The woman promised he’d be free by morning.

Her name was only spoken in whispers behind cupped hands, recorded only in memory and never on paper. The day he heard it spoken first, he was lying spread-eagle in the snow, face crusted with tear tracks, fingers curled around the neck of a half-empty liquor bottle. The girl saw him from the house across the road—he thought he knew her from town. What was her name? Amal?—and came rushing over, dragging his limp body back to the house when he refused to respond or get to his feet. He stared blankly, unspeaking while she asked him what he was doing in the snow, while she pried the liquor from his frigid, blue fingers and sat him in front of the crackling fireplace. 

“Were you trying to die?” she asked, peering at him the way you would a particularly challenging riddle. “That’s a terrible way to go! I can’t imagine what would be worth dying so painfully for. You’re lucky I found you.”

He said nothing, the fire throwing a flickering orange glow over his features. She said, “I know you. You’re Shahryar, from the farm down the road, aren’t you?”

The sound of his name startled some of his consciousness back to the surface. He said, “I was not trying to die. I was trying to forget. Though I suppose it might take death to forget after all.”

Amal studied him with a sharp, secret gaze. She said, slowly, deliberately, “Memory is not so stubborn. It is not so eternal. It’s easier to let go of than you might know.”

Shahryar moved of his own volition for the first time, turning his creaking body until he was eye to eye with her, his gaze suddenly attentive. He had a feeling that she didn’t mean her words in the way of a cheap comfort or a rehearsed platitude. 

He spoke, haltingly. “Wha—what does that mean. What are you saying.”

“There’s a woman. A rawia. She’s a craftswoman. Her trade is memories. If you have a memory you want forgotten, you can tell her what you want gone.” Amal’s cadence was no different than it had been only a moment earlier, but her eyes were fervored and she was leaning too close to him. He didn’t move back. “When you speak the memory aloud, she takes it and it is gone from you; you forget whatever burden you were carrying.”

Shahryar’s chest heaved with something like a gasp. He blinked and Amal’s thin shoulders were in his hands, crushed under the sudden, desperate strength in his grip. “Tell me,” he croaked. “Tell me! Who is she where is she how do I find her what’s her name—”

“Her name is Khalida,” Amal said, fearful of his sudden animation, but not so fearful that she’d forget to whisper, to look to the ground as she spoke. “You can see her tonight. You’ll be free of the memory by morning. That’s her promise.”

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