The river was slow and wide, and for two days nothing happened.
It was the strangest thing Nathan had ever felt. After the chains and the blue light and the roaring dock, the world had simply gone quiet. The barge drifted between low green banks. Herons stood in the shallows like gray statues. The bargeman, a stooped, silent man named Tomas who had said exactly eleven words since they'd boarded, steered with one hand and smoked a pipe with the other.
Nathan sat at the bow with his knees drawn up and watched the water.
He had lost something again, and he could not stop pressing at the place where it used to be. His mother's eyes. He'd tried to rebuild them from details: the shape of her brows, the crease at the corner of her smile, the way she squinted when she read by candlelight. But the color had slid out of his mind like a coin through a drain.
"You're doing it again."
Mira dropped down beside him, a heel of Dorrin's bread in her hand. Her throat was still bruised, a dark ring above her collar. She tore the bread in half and held out a piece.
"Doing what?"
"Staring at nothing and pretending you're fine." She chewed for a moment. "You lied to me on the dock."
He didn't answer. It was easier to look at the heron.
"I'm not angry," Mira said. "I just want to know what it was."
Nathan was quiet for a long time. A fish jumped somewhere behind them, a small silver sound.
"What color were my mother's eyes?" he asked.
Mira stared at him.
"I know it's a stupid question," he said quickly. "I just—I can't—"
"Gray," she said.
"What?"
"Gray. Pale gray, like rain on slate. Aunt Elara always said it was the only thing that made her look stern." Her voice had gone soft. "Everyone in the family says you have her eyes, Nathan."
He pressed the heel of his hand to his mouth.
"I have her eyes," he said in a strange voice, "and I can't remember what they look like."
Mira reached out and, awkwardly, put her arm around his shoulders. She smelled of river water and wind. He leaned into her without meaning to, the way he might have when he was eight years old, and neither of them said anything for a while.
"Then I'll remember them for you," she said at last. "That's what I'm for."
---
That night, they lay on the grain sacks under a sky thick with stars.
Nathan had never seen so many. In the valley, the mist swallowed the heavens, and he had grown up believing the night was a low, gray thing. Here the stars crowded together from horizon to horizon, and for the first time since the ceremony, he forgot to be afraid.
"Tell me about the others," he said. "The other bloodlines. What do you know?"
Mira thought about it. "Aunt Selene taught me some. There are three Great Houses in the capital. Veyron, for light. Ardent, for fire and forge. And Solenne, who are supposed to be healers, though people say they're the ones who write the laws." She yawned. "Then the lesser houses, the Guild, and the Ash Chorus, who don't seem to belong to anyone."
"Why would anyone want to erase a whole bloodline?"
"I don't know." She was quiet, then added: "Maybe they're scared. Whole cities are scared of the Desteroys. You'd be scared too, if all you knew was what happened at Hollow Sky."
"I do know what happened."
"No you don't. Not all of it." She turned onto her side to face him. "You know what your ancestor wrote. But the people who lived through it wrote something else."
He opened his mouth, then closed it.
"Don't trust the names," he said slowly. "That's what the letter says. Don't trust what the family says, or what the world says."
"Then who do we trust?"
"Each other, I guess."
Mira smiled at the stars. "That's a start."
She fell asleep first. Nathan stayed awake a little longer, listening to the water slap against the hull, and to the faint, familiar thing that rose in the back of his mind whenever he was alone. It wasn't a voice. It was closer to a pressure, a patient hunger, as if something deep in him were still counting.
---
On the third morning, Tomas finally spoke a twelfth word.
"Calder," he grunted, pointing downriver with his pipe.
A town rose out of the morning mist, built on stilts above a wide bend in the river. Hundreds of boats clustered at its docks. Smoke curled from a hundred chimneys, and a great iron bell tolled somewhere in its center.
"Calder Reach," Mira said, standing. "Biggest river port in the west. We can lose ourselves in there."
Nathan rose beside her, stretching stiff limbs. He started to say something about finding a place to eat, then stopped.
Mira was looking at him strangely.
"What?" he said.
"Nothing." She shook her head. "Sorry, I just..."
"Mira?"
"I was going to say your name," she said slowly. She laughed once, uneasily. "I had it right on my tongue. It was just a second, and then it came back, but..." She pressed her fingers to her temple. "Isn't that odd?"
Nathan went cold.
*The world will lose you.*
"It's nothing," he said, and made himself smile. "You're tired."
"Yes. Probably."
But as she turned away to gather her pack, Nathan caught the faint uncertainty in her face, the look of someone who had reached for something familiar and found, for the barest instant, a stranger's shape.
He had used the power twice in four days.
He wondered how many more uses she had left before she'd stop remembering him altogether.