“You are far from powerless,” the Kran-Valadar responded. “But you have suffered and you are afraid, and so you lie to yourself that you’re powerless.”

Ulín protested, but the leader of the stag people would not hear it.

“Come, I will show you the price of such fear,” she said.

She took Ulín to a settlement of log houses on a large forest glade. There was a person who looked different from any nameway and dreamway Ulín knew. This new person was older and fishlike, her skin silvery-blue with scales. Her eyes shone soft silver, and she sang in a voice deep and melodious, sang with words Ulín did not understand. It was breathtaking, that melody, and deeply soothing, and it healed and ruined her heart.

“This is my lover, Beautiful Song of the siltway people,” said the Kran-Valadar. “She comes here every few years. She comes here in secret. Her people do not want her to reach out to people not like hers, and she can neither accept her desire nor resist it. We can share the land and the sea, I said to her, but she told me it had been done before, done badly. She told me how it all went wrong. And now she is afraid. Her people, too, are afraid. They hold each other so tightly, so vigilantly, so firmly, so equally, and none of them will ever trust outsiders. They do not trust themselves either, afraid that if they don’t hold each other so tightly, the Shoal itself will dissolve. Each fish will go on its own, tossed with the current, powerless and bereft and easily hunted. So they clutch at each other, thinking that it is the only way. But a people can hold together with power greater than fear.”

Ulín did not understand this story back then. Not until now.

“Any day now, she’ll flicker away from me, my Beautiful Song,” said the Kran-Valadar. “But she will return in a few years’ time.”

“Why do you love her?” Ulín asked, incredulous. “If she cannot overcome her fear and commit to you?”

“She hesitates,” said the Kran-Valadar. “That hesitation is her gift to me. None of her people hesitate, but she does. She flickers away out of fear, and comes back out of love. Fear will make her loveless among her tightly held shoal, and love will make her bereft. One day, she will choose. But even now, she is changing. Already she learned the language of woman and she chose it, even though her language does not have such words.”

I must wet my gills. It is getting urgent, but I am not moving. I say, “This was my Old Song.”

“I think so,” Ulín says.

“I never heard her other name. This was before I bonded to her.”

“I think it was some years earlier.”

“All this time you listened to my story, and yet you said nothing.” I feel too brittle to accuse her of anything.

“I wasn’t sure at first,” she says. “Our tales have unrolled together, like an ancient scroll from its rod. Unrolled like a scroll, unsheathed like a weapon. You heard things you did not want to hear, and so did I.”

I swallow my feelings. It is not enough. “Old Song had been my teacher. My bonded. My friend. My tormentor. The one who loved me, and the one who abandoned me. If I were a client, she would be the only contract I’d weigh.”

“Would you order her killed?” Ulín asks.

“I don’t know. Some days, I think I would. Others, I imagine her being brave. I think of her touching me gently, restoring our bond. I imagine her happy with the Kran-Valadar in Lysinar. I imagine her sinking into this word woman that suits her so much.” I swallow and swallow, but the truth cannot be suppressed any longer. I say, “I imagine asking Old Song, why did you think being a woman would ever suit me?”

“Ah,” says Ulín. “You are—what you are. Only you can know—”

I interrupt her. “Do you know, when your brother came here, I wondered if he was a woman, too.”

I asked the Raker many questions back then. He had been here for months, after all.

I asked, “Why did you not recoil when you saw me? All nameway do. They tell me I look like a fish. They tell me I am uncanny.”

He shrugged. “I’m an exile, too.”

“Why do you wear a dress, and grow your hair long, and yet use masculine forms?”

He answered, “You don’t need to be a woman and I don’t need to be a man to exist.”

And then he said, “People like us have always existed. Here, in the desert, they call us in-betweeners. On the Coast, we say ichidi. Being genderless in the Shoal is not the same as being ichidi.”

“What is the difference?” I asked him.

“The difference is that you choose.”

I thought about this a lot since then. Everybody is the same in the Shoal, but Old Song chose to be a woman, as fast as she could. She gave that rebellion to me too. Not how she wanted, perhaps; but I, too, could choose—to be a woman, a man, or an in-betweener—and still be seen.

Perhaps I only dreamed all this.

I wipe my face. Tell Ulín, “You told me he is a cruel person. A person who always was hard and cold, even as a child. He judges himself as harshly. He is a loner and hated by many. You were summoned here because Ladder wants him dead.”

She says, “I am not sure if I understand the Headmaster’s reasons.”

I shrug. “The Raker thought it was jealousy—I understood that in Che Mazri, the Raker had met and courted Ladder’s old lover. Perhaps it was a different jealousy—jealousy of the Orphan, the Ladder’s second-choice star that spent five whole nights with the Raker and did not want to let him go. I am not sure. Does it matter? Ladder wants him dead, you want him dead—do you?”

Ulín does not reply.

I try again. “Why not Laufkariar? He certainly harmed you as much, if not more. Or your father. He was not a child, and yet he took your freedom from you, drugged you, dismissed you.”

Ulín is silent still.

“Shall I read your paper now?” I attempt a smile, half-frustrated, half-amused. “Certainly it would be a relief for me if you finally choose a target. I will graduate and with luck, my contract will be sold, and I might even see new places.”

Ulín inhales deeply. “When we study languages, we learn to hold complexity.”

“How does that relate?”

She tells me, “Studying languages, I learned that nothing is ever as simple as friend, or enemy, or powerless, or powerful, or kill, or forgive. In my land, men and women and ichidar live together and do as they choose, and yet my whole life had been shaped by these three people and the harm they caused me.” Her shoulders hunch, as if she is cold, even though it is never cold here. I think I understand.

I say, “You must hold this complexity now, and it must be held in your body, a body which these three people had harmed so cruelly, so thoughtlessly.”