"Drink this."
Unwilling to open both eyes to the pain pounding in her head, she cracked one eyelid, winced, and squeezed it shut again. It wasn't working.
He slid his arm under her neck and lifted her upper body. The movement increased the pressure behind her skull and she whimpered.
"You need to drink this, Jennifer. It will help."
Jennifer.
The word—the name—sounded so foreign. Yet she knew it to hear it from his lips, it was her name. Whenever he said it, called it, something about his voice made her want to hear him say it again because she recognized the sound despite the wailing drums clanging inside her skull.
She felt the smooth edge of a cup against her lower lip. Forcing her shaking arms to obey, she lifted her hands but could do little more than press them over his. She didn't have the coordination to take the cup from him, so she left her cold fingers against his warm skin and let him make the movements.
Gulping greedily, she coughed, surprised when a cold liquid filled her mouth.
It wasn't Thea's soup.
"Slowly," he ordered. She tried to push his hands away but only succeeded in dropping her own arms away from his.
She twisted her head away from the stone cup. "Soup," she managed to mumble around the sickly-sweet taste that tangled her tongue.
"That soup is what got you in this mess in the first place," he countered. "This will help."
She shook her head when he placed the cup against her mouth.
"I promise you this will take the headache away. You can drink it, or I can force you to drink it."
Through the pain she knew his words were a threat, but his tone carried no bite. He was big enough, strong enough he could very well force her to drink the liquid until she drowned... but he wouldn't. Of that she was certain.
Kiryk would never hurt her.
She chanced opening her eyes, wincing as she squinted up into his shadowed face. With his back to the fire she could see nothing of his expression other than a big, blurry shadow.
"I trusted you to save my life once," he said gruffly. "Trust me to save yours."
Gods, if only she could remember!
She wanted the pain gone. She wanted her mind back. But most of all she wanted to know that her heart was telling her the truth. Something was not right in this place. Her family. Her village. Everything felt so horribly wrong until the very second she'd seen this man. With everything so frighteningly disconnected, he was the one piece of the puzzle that made her want to believe.
Fighting against her aching head, she lifted her hands and placed her trembling fingers against his.
As soon as she finished drinking the sweet concoction, he helped her lay back down. When he moved aside, the light from the fire burned her sensitive eyes and she squeezed them closed.
Despite the warmth that should have been coming from the nearby flames, she started to shiver. Her skin felt sticky. Clammy. She was beneath a blanket yet she felt as though she were surrounded in ice. She tried to go back to sleep, but her mind wasn't willing to let go of the conscious existence just yet.
The cold was a bad sign. The cave was warm with the fire, but the rocks were damp. Damp was bad. Damp cold was bad. But why was damp cold bad?
A sold weight settled across her body. An immediate warmth seeped through the thin blanket she lay beneath. She peeked out through her eyelashes as Kiryk tucked his coat down around her. Her fingers gripped the edge of the new covering, the cool leather chilling her palms despite the heat that radiated from the inner lining of the heavy material.
She sighed and snuggled deeper into the protective layer. It smelled of leather and rainwater. As the shaking slowed the dreams came, and she drifted back into the city in the sky with the beautiful symbols and the strange people who knew her name.
.
.
The next time she woke her body was on fire.
She fought blindly to free herself from the tangled coverings that smothered her. Shoving the constrictive material away from her skin, she whimpered and rolled away from the fire that burned so closely. Her hair was damp and sticky, clinging to her cheeks and her neck. She shoved it away from her skin, pleading with the tangled mess to get away from her neck and shoulders.
An extra set of hands pushed her hair higher, brushing it off her forehead and away from her cheeks. Cool air reached the now uncovered skin of her face and neck, but it wasn't enough.
Icy cold clamped down across her forehead. She sighed at the welcome chill, clamping her hand down over a wet cloth, crushing it against her boiling skin. Beads of cold water ran down across her temples and dripped into her hairline. More. She wanted more. She dragged the cloth down over her face, then shoved it back to her forehead.
Hot.
So hot.
A second cloth landed gently across her neck. She whimpered and tried to grab it.
"Stop," a low voice commanded.
She opened her eyes and concentrated on the blurry face swimming above hers. Hazel eyes. Dark hair. She reached up, lifting her fingers to the side of his neck, tracing the tattoo of lines and dots... but before she could place her fingers on it it the image shifted and faded until the face above was transformed into that of the traveller.
But if he was here, then who was the other? The man with the dark hair and the tattoo she'd drawn over and over in her dreams? Before she could grab for the memory, it was gone.
Lost, like all the rest.
She whispered for Kiryk, letting her arm drop.
"I'm here." He wrapped her wrist in a strip of wet material.
She sucked in a breath as the cold water ran down her arm to her elbow. Kiryk placed her arm at her side then repeated the procedure with her right hand.
"So hot," she whimpered, closing her eyes.
Kiryk removed the cloth from her forehead. She opened her mouth to protest, to demand it back, but a fresh stream of water was running into her hair and down her cheeks before she could get the words out. He repeated the process, swapping each with a fresher, cooler one. She lost count of the number of transfers, letting the repetitive motion and sound of dripping water in the bowl beside her head lull her into the dream world once more.
.
.
The fire cast long, dancing shadows across the ceiling of the cavern. She struggled to remember exactly why she was looking at a rocky outcropping instead of a formed ceiling, but the thoughts were a tumbled mess of images and memories bouncing around with each pounding bash of her heartbeat against the inside of her skull.
She knew she should have jumped. Screamed. Made a sound. The other her would have let out a howl to wake up in a cave with no recollection of how she got there. But she couldn't muster the energy to react with anything more than a whisper of confusion.
Closing her eyes, she wanted to go back to sleep but the thumping in her head would give her no peace. She tried to adjust her position but at best was only able to roll her head to the side. Brightness pulsed through her closed eyelids making her stomach lurch. She immediately rolled her head to the other side, sighing at the welcome darkness.
A scrape of sound made her want to open her eyes again. Before she could register the hulking shape as Kiryk, his hand slid beneath her head and down her back, prying her up off the floor.
"Drink," he commanded, lifting a cup to her lips.
She didn't argue. Couldn't.
As soon as she finished drinking the syrupy sweet concoction, he lowered her gently down. She curled onto her side away from the fire.
"Hot or cold," he asked.
She didn't think she was neither hot, nor cold. She had only the pain in her head. Deciding she wanted a covering, she reached weakly behind her for her blanket. He pulled the blanket over her and tucked it around her.
"More?" he asked.
She rocked her head side to side.
"Sleep, Jennifer."
She agreed. Sleep was good.
It was the waking up part that wasn't.