“I cannot see you,” he reminded, impatient. “I wait only to hear if they will do.”
“It feels like you can.”
“I can’t,” he insisted, frowning. “Do you think I lie?”
She sighed heavily, relenting, and tugged off the long shift that wasn’t much more than a tattered sack with a hole for her head. She tossed it toward him, intending for it to hit him in the face. He’d complained enough about the smell; she thought it would be humorous. Instead, he snatched it from the air and tossed it on the fire, easily, effortlessly.
She gaped and growled, rushing to cover herself with his old tunic.
“What?” he asked.
“How did you do that if you cannot see me?”
“I heard you.”
She huffed, struggling to pull on the hose that were too long and the blouse that slid off her skinny shoulders. She folded the neckline in on itself and rolled the legs of the hose, cinching both at her waist with the bit of rope that Hod offered.
“Can you hear that they don’t fit?” she marveled.
“I can hear you making adjustments.”
“If you have a bit of thread and a needle, I can fix the hem and alter the neckline, though you’ve thrown my shift in the fire, so I have nothing else to wear while I do so.”
“I cannot see you,” he insisted again, a note of irritation in his voice. It made her smile to irk him.
“Yes . . . but what if Arwin returns and I am unclothed?”
He stilled, as though he’d forgotten all about Arwin. He cocked his head, turning his face toward the entrance.
“He has been gone longer than usual. Mayhaps there is something wrong.”
Ghisla didn’t know what to say, and so said nothing. For several seconds, Hod was frozen, listening, and then his shoulders relaxed.
“He is not near. The forest sounds different when he enters it.”
“How does it sound?”
“The birds get quiet. The creatures in the trees and in the brush hear him . . . and I hear them. It is not sound as much as it is a cessation of certain sounds. The silence precedes him, and, if the breeze is right, I catch his scent when he is still a good distance away. He has never returned without me knowing he comes.”
That evening when Ghisla sang for Hod, she flinched at his grip, revealing the soreness of her arms. Horrified that he’d hurt her, he tried to keep his hands in his lap as she sang, but the connection wasn’t as immediate, and the images weren’t as infused with color.
“My ears are overjoyed . . . My heart too, but it is like the night of the storm. I can hear you—your voice found me over miles of stormy sea—but I cannot see your songs. Not clearly. What fills my thoughts are more my own imaginings . . . a communion with your words and sounds, but not your . . . pictures.”
She’d held both of his hands after that, and he made her promise to tell him if he was hurting her. When she sang she watched Hod’s face, entranced by the emotions that danced there. He didn’t keep his eyes closed—he had no need. His eyes didn’t see; his mind did, as though she poured her own images into his thoughts with her songs.
He had his favorite songs, the songs of her people, the songs where the lyrics painted pictures, but he also enjoyed exploring.
“Sing me the one about the toad . . . the way your brother sang it. I was not holding your hand when you sang it the first time . . . and I was too distracted by the fact that you gave a toad my name.” He smiled, letting her know she was forgiven.
She sang the silly tune, training her own thoughts to picture a croaking, odious little beast who hopped from one catastrophe to another, but her thoughts skittered away before he was flattened by a cart’s wheel.
Hod laughed, throwing his head back. “I could see the toad. That was wonderful!”
“You are odd,” she said, but she laughed too and sang him another one of Gilly’s tunes, one about a talking trout with rainbow scales.
“A rainbow is many colors,” Hod marveled.
“I will have to think of a better song—a more powerful song—to show you a rainbow, but I cannot think of one now.”
“I don’t think it is the songs that have power . . . It is you.”