“Hod?” the word was so faint, it was hardly there, but he shouted in response.
“Ghisla! I heard you singing. I heard you singing, and it was so beautiful.”
“Hod?” His hand was still burning, and he cried out again, babbling in joy and disbelief.
And then her voice was there, as clear as if she stood beside him, and he fell back on the sand, his face to the sky.
That day, he’d made her promise to use the rune again, to call out to him when she was able, and she had, many times since.
She didn’t tire of his questions, and she never refused him a song.
She gave him so many songs.
With her songs, he saw Elayne of Ebba with her fiery hair and her gentle ways, but he didn’t just see her, he knew her. He knew them all.
He knew Bashti; he saw the brown warmth of her skin and the bright flash of her mind. She was a marvel at mimicry, both mannerisms and voices, and she made Ghisla laugh. That was a wonder too—Ghisla’s laugh. Rare and rippling, it never failed to rob him of breath; he loved Bashti for that, for giving Ghisla laughter.
He knew dark-eyed, little Dalys and experienced all her colors. Ghisla composed songs as Dalys painted, just so he could see them too.
Through Ghisla’s music, Juliah danced in his thoughts with her sword and shield, pouncing and punching, and he delighted in her antics, though she and Ghisla were often at odds.
“She does not understand me,” Ghisla said. “And I don’t know how to make myself understood. We are very different.”
“I think it is more likely that you . . . are the same,” he suggested gently. “You are both warriors. Both fighters. You just fight in different ways.”
“I’m not always certain who I am fighting. Who the enemy is. All I know is that you are my dearest friend, Hody.”
“And you are mine.”
“I could not bear it if I could not talk to you.”
Hod often wondered how he’d borne a single day before she’d washed up on his shore. When Ghisla sang he saw the world. Her sisters and the keepers, the castle and the king. He saw the gardens and the gates and the wall that separated them all from the rest of Saylok. He saw the sea and the sky and the mountains and the trees. He even saw himself.
It was a beautiful world to look at, though he knew, for Ghisla and her sisters, it was not always a beautiful world to live in. Sometimes Ghisla’s songs were washed with grays or infused with shadows. Sometimes her loneliness and despair made the images she drew for him waver like the sands after high tide.
And yet she kept on singing, and he kept on listening, doing his best to shoulder her sorrow and speak relief to her soul.
He did not tell her how he missed her or how he suffered when she could not visit him. He did not tell her how the darkness wore on him, and how he worried there would never be a better day, a better Saylok. He did not tell her that he fought his own hopelessness and could not see his own path. He did not reveal that he feared the reason for his existence and begged each day that the gods would make it clear.
He greeted her with only joy whenever he heard her voice and made her promise to not give up.
PART TWO
10
LULLABIES
“You have grown so much, Liis. You hardly look like the same girl I met two years ago. There is some flesh on your bones, and your cassocks are so short, your ankles are showing,” Ghost remarked one morning as they worked side by side in the garden.
“I will let the stitches out of my hems,” Ghisla said.
Her sleeves were too short too, and she’d begun to bind her breasts in a length of cloth to keep them from swaying beneath her shapeless frocks, but she didn’t mention that. She thought Ghost had probably noticed. She was sixteen summers now, and she’d begun to look her age, though no one commented on it. She was still not as tall as Elayne—she never would be—and she was still too thin, but the swell of her breasts and the curve of her hips was much more pronounced; she would not pass for a child any longer.
“I will ask Dagmar to fetch the seamstress again. All of you girls