Ulín smiles at me. “You pronounced it perfectly.”

I look away from her, stilling my features. “In the tongues of the desert, such people are called in-betweeners. In the siltway tongue, there are no words like that. Nor words for woman or man. Nobody is different from another person.”

“Perhaps you are all in-betweeners,” Ulín speaks as if it’s a jest. But it’s not.

“No,” I say. “It’s not that. It’s that a single person is unimportant. We are a collective. The language of I itself is discouraged, even though many use it.”

“I would love to hear more,” she tells me, warm.

“I will tell you more. But not yet. First, I want more of your story.”

Laufkariar came in the night. He had hunted in serpentshape in the dreaming sea that stretches above the waking lands. Only the strongest of dreamway hunters could ascend there, and for him it was easy, to leap up in serpentshape, leaving nothing behind. Ulín had always admired him for it. His power. His prowess. Now his breath smelled of lilac, and in his violet eyes were reflected his kills—dreaming fish and porpoises; aquatic birds; even serpents. Ulín did not think it violent—these were only dreams, after all. He hovered above her, his smile of hunger and need, and he was the handsomest of men, and she wanted—

She wanted to show him her notebook.

“Look, I am learning your language,” she said. “I’m making such interesting discoveries. For example—”

Laufkariar looked frustrated at first, uninterested. Then he grabbed the pages.

“Who said all this?”

“Oh, your sister, I think.” Ulín described her to him. “She’s helping me learn.”

“You are naïve, nameway woman,” he said. Then: “Beloved.”

His gaze was dark, but he bent to kiss her, and Ulín’s breath caught. Her whole body yearned for him, just like her mind yearned for words and their meaning.

“She is simply jealous,” he said. “Jealous that she can never inherit. Jealous and weak. She’s not even a hunter. Don’t worry.”

Ulín was falling asleep when he stepped out of the room.

Ulín breathes deep. Looks away. “Can you teach me a word? Any word?”

She needs a break, I guess. And I don’t mind.

“All right.” What shall I teach her, then? “Rordan is a word that means inwards-toward-the-center-of-dan. Roh-ereh-dan. Dan is the thing which is stable.”

“Stable like a stone?” Ulín leafs through the notebook. “Like kah and kahir?”

“No, not like a stone. Dan means the solidity and center of people. Rordan is the centered, stable thing which is all of us. A collective. Perhaps you would say in your language, a family.”

“I’d say . . . a house,” she offers.

I do not understand. “A dwelling?”

She nods. “A dwelling which is a center of people. For me, it’s the house of my ancestor Ranra. Once, in our Coastal language, the word house meant ship.”

She explains the word for me—a ship is a kind of boat, but larger and steadier than the one my people would make out of driftwood. Now House Ranravan is a dwelling, and a name for Ranra’s people—her descendants, and their lovers, and their friends, and their children.

I know this name.

It is a lurching, dizzying feeling; a coincidence, maybe. I could ask, but I’m wary of where the story will lead us—lead me. After a moment I school my features and continue my tale.

Rordan is a word that means the whole of the Bonded Shoal. The star made of ancestors, shallowly connected to the world of the living and nurtured by it. But the past is reachable, if one so desires. If one wants to talk to the ancestors, one has to descend centerward, travel down the bonds.

Among the living, this is rarely done. What reason is there to go so deep into the Shoal? The task of the living is to live. To work, to maintain the body, to share it so that more siltway bodies can be born. The living are simply an anchor for the Star of the Shoal, a safeguard so that it won’t diminish again. What purpose, what curiosity, would move a single one of us to descend into the Shoal of the dead?

Yet it is known to happen. The one who birthed me taught me to do this before they abandoned the body, if I needed to find them again. And so at night I lay down in the shallow pool in my cave, and tugged on the ancestor-bond through my two-syllable deepname.

It was quiet and silvery-gray in the ancestor Shoal, and my parent did not stir when I flickered to their side. They had a personshape in the water of that place, with eyes of pale silver that stared past me, and a mouth that spoke nothing. I wanted to talk to them, or simply be by their side, but I was afraid to linger.

My parent’s soul was bonded to others, I saw—people of their own generation, and the preceding one. I tugged on that vertical bond, and descended through the bonds of the dead.

There were so many bonds. I did not understand this geometry. More than one bond could be formed through a deepname. Old Song told me about it, but nobody taught me how. Yet I could not stay to figure it out. If I thought too much, I would find myself back in the pool in my cave, my residual gills stretched taut with the labor of breath.

No, I had to keep moving, and so I pulled myself down centerward, generation after generation. These people were unfamiliar to me. Their bonds were strange, and they looked translucent, leached of color, with little awareness of me—but the more I descended, the more I sensed that I was being watched, as if all of them watched me at once.

It was foreboding and dreary and I could not imagine moving to live here. This was what death was about, what we all wanted at the end of a life—to be free from the body and its labor, to continue in the ancestor Shoal. Why did it feel so constricting? I was frightened, and wanted to flicker back out and up to the living, all the way to Old Song. I hovered, motionless, by one of my great-great-ancestors, seventy generations deep.

Just then, a song began to ascend from deeper inwards below. A song I thought I recognized.

I am Stone, I told myself. I am strong. Strong enough to anchor the isles. Strong enough to anchor Old Song. I am Stone. I am a warrior.

So I moved deeper down, and in a few generations I began to see the red light.

The color was coming from inside a cluster of ancestors, all bonded together. Each of these ancestors had a translucent body, whitish, but formed around a red light that colored the edges of their arms in a pink glow. These ancestors moved around in the water, all looking at me.

We are Song and Stone, they sang, from before the Star of the Shoal came to this world and sank into this sea. We are the youngest of travelers, the last unalive generation.

We are the ones who saw and heard when the twelve stars were carried upon Bird’s burning tail.