Page 96 of Dark Destiny: The Fates' Bargain

She followed Bridget to the first bed.

"Look at his eyelids," Bridget said. "And wait for it."

Annani did as the physician directed and focused on the eyelids that someone had coated with lotion. Then she saw the flutter. One, two, and then nothing.

"I saw it." She turned to Bridget. "Is he waking up?"

"He is on his way."

"Mother," Alena said. "Look at his fingers."

Annani looked. The male's fingers were twitching against the blanket, small, aimless motions, but after so long of no motion at all, this was a cause for celebration.

"Thank the merciful Fates," Annani whispered.

It was time to change the stories she was telling these males. She should focus on things they knew, names they should recognize, and events they had lived through. It might jog their memories and help them surface faster.

She leaned over the male with the fluttering eyelids and spoke slowly, clearly, in the old tongue, in the accent of the world they had all lost together. "Good morning. I am Princess Annani, daughter of Ahn, wife of Khiann. I am the one who has been telling you stories. You have been asleep for a very long time, and you are waking among friends."

The eyelids fluttered, the fingers twitched, and she watched the movements, hoping to see a change, a sign of recognition. Even just a faster flutter would have been an encouraging sign.

But nothing indicated that her words had any impact, or that her name had produced any ripples.

She moved to the second bed and said it again. "I am Princess Annani, daughter of Ahn, wife of Khiann." Then again at the fourth bed, and again at the fifth, with patience and warmth, enunciating every syllable of names that had once needed no introduction anywhere in the civilized world.

Nothing. Four sleeping faces, four sets of restless eyelids, and not a single flicker of recognition among them.

She stepped back from the fifth bed and considered what the silence meant.

Annani had been the most talked-about person of the age. The only legitimate daughter of Ahn, the heiress to his throne, the princess whose impossible love story had been the stuff of legend while she was still living it. Every god and immortal in the region had known her. Not only her name but also her face, thehair she had been famous for, her tiny stature that people had spoken of fondly.

These males had been Khiann's guards. They had lived in his orbit, served in his father's house, and accompanied him on more than one caravan. If these four remembered anything at all of who they had been, they would have remembered her. The sound of her name would have gone through them like a bell.

It hadn't.

"Give it time," Bridget said. "They've been in stasis for five thousand years. Consciousness doesn't reassemble itself overnight, and it certainly doesn't come back ready for the races. Disorientation at this stage is to be expected."

It was the correct thing for a physician to say, so Annani nodded in agreement despite knowing better.

Wonder had woken from her millennia in stasis with no name and no past, and weeks later she'd still had neither. She had even taken her name from a human child who had called her Wonder Woman because she looked like the actress who had played that character. Her memories had come back to her eventually, months afterward, but months was a very long time to be no one at all.

Ell-rom, who had spent even longer in stasis, had surfaced with only a handful of hazy fragments, mist where memories of his life should have been. They had all hoped the memories would return as he healed, but they had not. What Ell-rom had of his past, he had because Morelle had woken with her memories intact. The twins had spent every moment of their lives together, so her memories were his, and she had filled in the blanks for him.

That was the precedent Annani could base her hopes on. Neither Wonder nor Ell-rom had woken up completely blank. Their intelligence had survived. Wonder had forgotten her language and her history, but she had not forgotten her resourcefulness or the ability to learn, and she had taught herself to speak Arabic and then English. Ell-rom had not forgotten who he had been as a person, just what he had done and almost everything he had learned.

One of them had gotten his past back from his twin. The other had waited months for hers to return on its own. Neither had woken up knowing a single thing.

The four males in these beds would likely wake the same way, whole in their skills and their speech and their selves and swept clean of their life stories. They would look at the most famous face of their age and see a small, redheaded goddess they did not recognize.

She would tell them who they had been. She did not know their names or even recognize their faces, but it was possible that Esag would remember them and be able to recount some of their individual histories. She, at least, could tell them about the world they had lived in and what had happened to them.

They would join her clan, and the community would wrap them in warmth and acceptance like it did almost every newcomer.

They would be fine. They were waking.

Annani walked back to the middle bed, the third in a row of five, and looked at her mate.

His monitors retained their old rhythm. The deep, even, unvarying metronome, breath after identical breath, heartbeatafter identical heartbeat, the sounds that had faded into the background because they never changed.