“It took you long enough,” Lotan says as we cross the bar to where they’re sitting. I have the box-harp in my hand. “What were you two doing–”

Samila turns to look, having had her back to us. “Bloody Hell!” she exclaims, lapsing into English. “You brush up nice don’t you?”

I don’t really know what to say to that, so I just smile.

“Both of you,” Samila continues, switching back to Jeodine for Jalese’s benefit. “You look really nice.”

“Thank you,” I say. “It’s amazing what a bath and a change of clothes can do, I guess.”

“Come on then, give us a twirl,” Lotan says, in English.

I roll my eyes at him, but I oblige for the group, doing a little turn, enough to make the long skirt flare out a little. I’m wearing, basically, a full-length dress made of a rich dark-blue dyed linen with a lace-up bodice and a white under-tunic with long sleeves and no collar, and lace ties rather than buttons. Jalese picked it out for me and now I wonder if she deliberately overdressed me for the occasion. She herself is plainly dressed in a grey quilted skirt and tunic, and perhaps that is a slightly mischievous look on her face. I find it remarkable that a garment as nice as this could have been left behind by accident, but as Jalese said, once a ship leaves its mooring you can’t just quickly go back for something you’ve forgotten or left with someone to wash, and you may not be back this way in months or years.

“They’ve got baths here?” Samila catches on, with evident hunger.

“For very small values of. Jalese, do you think they can–”

“We thought we might as well stay here the night anyway,” Kerilas says. “It’s only two Torcs a night. I presume they’ve got washing facilities for the guests.”

“Yes,” Jalese agrees. “I’ll show you. Do you want to do that now?”

“Yes!” Samila agrees.

“Sami, why don’t you go now, and we’ll catch up with Taniel here?” Kerilas suggests.

“Okay. Sounds good to me.” She practically bounds to her feet, picks up a cloth bag she didn’t have when we docked and follows Jalese out of the bar towards the stairs.

“So… you two got jobs here, right?” Lotan asks, to confirm.

“Yeah,” I say. I move to sit in Samila’s vacated seat, but Kerilas gets up suddenly and takes my hand and leads me around to the more comfortable seat next to him and seats me. Seriously gentlemanly. I blush and stammer “Th-Thank-you.”

“You really do look lovely tonight,” he says. I’m sure my face has gone completely pink, if a Neri complexion can do that. I sit, and he resumes his seat.

Lotan, sitting across from me, is grinning. “So how come you’re so dressed up?” he asks.

“Oh…” Then I remember. “It’s my big debut tonight, didn’t you hear?”

“What?”

“Hethan didn’t get the flyers out?” I ask with mock indignation. “I seem to be able to play this,” I continue, raising the box-harp, “so I’d better warn you, I’m probably going to start shortly. Only problem is I don’t know any of the local music.” ~For a very large value of ‘local’,~ I think to myself. I’m not sure why, but I don’t feel like I want to talk about the flashbacks I got earlier, the memories evoked by playing this instrument.

“Well, you could always play stuff from home, I guess,” Kerilas suggests.

“You want me to?” There aren’t that many other customers in the inn at the moment. I don’t know if I should expect it to pick up later. The two young women that were here earlier have gone. There are a few couples now, and a family with two girls and a boy that I’d guess are between eight and twelve years old. “Are you going to tip me if I do?” I add coyly.

“Tip you over, more like,” Lotan teases.

“I’ll probably be crap at it anyway. I seem to be able to play native songs because it’s here, you know?” I tap the side of my head. They both nod. They must be going through similar processes of learning what memories and skills they have. “As long as someone hums it or something so I’m reminded. I don’t know if it’ll work if I try to play something from home. Might give it a try though. So anyway you’re staying here as guests, right?” I ask them both. “Where’d you get the money?”

“Oh, we got jobs,” Lotan says. “Well, me and Sam did anyway. I can’t believe it, it’s so easy to get a job around here!”

“Yeah, I found that,” I say.

“It’s like, you just go up to someone who looks busy and say ‘do you need another hand?’ and they’ll either say yes or point you to someone who’ll say yes. I’m helping with building the pontoons for the market ships. Did you know? The way they do it is we put all these pontoon jetties down across half the harbour and the marketeers come in and moor up and you — we — walk out to them, right out across the harbour itself, and from one ship to the other like a huge floating mall. I think it’s going to be fantastic.” He’s slipped into Jeodine somewhere in the middle of that, but certain words like ‘mall’ still poked through in English. “We were so lucky everything’s gearing up for Market. Sam’s doing something with the team putting up the awnings I think.”

“What about you?” I ask Kerilas. From his face I already know the answer.

He just shakes his head.

“Why not? Do you know?”

He sighs, then leans forward to talk to me more privately. “In case you forgot, my character’s– I mean, I’m a dark elf.”

“Oh.” I had forgotten. It wasn’t as if he was actually dark. As in, the image I’d had in my head while we were playing before was one from a sourcebook I remembered reading a few years before; with jet-black skin and brightly glowing eyes and long white hair. Kerilas has the hair, at least, but he’s pale and fey, with those large blue eyes, and actually very beautiful, I thought.

“You’ve been getting some funny reactions all day,” Lotan agrees. “Everyone knows dark elves are supposed to be evil, right?”

“Yeah, but you’re not!” I point out unnecessarily.

But Kerilas looks doubtful. “I think it’s only ’cause this is Jeodin I haven’t been lynched already,” he says. “It’s a diverse society. It’s how it came about, I mean, for a long time I think people came to Jeodin because they were being oppressed at home, you know? I’ve seen a bunch of human ethnicities here, that I’d recognise from home. Arabic, Chinese, Anglo, Nordic, African. That’s not what they are here of course, but that’s what they look like to us, and this is just a little market port. And we’re not the only elves in town either.”

“We’re not?”

He shakes his head. “I must have seen, I don’t know, eight or nine others. It’s obvious, they’re as fully integrated into this society as any human. And I saw three types, I think. Marine, like you, and woodland, and there were a couple of another kind I saw, but I’m not sure. They were small, they might have just been woodlander kids. I didn’t see anyone else like me at all.”

“People were just suspicious of you,” Lotan says in support. “Ignore them.”

“Well that’s just it.” He sighs, falling into thought.

“What?” I prompt.

“Nothing. It’s okay.”

“No it isn’t,” I say. “What are you thinking?”

He looks at me a little oddly. “Have either of you been getting… I don’t know, like flashbacks?”

“Yes,” I say quickly.

“Yeah, me too,” Lotan says.

“What are you remembering?” He’s asking me.

“Uh.” I hadn’t been ready to talk about this. “Growing up on a familyship.” I interject the Jeodine word there, having heard it earlier. “My — um — Taniel’s parents I guess. Learning to play the box-harp.”

“Lotan?”

He shrugs. “Growing up, like Tani says. On a farm somewhere. I think we raised goats or something. There were mountains…” He pauses, caught in some recollection.

Kerilas nods. “I’ve got more than just growing up. I defined my character to be evil,” he says. “That’s how I was going to play him. He joined in the escape because he saw the opportunity. He was just going to use the rest of the party, go along with things only as long as it suited him, only for what it would get him, even if that meant good things coming out of it. Kerilas is not a very nice person. He’s completely self-serving.”

“Yeah, but that’s not you,” I insist. “It’s just the character. That doesn’t matter now.”

He looks at me intensely again. “Doesn’t it?”

“No!”

“Does Taniel matter?”

I can’t answer to that, of course. And that’s answer enough.

“Thing is, I know why he’s evil. I created the backstory, okay? With Ken. I know what happened to him. But now I’m — remembering it, like it happened to me.”

Fuck,“ Lotan says.

“There’s just so much,” Kerilas says. “I mean, I’m old. Hundreds of years old. There’s so much. Most of it isn’t clear yet but… What I can tell…” He shivers. “And I think, I’ve only got, what? Twenty three years of my own memories and it’s…” He snaps his fingers. It’s ephemeral. “Not much to stand against all that…”

Kerilas is scared. I can’t think of anything I can say to him. I take his hand, knowing as I do it I could never have been so demonstrative or personal before. He squeezes my hand, accepting the contact.

I suppose I am lucky: Taniel was expressly someone I would have wished I could be. Playing her in the game was wholly vicarious. Even so, the reality of her body and her memories, the few of them that have surfaced (so far), is sometimes more intense than I know how to deal with.

“I know you’d never hurt anyone,” I say.

“I think I already have.”

And he looks at me; the briefest of glances, but enough that my stomach lurches. It feels like when a ship comes off the top of a wave. I don’t know what he means by that. Surely if he’d– if Kerilas had done something to Taniel, before, there’d be some residual reaction. I’d know! Wouldn’t I? I’d feel it somehow. But I haven’t found any memories more recent than that fire on the familyship. My father pushing me into a hidey-hole. Kerilas isn’t a part of those memories, and there’s nothing since. He was a prisoner too, like us!

He looks away and pulls his hand back. “I don’t know. Everything’s muddled. There’s just so much. There’s just so much.”