He woke to the sound of his own name.
Someone was shouting it outside. More than one voice, layered, urgent.
"...said he went in at midday, it's been two days..."
"Doesn't matter. We're not going in there. You know what happened to the..."
"Calder!"
He sat up.
Dark room, stone floor, cold. Roots came through gaps in the ceiling and dangled in the air. The whole eastern side of the room was open where a wall had fallen, rubble sloping out into a courtyard, and through that gap he could see torchlight. Three sources, moving, thirty meters off and coming closer.
His hand went for a blade that wasn't there.
He was on his feet crossing to the broken wall before he'd thought to stand. His left shoulder ground badly. His ribs on the right side said something similar. At the back of his skull a pain had dried blood crusted around it, old enough to have sealed. He looked out.
Three men with torches at the edge of the courtyard. Farmers, by their clothes. One was young, seventeen at most, and he was the one who'd been shouting the name. He was looking at the tower with the expression of someone who has decided to do something stupid because the alternative is worse.
The other two were holding him back.
"Calder!"
He looked at the name the way you look at a word in a language you almost speak. He turned it over. Reached for it.
Nothing came back. There was a door that should have opened and it didn't. Behind it he could feel the weight of everything he couldn't reach.
Below, one of the older men had a grip on the young one's arm. "He's gone, Bram. Went in on his own and he's gone, and if you go in after him you'll be gone too, then what..."
"He's not gone, I saw the light from his lantern last..."
"You saw something from his lantern. In there." A pause. "Not the same thing."
He stood at the edge of the wall and thought fast.
They were looking for someone named Calder. They hadn't looked up yet. He was in a ruined tower these men were afraid to enter, no blade, no explanation, a wound he couldn't account for, and the question of whether Calder was a name that belonged to him was one he couldn't answer from the inside.
What he could do was count the facts. The young one needed badly to find whoever Calder was. The older ones were afraid but had come, which meant either the person mattered enough to override the fear or someone had required it. The torchlight was held high and open. People who held torches like that were trying to see, not trying to sneak up on something. That was a different posture.
Not a threat. Not yet.
He cupped his hands to his mouth. "I'm here."
All three torches swung up toward him. The young one made a sound that wasn't quite a word. The two older men stepped back together, the instinct fighting with whatever had made them come out here at all.
"It's all right," he said. "I'm coming down."
Silence while they looked at him.
"Calder?" the boy said. His voice broke on it.
The name hit him the way a key hits a lock in the dark, the right shape, turning, but nothing opening. Something happened when the boy said it. He couldn't tell what.
"Yes," he said. He had no better answer, and the boy's face in the torchlight was the most relieved thing he'd seen, and a man in a ruined tower with no blade and no memory could stand to have one thing go simply.
He came down.
The stairs had partially collapsed, which explained why he'd been sleeping on the floor rather than anywhere a person would choose. He got down two flights managing his left arm, his ribs making their complaints known at each step. By the time he came through the ground floor doorway into the courtyard he'd made his peace with looking like something that had been through a bad time.
Bram crossed the courtyard fast and stopped just short of him, uncertain about the reception.
Fifteen or sixteen. Dark-haired, sharp-featured. He had the kind of watchfulness that sat oddly on someone that age, a child who'd been paying serious attention to the world for longer than was fair to him.
"We thought..." Bram started. He stopped. He was looking at the dried blood on the collar, the empty scabbard, the way he was carrying his left arm. "What happened?"
"I fell."
"You fell."
"From the upper floor. Hit my head. I've lost some time and I'm not certain how long I was up there."
Bram looked at him with the expression of someone who can tell they're getting the true version of events but not the complete one. The two older men came up behind the boy and looked at him with a wariness that hadn't fully settled into relief. One of them, heavyset, graying, with the squint of a man who worked outside in all weather, held his torch at an angle that kept the light on the tower doorway rather than on him, like he was watching it.
"Shouldn't have gone in there alone," the heavyset man said. Not angry. Tired of saying it.
"No," he agreed. "I shouldn't have."
"Can you walk?" Bram asked.
"I've been walking." He looked at the boy, then at the treeline beyond the courtyard wall.
"How far is the village?"
"Two hours," Bram said. "Less if you're..."
"Two hours is fine."
They gave him water from a skin and walked out in a loose group, the two older men slightly ahead, Bram at his side. Close, the way a person stays close to something they're relieved to have found and aren't yet sure of keeping.
The forest was dark and the torchlight made it darker by contrast, pressing the trees back into black at the edges of the visible circle. He walked and let his body find its pace and turned the name over in his mind.
Calder.
He said it to himself carefully, waiting.
Nothing opened. No face, no voice, no warmth of recognition. Just the door, just the locked room. He was in there somewhere and Calder was presumably the shape of him, but the shape wasn't accessible from this side.
What he had was something else. He wasn't surprised by the feel of the forest at night, by the sound of leaves underfoot, by the way torchlight moved in air disturbed by walking. His legs knew the uneven ground and adjusted for it without asking him. He'd been in forests at night before, somewhere in the life he couldn't reach.
He noticed the two older men navigating by landmarks, checking a bent tree twice, while he'd been tracking direction from the stars since they entered the treeline. He hadn't decided to do that. He'd simply been doing it.
He filed it alongside the other things he apparently knew without knowing how, and looked at the boy.
"Bram."
The boy looked at him.
"How long was I in there?"
A pause. "We noticed you hadn't come back on the second evening. At least a day and a half. Maybe two full days."
Two days unconscious, and the wound had been cleaned. Either he'd done it himself before losing time, which was possible but required a level of function he doubted he'd had, or someone else had been there.
"Did anyone go in after me?"
Bram's expression went careful. "No one would go in. I tried." A glance at the two men ahead. "I argued for most of yesterday."
He looked at the boy. Fifteen, maybe sixteen, out here past midnight, arguing all of yesterday for the right to enter a place that frightened grown men. That said something about what he was to Bram, and through Bram, something about what Calder was in this village.
"I'm all right," he said. "Nothing that won't mend."
Bram nodded once and looked away. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to.
The village stake wall was pale in the dark. One window lit in the house nearest the gate. Someone had stayed up. As they came through the gap, a woman appeared in the doorway with the light behind her.
She waited until they were close enough to see his face, then looked at him with an expression he couldn't read, though it had relief somewhere in it and something more complicated behind that.
"You look terrible," she said.
"I'm told I fell."
She looked at him for a moment. A small assessment, quickly made.
"Come in." She stepped aside. "Bram. Go home. Your mother has been up."
The boy hesitated.
"Go," she said. Not unkindly. He went.
Inside was warm, dried herbs and cold food. She sat him in a chair by the fire and looked at the wound without speaking, her hands quick and careful in a way that meant she'd done it before.
He looked at the room while she worked. He couldn't stop himself. Everything had a place, and in each placement there was a logic. Tools by size. Sealed pots high and out of reach, kept rather than used. The children's shoes at the door because that was the last check before leaving, not the first. He traced the rules of it all before he'd decided to, finding the structure the way you find your footing in an unfamiliar room, automatically, without choosing to.
He noticed this about himself and said nothing.
"You don't remember, do you," she said. Not a question.
He thought about the various answers available. "How much is obvious?"
"You looked at Bram like you were working out who he was." Her hands stilled briefly, then continued. "And you said you fell, which is what you'd say if you didn't know what actually happened."
"I know my name," he said. The name they'd given him, anyway. He wasn't going to complicate the next hour with that distinction. "I don't know what I was doing in the tower. I don't know how I got there. Most of before is not available."
She came around to face him. She had a scar on her jaw, thin and pale, and the composure of someone who had absorbed hard things and kept walking. She dried her hands and pulled a stool over and sat.
"The tower is old working," she said. "Mage-work, from before the Interdict, before the Conclave set limits on what was permitted. Things were built into the stone. They don't go quiet just because no one tends them anymore." She looked at her hands. "A Reader came from the Conclave seven years ago to study it. Trained, licensed, came with apprentices. They found her sitting in the courtyard three days later, breathing, not present. They carried her back to Anshem." She paused. "She's still sitting."
He kept his expression still.
"I walked out," he said.
"You walked out."
He turned it over carefully. A trained mage had gone to the tower with all the tools of her education and gone dark. He had been inside for two days and had walked out, damaged, stripped of memory, but alive and functional, with the wound cleaned. The difference in outcomes was too large to be noise. It was signal. And signal meant the system wasn't arbitrary, and systems that weren't arbitrary had rules, and rules could be found if you looked for them correctly.
He didn't have the tools for this yet. He had no framework for what working meant, no language for why training had failed where he apparently hadn't. He was at the beginning of a problem he couldn't yet see the shape of.
But the beginning was somewhere. You started where you could.
"Sera," he said.
She raised an eyebrow. He'd used her name without thinking, which meant it was in him somewhere, recent enough to have survived whatever had taken the rest.
"What do I need to know about what I was before I went in there? What people knew about me."
She looked at him for a long moment, reading him.
"That's going to take more than one night," she said.
"Then we'd better start."
Something in her expression eased, very slightly, into something that wasn't quite amusement.
"There's food first," she said. "You haven't eaten in two days."
He nodded and looked at the cold hearth while she moved around the room, and thought about a mage who had gone dark and a name that fit a lock without opening it, and the slow careful work ahead of finding out who he was in a world he couldn't remember.
It would not be quick. He knew that already.
But the problem had edges. Problems with edges could be solved.
End of Chapter One