.

Then she spun around, ran to the door, and grabbed the frame.

“Brother!” she shouted down the hall, at the top of her lungs. “Brother, get up here, now! He’s awake! He’s awake! Hurry up, you idiot!”

For a moment there was nothing. Then a door banged somewhere below, and boots hit the stairs two and three at a time. Something clattered and was ignored.

A boy skidded into the doorway, breathing hard, one hand still gripping the frame. He was a teenager too, a year or two younger than the girl, with sawdust in his hair and his sleeves shoved up to the elbows, like someone who had been in the middle of a chore.

“What? What is it, what’s—”

His eyes landed on the bed, and he stopped.

For a long moment he just stood there, chest heaving, his face passing through every expression at once and settling on none of them. His knuckles went white on the doorframe.

“Is that...” His voice cracked. He tried again. “Are you...”

“He’s looking at me,” the girl said, half laughing, both hands pressed over her mouth. 

The boy crossed the room in three strides and dropped to his knees beside the bed. He didn’t touch him. His hands hovered in the air, as if contact would be too much. His eyes were red-rimmed, with deep shadows beneath them, the look of someone who hadn’t slept properly in a long time.

“You,” he said, and swallowed. “You stupid little... you scared us.”

I’m sorry. I don’t know you. I don’t know what I did.

“Three weeks,” the boy said, almost to himself. “Three weeks, and the healer kept saying...” He pressed the heel of his hand hard against his eyes. “Never mind. Never mind that. You’re awake.”

The girl came up beside him, wiping her face with her sleeve, and smeared the graphite even further across her cheek. She laughed, a wet, ragged sound. “Go get Grandfather. Right now.”

“Grandfather.” The boy nodded quickly, as if the word needed a moment to land. “Right. Yes. And Mama and Papa? The clinic’s not far, I could run—”

“No.” She said it fast, then looked faintly surprised at herself and rubbed her eyes again. 

“No, not yet. They’re with patients until evening, and they haven’t slept properly in weeks. Let them finish their work. And when they come home...” The corner of her mouth trembled into something that was almost a smile. “We’ll surprise them. They walk through the door and he’s sitting at the table.”

The boy stared at her. “They’ll be furious if we don’t tell them.”

“They’ll cry either way. Let them cry at home.”

He looked at her, then at the bed, then at her again. His jaw worked, and then he gave a short, unsteady laugh. “...Fine. Fine. Grandfather first.” But he didn’t move. His eyes had gone back to the bed. “I don’t want to leave him.”

“Somebody go,” a small voice said.

They both froze.

It took him a moment to understand that the voice was his own. It had come out as a rasp, and he hadn’t meant to speak. The two of them had been so busy deciding who would leave and who would stay that he’d felt, with a dull, faraway clarity, that they might stand there arguing until the sun went down.

The girl made a sound halfway between a sob and a hiccup. The boy let out a shaky breath that might have been a laugh.

“He’s right,” the girl said. “Go.”

“I’m going. I’m going.” The boy rose, then paused and, quickly and a little awkwardly, touched two fingers to the back of the bandaged hand on the blanket, as if making sure it was real. “Don’t go anywhere,” he said, and winced at his own words. “I mean. Obviously. I’ll be right back.”

He bolted. His boots pounded down the stairs, and the front door slammed hard enough to rattle the shelf. Then there was only the sound of running, fading into the fields.

The room went quiet.

The girl stayed where she was, hovering by the bed. Then she dragged her chair over, sat down hard, and pressed her palms against her knees to stop them shaking. She wasn’t smiling exactly. She looked like someone who wasn’t sure she was allowed to.

“Can you hear me okay?” she asked softly. “Does anything hurt? Besides your head. Obviously your head. You took a really nasty fall.”

He tried to nod, and the room tilted. Her hand shot out and caught his shoulder, light and quick, then pulled back as though she’d embarrassed herself.

“Don’t nod,” she said. “Just... blink or something.”

Blink or something.

It was so ordinary and so ridiculous that a strange noise nearly escaped his throat. He blinked.

The girl huffed out a laugh and wiped her nose with the back of her wrist. “Okay. Good. That’s good.” She shifted in her chair, then asked, quieter, “Do you want some water?”

He did. He hadn’t known it until she said it. She fetched a clay cup from the shelf, held it carefully, and tilted it against his lips. The water was cool, with a faint taste of stone, and it was the best thing he had ever drunk. He took it in small sips while she watched each swallow as if it were a small miracle.

Why is she looking at me like that?

Why does everyone look at me like that?

He was so tired. It wasn’t the kind of tired sleep could fix. It went down into his bones. He understood none of this, and he had no strength left to try.

“Do you know me?” she asked, very quietly. She was trying to keep her voice light, and it wasn’t working. “Do you remember who I am?”

He looked at her. At the green braid coming loose over her shoulder. At the graphite on her cheek. At her fingers twisting in the hem of her sleeve.

He shook his head, and the movement cost him a wave of nausea.

Her face didn’t crumple. It went very still instead, the way a person does when they’ve braced for a blow and it lands anyway. She nodded once, slowly.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. That’s... okay. You hit your head hard, it’s only natural.” She breathed in and steadied her voice. “It’ll come back. We’ll help it come back.”

I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t have it. I don’t have any of it.

“Do you know your own name?” she asked, gently now. “At least that?”

My name is…

He opened his mouth. He knew it. It had always been right there, so ordinary that he had never once needed to think about it.

It wasn’t.

There was only a smooth, blank space where it should have been, like a tooth that had gone missing. He couldn’t tell whether it had been knocked out, or whether he had left it behind on purpose.

Of course. Something has to be gone.

“It’s Sebek,” the girl said quietly, when he didn’t answer. She swallowed. “You’re Sebek. You’re eight years old. And this is our house, you live here with us. You’re home.”

Sebek.

He stared at her.

I know that name.

It tugged at something deep inside him. Not a memory, exactly, more the shape a memory leaves behind, like a word on the tip of the tongue, or a song heard once through a wall. Something in the sound of it. The hard edge in the middle. A feeling that it had once been shouted, in someone’s voice.

But when he reached for it, there was only the blank, smooth and white and humming faintly.

“...Sebek,” he repeated, testing it. It felt like wearing someone else’s coat, too big in the shoulders, cut for a person who had somewhere to be.

The girl let out a breath that shook on the way out. She bowed her head and, for a moment, rested her forehead against the edge of the mattress, right beside his bandaged hand.

She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t have to.

He let her stay there. He didn’t know what else to do. Past her braid, past the dark beams and the faded curtains, the window was full of a rolling green hillside he had never seen, gold under a low, soft sun. A bird landed on the sill, looked at him, and flew off again.

Eight years old.

This isn’t anywhere I know.

One thought broke through the fog and stayed, quiet and certain, settling low in his stomach:

I’m not supposed to be here.

Sebek's room

The front door slammed again, and this time it didn’t sound like one pair of boots. It sounded like three, or like two and something heavier, a slow, uneven thump rising up the stairs between the quick scuffs of the boy’s steps.

“Careful, careful,” a voice wheezed in the hall. It was the boy’s. “Grandfather, the third step is loose, you’ll trip—”

“I know which step is loose, boy. I fixed that step.”

“You fixed it wrong!”

“Hold your tongue and go ahead of me.”

Sebek lay very still. The voices came toward him in waves, louder, softer, louder again, and the second voice was by far the loudest. It carried like the voice of someone used to giving orders across a field. 

Every word rang through his head like a knock on the inside of his skull. He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them the doorway was full.

The boy came in first, red-faced and panting, one hand pressed to a stitch in his side, sawdust still in his hair. Behind him, filling the frame as though the door had been built a size too small, stood an old man.

He was broad, even bent with age, and he held himself with a stiffness that had nothing to do with his years. It was the posture of someone who had stood at attention for a very long time and never quite learned how to stop. His hair stood up in short, dark green spikes, as if it had never once agreed to lie flat. 

One hand was braced on a gnarled walking stick and the other gripped the doorframe, and both were big, scarred, and shaking. His scowl looked permanent, carved there long ago.

Grandfather.

That was the word the girl had used. The old man hadn’t said it himself. He hadn’t said anything. But the boy had called him that on the stairs, and Sebek’s foggy head had decided that was enough. He didn’t know him at all.

Then the old man stepped farther into the window light, and Sebek noticed the rest.

Along his jawline, the skin changed. A band of dark green scales, fine and patterned, caught the light like wet slate. His ears were long and sharp, tapering to points. And his eyes, narrowed and fixed on the bed, were wrong somehow. The pupils were thin vertical slits.

...Huh?

Sebek stared, slow and blank. That was not the shape of an ordinary person. His gaze moved from the scales to the ears to the strange, narrowed eyes, then to the harsh, furious, wet-eyed face around them.

Is that normal here?

Do people look like that?

He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything. Nobody else in the room seemed to find it strange. The boy hadn’t so much as glanced at the old man’s face. Sebek let the question go, because his head was too sore to hold it.

The old man stopped in the doorway.

His eyes found the bed and stayed on it. They went over Sebek like those of someone looking at a thing he had thought lost for good. His mouth moved, and no sound came out.

“Grandfather?” the girl said softly. She had risen from her chair.

“I’m well,” the old man snapped, to nobody. “I’m well. Don’t fuss.”

He wasn’t well. His hand on the frame was shaking so hard the wood rattled.

The girl crossed to him and began to speak, quick and low, her hands moving as she talked. Sebek caught the shape of it but not the words. 

Her voice lifted and fell and tangled with the boy’s, who kept breaking in with and he drank all the water, and he blinked when I asked, and the whole conversation slid away from Sebek like a rope running through his fingers.

He tried to follow it. He honestly did. But every sound hit his skull like a pebble dropped into a bucket, and the ache that spread out after it turned the edges of the room gray. 

He caught healer, and the parents, and surprise, and somewhere underneath, his memory, and each word sank away as soon as he reached for it.

Too loud.

He fixed his eyes on the ceiling and counted the knots in the beams. One. Two. Three.

Too many people. Too much.

The counting helped a little. Four. Five. A long crack ran between the sixth beam and the seventh, patched once with something darker. Someone had cared enough about this ceiling to mend it. He held on to that small, solid fact while the voices rose and fell around him like weather.

When he came back to himself, the voices had stopped.

They were all looking at him. The girl and the boy had gone quiet behind the old man, and the old man stood at the foot of the bed with one broad hand resting on the blanket, as if he weren’t sure he was allowed to touch it. They watched him the way you might watch a candle in a draft.

Slowly, the old man lowered himself onto the edge of the mattress, the movement controlled and unhurried. The frame creaked beneath his weight. He rested his stick against the wall, more out of habit than necessity, and took a quiet breath through his nose. Then, with a gentleness Sebek would never have expected from those large, calloused hands, he reached out and laid two thick fingers against Sebek’s bandaged knuckles. 

“Hmph,” the old man said, low. His voice was rough as gravel. “There you are.”

It wasn’t much. It wasn’t little one, or my boy, or anything soft. But for some reason it made Sebek’s throat tighten. He only knew that no one had spoken to him in that tone for a very long time, as though he were something worth being gruff about.

“I’m... sorry,” he managed, in that small, cracked voice. It was the only thing he could think of. “I don’t... I can’t...”

“Hush.” The old man’s fingers pressed down once, hard. “None of that. You hear me? You’ve nothing to be sorry for. Not one thing.”

His slit eyes were wet. His scowl hadn’t moved at all. He simply let the tears sit there, bright in the creases around his eyes, and glared at the wall as though daring anyone to mention it.

The boy made a rough noise and turned toward the window. The girl pressed her lips together and looked up at the ceiling. For a while nobody spoke.

They’re sad.

It took him a long time to get there, as if he were wading through mud.

All of them. They’re sad, and it’s because of me.

He didn’t understand how. He didn’t know what he had done. But the grief in the room was so thick and so real that it pressed on his chest like a hand, and he understood that whoever he had been, whatever he had done, it mattered to them. It had hurt them. And he had lain here, blank and useless, while it did.

I’m sorry.

The old man cleared his throat with a harsh rattle and sat up straighter, as though remembering himself. The soldier slid back into his face, and he looked over Sebek the way a man inspects a wall he means to repair.

“Hold still,” he said. “Let me look at that head.”

It wasn’t a request. His big hands moved with quick, practiced care, the way hands do when they have done the same thing worse than a child. 

He turned Sebek’s wrist to check the knot in the bandage. He tipped Sebek’s chin toward the window with one rough knuckle and studied his eyes, left and then right, his own slit pupils narrowing in the light. He pressed two fingers under the jaw, then at the side of the neck, counting under his breath.

“Pulse is steady,” he muttered. “Eyes track. Color’s coming back.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Has he kept the water down?”

“Every drop,” the boy said quickly.

“Hmph. Good.” The old man turned back, and for a moment the scowl eased into plain attention. He held up three fingers. “How many?”

“Three,” Sebek whispered.

“And now?”

“...Two.”

“Good.” A pause. When he spoke again, his voice was rougher. “Do you know who I am, boy?”

The room went very quiet.

Sebek looked at him. At the green scales along his jaw. At the spikes of dark hair, the scarred hands, the scowl that seemed to be holding up the rest of his face. He looked for it, any flicker of recognition, any warmth that wasn’t borrowed from the others.

There was only blank. Smooth and white and humming.

He shook his head, as slowly as he could.

The old man’s jaw tightened. For a second the scowl wavered and something raw showed underneath, something old and hurt that he plainly had no intention of letting anyone see.

“Hmph,” he said again, and his voice cracked in the middle. “Of course you don’t. Hardest head in three villages, and the one time it matters, it goes and cracks.”

“Grandfather,” the girl hissed.

“That was a joke, girl.” But his hand tightened on Sebek’s, gently, and the shake in it gave him away. “I’m your grandfather. That’s all you need to know today. The rest can wait until your head stops rattling about like a pebble in a jug.”

Something in Sebek’s chest loosened, just slightly. It was such a bad joke. It was so gruff and clumsy and so plainly meant to make him feel less like a failure that it worked.

The corner of his mouth moved. It wasn’t a smile. But it was the nearest thing he had.

The old man saw it. His eyes went very bright. He looked away at once, at the shelf, at the curtains, anywhere.

“Brother,” the girl said, and the boy jumped. “The pillow.”

“What about it?”

“His head’s too low. Prop it up.”

“I’m propping, I’m propping.” The boy scrambled up, rummaged at the foot of the bed for a second pillow, and slid it behind Sebek’s shoulders with both hands, lifting him a few careful centimeters. It was so gentle it was almost comical. 

Afterward he hovered, tucking the blanket in at the sides and patting it flat, as though he didn’t know what else to do with his hands.

“Is that better? Too high? I can lower it.”

“It’s fine,” Sebek whispered.

“You’re sure?”

“It’s fine.”

The boy exhaled and sat back on his heels, looking oddly pleased with himself.

The girl had crouched to retrieve her sketchbook from the floor. She smoothed a bent page corner with her thumb, and as she did, Sebek caught a glimpse of the drawing. 

It wasn’t a face or a landscape. It was a coat, a small one, in careful pencil lines, buttoned to the throat, with a collar and fitted sleeves. Beside it, in tidy handwriting, ran a column of notes: chest, arm, length, each followed by a question mark.

She saw him looking, flushed, and shut the book against her chest.

“It’s for when you’re up,” she muttered. “You’ve outgrown the old ones. And the healer said you’d need something warm. It’s nothing, it’s just a draft.”

She’s been making me a coat.

For three weeks. While I was…

He didn’t know what to do with that. It settled in his chest, heavy and warm.

The old man’s gaze drifted downward. It traveled over the bandages on Sebek’s hands, up his wrists, to the edge of the linen at the collar of his nightshirt and the faint swelling along his jaw, which Sebek hadn’t known was there until he saw the old man look at it.

Something crossed his face. The scowl deepened, and the green scales along his jaw seemed to flatten and bristle all at once.

“Those little—” he began, very quietly.

“Grandfather,” the girl said.

“—wretched, spineless little—” His lip curled, and Sebek saw the small, sharp points of fangs flash behind it. His voice was rising and shaking, rough as stone against stone. The hand on the blanket curled into a fist. 

“Should’ve gone to their fathers that very day. Should’ve dragged every last one of them into the square and let the whole village see. A tongue-lashing, a week’s chores, that’s what I let them off with, as if it were...” He shook his head violently. “Not enough. Never enough. If I’d known, if I’d known what they...”

“Grandfather,” the boy said, sharper now, with a glance at the bed. “Not now. He’s... not now.”

The old man stopped. His jaw worked. He looked down at Sebek, at the small, pale face on the pillow, and the fangs vanished behind his lip as the fury drained out of him all at once. What was left was worse. His shoulders sagged, and for a moment he only looked old.

“Aye,” he said hoarsely. “Not now.”

Who?

Who did he mean? Who were they?

A cold flicker passed through him, the faintest brush of something. A shape. A laugh. A shove. Then the white hum of the blank closed over it, so quickly he couldn’t tell whether he had remembered it or imagined it.

He swallowed. His head pulsed.

“It’s fine,” he said, which made no sense, and he knew it. “I’m... it’s okay.”

The old man looked at him for a long moment. Then he made a sound that might have been a laugh or a sob, short and rough, and lifted one big hand and rested it very carefully against the side of Sebek’s head, over his hair, as though his palm could cover the whole of the pain.

“Spoken like your mother,” he muttered. “Always the one to tell me it’s fine when it wasn’t.”

With his other hand he fumbled in the pocket of his coat, scowling harder, as if the pocket had insulted him personally, and drew out a small wrapped sweet. He set it on the blanket beside Sebek’s fingers with all the care of a man laying down a weapon.

“For when you can stomach it,” he said gruffly. “And don’t tell your mother I keep those.”

The boy let out a wet, helpless laugh. The girl covered her face with both hands.

Sebek didn’t answer. The hand on his head was heavy and warm and smelled of tobacco, cedar, and the clean cold of outdoors. His eyes slid shut again, just for a moment, just because it felt, strangely, safe.

He heard the girl speaking softly. Let him sleep. He’s exhausted. We’ll tell them together. He heard the boy shift, the floorboards creak, the stick being lifted from the wall. He heard the old man say, low and loud and not quite steady, “I’m staying.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I’m staying.”

Nobody argued back.

Sebek drifted. The ache hummed on, patient and dull. The voices thinned into murmurs, and the murmurs into a warm blur, and the blur began to close over him like water over his head.

They’re sad.

Because of me.

I did something.

What did I do?

That man was so angry. Who was he talking about?

Who are they talking about?

He woke slowly, the way you rise through deep water, with the surface a long way up.

The light had changed. The gold in the window had thinned to amber, and the corners of the room were going dim. Someone had lit a small lamp on the shelf, and its glow touched the carved animals and the cracked mug and the dried flowers on their string.

The chair beside the bed was empty. A heavy coat hung over its back, and the walking stick still leaned against the wall. The sweet wasn’t on the blanket anymore. It was in his fist. He didn’t remember closing his hand around it.

He said he was staying.

Below the floor, voices moved around the house.

The boards and plaster blurred them into shapes, a low rumble, a quicker voice, a pause. A chair scraped. A pot clanked against something. Once someone laughed, a short, cracked sound that stopped almost as soon as it started. Once a cupboard door banged, and the whole house seemed to hold its breath after it.

He lay and listened without really hearing. Words surfaced and sank before he could catch them. A woman’s voice climbed above the others, sharp and unsteady. A deep growl answered her. Then the boy’s voice, pleading. Then the girl's voice was firm.

It was all too much to follow. His head was still tender, and the sweet in his hand was easier to think about. He turned the little paper-wrapped lump over against his palm.

Something sweet. That’s all.

The voices stopped.

For a long moment there was nothing. Then the front door opened and closed, and quick footsteps crossed the floor below. They reached the stairs and came up fast, fast enough that the third step gave a loud, protesting groan. They didn’t slow at the top. They raced down the hall, and then, right outside his door, they stopped.

Someone was breathing out there. Two people. One breath was quick and ragged, the other slow and deliberately steady.

The door opened.

Two adults stood in the doorway, one half a step ahead of the other.

The man was the easier of the two to look at. He was ordinary, lean and tired, somewhere in his thirties or forties, with wire-rimmed glasses sliding down his nose and brown hair rumpled as if he’d pushed his hands through it all afternoon. He wore a pale work tunic buttoned to the collar, with a small embroidered tooth stitched over the pocket. His face was gray with strain, and his mouth was pressed into a line that wasn’t quite holding.

Then Sebek looked at the woman and forgot the man completely.

She looked like the old man. Not the way a daughter resembles a father, in a nose or a chin, but as though someone had peeled thirty years of weather off the grandfather and left the rest. Her hair stood in the same short dark green spikes. Dark scales ran along her jaw, finer than his and brighter, catching the lamplight. Her ears were long and sharp. 

Her eyes were fixed on the bed, and in the dim room her slit pupils had widened until they were almost round, huge and black and shining. Even her scowl was the same, set deep in her brow, the face of someone who spent a great deal of effort looking angry so that she wouldn’t have to feel anything else.

The woman made a sound, a small, broken noise with no words in it, and then she was across the room. She seemed to cross it without moving. She was on her knees beside the bed with her hands hovering over him, shaking, as afraid as the siblings had been to land.

“Oh,” she whispered. “Oh, my darling. My little boy.”

The man had followed her. He took off his glasses as if they were in the way and pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes. A muffled sound came out of him too.

Then the woman stopped holding back. She gathered Sebek against her, carefully at first, and then all at once, tight and fierce, with her face pressed into his hair.

Pain flared bright in his ribs, and he gasped.

“Gently,” the man said at once, his voice thick. “Gently, love. His ribs, the healer said—”

“I know. I know.” But she didn’t let go. She loosened her grip and kept her arms around him, and her whole body shook against his while she whispered into his hair, over and over, half laughing and half sobbing.

Her skin was warm. The scales that brushed his cheek were cool and smooth and faintly ridged, like river stones. She smelled of soap and mint and something clean and sharp. The man wrapped his arms around both of them, glasses dangling from one hand, and rested his forehead against hers.

Sebek stayed very still.

He didn’t know what to do. His arms were pinned between their bodies. His ribs hurt. His head had started to pulse again, slow and heavy. And under all of it, there was a feeling he had no name for and no room to hold.

They’re holding me like I’m…

He couldn’t find the end of it.

Nobody had held him like this. He was certain of that much. There had been a house, a table, a long silence, and someone’s hand in his, small and cold. There had never been this.

After a while, awkwardly, he worked one hand free. It took effort. He raised it, shaking, and laid it flat against the woman’s back and patted her. Once. Twice. It was a stiff, uncertain pat, the kind you’d give a stranger at a funeral.

She went rigid.

Then she gave a cracked laugh and drew back just far enough to look at him. Her face was wet, her scales were shining, and her pupils were huge. She wiped at his cheek with her thumb, though he hadn’t been crying. “Look at you,” she said unsteadily. 

“Trying to comfort me…”

She took a glance over her shoulder.

The doorway was crowded. The girl had a fist pressed against her mouth. The boy was grinning in a helpless, wobbling way. Behind them, taller than either, the old man stood with his arms crossed and his scowl locked firmly back in place, his eyes very bright.

“I knew it,” the woman said to the room, her voice shaking. “Father, you left your boots by the door. How was I supposed to not notice them?”

“One takes one’s boots off in a house,” the old man said stiffly.

“Then you didn’t want it to be a surprise!”

“It was their idea.”

“They’re children.”

“Teenagers,” the girl said weakly, and the boy made a strangled noise, and a laugh broke out across the whole doorway, jagged and relieved and wet.

The woman turned back to Sebek. Her hands rested on his shoulders now, light, as though she still couldn’t quite believe she was allowed.

“Sweetheart,” she said. She made herself say it steadily. “Do you know who I am?”

The man touched her arm. “Love. They told us in the hall, remember?”

“I know. I know. I just...” Her mouth trembled. “I had to hear it.”

Sebek looked at her. At the dark scales along her jaw, the sharp ears, the swollen red eyes with their narrow pupils, so like the old man’s and so much younger. He searched for it as he had searched in the others, for any flicker of recognition.

He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

“No.” She said it almost before he’d finished, fierce and soft at once. “None of that. You’ve nothing to be sorry for.”

It was exactly what the old man had said. He wondered, distantly, whether it was a password in this family.

“I’m your mother,” she said, and laid a flat hand against her chest, slowly, as if it needed to land. “And this is your father.”

The man put his glasses back on, crooked, and managed a small, kind smile. “Papa’s fine. Or Father, or just my name, whichever’s easier. We’ll work it out.”

Mama.

Papa.

The words sat in his mouth and wouldn’t move. They didn’t feel like his. They felt like words in a language he’d only ever read.

“I...” He stopped. His face was getting hot. He looked down at his bandaged hands. “I don’t know what to call you. I’m sorry.”

“Then don’t,” the man said gently. “Not yet. Call us whatever you like, or nothing at all. That’s all right.”

“Thank you,” Sebek said.

It came out stiff and careful, absurdly formal, the way you’d thank a shopkeeper. The room went silent.

Then the woman burst into tears again, laughing, and the man chuckled shakily and took off his glasses once more. In the doorway the girl said, “Oh, that’s worse, he’s being polite,” and the boy wheezed with laughter, and the old man muttered something that sounded a lot like about time somebody in this house had manners. 

Sebek burned to the tips of his ears and wished the bed would swallow him.

Was that wrong?

“It wasn’t wrong,” the man said, as if he’d heard. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and smiled, lopsided with relief. “Not at all. It’s only that you’ve never said it to us in your life.”

Oh.

Somehow that was worse, and also better.

After that, nothing was very organized. The mother wouldn’t let go of his hand. The father kept straightening the blanket and then forcing himself to stop. The girl fetched a second lamp and forgot where she had set it down. The boy kept appearing with things, a cup of water, a cushion, a second cushion, until his sister told him to stop hovering and he said he wasn’t hovering, he was standing near. The old man hauled the chair closer, lowered himself into it with a groan, and glared at a spot on the wall as though it had said something rude.

At one point the father leaned in and said, in a tone he clearly believed was casual, “Would you mind opening your mouth for a moment?”

Sebek stared at him.

“Just a look.” The man was already tilting his head, glasses glinting, with the unmistakable expression of someone who couldn’t help himself. “You took a knock to the jaw. I’d like to be sure your teeth are all right.”

“Darling,” the mother said.

“It’s a professional concern.”

“You can’t do his teeth now.”

“I’m not doing them. I’m looking at them.”

Sebek opened his mouth, mostly to end the conversation. The man peered in, hummed to himself, and sat back with enormous satisfaction. “Molars are fine.”

“Good,” the old man said. “Then he’s fit for soup.”

It was the mother who brought it up, a little later, when the laughter had died down. She was holding his hand in both of hers, and her thumb had been tracing slow circles over his knuckles for some time. She took a breath.

“Sweetheart,” she said carefully. “When you fell, you—”

He flinched.

He hadn’t meant to. It went through him before he could stop it, a cold, white flicker down his spine, and the hum of the blank rose with it. His hand jerked in hers.

“Not yet,” he said, too quickly. “Please. Could I... could I not know? Please?

The room went still.

He hadn’t known he would say it until it was out, and now he couldn’t take it back. He stared at the blanket, his face burning. 

I don’t want to know what happened…

The mother’s grip tightened. For a second he was afraid she would insist, or be hurt. Instead, after a long breath, she said softly, “Of course. Whenever you’re ready. Or never, if that’s what you’d like. That’s yours to decide.”

The man rested a hand on her shoulder. The old man grunted, which seemed to mean agreement.

“I’m sorry,” Sebek said again, and the mother shook her head. He had the sense that she badly wanted to say don’t be and was forcing herself not to.

“Is that normal?” the girl asked, low, from the doorway. “Not wanting to know?”

“Perfectly,” said a dry, unhurried voice from the hall. “Often wise, even. A mind will sometimes decide what it can carry, and it’s rude to argue with it.”

Everyone turned.

The healer was small and brisk and older than Sebek had expected, a wiry woman with a silver braid down her back, a leather satchel on her shoulder, and a face like creased brown paper. She smelled of mint and woodsmoke. She stood in the doorway with her head cocked, looking at Sebek the way a baker looks at a loaf she suspects of being underdone.

“Your boy shrieked past my gate an hour ago, shouting that a miracle had occurred,” she said. “I thought I’d better see to it. Move aside, the lot of you, you’re blocking the light.”

They moved. Even the old man moved, which Sebek hadn’t thought possible. She pulled the chair to the bedside, perched on its edge, and set her satchel on her knees.

“Now, then. Let’s have a look.”

It wasn’t like the old man’s inspection. She was lighter-fingered and quicker, and she talked the whole time. She tilted his head and peered into each eye. 

She pressed along his ribs, murmuring, and stopped to ask, “Does this hurt?” When he said yes, she said, “Good,” which didn’t seem like the right answer. She tapped his knee. She had him follow her finger with his eyes. She said “Hm” a great deal.

Then she held up her right hand, palm toward him, and light gathered around her fingertips.

It was small, pale gold, no brighter than a candle flame. It didn’t burn. It simply hung above her skin, swaying and pulsing, soft and slow and alive.

Sebek stared.

What is that?

She passed her hand over his head, then slowly down his chest, then over each bandaged wrist. The light followed. A faint warmth spread behind it, the same dull warmth he’d woken to, like a hearth burning in another room.

“What is that?” The words escaped before he’d decided to say them. His voice was a hoarse little thread, but in the quiet it carried.

Everyone looked at him.

The healer’s hand paused. Her eyebrows rose, and she glanced at the family, and the family glanced at each other. In the doorway the boy opened his mouth, and the girl elbowed him in the ribs.

“Healing magic,” the healer said mildly. “A little of it. Nothing grand. I’m no great mage, I only mend what can be mended.” She studied him. “You don’t remember it?”

“No,” Sebek said. “I’m sorry.”

Magic.

He turned the word over slowly, like a coin too heavy to spend. He didn’t know whether he ought to be frightened or amazed. For a wild second, he wanted to ask her to do it again.

He didn’t. But something in his face must have said it, because the corner of her mouth twitched.

“A knock on the head scrambles all sorts,” she said, to the room as much as to him. “Names, faces, the order of the days. Sometimes the plainest things, how to hold a spoon, what a thing is called. No cause for alarm, and none for scolding.” She fixed a stern look on the old man, who looked offended. “If he asks you something that sounds foolish, answer it. Plainly, and without pity. He’ll fill himself back in faster that way.”

“Of course,” the mother said at once.

“I wouldn’t dream of scolding,” the old man muttered.

“You’d dream of little else. Hush.”

Sebek lay quite still, and something small and quiet turned over in his chest.

They think I’ve lost all of it.

The whole world.

Which means I can ask anything.

It was a small, cold, careful thought, and he tested it the way you test a plank before trusting it with your weight. No one here would think it strange if he didn’t know the name of a plant, or a coin, or a country. They would just explain. They would assume the blank, and the blank would shield him.

He didn’t know whether that was a gift or a trick. For now, he decided, it didn’t matter. It was a door, and it was open, and he was so tired of walls.

The healer finished with a brisk pat to his shoulder. The light faded from her fingers, and she folded her hands in her lap.

“Well. The skull is knitting nicely, which is the worst of it. The ribs are mending. The wrist will be stiff a few weeks yet. He’s thin as a rail, which is no surprise, but he’s keeping water down and his eyes are clear. All things considered, he’s done astonishingly well.” 

She turned to the mother. “You may sit him up. Slowly, a few minutes at a time. He’s not to stand, and he’s certainly not to try the stairs. A week in bed at least, perhaps longer. If the dizziness comes, he lies back down, and nobody argues.”

“A week?” the boy protested.

“Possibly two. Unless you’d like to carry him up and down yourself.”

The boy shut his mouth.

“I want him fed,” she went on, rummaging in her satchel. “Broth, bread, something soft. Nothing rich. And someone sits with him through the nights, in case he wakes confused. Not you, old goat, you snore.”

“I do not snore,” the old man said.

“You do. The whole valley knows.”

The mother slid an arm behind Sebek’s back and the father took his elbow, and together they lifted him. It was slow, careful, and humiliating. 

The room swung. Nausea rolled up his throat, and he clenched his teeth and breathed until it passed. The father tucked pillows behind him one at a time until at last he was sitting, swaying slightly, propped upright, and the whole room spread out before him from a new angle.

He could see the shelf properly now. The carved animals were small wooden foxes and rabbits and a dragon with one wing missing. The cracked mug held a bunch of wildflowers. 

He could see the whole window, the long slope of the hill outside it, and the line where the green met the darkening sky. And he could see them all, ringed around the bed and watching him as if he had just taken his first steps.

“There,” the healer said. “A sitting boy. Marvelous.”

“I’m fine,” Sebek said, mostly to convince himself.

“You’re green,” said the old man.

“I’m fine.”

“He’s fine,” the girl agreed, hiding a grin.

They fed him, in the end. Or tried to.

The broth came up on a wooden tray, carried by the boy, who held it before him like a sacred object and was told twice by his sister not to spill it. It was pale and fragrant, with little green flecks floating in it, and a heel of dark bread sat beside the bowl. Sebek reached for the spoon. His hand shook, and the spoon rattled against the rim.

“I can help,” the mother said.

“I’d like to do it,” he said, too fast, and then, softer, “Please. If that’s all right.”

She looked at him, and something understanding crossed her face. She sat back and folded her hands in her lap.

It took him a long time. The broth was hot and the spoon was too big, and twice his wrist gave out and he nearly lost it. Nobody spoke. Nobody helped. 

They watched him with an attention so intense he could almost feel it on his skin. When he finally got a mouthful past his teeth, and it was warm and salty and tasted of herbs, and his whole body went soft with relief for one brief second, the room let out a collective sigh.

“What’s the green?” he asked, a few spoonfuls later, squinting into the bowl.

“Nettle,” said the mother.

“Is it... safe to eat?”

“Once it’s cooked. Never pick it raw. It stings.”

He filed it away carefully. It was a small piece of the world, handed over without a flicker of surprise.

“Where are we?” he asked a little later, when the bowl was half empty and he felt, for the first time, bold enough to try.

“Briar Valley,” the father said. He sat on the end of the bed now, half turned, glasses pushed up into his hair. “We’re up in the hills, on the edge of a village, a long way from town. It’s very quiet. Mostly sheep and farmland. You’ve always liked it.”

Briar Valley.

It was a pretty name, and it meant nothing. He waited for the tug of recognition, the half-seen shape of something remembered.

Nothing came.

“Is it a country?” he asked. “Is there... a king? What’s the world like?”

The boy and the girl exchanged a look. The old man cleared his throat. The mother rested a hand on his arm, and the father, very gently, smiled.

“That’s a big question,” he said. “We’ll take it a piece at a time. But yes. Briar Valley is part of a larger realm, and it does have a ruler. A good one. We’ll tell you about him. We’ll tell you about all of it.”

“Slowly,” said the mother. “You have time.”

“We’ve all got time,” the old man said gruffly. “Now eat your soup.”

Sebek ate his soup.

It was the strangest meal of his life, and quietly, one of the best. His family sat around him in the amber and blue of the dimming window, eating their own bowls on their knees, talking in low voices about nothing, the weather, the sheep, a neighbor’s gate that had come off its hinges. 

They answered every small question he asked. What’s that called? What’s it for? Why is the curtain that color? They answered every one of them, seriously and without impatience, as if he were a visitor from some far country and it was an honor to host him.

In a way, that was exactly what he was.

He should have found it frightening. A small, cold, steady part of him did, and stayed awake no matter how warm the broth was. But the larger part of him, the tired part, was only grateful. The lamplight was soft. The bread was good. Nobody asked him to explain himself.

At last, when the bowls had been cleared and the window had deepened to dark blue, the healer rose and gathered her satchel. The father walked her to the door, murmuring. The girl and the boy withdrew one by one, looking back over their shoulders. 

The mother stayed the longest. She tucked the blanket around his shoulders, smoothed his hair back, and kissed his forehead, quickly and shyly, as if she didn’t quite trust herself to do it.

“Sleep,” she said softly. “We’re just down the hall. If you need anything at all, you call. All right?”

“All right.”

She hesitated at the door, one hand on the frame, and looked back at him. The lamp lit her scales from below and turned them to dark green glass.

“I’m so glad you’re home,” she whispered.

Then she was gone, and the door closed softly behind her.

Sebek lay against his pillows in the quiet. The chair beside him creaked. 

The old man had settled into it with his arms crossed and his chin tucked down, eyes already half closed, with the massive, stubborn calm of someone who had made up his mind about something and meant to defend it to the death.

“Go to sleep, boy,” he said, without opening his eyes.

“Yes,” Sebek said. “Um. Sir.”

“Grandfather,” the old man said gruffly, “will do.”

“...Grandfather.”

The old man made a low sound in his chest, deeply satisfied, and said nothing more.

Outside, the last light slid down the hill. Somewhere very far away, a single bell clinked once and went quiet.