“You’re always the favorite—better than everyone—at least do not marry the Bird-plucked bastard, Ulín . . .” His voice shook. “At least that—or did you plan this? You planned this?”

Tajer swung his arms as he screamed, and Ulín could have retreated, but instead she pulled on her deepnames. One-syllable and two-syllables. She used to be so much stronger—

I shudder, and my fingers dig into my palms. The familiar name, the terrible spiraling of the story as it rushes inward toward darkness, ready to devour itself.

“Are you—” Ulín asks.

I do not want to hear. It is too much.

I promised to witness.

No, I want to. I want to witness.

I exhale. “I am ready. Go on.”

Ulín was used to being so much magically stronger than her brother—he’d only had the two-syllable deepname. But something felt different now, because her brother—the one with the two-syllable deepname, the one who had been so much weaker, so much more of a child—he had more. His deepnames—more than one, more than two, more more more—

She could not stop now. She yelled, “Don’t deny it, you wanted him—”

His deepnames formed blinding, rotating structures over her head, like a whirlwind that shook with lightning. Both of them yelled, their words swallowed by that whirlwind. The weight of his magical structure descended upon her, and all was dark.

When Ulín awoke, her father was by her side.

A splitting headache.

Later, she was told that her deepnames were burned out. It was her brother who called for help, and then helped carry her in. He was in his rooms now, under guard.

So . . . finally, the target is revealed. My mouth feels bitter. “How long ago was this?” I ask.

“Ten years.”

Her story left me raw, and my words come harsher than I want them to. “What makes you want to seek your brother’s death now?” I thought it would be her serpent prince. Laufkariar. That would make sense. The serpent people live underwater, and I can move underwater. But this—

I grimace at my own insight. “The Headmaster sent you to me.”

She looks confused. “Why are you angry?”

“Forgive me,” I mutter. “I am not angry, I’m just—”

I wish the Headmaster asked me first. But he knew I would take any contract if I wanted to graduate and get out of here.

Ulín tries to get up, her eyes dry and empty as if she’s newly injured. “Forgive me. I will ask for someone else.”

“No!” I speak before thinking. “I do not want you to leave.”

I take a deep breath. It is moments like this which hold an answer to everything. Anger clears the mind and makes you stronger, as long as you trust your own judgment. Somebody came here and taught me that. I say, “The target is your choice.”

Ulín sits down again, shakes her head ruefully. “I’ll be honest, I am still not sure about the target. It could be my brother, or someone else.”

I say, “There’s more to your story. And mine.”

“Yes.” She wraps her hands around her empty teacup. “Do you want maybe . . . to tell me more?”

Yes, I do.

After Old Song left the prison-cave, I lay in the pool, tasting salt water and blood. The severed bond burned like a lashing of storm against skin. But even more than the pain, my anger burned red-hot. I had never before felt anything like it. It was exhilarating and terrifying, that despair—yes, despair. The isles themselves, my people, my whole life, were ash and blood on my tongue. Old Song still had living bonds and could flicker away, but I was motionless. Before I bonded with Old Song, this did not bother me—I lived simply on Stone Isle, like others, and if I wanted to leave Stone Isle, I could form a temporary bond with someone, or ask a Boater person for passage. I do not much remember those days before Old Song, now. Gray on gray, and the water lapping. Was I happy? Was there even a word? I do not recall.

I was a prisoner now, and the only way out of here lay through the gathered will of others. Perhaps in time I would bond again. I would be told that I belonged, again. I would birth new bodies and raise them to bond, to live quietly in the collective. And when I died, I would be held in the Shoal underwater, like the ancestors of red.

This had been my life before and I was content with it, but now all I felt was despair. I would not live like this. I, whose Stone storyline had lost its meaning—but not its place in our long passage through the void—I was weightier than my imprisonment.

I sank deeper into the cold water, and tugged on my remaining bond. My parent, the one who birthed me, hovering fearfully on the edges of the Shoal of the dead. I sensed that my parent wanted to talk to me, chide me, but I had no time. I pushed away from them, deeper into the Shoal.

It was only a matter of time before I would be noticed.

Years later, it occurred to me that I could have stolen a Boater’s boat and rowed all the way to the shore of Lysinar, but I did not think this way. This is a nameway thing to think. I learned how to think this way from the nameway people, and I cannot unlearn it now, so I can never be translated back to my own people. I fear that in time I will forget my language. Maybe even my shape. I cannot become a nameway or a dreamway person, but I’m not like I had been. Some different, new thing.

Where was I? Traveling deeper centerward into the ancestral Shoal.

At last, I reached the ancestors of red. They looked even more distorted behind the glowing bars of their bonds, as if they had screamed themselves raw—but now they were silent. Around me the Shoal was swirling. The intelligence I perceived in it was not any single ancestor, but a togetherness. The soul-minnows moved and separated and moved again, pressing me in, crowding around me. I was too small to notice, that first time I came here, but now the Shoal knew me and thought me dangerous. I was not supposed to come back, not until death, and even then my place would be on the shallow outskirts of the collective. This deep place wasn’t my place.

The Shoal’s pressure became pain, even though I was not here in the body, only as my spirit, but the pain was pressure in my spectral ears, in my spectral throat. Somewhere on the surface, my body thrashed in the pool.

Thoughts rushed through me, like song. That red song. If it could be heard here, in this ancient and hostile deep, then I could follow it like a bond. But I wanted, I wanted to know, to make sense of it all—the Shoal, these ancestors of Stone, the red color, my people, my story. So I shouted—it came out a hoarse, ragged whisper—