Ascendant

His whole body ached, a dull but insistent pain. His eyes were crusted shut, and it was almost too much of an effort to pry them open. Even then, the world was a blur of blue and white sky. That was strange, but he couldn’t say why, like looking at something familiar from an unusual angle. His mind struggled to catch up, but it took several more seconds for him to register what had woken him.

“Wake up!” a woman’s voice yelled. “You’ll get dragged into the cove with the tide!”

Her voice pierced the fog over his mind, and he struggled to sit up. For something so simple, it felt like a monumental task, and he couldn’t manage anything better than rolling over and climbing to his hands and knees. Then a wave struck him and bowled him over.

He tried to crawl farther up the beach, but his limbs were too weak to drag him. The next wave flattened him again and pulled him away from safety. He kept trying, but it was a losing battle. By the time the woman reached him, the water was up to his chest and he’d been dunked underwater several times. She grabbed his arm and started dragging him back up the beach.

He didn’t remember much after that. The woman helped him to his feet and held him upright. Without her, he would have toppled over, unable to support his own weight. With her assistance, they trudged up the beach and navigated a narrow trail up the bluffs. He blacked out somewhere near the top, and after that, he had only hazy memories of scrub bushes and dusty fields.

The next time he opened his eyes, it was evening. Pale light illuminated a ramshackle room, filtered through cracks in the wall and holes in the ceiling. He was in a bed with a threadbare blanket draped over him, which did little to ward off the chill of the coming night.

He could hear two people in the other room talking, though their voices were soft enough that he only caught bits and pieces of the conversation. He overheard a man mutter about arcana poisoning and death sentence, and the other voice, the woman who’d saved him, insisting on something. They kept arguing, the volume gradually increasing until finally the man said, “I’ve given you my diagnosis. Do whatever you want with it.”

There was the sound of a door slamming after that, so hard that the walls shook and he felt it through the rickety legs of the bed. He struggled to sit up, but he was so weak that even the weight of the blanket was too much. After a brief surge of effort, he sagged back down onto the bed and closed his eyes again.

* * *

When he woke, daylight was coming in through the cracks in the walls. He tried to sit up again, and this time managed to prop himself up on his elbows before a wave of vertigo hit him. He rolled to the side and hurled his guts out onto the dirt floor, then collapsed back into the bed. The noise was enough to summon his rescuer, who entered the room with an earthenware cup that had a crack running down half of its length.

“You’re awake?” she asked, nodding to herself when she saw his eyes open. “Good. You should be past the worst of it now, if Magister Tormin was right. He said you had arcana poisoning somehow and that you were as good as dead. You’re looking pretty alive to me though, so what does he know?”

He could barely follow the woman’s voice. Mostly, his eyes just followed the cup in her hand as she talked, and she fell silent when she realized what was distracting him. “Ah, sorry. You must be thirsty. Here, let me help you up and you can drink this.”

The woman sat next to him on the bed and helped him into a sitting position. The world spun again, but he managed to keep himself from spewing all over her, or at least from dry-heaving in her general direction. There wasn’t much of anything left, and he was pretty sure he’d hacked up all the sea water in his belly a minute ago.

The water in that cup was warm and gritty, like drinking from a mud puddle that someone has sprinkled a fresh layer of dust on top of. To his parched throat, it was delicious. He tried to drain it in one swallow, but the woman kept a hand on the cup and only let him sip at it. Still, she remained patiently at his side until it was gone.

“Better?” she asked.

“Yes,” he croaked. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. You know, you’ve got to be about the luckiest kid in the world. You look like you survived a shipwreck and somehow washed ashore in Bloodfin Cove in one piece. There are more sharks in the waters off the coast here than there are people in Palmara, and you were right at the thickest of it.”

He didn’t feel very lucky. Mostly, he just felt sore and sick. His head was killing him and his stomach was still threatening rebellion. It was sheer willpower and grit that kept the few ounces of water he’d been given inside of him.

The woman kept talking, but he’d stopped listening. It wasn’t until she’d repeated herself for the third time that he realized she’d asked him a question. “Sorry,” he told her, “Tired still. What did you say?”

“I said my name is Ciana, and asked what yours is,” she told him, not a hint of impatience in her tone.

“My… name?” He thought about it for a second and felt his mind drifting. It was harder to focus, hard to remember anything.

He mumbled something and sunk back down onto the bed. His eyelids were too heavy to keep open, his limbs too weak to move. Whatever Ciana said next, he was already too far gone to hear.

* * *

What finally woke him hours later was the smell of cooking food. It took him a few attempts to sit up and swing his feet around to the edge of the bed, and then there were a few more false starts before he finally got upright and was able to wrap the ratty old blanket around his shoulders. He hobbled across the room to the door.

Ciana was tending a metal pot hung over top a firepit in the center of the room. There was no chimney that he could see, but given the nature of the shack he was in, one was hardly needed. None of the boards that formed the walls had been sealed in any way, and even if they’d been square when they were constructed, time and the elements had conspired to warp and pull them. The roof wasn’t in much better shape, and the smoke that rose from the fire simply passed through the many, many holes instead of lingering.

“Finally awake again?” Ciana said, looking up at him. “I knew the smell of a hot meal would get you out of bed. Come on over and have a seat. It’s almost done.”

He walked across the room, each step deliberate and wobbly, and all but collapsed on a driftwood log that had been carved into something like a bench and set up near the fire pit. He watched in silence as the woman ladled out two scoops of whatever was gurgling in the pot into wooden bowls and passed him one, along with a spoon.

“Here you go, Nym.”

“Nym?” he asked.

Ciana frowned. “Sorry, did I get it wrong? I thought that’s what you said your name was.”

He blinked and considered. He remembered her asking, and he’d said something as he was passing back out. “I don’t know what my name is,” he told her. No matter how hard he considered it, he couldn’t really remember much of anything specific to his identity, not his family or where he was from or even how old he was.

“That’s awful,” she said. “Maybe the magister can help you get your memories back. For tonight, we’ll call you Nym, okay? When you’re feeling better, I’ll show you the way to town and we can ask.”

“Okay,” Nym agreed quietly. He ate the stew in front of him slowly, lost in thought. The oldest thing he could remember was waking up on the beach and getting pounded with waves. Ciana had been yelling at him from the trail at the top of the bluffs and had somehow made it down to the shore in time to drag him back out of the water.

Whoever he was, whatever he’d been doing prior to that, he had no idea. He didn’t remember being on a ship, or what had happened to it. She didn’t know who he was, so he guessed he wasn’t a local. Really, there were no clues at all, and it was a struggle to even string those thoughts together.

Ciana didn’t say anything while they ate, a small mercy Nym was thankful for. She gave him the time he needed to start to put himself together. The two sat in silence interrupted only by the crackle of the small cooking fire. Nym took a moment to study the woman who’d saved his life.

She was in her early twenties, plain-faced and lanky. She had tanned skin with a splattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks, and brown-red hair that hung down past her shoulders in a braid. Her clothes were in better condition than the blanket he had wrapped around him, but still showed plenty of signs of wear. Her hands and feet were heavily calloused, and scars showed on her bare arms.

“Why are you helping me?” he asked.

She seemed surprised by the question. “Why wouldn’t I help you?”

He gave her a wry smile and looked around. “Can you afford to? You don’t look like you have much? Not that I’m not grateful, but…”

Ciana shrugged. “I’m not going to let a kid get turned into chum, and I’m not going to let one die if I can do anything about it. Sure, I don’t have a lot, but I can spare a bed for a day and a meal.”

Nym wasn’t sure that was true. There was a hollowness in her cheeks that told him times had been tough for her, and that maybe she was giving away more than she could afford. He looked down at the empty bowl in his hands and felt guilt squirm through his guts.

“Thank you,” he told her.

She smiled. “Don’t even worry about it. I’ll survive. I always do. And you’re going to survive too, right? We’ll see about healing your mind tomorrow and then figure out how to get you home.”

“That… sounds good,” Nym said.

“But first, we need to find you some pants!” she told him. “That blanket is more holes than not anymore.”

He looked down and realized exactly how much of himself could be seen through it. His face flushed and he shrugged it off his shoulders to bunch up extra material around his waist.

Ciana laughed. “Not your fault, Nym. And nothing I haven’t seen before. No need to be embarrassed.”

But there was need. Oh yes, yes there was.

“I am going to lay back down again. Thank you for saving me.”

She waved him off. “Anyone would have done it. Sleep well. Big day tomorrow.”

He laid back down and watched the sun set through the wall slats while he pondered her words. Somehow, he doubted anyone else would have saved him, let alone offered him shelter while he recovered his strength.

He owed Ciana big time. He’d have to find some way to repay her. Paying back debts seemed like the kind of thing that was important to him. Sleep took him while he turned that idea around in his head.