Tauran was starting to realize just how inadequate his rushed notes were. It didn’t matter. They’d figure it out.
Once they arrived at Iako’s house, Jinhai had to leave, since the masters in the temples wouldn’t tolerate him staying out all night. As much as Tauran wished Jinhai could stay to help him communicate with Iako, Tauran was grateful for his help. To his surprise, Jinhai pulled him into an embrace, giving him an awkward smile before taking off.
Tauran turned back to the house, pausing briefly in the doorway.
He placed a hand on the frame. This was where Kalai grew up, where he’d spent twenty-five years of his life dreaming of the stars. Tauran swallowed. He wished Kalai could have shown him around, himself. Instead, he was in there, fighting a lonely battle.
Tauran took a steadying breath and stepped inside.
Iako’s soft voice filtered from an adjacent room and Tauran steered for it, knocking gently on the door frame before entering. Kalai lay on a bed, Iako standing beside him with a bowl of water and a cloth. When she heard Tauran, she raised her head and looked at him expectantly.
“Uh…” Tauran cleared his throat, then drew the note from his pocket and glanced over the words. “Ha… Hashi-yo aru?” he stammered. Can I help?
She regarded him for a moment, then held the cloth toward him.
“Akal-iya varai,” she said, pinching the fabric of her own shirt between two fingers and tugging on it, then wiggled the cloth for emphasis.
Tauran took the cloth and nodded. “Okay.”
Without another word, Iako stepped around him. A moment later, the sound of chopping and the faint smell of herbs filled the small home.
“Okay,” Tauran repeated, pulling a stool over beside the bed.
Kalai’s breathing was fast again. He seemed restless, the line between his brows deeper. When Tauran touched his face, he twitched, but didn’t wake.
Placing the cloth in the bowl, he reached for Kalai’s shirt and opened the buttons one by one, then grabbed the cloth, wrung it out and brought it gently to Kalai’s burning skin. The bowl wasn’t full of water, but of a faintly bluish concoction that smelled of flowers. “It’ll be okay,” Tauran murmured, passing the cold cloth over Kalai’s shoulder and down his arms. “I’m watching over you.”
CHAPTER 40
Events unfolded like someone had scrambled all the scenes in a storybook. Pulled all the pages loose, tossed them into the air and gathered them back up, then stuffed them inside the cover in the order they’d fallen. Kalai’s memories were fractured. He remembered Tauran gently whispering his name, remembered being helped to sit, remembered a large, gentle hand under his jaw as someone fed him. Remembered pain. But he couldn’t say in which order they’d happened, and some memories he wasn’t even sure were real. He knew he dreamed a lot, some dreams so realistic that they were indistinguishable from reality. He remembered burning on the inside, curled up on his side and clinging to Tauran, begging for mercy. And he remembered dreaming that exact same scenario, only this time, Tauran had kissed him, and it bothered Kalai that he wasn’t sure if the kiss had also been a dream.
He had screamed, and he didn’t know if he’d done it out loud, but he must have, because his cries of agony somehow always ended with someone’s arms around him. Sometimes Tauran’s, sometimes Aunt Iako’s, which didn’t make sense, because he was in Kal Valreus, hundreds of miles from home. Until he remembered that he wasn’t. That they had gone on a long journey to both the Terror Marshes and Sharoani. That he was back home. And it terrified him he could so easily forget months of his life, that he couldn’t trust his mind to know what was real or what had happened and when.
Kalai lay on his back with his eyes closed, as he seemed to do endlessly, counting his own breaths. Eighty… Eighty-one. He’d started doing it to manage the pain. The searing, blinding, all-consuming agony that set his entire body alight. He knew he’d find peace roughly around one-hundred, because that was when unconsciousness would usually take him.
Eighty-seven, eighty-eight.
At the moment, he wasn’t hurting. He couldn’t remember a time before it all started when he hadn’t been hurting. How long had this gone on?
Ninety-nine, one-hundred.
It was daytime. He could tell, because the sunlight fell across his face, likely through a window, warming his skin, turning the insides of his eyelids bright orange-red.
One-hundred-and-five, one-hundred-and-six.
He could hear birds too, chirping outside. When