I perk up. “Lysinar? Did you meet the stag woman there? Her name was Kran-Valadar, Old Song had told me.”
Ulín is elusive. “It was a very long journey north in the rattling carriage. Forgive me, Stone Orphan . . . But could it be your turn to speak?”
I am not the only one to keep secrets. I stand up to stretch, then sit down again. I am not happy, but her story was heavy, and it is fair to ask for a rest. I say, “Very well. I told you before how the youth I’d killed became ember and joined the vast globe of coals underground. It happens here, I discovered.”
The smoldering heart of despair
Orphans come here, to Ladder’s court of sandstone terraces. Some have living parents who exiled or disdained them, yet others had parents who died or were tortured out of their parenting. Some of these orphans have parents whose nature is such that it would be better to be parentless. Some had, themselves, rejected their families. A few had never known their kin. But none of those reasons brought anyone, ever, directly to Ladder’s court. It was despair that summoned them.
Some of those who come here, I learned, had committed crimes by mistake. The crimes were unplanned—this is not a place for intentful criminals. But these inadvertent crimes were so terrible that the goddess Bird herself had disdained them, and often their families, and there was no way out of this, no way to live. No hope.
It is despair that makes a person hear the song of the Orphan Star. Its song is yearning and pain. Its song knows you and sees you when everyone else turns away. The song summons you to this court. But even if you survive the training, that despair does not end—you just learn to wield it like a weapon. To serve something greater that makes sense to you, a whole star of despair.
There are three circles of training. First is the beginning, when you are measured against many others, these orphans with grief-deadened eyes. You train and live together in the upper terrace, ten to a room. Many do not survive, but if you survive, Ladder tells you about the body of coal and black shards, the smoldering ruin of star underground which is known as the Orphan.
When the first part of my training was finally done, the Headmaster told me to come at night to the center of the court under the open sky, to the very bottom of the terraces, where there are areas for students to train and to fight. At night, the stones here give up their heat to the cooler desert air. Under my feet, I could sense a faint thrumming. There was something there, underneath.
Ladder’s body loomed huge and unrelenting in the semidarkness of the court. His bare arms and bald head almost shone, reflecting the stars, or so it seemed to me. I felt I was dreaming. My vision was full of floating sparks, sudden embers that flared and winked out, and inside me I felt hunger. Like Old Song’s melody before we were judged. Such anguish was in it, as if singing, No way out. No way.
Ladder took me by the shoulders, a touch which was not that of sharing or teaching, but a command. That, too, I understood in the body. Inescapable, and yet so comforting and solid. I was held.
“Stone Orphan,” he said. “I don’t know you and you won’t be worth knowing, unless you survive to learn. The second circle is when you’re tempered. Are you ready?”
“Yes,” I said.
He tapped his foot on the floor. A heavy sound.
Something turned underneath, and then I was falling.
Long ago, there was a world in which nameway, dreamway, and siltway people all lived together. They had different countries perhaps, or different continents; they shared big cities and even small islands. The siltway people were guardians of the sea, their deepname magic fishlike, gathering and guarding all the small living beings of the deep. And they fished, too, and as they fished, they made sure that the shoals of the sea would never diminish. Share with us, said the nameway and dreamway people of that world. Let us share the bounty of the sea, and we will teach you what we know of land.
I was falling between them now. What was left of their world. Coals and embers, tied between themselves in a structure which was not that of bonds. It was spherical, with longer, weaker deepname-souls on the edges and stronger, shorter deepname-souls in the center. They were not bound together in an undulating structure, like the Star of the Shoal, but they clung to each other by some other magic, surrounding a powerful, invisible core I could not quite see.
And all of them wailed.
Lost, all lost. You cannot save a world. Dead forever, hanging in the crucible of ember, dead forever and devouring the souls of the living, for no star can live unsupported by those alive.
I heard among them the voices of the siltway warriors of Stone and singers of Song who had chosen to separate from the original Shoal and join with their dreamway and nameway allies. Their souls called out to me in the siltway tongue, but the way they spoke it was different. I recognized some of the phrases, some of the words, but the structure of it moved and shifted with additions I did not recognize.
Did these kinspeople of mine take bits and pieces of language from their friends, live lives of figure and ground just like I had learned it?
What good did it do to these ancient siltway? They mixed their language with that of the nameway and dreamway. They lived all together. Together, they ruined their world. Only my people survived, the siltway of the splinter Shoal, the ones who never united with any strangers. They left the dying world on Bird’s wings. Our new Bonded Shoal had no ancestors, no masters, no guides. The Bonded Shoal had only each other, only our unity, the single voice in which nobody truly died and nobody was free.
The despairing souls I saw in the Orphan were the ones that united with others. My ancestors were in the Shoal and these ancestors were bound in the structure of the Star of Suicides, the Orphan’s heart of despair. All of them, neither alive nor gone.
The Star of Despair, too, needed the living. Ladder’s words, so casually spoken throughout my training, finally made sense for me. Not many survive the first circle. The youth I killed, and others, and I myself, all who wailed for their lives to end, but came instead to this court, all of us were nourishment—a shallow layer of living above this ember-shoal of the dead.
What have I done? Despair opened me like I was a shell and settled inside me, smoldering. Twelve stars had arrived in the world in Bird’s tail, and all of them were alike. All people, the nameway, the dreamway, the siltway, all of us lived under the yoke of these ancient and wounded stars. I had simply exchanged one shoal for another.
My despair felt endless, devouring, spilling out of me like ribbons, and in response to that feeling the coals of the Orphan Star flared brighter.
You are one of us now, the voices said.
We are the Star of the Last Resort. Nobody is turned away.
All are welcome. All who lost hope.
