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Niall awoke expecting to see blood, but there was none. The perceived injury must have been a phantom from a dream. Instead of lying forgotten and half-dead in a field, he was sprawled on a thin mattress in a house he did not recognize. What he had thought was a dripping wound was only rain leaking through the roof. It pattered steadily into a strategically-placed basin on the floor.

Pat. Pat. Pat.

He sat up cautiously, his heart pounding from the turbulent dream. It had been as vivid as anything in the waking world, but the details faded when he sought them. Soon, only the fear remained.

His chest ached as did a spot at the back of his head. Niall looked down, worried he would discover a gaping hole in his torso. In the dream, or what he assumed was a dream, someone had stabbed him there.

Grey light fell through the open doorway in bars, spreading over him in strange patterns. From what he could see, there was no injury. Whoever had lain him on the mattress had not seen fit to cover him with a blanket. All he had on was a long shirt and stockings.

Dizziness came over him in a shower of spectral lights and nausea. The room and everything in it rocked back and forth around him. He laid his head carefully back on the mattress and waited for the sensation to pass. It subsided, but only mildly. It was probably best to lie still.

Pat. Pat. Pat.

He wasn’t sure where he was. No one else stirred in the aging house, which smelled of smoke and livestock. He did not get the impression that he belonged there. It was strange because while he could not remember being a shepherd, he also did not recall anything otherwise. Much like the dream, his memories consisted of faint images.

Niall remembered almost nothing from before. Even waking up was beginning to feel distant, like a daydream from weeks ago.

He closed his eyes and tried to remember anything that transpired outside the shepherd’s house. There was a thud and a flash of grey sky, and then everything went dark. He thought he heard someone’s voice calling to him, but he couldn’t be positive.

He couldn’t imagine getting far in his condition, so someone must have brought him there. Whoever they were, they could answer a few of his questions. But where had they gone?

“Whose house is this?” he asked, slurring every word.

Nobody answered, and the house remained still. After a while, Niall conceded the house was empty. He returned to the thoughts racing through his mind in a blur. He couldn’t latch onto any of them. An unpleasant pressure bloomed in his head, aching so much that he stopped trying to think.

Pat. Pat. Pat.

Niall watched rainwater collect in shining beads on the ceiling before it dripped into the basin. He was starting to feel more at ease when something creaked in the corner of the room.

He turned his head in the direction of the noise, and the room pitched again. Nothing shifted in the corner.

…Pat… Pat…

The rain slowed. He heard the shouting in his head again, an echoing voice that called to him in concern. The image of the sky returned to him, this time accompanied by someone’s silhouette. He saw their hand reaching for him.

What had happened?

…Pat…

For the first time, he worried that he might never remember anything important. He reviewed his history in an effort to preserve it.

His name was Niall. He had lived, at some point, in a cliffside village and… and that was it. Isolated events came to him gradually and out of order, as if someone had taken all of his memories and thrown them up in the air to see which ones would fall down first.

He remembered traveling up a mountain once, as a test of endurance. At the top of the mountain rose a black-stone fortress, characterized by sharp edges and formidable walls. No images came to him of the people who lived there.

He remembered the flat, sheer cliffs of his natal home. They were the same, sleek black as the mountain fortress. He remembered tripping and slicing his arm on the rough ground.

What puzzled him was that he had names for some of the things he saw in memory, that he knew all manner of words, but half of those words meant very little to him. The fortress was a building, but that was all it was. Did it have any purpose? Livestock and shepherds were related, but what did they do? Where did he fit into any of it?

Some time later, a man of middle-years darkened the door, bringing with him the warm odor of wet sheep. This was a shepherd, surely. He shook his red-and-grey curls to rid them of rain as he stepped under the eave. Before he came inside, he removed a dripping overcoat from his shoulders and set it on a rack by the door.

He was compact in frame and dressed in clothes meant for warmer weather. As soon as he made it inside, he pulled a hollow reed from a shelf and grabbed the little box that had lain beside it.

“Awake yet?” asked the shepherd, in a gravelly voice that might have been familiar, but, then again, might not have been. He sat on a stool near the door and opened the box. From it, he took a pinch of crushed leaves and stuffed them into the bulbous end of the reed.

Niall decided at length he did not recognize the man. “Where am I?” he asked. His stomach roiled with nausea, and he did not rise from the mat this time.

The shepherd paused with what Niall now remembered was a pipe poised in midair. “You hit your head that hard, did you?” he asked. He shook his head with an incredulous snort and brought the pipe to his lips. “I hope your thoughts return to you, my boy. You’re a promising sort, you know, with that talent of yours. You could be quite the commodity, someday.”

With the pipe clenched in his teeth, the shepherd removed two black shards from a pocket on his belt. He struck them several times before they produced an eye-searing shower of sparks that nearly grazed his nose. The flickering light highlighted the pebbled-beach complexion of his cheek.

“Damn things,” he muttered, balancing the mouthpiece between uneven teeth. “Never work when you want them to.”

A heavy fragrance rose from the pipe soon after, compounding the ache throbbing behind Niall’s eyes. It was a scent he knew well, and one he didn’t associate with pain like this.

The shepherd leaned back on the rickety stool, paying no mind to the shrill creaking when he settled on it. Rings of pungent smoke curled around his long, windblown face. He came closer and watched Niall seriously. His tired eyes were the color of rain clouds.

Nothing in his patient, studious face made a name or anything significant come to mind, but the nagging feeling it should have poked at Niall as much as the urge to escape the cloying perfume of his smoke.

The shepherd tapped his foot against the lower rungs of stool. “Now, I hate to tell you this, my boy,” he said, fiddling with the pipe, “But it seems our friend, Bran, was not as lucky as you were.”

The name ‘Bran’ brought a laugh to mind, but its owner lingered in the fog. The more Niall tried to hold onto the sound, the weaker it became, and the more the edges of it changed. In seconds, it was nothing but a distant mess of noise, the voice a phantom cobbled together from pieces of others.

It was difficult simply recalling what the shepherd had said a moment before.

“What do you mean?” Niall asked, but the words fell short in his mouth. The syllables stumbled over each other in a race to be spoken first. The result was almost unintelligible, even to his own ear.

“What a mess,” said the shepherd. He chewed on the pipe as he rose from his seat, muttering to himself as he prepared to step out again. “I’ll have to send for the physician. You wait here a while, and I’ll be back before you know it.”

The shepherd was not back by the time Niall woke again, but his head was a touch clearer.

A girl of sixteen or so sat across the way, prodding at something that sizzled on the fire. She was visible only in profile, but he assumed her the shepherd’s daughter. She had the same light hair and pale, pebbly complexion as he did, and the same studious gaze, as well.

She jumped when she turned and noticed him watching her. “What’re you about, staring at people all silent like that?” she asked. “You don’t even know who I am, do you? I should have guessed your brazen nature would stay. It must be engrained in you. At least you’re not running around with that smug grin.”

She talked a lot. That was the first thing he noticed. Second was that her face, round and rosy, was mildly familiar; but not because of her resemblance to the shepherd. He got the feeling it was due to her resemblance to someone else. Traces of a deep laugh flitted through the back of his mind before it vanished.

She dropped a wooden bowl filled with grilled meat beside him. The steam rising from the char should have smelled tantalizing, but it made his stomach sour. He couldn’t bring himself to reach for it.

She glared at him and nudged the bowl closer. “That was our best sheep, I’ll have you know,” she said. Her eyes were round and shining. “Father had us butcher her so you’d have something to get your strength back.”

“Sick,” Niall said. It was all he could manage. The food’s aroma was overpowering.

The girl rolled her eyes and got to her feet with an aggravated grunt. She went to the other side of the room and poured something from a pitcher into a wooden cup. When she returned, Niall realized for the first time how thirsty he was. He grabbed the cup hastily when she brought it to him, spilling some of the drink over his fingers.

“Careful with that,” she said, still frowning at him. “You drink it all at once, you’ll never keep it down. Drink it slow, and it’ll settle your stomach.”

Niall was not sure how long it had actually been when the shepherd finally returned. It might have taken him a week to retrieve the old doctor, or it might have taken him a day.

The doctor, seemingly made of wrinkles, hovered close and peered into Niall’s eyes while the shepherd held a candle. It was so bright, Niall thought he would pass out from the discomfort.

They held his eyelids open with leathery fingers. “It looks poor,” they said in a rattling voice. “Only one eye responds well to the light. See how the right pupil shrinks when you bring the flame closer?”

The shepherd leaned closer. “The what?”

“Those black dots in the center.”

The shepherd made an enlightened noise. His daughter peered over his shoulder, tilting her head to get a better look.

“How can you tell anything from that?” she asked. “Do eyes do that normally?”

“If they’re in good working order, they ought. Now, let’s see. You said he had trouble speaking. Is that still the case, young man?”

Niall could think of nothing to say in response.

The shepherd’s daughter spoke for him. “He was talking fine an hour ago; he’s just baffled by damn near everything.”

The doctor brought a hand to their chin. “Confused, are you?” they asked Niall. “Do you know where you are? What would you call this place?”

“A house. A shepherd’s house.”

“So, you know what a shepherd is?”

“Sheep.”

“Hmm.” The doctor bade him raise his arms and puzzled over him a while longer, asking all manner of questions about Niall, the world, and the people around them.

He was able to answer about half the questions confidently, but half of those seemed to displease his audience as much as his failure to recall something outright. Whether it was the words he chose or that he was entirely incorrect on a subject, he didn’t know, and he quickly decided he didn’t care. More than anything, he wished the encounter to be over. The pain blazing in his head made it impossible to keep his eyes open any longer.

“His head’s giving him a powerful woe, it looks like,” the doctor said. They made no more inquiries to him and blew out the candle. “Well, he’s alive, anyway, and his memory seems improved by the hour. Gather some snow from the shade of your house and keep it on the wound. I may yet have to operate. I’ll give him something for the pain after, but that’s about all I can do for him. If he’s as fortunate as you say, he may be up and walking again in a week. You can pray to the stars for that.”

The shepherd’s voice followed the doctor’s to the door. “And?”

“And what?”

“What are the odds he’ll get back to the way he was before?”

A harsh, puffing laugh rolled from the doctor’s lips. “He’ll never.”