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.”
