The Raker raised his hand, and the familiar carpet wove itself out of the sand at his feet. I don’t know if Ladder would have opened the gate. The Raker’s anger flared into a towering structure of diamond, hoisting the carpet and the Raker himself up over the wall of the School of Assassins and away.

In a moment, the Headmaster turned around and his attention shifted to me. I did not see him age-change that first time because I was busy vomiting, but I saw it now. He must have been about a hundred, ancient and just slightly stooped—and absolutely murderous. “Did you learn how to slay him, Stone Orphan?” I guessed from his tone that he wanted to call me names, but this time he desisted.

I nodded. “I did.”

“Good.” His years slid off him slowly, like moss from a rock, until he appeared again middle-aged. “I cannot send you after him without a contract. We must live by the Orphan’s rules, no matter what he thinks we do here. But he has a singular talent for making enemies. Someone will have a legitimate grievance. A contract should come soon enough.”

Ulín looks slightly nauseous. “So do you think—my arrival . . .?”

“I think so, Ulín. I am sure.” I figured it out at last, the Headmaster’s plan to summon her here, his plan to set me up with this particular contract. “We were both set up, I think.” This was his shoal and he did whatever he wanted.

She is pensive. “This explains why after all those years I heard his song, and was tempted to come here.”

“Yes,” I say. “But nobody dragged you here. Your anger was all your own. Your grief, your loss, your desire to see justice done for what has been done to you, your disempowerment, your will to make this journey—all yours. This is what made it possible for Ladder’s voice to reach you and summon you. This contract is yours. Nobody can force you.” He tricked her, but she chose this moment too.

Ulín turns away from me, but her voice is bitter. “I keep thinking, you know, if he was so torn about his crime, he could have at least written me a letter.”

What can I say? Yes, Ulín, he’s a mess. You can order him killed and be done.

She seems to sense the direction of my thoughts. “You can look at my paper now.”

“No, it is not yet time,” I say, my stubbornness overriding my curiosity. “I concealed things from you, but I think you kept something back too. So tell me about Lysinar.”

A miracle at sunset

Ulín sold Laufkariar’s jewel-encrusted pen and hired a deepname-powered carriage and a guide. Her aim was to travel north to Lysinar. Her ancestral lands ended with Priadét, and it was all wilderness from there, forests flanking a thin, sandy strip of a coast and between them an ancient trade road, sometimes narrow, sometimes a little bit wider. The land itself was wild here. Small bears fished the waterfalls, unafraid of the deepname-steered carriage and its riders. Birds flew overheard, startled by the rattling of wheels. Beyond the driver and her guide, she saw people only rarely, here and there in fishing and hunting villages.

Once Ulín passed by a bookhouse that stood in the middle of a small town. The building was made of wood and painted lavender, and had books stacked high in the windows. The bookseller was a stooped and ancient ichidi who once lived on the Coast, but had found its gatherings too loud, or so they said. The bookseller had lived in this town now for sixty years, peddling healing herbs and old books that smelled of bitter tonics and honey. Ulín traded more of Laufkariar’s gifts for two modest pens carved of alder, and a traveling inkwell filled with walnut ink. She got notebooks bound in leather, and books about Lysini culture and about the ancient war which made the Lysini people who they were. There was also a dictionary of the language of the stag people.

Ulín’s journey north from there was a happy one. She read, disdaining the headache for as long as she could; and when the carriage made stops, she jotted notes in her new notebook. The language of the serpent people and the language of the stag people had similar words—words for dreaming and waking, for rain and woman, for hunter and leader and trader. This is what she had wanted all along—this learning, and travel, and wide-open spaces.

She crossed the border of Lysinar, into the land of rivers that gurgled and spoke in the language of water that knows no dictionaries. Birds sang differently here, as if their language, too, was different from what she’d heard at home. Golden mice and voles darted underfoot, their pelts glinting in the rays of sun that stole through the canopy of the great trees. The carriage driver and guide would go no farther, but Ulín did not want to stop. She parted with her companions and walked alone, deeper and deeper into the sun-dappled wood.

It was almost sunset when people stepped out to greet her. Their leader was a woman taller than any nameway Ulín had ever seen. She was proud and regal of bearing, and she was clothed—

I cough, and Ulín frowns at me, but it is indulgent. She says, “Stone Orphan, she was definitely clothed.”

I laugh. “Go on.”

She was clothed in heavy garments embroidered with the shapes of berries and leaves. Her skin was grayish-green, and her head was crowned in beautiful sunset-pink antlers that branched into the air. These tree-like antlers glowed with the light of hundreds of tiny magical candlebulbs, which must have been planted there by her nameway companions. The people surrounding her were hunters, both nameway and dreamway, dressed in leathers and furs and adorned in ornaments made of brass and beryl and twigs. The queen of these people was unsmiling, but Ulín detected a warmth emanating from her.

“Who are you, and why do you come here, and what do you bear?” the stag woman asked in the common tongue of the North.

She said, “I am Ulín Ranravan, daughter of Sibeli and Kannar, and I am a child of the Coast. I am a person who was named for heirship of my people, but I myself want only words. I want to learn languages, and meet the people who speak them, and share friendship under the open arms of the sky.”

The stag woman bowed slightly, and the magical lights in her antler crown jangled and twinkled, but did not blind Ulín.

“This land does not open its arms to the sky,” said the Kran-Valadar, for such was her title, and she was the leader of the hunters and warriors of that land. “Four hundred years ago, my people of the stag were exiled here from Katra. Our star was destroyed, and we ran northwest, where the nameway people of Lysinar welcomed us. These forests grew out of our entwined magics, the powers of the nameway and the dreamway—and all the birds and the voles and the rivers and the lakes. We know what it is to fight and to flee, and we know what it is to lose and to gain. Friendship is ever an empty word if no action accompanies it.”

“The Katrans attacked us too,” Ulín said. “During that war four hundred years ago, after they exiled you, they subjugated our Coast.”

“I know this history. Once it was even true,” said the Kran-Valadar. “But now your people sit in Katran governance. Your own father is a minister of war. If Katra attacks us, your father will lead the troops. Is this your ambition as well?”

“I do not want power,” Ulín said.

The Kran-Valadar heaved a big sigh, and her companions whispered between themselves. “You are still a child,” she said. “You have been through much, but you are still young, and naïve. Nobody can escape wielding power. If you have it, you must learn to use it.”

“I know what I want,” Ulín said, stubborn. “Languages and people and learning. I do not want power. I do not want to choose any sides, to contribute to any wars. I just want to learn.”

The Kran-Valadar said, “Once you learn, you change. Once you change, you choose. Once you choose, you exercise power.”

“I am powerless,” Ulín insisted. “My own brother assailed me and disempowered me.”