I say, “He taught me how to take pleasure.”

Ulín looks away. The notebook at her knees lies open, forgotten.

“Did your serpent prince not teach you this? You were new, too, and he wasn’t, and your body was not needed for production.”

She rubs her eyes. “Most people . . .” she says. “Even your siltway people, it seems . . . most people in this world choose passion. I used to think I did, too. Maybe. I no longer know. Back then it was new, and I was new, and I thought—I loved him, you see, and I thought it would feel better with time.”

It’s my turn to look away now. “I made you sad. I did not mean to. If you want, just name your target, be it your lover or your brother, and we will come to a deal, or not. This has been painful enough.”

“There is no end of pain in my story.”Ulín speaks slowly, as if reciting a line from a poem. “The pain is a maze that brought me here, singing with red, calling from under the earth.”

I think I understand. She is a client, but also she isn’t. She came here because of that voice, the song of despair which is Ladder’s to command, but which does not always come from him.

I tell her the story I heard from Old Song and gleaned from inside the Shoal—the story of the siltway Star, of how it fell. “The Headmaster did not catch the star he chose first for himself. His first choice was the Star of the Shoal—but our star denied him. Only I, Stone Orphan from the Stone storyline, came here.” I was severed, and if I remained the same, I too would know only this grief, only pain, an endless and incomprehensible maze. But I translated myself. “Ladder trained me. It was a fair deal. But I am still an orphan. Held in a bonded collective with nobody, just like your people.”

Ulín speaks, each word as slow as a falling stone. “I am not an orphan, but everything ended when my deepnames were destroyed.”

Ulín’s brother was prisoned in his rooms, and she was prisoned in hers just as surely, with bandages and blankets and words of care. Healers came and went. Her head felt like a brazier of coals, sputtering and flickering and burning down her throat and out of her eyes. In and out of consciousness. Healers came—in her moments of clarity, Ulín saw them hovering over her. Heat—she could no longer see magic—but heat from the applications of other people’s deepnames, and after that, pain. Kannar, her father, hovering behind the physickers, his tall frame stooped and his face sick with fear. His eyes sliding off Ulín’s face, never directly looking at her.

She fell back down into darkness.

One time Ulín came to, and her parents were arguing.

She had not seen Sibeli there before, but now they stood at the foot of the bed. Sibeli’s face looked bloodless. Ulín wanted to cough and to speak, she wanted her parent to touch her, but Sibeli stood motionless, their hands clasped behind their back. Their eyes on Kannar. His face was livid. So focused were the two of them upon each other that neither noticed that Ulín was awake.

“Day after day she is here, sedated out of her mind by your healers.” Sibeli.

“The physickers will help. Someone will know something—some remedy—some hope—” Kannar said.

“Let her wake. Let her recover. Let her—”

Ulín slitted her eyes, pretending to sleep.

“Recover?” Her father half-whispered, fighting for quiet and losing. “She cannot recover without her deepnames—she cannot inherit—”

“Nameloss can never be repaired,” Sibeli said, their voice bone-tired. “But she is alive. Let her live.”

“Let her live?” her father roared. “Next you will say . . .”

“Kannar.” Ulín’s parent pointed, and both looked at her, waiting for her to awaken, but she made her breath even. After a while, they resumed in quieter tones.

Kannar whispered, “War is going to break if she is not healed. And even if war is avoided, I have no idea if I’ll ever allow her to go back to these—”

“It will be her decision,” Sibeli said, quietly.

“The whole of the Coast!” Kannar’s whisper came hoarse and furious. “For four hundred years we had peace with the serpents until that son of yours killed three of Laufkariar’s cronies that he was always running around with, and now—”

“He is your child too,” Sibeli said.

“That murderous snake is no child of mine,” spat Ulín’s father. “He can rot in that room. Ulín—I need to heal Ulín, I need to fix her, to teach her, I need—”

“Let her wake,” Sibeli said. “Let her decide if she is to be subjected to more and more of these healers of yours, or recover and live.”

“If not for your insistence on her free will, she’d never prepare to marry and never go down to that shore, she’d still be uninjured—”

“It is her will that matters here,” Sibeli said. “Ulín is not a child.”

“She is—she is nineteen—unformed—” Kannar’s hoarse whisper was lost now in angrier, louder tones.

“You are confused.” Sibeli, too, was losing their customary calm. “In your anger and grief you call your fourteen-year-old child a snake, and your nineteen-year-old adult daughter a child, and neither—”

“Shut up,” Ulín’s father roared. She felt a wave of scorching heat, as his deepnames activated—Ulín could no longer see them, but the room became suffocating, as if the air was burning, just like that morning on the shore. “Shut up!” he yelled. “Shut up!”

“No, I will not,” Sibeli retorted. “I will not allow you to torture her without her consent—Ulín must decide what she wants—”

Ulín’s father’s face contorted, and she screamed—stop it, stop it, stop it—because she knew what was coming. His power of three single-syllable deepnames—the Warlord’s Triangle, the most militant, potent, unyielding configuration in the land—would destroy her parent’s deepnames just as her brother had destroyed hers. Ulín screamed and screamed, and the world faded into the tearing blind wail of the headache.

It took Ulín many days to fully regain her mind.

Physickers and healers and nursing people came to the room, talking between themselves. In time, she learned that her parent Sibeli had left—just up and left. She heard whispers that Kannar had struck Sibeli, and whispers that he only threatened to strike them; that he was grieving. She heard it said that Sibeli abandoned their duty to their spouse, to their children, to the Coast. She heard that by leaving, Sibeli did the right thing, and who wouldn’t do the same in their place?

Ulín woke up to more physickers, and drifted to sleep again. Her parent never came back. And she could not leave.

“Wait,” I ask. “Is it your father you want killed?”

She is silent. I am becoming adept at her silences now.

Three deepnames—not just any three, but a Warlord’s Triangle; and he was some kind of leader, a politician, he would be well protected even without his own magic. Still, I would take this on.

“I’m willing,” I say. “If you name him as target.”

Ulín chews her lips. “Sometimes I do want to kill him. More often than I would like. Rage rises like bile, this memory of unfreedom, but also . . .” She sighs. “More than his death, I want—my father back, the way he was before. Before he stopped seeing me, and began seeing nameloss.”