Despite her words that everything was fine, Ife was not fine.

  She tossed and turned all night and couldn't sleep. In fact, she didn't even want to fall asleep. Her body, tired from training, certainly demanded it, but her mind demanded the opposite — to stay awake and think about everything she had just seen.

  She thought about what she had seen at the moment of the piercing headache: they were fragments of some moments... it seemed that they were fragments of her own memories. The sensations were so realistic: the suffocating smell of burning, someone's loud cry, someone's tender promise, and then a strong blow to the head, which was so realistic that for a second she even thought she had died.

  Ife did not want to consider these fragments of her memories; no one wants to believe that such things really happened, and not to someone else, but to themselves. However, Ife could not resist this realization for long, because literally everything pointed to the fact that these were her memories.

  But the most important thing was not even the memories, but her dream in which she saw Arenor.

  Ife had seen many dreams in her life; some were good, some were not, but she had never seen dreams that awakened such a strong feeling of pain in her. And no, it wasn't just a strong feeling of pain, it was a tearing pain that seemed to burn her from within with its fierce fire of resentment.

  Arenor's words in her dream, asking how she could have believed his promise, literally destroyed her. She felt like a glass jar that was whole one moment and shattered into a thousand pieces the next.

  Such pain... no, it definitely couldn't have been caused by a normal dream.

  After all, Arenor was just a Prince and had nothing to do with her; she didn't care about him and had no feelings for him. But why did his words and gaze in her dream cause her such pain, as if they had known each other all her life?

  And now, she supposed that perhaps that was the case.

  After all, the most important thing was not her memories, or even her dream, but the name she was called in those dreams.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  And that name was Airena.

  ***

  Due to lack of sleep, Ife was forced to come to breakfast much earlier, as she simply had nothing else to do.

  Besides, as far as she knew, the herbal sleep potion she had drunk before bed last night was strong enough to cause stomach upset, so she needed to eat something urgently.

  Two days ago, when she decided to find out if Arenor was connected to her past, she remembered a long-ago conversation with Irai, when they discussed her memory loss; he told her that memories often return through dreams, as somehow everything is connected there—she honestly didn't remember exactly how. She remembered how Irai had offered her many times to drink a special potent sleeping potion that had a hallucinogenic effect and caused vivid dreams that could help her recover her memory, but she refused. Ife was satisfied with having Irai by her side, so she had no desire to recover anything; besides, as Irai had explained to her, the cause of memory loss is usually either physical or psychological trauma, which meant that whatever had happened to her in the past was not good. And why remember the bad, especially when even now things were not going so well for her?

  But now that she suspected that the Prince knew more about her than he was saying, she simply had to try this method.

  So at night, when everyone was asleep, she stole the key to the infirmary door from Shafia and, sneaking in, took the necessary tincture. Then, just as quickly, she left and returned the key to Shafia. Ife was a little surprised at how soundly Shafia slept, but in the end, she was just a Healer, not someone very important, so she had no need to worry about her safety.

  At least, that's what Ife thought.

  But she was wrong.

  Then, before going to bed, she drank the potion, and as it turned out that same night, it really did work as it was supposed to. So Ife wasn't going to stop there and was going to find out as much about her past as she possibly could.

  Especially if it would finally shed light on the Prince's strange attitude towards her.

  Ife's thoughts were so extensive that neither during breakfast, nor during lunch, nor even during dinner did she notice Arenor's absence from the dining room.

  ***

  After an unusually late training session with Zafir, for which he gave no explanation, she stumbled into her room and literally fell onto the bed, completely exhausted.

  This time, the training was much harder, not only because Zafir made her training more difficult each time, trying to teach her more and more things, but also because she had hardly slept today and was incredibly tired and exhausted throughout the day; and in the evening, when the training took place, she was on the verge of collapsing.

  After their very friendly conversation late at night — not counting the fact that he hit her in the face three times, of course — she thought he would treat her more gently, but no; Zafir did not reduce the load, pressuring her both physically and psychologically — doing everything he usually did.

  As he told her at one point:

  "A hired killer must be able to act even when he is exhausted, tired, or on the verge of death; if you don't learn to do that, you will never become a hired killer, a soldier, or even an ordinary person capable of defending yourself."

  He was right, but that didn't take away her anger at him for seeing how bad she felt and tormenting her even more than usual.

  However, after the training was over, he softened a little and said:

  "If you feel too bad, I can call the Healer."

  However, she still refused, as she didn't want to blow the whole story that had happened to her out of proportion; one witness in his person was enough for her, and she certainly didn't want to add a few more in the form of Arenor and Shafia.