Windowmirror Chapter 7 ~ Torlian

When Inco woke in the morning the girl was not lying on the ground beside him, where she’d been when he went to sleep.  He sat up quickly and saw Delfano, already awake, looking up the hill.  He was looking at the girl, who stood there a little ways away, the early morning sun falling on her back as she faced the west, with a westerly wind blowing her hair and the blanket back from her.

“How long . . . ?”

“I woke up about half an hour ago,” Delfano replied.  “Who knows how long she’s been standing there.”

Inco got to his feet and walked up the hill after her.  He stopped a few feet away, saying cautiously, “Hello.”

She turned to look back at him, and said his name, “Inco.”

Inco smiled a little, surprised at how she said it, as if he was familiar and known to her.  “Yes, I’m Inco.  Who are you?”

“I don’t know who I am,” she said, casting her eyes down sadly.  “I don’t have a name, or a home, or a family.  I know what all those things are and that people generally have them, but I can’t remember mine.  Unless I never had it and I can’t remember that.  I don’t know.  I don’t know, it’s like I know everything I ought to know about the world but there’s a great hole where I belong in it.”

Inco was stunned silent to hear her stringing so many words together after her dumb silence the evening before.

“I . . . don’t have a home or a family,” he offered, as if in consolation.  “My parents died when I was a baby and ever since I was seven I’ve been wandering all over, never staying anywhere long enough to call it a home.”

She looked back up and gave him a frown.  “But you know that.  You know that you don’t have parents because they’re dead and you don’t have a home because you travel, and you know your name is Inco.”

“Well, ah, y-yes,” he stammered.  “I didn’t mean to say I’m in the same situation, I just. . . .   Well anyway I think you had an injury of some sort, and perhaps after the shock wears off you’ll remember it all.  Sometimes that happens.  Someone gets a knock on the head and forgets a lot of stuff, but then it comes back again.”

She continued to frown, and he smiled in apology.

Delfano came up beside Inco.  “You’re from a wealthy family, either a daughter or a servant, either way I’m sure if we ask around here we’ll find somebody with a missing girl.  Then you’ll be back home and they can help you remember.”

“I don’t want to be told!” she cried, startling them both.  “I don’t want to be told who I am and where I belong, how am I supposed to know what’s lies and not?”  She turned her large, animal eyes on Inco and begged, “Give me a name and I’ll know at least the day I was given it, and that will be who I am.  I can believe that.”

“But . . . ” Inco gave Delfano a quick, helpless glance, “what about your family?  You have a mother and a father and who knows who else, all worried about you now, thinking you’re dead.  And you come from a nice home, the kind of home some would kill to have.  You don’t want to run away from that.”

“I don’t know anything, except that I woke up in a boat with you looking at me,” she said.  “And there’s nothing innocent feeling about the blackness in my mind where I can’t remember.  I feel like I’ve escaped something, left my name and life behind but escaped with my soul intact and I . . . I don’t want to go searching for where I ran from.  Can’t you understand?”

At the word “soul” Delfano took a sharp breath and turned away.  Inco could tell he did not like the idea of keeping the girl with them, not at all.

“We can’t very well kidnap you,” said Inco.  “If your family comes looking and finds you and finds that we didn’t try to return you to them, they’ll hang us for sure.  Look, I can tell by the way you talk that you’re not some uneducated servant girl or peasant, you’re some rich man’s daughter and he’ll want you back.  You’re asking us to put our lives in danger here.”

She gave him a look of such disappointment and reproach before turning away, that he could feel the memory of the headmasters’ whip on him, as sharp as it was nine years ago when last he’d experienced it.

“Torlian,” he said, disregarding Delfano’s sounds of protest in the background.

“What?” she looked up.

“Torlian.  That’s your name, you wanted me to give you one.”  He didn’t tell her that the name, a perfectly innocent and pretty girl’s name, was the name the headmaster had given his whip, as if it were a cherished pet or daughter.

“Thank you,” she said, and wrapped her arms around his waist, hugging him tightly.  He gave an apologetic and embarrassed look to Delfano, who knew when he was disregarded and beaten.

“We’ll have to get out of Elsariat as quickly as we can, then,” he barked, trying to retain some of his authority.  “If her family finds us all camped out without a care in the world it’s a swift hanging for you,” he pointed an accusing finger at Inco.  For himself, he knew this was not the way fate or the gods intended for him to die.