“It’s not fair,” she says.

“So I’ll kill him at your word. Any one of him.”

“Even my brother?”

I nod. “Yes, even the Raker.”

“I thought you cared for him,” Ulín says.

“I do. But I’ll take the assignment. He will understand.”

She reaches her hand toward me, and traces her fingers along mine. This is the first time she has initiated touch, and I do not move away. “Help me understand, Stone Orphan.”

I speak my thoughts that I never voiced to anyone. “The whole world devours. Stars uphold the land, but they must absorb souls to keep living, no matter what language we use.”

“I believe not all stars are like this,” Ulín protests.

“Maybe, but these are the stars I know. We live under the yoke of the stars, and under the yoke of each other. We are held so tightly, first willingly, then against our will, then perhaps willingly again, but it does not matter, because we are held, inescapably held, by each other and the stars.”

She smiles and pulls back. “Unroll my note, Stone Orphan, and read the name of the target.”

I do so. The paper is empty.

I say, “I do not understand.”

"This is what I can give you,” Ulín says. “What I can give both of us. Freedom.”

I still do not understand. “What does it mean to you? Freedom.”

“Freedom does not have to be empty of people,” she says. “This I learned from the Kran-Valadar, and from all of the stories you and I told each other. People can hold you, and yet not jail you. People can gift you their words and their stories and listen attentively to yours. People can love you and yet not constrain you. People can hate you, and yet choose to turn away from violence. Freedom is not pain, but neither is it painless; freedom is choice, even if it leads you wrong. Freedom is to seek more knowledge, even if others think that you are naïve.”

Ulín exhales, and I exhale with her.

She tells me, “Today I use my freedom to say, I cannot go through with this now. I must learn more, and think.”

III. Toward

I tell Ulín, “I would tell you one last story. A story that does not exist.”

In my story, Old Song made a new choice at last, after all her betrayals and her lies and her hurts and her hesitations. In my story, she’d chosen out of love to become bereft, and yet free.

She told me that I was brave and that she wasn’t. But in my story, after I left, she made herself braver. And so she decided to translate herself away from our people and into that wood where the nameway and dreamway people of Lysinar live together under the wise and illustrious guidance of the Kran-Valadar.

“What do you want?” I had asked the Raker.

He told me, in the end. He said the same thing. “I want to be free in my ways. Neither prisoning nor prisoner. Free.”

He always used to say, Everybody wants something from me. This was true for me, too. The Star of the Shoal wanted me to never separate from the collective, not in a breath or a dream, to be held together with them in the Shoal’s own safety and fear. Ladder wanted me because he thought I had skills that could serve him and the Orphan. I escaped my old world, but I did not deviate from this new shoal. I learned this new language, and I learned the body. I wanted to train and make progress, to follow the rules and the orders. Fulfill contracts chosen for me.

I tell Ulín, “At first, I thought what you wanted from me was the contract. Then I thought it was my language. But you wanted—you wanted to hear me, and to be heard. Is that freedom? Or is that a kind of a shoal? Could I have that with others, without coercion or fear?”

“You can,” she says to me. “I think we both can.”

I say, “You know, I had always waited for others to bond with me. My parent bonded with me. Then Old Song. Even Ladder, they all reached out to me with their power. But if I am to be free, I can choose.”

“Who would you choose, then?” Ulín is curious now.

There is only one answer I want to give to this. “I would rebond with Old Song.”

If I were to choose to bond again with Old Song, I would reach out to her with my power. I am an exile and forbidden to return to the isles, but in my story, Old Song would no longer be in the Shoal. She would be in the wood, and so she would be free to reject me or to accept me, without the laws of the Shoal.

Ulín nods at me. “You would forgive her?”

“I . . . I would want to begin again. No, I . . . I would want the story to go on.”

We look at each other, and Ulín’s eyes glisten.

I say, “This is painful, Ulín.”

“Yes,” she agrees.

Even if Song is not in the Shoal, she had wounded me. She could have refused, but she did not dare. Is she brave enough now? Is she an orphan like me, or did she stay in the Shoal? Is she yearning? Or did she forget me? Will she understand that I am not a woman, and yet not lesser for it?

Still. If she is free and would accept me, then I would flicker toward her. I would translate myself again, from this place to be at her side, and I would retell my story once more in a language woven together of threads and of stories—neither siltway nor nameway or dreamway, neither old nor new. Something different and difficult, but still entirely mine.

I ask Ulín, “If Old Song is in the wood, and if she accepts my bond, would you travel with me?”

She is startled. “Can this even be done?”

“Oh, I think so.” In fact, I am sure of it. “The two of us now share something which is very much like a bond. If you hold my hand, I will hold you with my deepnames as if you were mortar. We will travel—and not like a figure on ground, but between soul to soul, all distance swallowed by breath.”