bandages on Ghisla’s hand. “Does it hurt very much?”
“It does not hurt at all,” Ghisla replied, regretful. The pain of her hand had shrouded other hurts, and as it healed, her despair grew.
Her rune was gone.
The star-shaped scar and the fibrous web of healing skin obscured it completely. Ghisla couldn’t trace the lines in blood; there were no lines. She’d bathed her hand in tears and blood and sang until she was hoarse, but Hod did not answer.
Yet she had not lost her ability—if an ability was what it was—to hear the thoughts of others while she sang. She’d tested it while Elayne sat at her bedside, clasping her left hand. Ghisla had warbled but a single verse, and Elayne’s thoughts had poured into her head like water over the falls. Whatever the rune had once unlocked—if the rune was indeed the source—still remained, embedded beneath her new scar.
She thought that when her hand had more time to heal she might be able to re-create the lines of the soul rune; she’d traced it often enough. But it was much harder to carve with her left hand than she anticipated, and the pain to her healing palm was intense.
The cuts she made became infected, and she suffered for a week before Ivo asked to see it. The oozing mess had him cursing the Norns and the king, but he drew his runes and mumbled his words, and her hand began to heal once more.
She practiced the soul rune when she was alone, drawing the character in the dust, but though she remembered the angle and shape of the mark, she didn’t know which line to draw first; a rune could not be crafted any which way, and the soul rune was forbidden. She could not ask for instruction.
She worried Hod would think her affection had waned, then she worried that something had befallen him, and that fear was worst of all. She missed her menses two months in a row, but on the third month, her bleeding was so heavy it soaked her bed coverings and woke her. She cried then, though she did not cry in relief or even despair.
She simply cried for yet another love that would not be, for yet another life that had been denied her. The king, as fate would have it, sent for her that night, and when her songs were done and he lay sleeping, she left a puddle of blood in the middle of his bedroom floor where she’d stood for an hour, humming to soothe his splitting head.
Not long after that, Master Ivo summoned her to the sanctum, and when she stood before him, her hands folded demurely, he made a surprising confession.
“I realized some time ago that I am a fool,” he said.
She raised her brows in question but did not argue with his assessment.
“All this time—all those years—you were communing with a blind boy . . . not a blind god.”
She blinked at him, neither confirming nor denying it.
“I admit. I have laughed about your cleverness these last months . . . when my heart did not ache for you.”
“Why would your heart ache, Master?” she whispered.
“Do you think me so unfeeling?”
He had sent Hod from the temple with nary a second thought. I will rest better when he is gone.
“The cave keeper . . . Arwin . . . told me many things when I sought his release from the stocks. He was quite adamant that you are a witch.”
“I never said I wasn’t.”
Ivo chortled.
“He said you have addled all our brains, though he is hardly one to talk. He is quite mad himself. He did not thank me for the mercy I showed him, though I blame him, in part, for your hand.”
“He was not terribly injured?”
“I watched him walk through the gates myself. I am confident he left the mount and rejoined his apprentice.”
She had worried about Arwin finding Hod and was grateful for that meager bit of news.
“Arwin said you washed up from the sea and beguiled young Hod. He said it was he who took you to Lothgar,” Ivo added, his tone careful.
She nodded once, and Ivo grew pensive with her admission.
“Is it your song? Is that how you talk to him?” he asked, grave. She didn’t ask to whom he referred. She knew.
“I don’t know. He does not . . . talk to me anymore.”
“You do not know . . . or you do not want to tell me?”