What the hell is Demotic?
Memnon grabs my journal from my desk, and immediately, I tense. My mind and life are laid bare in those pages.
He flips to a particular page and turns the notebook to me. It’s full of writing crammed together in various colors, some of the text highlighted, some crossed out.
He points to a doodle I scribbled in the corner. “Do you see this?” he asks me.
What he’s referring to looks like nothing more than the crests of a wave, except on top of each crest blooms a three-petaled flower. It’s a strange design, clearly something I drew while I was zoning out.
Memnon lifts the sleeve of his shirt and points to one of his tattoos. “Those are the horns of a saiga on my arm.”
I take a step forward, momentarily transfixed. My drawing does look eerily similar to the artwork on his arm.
“This page is from three months ago,” he says. “You drew this before you ever saw me.”
My heart seems to stop at that. I can deny Memnon’s ravings but not my own records.
Could I really be this other woman?
Roxilana?
“I can show you more examples from your books if you’d like more proof,” he adds.
I narrow my gaze at him. “Just how many of my journals have you gone through?”
Those are private.
“You’re trying to change the subject, Roxi,” he says, snapping the notebook shut. “What I am telling you is that your memories have not been destroyed. They still exis;, they’re simply locked away. But, if you had the key to that lock, you could retrieve them all.”
My blood pounds between my ears.
Memnon glances at the journal he holds again. “These notebooks are so meticulous, so thorough. How important they must be,” he says, running his thumb over the dark blue cover, where I scribbled in gold Sharpie the dates when I used this journal. This one is from June and July of this year.
The sorcerer’s eyes flick to the book bag at my feet, and the air thickens with his magic. The flap of my satchel flicks open, and my latest notebook slides out, lifting into the air.
“What are you doing?” I grab for it, but it slips like butter through my fingers.
Memnon catches my planner in his free hand, and now panic rises in me.
“Seriously, Memnon, I need that back.” The Politia’s coming later today to look at these very journals.
I don’t want anyone pawing at them in the meantime—especially not Memnon.
Ignoring me, he sets my journal from the summer on my desk and opens my latest notebook before flipping through it.
“Oh, there’s a Samhain Witch’s Ball happening at the end of the week.” He reads the reminder like it’s a diary entry. “Sounds like fun.”
I fold my arms and force myself to chill out. “Are you done?” I ask. Whatever rise he wants to get out of me, he won’t get it.
“I can give you your memory back,” he says, not looking up from my notebook.
My breath catches at his words. It’s one thing to tell me that my lost memories exist; it’s another to tell me I can retrieve them.
“No one can give me that,” I finally say. I don’t even let myself ponder what life would be like with them back.
Now Memnon looks up from my journal, his smoky-amber eyes glinting. “My queen, I can.”
“I don’t want your help.”
“But don’t you? Aren’t you tired of not remembering? How much easier would life be if you didn’t always forget?”
He’s the devil in my ear, offering me the one thing I’m supposed to want. The thing I used to have, before my magic Awoke.
My memory.
I shake my head. “What you’re saying is impossible.”
“It’s actually quite simple. Your power is bound up in a curse—the one you placed on us both when you locked me in that tomb.”
I frown at him, not liking where this conversation is going. Nero must not either because he slinks over to the window and leaps out onto the bough of the tree outside, then prowls out of sight.
Memnon continues. “The Romans called it damnatio memoriae—to condemn from memory. To cast into oblivion. It was one of the worst fates you could inflict on a person of power.”
And this is where Memnon’s true purpose is coming into focus.
“If the curse is lifted, it’s not just my memory that returns, is it? You’ll be remembered too, won’t you?”
His eyes are alight with the first true stirrings of his power. “Yes,” he agrees. “My name and my kingdom will return to the historical record. I want the world to remember me. But”—and now he switches into Sarmatian—“my queen, more than even that, I want you to remember me. To remember us and our life. I cannot be the sole bearer of our past. That is…” He shakes his head slowly, his smoky eyes burning. “Unendurable.”