Her eyes went vague as if she were slipping back inside the memory. Mihai leaned forward and listened. "You'd been swimming," she said to him. "You tasted like river. Your hair was wet. It was winter, and blue slabs of ice came downstream like little ships. The melt had begun. You could hear it, the sluice and drip all down the mountain. Everything was still white, but it wouldn't be for much longer. It was cold. But... but your lips were warm." Esme's eyes refocused at once and her brow furrowed with confusion. She shook her head. "It wasn't me," she said warily, taking a step away from him. "No, Esme, it wasn't you."
"Then why -- ? What's happening to me?" Her young face was vivid with fear and she whimpered like a small animal. "I remember other things too," she whispered. "Awful things."
Mihai spoke very soothingly. "It would be best if you could leave your mind clear now, Esme. Listen to me. Think of a long corridor with doors on both sides. I want you to leave all the doors open. Okay? Just think of that corridor of open doors, and if you can keep your mind like that, it won't hurt very much."
"It's going to hurt?" Esme asked in a tiny voice.
"Not very much, my pretty pearl," he murmured. "Only a little bit." He was lying. It would hurt. Like roots being ripped asunder, it would hurt. He was sorry for it, but he didn't know any other way.
It was the only way. He had discovered it by accident long ago.
Mihai came from a Druj citadel called Herezayen in the Tien Shan Mountains. It was a world of snowdrifts and ice, spruce forests without end, frigid lakes cupped in ancient rock. A world of wolf-song and wind. The Kyrgyz nomads called the land "the mountains of the spirits," and kept their yurts and goats on the lower slopes, well clear of the Druj who haunted the high places. Not that that kept them safe.
Life in Herezayen was a brutality of numbness. Time dripped off the tips of icicles and Mihai's tribe did what they could to relieve the bleakness of their endless days. They hunted as they pleased, as wolves or eagles or snow leopards. They spied on humans when they could find them, and slipped inside of them too, though it was seldom rewarding. There was little fun to be had wearing the body of a lonely shepherd or a blunt-bodied woman who spoke a language of grunts and smelled of rancid grease. When they found human children wandering alone, they took them back to their cold caves and kept them. They tried to make them laugh, but the children were dull-witted and weepy, and such amusement as that provided grew wearisome very quickly.
Rarely, once every few decades, the dullness was relieved by a visit from the Queen. Mazishta, she was called, the greatest of them. She came in her sledge with her coterie of wolves and she expected them to drop to their knees and worship her. They did. Back at the fringes of their pale memories they could recall what had happened when some of their number had refused. Until the tides of oblivion crept up to swallow that gruesome day, they wouldn't fail in their worship, but they wouldn't be pleased about it either.
There was no love lost between tribes. Undoubtedly the Druj had all begun as one people, but long isolation had made them rivals. None of the far-flung Druj were pleased to greet the Queen and feel the lash of her power as she lorded her supremacy over them. The Herezayen Naxturu -- including Mihai -- and the Tajbel Naxturu had circled one another like warring wolf packs, their bloodlust only held in check by their Queen's indomitable will. If she had not been there, they would have torn one another apart. As it was, the Druj ranks were only waiting for the day her power would weaken and they could humble her -- and her pack -- as she had ever humbled them.
Still, as much as they resented her dominance, her visits and the raw pulse of her power did serve to remind them how their own power had fallen into disuse. It revived them for a time, but the revival never lasted long after she left. There seemed no escape from the desolation of life.
Mihai believed things had been different once. After all, someone had carved the magical symbols on the rock surfaces of Herezayen, and someone had written the books that had moldered in snowdrifts until no more words were legible. His mind ached to know what they had said, but the words were only smears now. And he didn't believe some forgotten ancestors had written them either -- there were no ancestors. There were only themselves, their own interminable lives stretching from the lost beginning to the unknowable end. He himself might have written those books, but he had no memory of it.
He couldn't remember anything but the rhythm of monotony. When he tried to think of a time before, his mind became lost in a fog.
The day he left Herezayen, he went without forethought. He just started walking one day and kept walking. Thinking back, he realized there must have been a part of him that planned not to return or he'd have shifted cithra and flown that day as an eagle or leapt through the snow on broad, furred wolf paws, knowing that someone, upon his return, would whisper him back. But he hadn't shifted. He had struggled on in human form and gone further down the mountain, wending wide round wisps of hearth fires from the black, huddled yurts of the nomads. He hadn't turned back. He hadn't ever returned to Herezayen, and he hadn't shifted cithra since.
That was hundreds of years ago.
He drifted into the human world, across farms and into foul-smelling cities where they didn't know to fear him. He moved among them like a phantom, finding those humans who drew him in, some trick of their bright eyes beckoning to him like portals. Human eyes were like windows left open in a storm and it was a small matter to slip inside and mess about. He wore men and women both, and he danced in their feet, tasted with their mouths, and fought with their fists. He rutted in a haystack, one of their bodies pressed against another, and he passed himself back and forth between their moonlit eyes.
It was, all of it, a curiosity. The thrum of their blood enclosed him like a cocoon and it woke something in him, an almost-memory. But memory danced in the mists, taunting him, and never drew close enough to grasp.
He kept on because there was nothing else to do. He learned to leave his body and hunt over distances as an invisible animus searching for a host, so that his inert body might wait somewhere safe until he returned to claim it. He tried on warlords and priests and serving girls. He smelled the Black Death and nudged bodies out of his way with his boot. He fired an arquebus in the Battle of Pavia and shot the French king's horse out from under him. He started a mutiny on a slave ship. He mixed pigments for a Florentine master and tasted the carmine of crushed beetles on the tip of a sable brush.
He learned what quickens human hearts, how the touch of lips could make two lovers slip into a niche between moments so time rushes past them. He learned that a kiss could bring his almost-memories closer than anything else, but still not close enough to catch. It was sweet and bitter and maddening.