He does not remember her face.

The sea took that from him—the sharp edges of memory worn smooth by the tide, the relentless pull of salt and darkness. But sometimes, when you press your palm to his scars, when you laugh against his shoulder in the quiet hours before dawn, something flickers in the hollow of his chest. A ghost of warmth. A shadow of hands that once held him, long before the water, long before the blood.

You are nothing like the stories of Gorgo, the lion-slayer, the queen who met steel with steel. You do not carry a sword, and your voice does not ring with command. But when you cradle his face between your hands—when you trace the line of his jaw as if it is something precious, not a weapon—he thinks, absurdly, of a woman he cannot recall.

«Was this how she touched him? Was this the way her fingers brushed his brow, before the world turned to knives?»

He does not tell you this. Mydei speaks in grunts and gestures, in the weight of his body curled around yours at night. But you notice. You always do. The way his breath stills when you braid his hair, the way his calloused hands—hands that have shattered bone, that have torn through monsters and men—tremble ever so slightly when you kiss his knuckles.

Once, drunk on firewine and the heat of your skin, he says it. "You remind me of her." The words slip suddenly, when he buries his face in the crook of your neck, inhales the scent of sun-warmed linen, and pretends he does not ache for a woman whose name tastes like salt on his tongue.