Jinyel. Jinyel. Jinyel. Jinyel.
The notebook weighed heavily in his hands every time he took it out, and heavy in his bag whenever he didn’t. Jinyel, it said, twenty times for each day he was busy and forty times for each day he wasn’t. Hunter was in there, too, scattered amongst the pages like eggshells in a chicken coop. It was the name that had protected him for so long, and it deserved to be written correctly. Especially if anyone asked for him to write it on another contract.
But Hunter was second priority. It was Jinyel that had to be perfect. Invulnerable. He could afford nothing less.
Faldrass heat crept up his boots as soon as his feet touched ground. The shore didn’t glow, but the air above it shimmered where sharp Cylus chill met the inexhaustible warmth of orange sand. He felt the air moving all around him, even though he could not see it ― some aspect of his rupturing spark, he knew. Hot air rises above cold air, a knowledge that would have been thrilling and important if there wasn’t this hollowness within him. What did the mysteries of the world matter if he had no one to share them with? The rise of hot air could matter once he told Sade about it. Once he had handed these magic papers to him and said, I fixed it. Now there is nothing wrong. No miscommunications, no doubts, nothing left to stop your hand from finding mine.
Jinyel. Jinyel. Jinyel. He kept a hand on his bag as he navigated the ramshackle hamlet of Haven, as if thieves ― thieves who were not the sun ― could steal the name from him and scatter it to the world. He feared to write it, sometimes, the way he had feared to speak it in the mountains. He wondered if the Prince… he wondered if his uncle knew his name already. It wouldn’t be a surprise. Sometimes Jinyel assumed his uncle knew everything in the world the day after it happened, and he knew his uncle would not misuse his name. Not on purpose, at least.
It was Jinyel’s grandmother and grandfather which concerned him most. He didn’t want that worry to become a distraction, but it was hard to stay focused when a break’s rest at the Haven tavern became two breaks. Then three, and four, and on and on until an entire day had passed in a place where no one knew any of his names.
This was the correct tavern. Jinyel knew it. Sade had said they would meet again here, which meant that was the only thing that could happen. Sade would find him, if he waited.
Eventually.
The tavernkeep noticed, and so Jinyel slipped outside before any questions came his way. Sade wasn’t yet inside the building, so the hunter spent the evening simply watching the door from a distance and writing his name over and over by the thin light of street lanterns. Jinyel, he practiced, until the letters could never be mistaken for anything else. Until he was able to make them beautiful by choice instead of by accident. Until he knew that he would not fail Sade by writing his name poorly.
One day turned into two, and the tavernkeep found Jinyel in the darkness.
“You were at that wedding,” the keeper said. “Did the ship leave you behind?”
I don’t know you. It’s not your business. Whether the man understood or not, Jinyel retreated, and he found shelter in the shadows just beyond the village where he could watch the tavern without being watched in return. His handwriting had improved enough that he could afford to lose the light for practice.
No thief came. Not on the first day, the second, or the third, when Jinyel shook off his bed of orange sand and returned to the tavern on quiet feet.
“I’m looking for someone,” he whispered, because no one else could be allowed to hear.
“Figured.” The tavernkeep raised an eyebrow at him. “What you lookin’ for?”
“Brown hair. Eyes, mostly brown but also red and pink and… yellow, sometimes, when they look at me. Warm.” The sun.
“Changing eyes. A biqaj?”
“No.”
“Human?”
“No.”
“What is he, then?”
Himself. Only himself. “He is as I have told you.”
“Haven’t seen anyone like that since the wedding, and haven’t seen anyone else from the wedding since the ship sailed off.”
“Since…” What? No. “The ship hasn’t sailed off.”
“Well it hasn’t sailed back, that’s for certain.”
“It has not sailed away.”
The tavernkeep’s expression softened. “Ah. They leave you behind?”
“No.” He wouldn’t. “He didn’t.”
For a moment, the tavernkeep was quiet. Then he said, “I haven’t seen anyone here with eyes like that.”
Then you are blind. Blind and deaf, to have missed the sun at your door.
Jinyel turned on his heel. The walls slanted at an odd angle around him. The floor seemed to move under his feet, and his chest…
… his chest was also blind and deaf, to clench so traitorously.
Sade had said to meet here. In a tavern. Not on the orange sand where all their mistakes had piled into mountains, nor by the ship where Jinyel had made the worst mistake of all. The hunter understood why. He honored it. He had come here instead of there because this was the right place. The ship was the wrong one.
The ship was the wrong place to go.
This was the wrong thing to do.
Something settled in the hunter’s stomach as he turned southward, almost like a stone and almost like sickness. These footsteps were not what Sade wanted, and an irrational fear told Jinyel that if he looked over his shoulder, even for a moment, he would find a thief with eyes blazing yellow and a mouth shut silent forever.
But still, he walked. He did the wrong thing because he didn’t know what else he could do.
Stars rose from the east and set in the west. Jinyel did not know their names, and he did not know how to use them as timekeepers. He walked. Haven vanished behind him. The cold dread in his stomach blurred all sense of trills, bits, or breaks. In the eternal dark of Cylus, it was easy to believe time did not pass at all.
Jinyel walked until he couldn’t feel his feet or his hands. He walked until the ocean’s roar was so familiar that he didn’t hear it. Until he couldn’t feel the clothes on his back or the shift of sand below him. Until he might as well have been sleepwalking through his own dreamscape, for all the sameness that surrounded him.
And then, after eternity spat him out, Jinyel came to a cove.
Even in the dark, he knew the shape of that cave. He saw footprints still in the highest dirt, where the tide didn’t reach. He saw a handkerchief caught on a tree, torn by weather.
And in the water that had smoothed the shore clean, he saw nothing.
Jinyel stopped walking. He watched the empty waves. Wind moaned through the cave, back out again, and whistled between Jinyel’s ribs and the hollowness there. For just as long as he had walked, Jinyel stood motionless, filling himself with the sight of this place and all the people who weren’t in it.
Oh.
The realization hatched slowly. It began with, he said he would be waiting, and pried forward into he was not waiting.
The ship is gone, echoed the tavernkeep’s voice, which unfurled to, The ship left this island as soon as I did. He could read it in the sand, the earth, the mortal marks left around the cove’s entrance ― no foot had disturbed this place for tentrials. Perhaps not since Cylus began.
The realization stretched its wings, and it took on the voice of Sade himself.
I flatter and bow because I’m a liar, Hunter. That’s what I do.
He’d warned Jinyel. He’d warned that he was a liar in the very same breath he’d said everything else ― You are everything that I want. I still want to be near you. I miss you.
And Jinyel, in his foolishness, had only believed the pieces he wanted.
“Oh.”
The hunter sat. Not quickly, nor violently, nor with the unsteadiness that had chased him out of the tavern. He lowered onto the sand with more steadiness than he’d felt in a long time, because for the first time in a long time, he understood. In those empty waters, the answer to all his questions stared back with yellow eyes.
You told me, Jinyel signed into the darkness. You said that you would hurt me and I said you did not have that power.
He leaned back against the earth, the air above him scathingly cold, the sand below viciously warm. The stars were distant. The sun was long, long gone.
You win he told the vanished sun. You won and I lost. I’m sorry I disbelieved you for so long.
The defeat did not fill him with bitterness. All it did was exhaust him.
Jinyel pulled the notebook and charcoal sticks from his bag. He flipped pages to the last Jinyel, its lines sharp and practiced. He ran a finger over them, and then over Hunter, and when the letters stopped meaning anything, he flipped to the center of the book. There, shielded from all elements and mishandling, was a folded piece of paper.
The marriage certificate cut his finger on the way out. He smeared one corner of it, red made black by the cold night. He didn’t need light to see its contents; Jinyel had memorized the slants and loops of nearly every letter, no matter that he was incapable of reading them.
He ran a thumb over the lines of text. He paused at the two empty spaces where names ought to be written. He leafed through pages and pages of Jinyel and Hunter, practiced until they were as perfect as someone like him could muster.
He folded the paper back into the book, set both of them onto the sand, and placed the writing utensils on top.
Somewhere in the dark, the sea crept higher. It paused, as if to reconsider, then retreated to gather strength for a longer wave. The tide was coming in, as indifferent to Jinyel’s presence as anything else in the world.
He sat up. As slowly as he’d folded, Jinyel returned to his feet. He left the book and certificate where they lay, to be swallowed by ocean and their letters washed together until no trace was left of what they had once said. No one was there to read them, after all. No one had ever planned to be.
Jinyel walked, and no one was there to watch him leave.
