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.”
“I am not sure I understand siltway travel,” Ulín says, but I worry that her hesitation is about something else.
I say, “Or you can stay here without me. Now that you won’t choose your contract, you can simply leave, if Ladder allows it. You heard his song, after all, but I think you’ll have choices.”
“No, I—I don’t understand how this will work, but I want this to work. I want to travel with you. I trust you, and . . .” Ulín laughs. “I always want to travel.”
I, too, want for this to work. I want Old Song to be in the wood, where she can reject or accept me. I want her to accept me. I want to leave the Court of Despair behind, for Ladder to solve his own problems. For the story not to end, but to go on.
Ulín is putting away her notebook. "If this doesn’t work, I want you to know—we can travel my way, all the long way back to Lysinar.”
I nod at her, oddly encouraged. We have exchanged yearning and pain, but we can be free together, free of the yoke of the devouring stars. Traveling—not away from, but toward.
I tell Ulín, “Hold my hand.”
Neither pain nor yearning now
The room on the third terrace is empty. The shallow water in the pool is dull and lifeless. There is no need to refill it again.
Afterword
Motion is central not just to human experience, but to our cognition. Even if we cannot physically walk or run, we process the world through motion metaphors. Business is hopping, time really crawls, you ran out of pasta. We do not physically sprint out of the gates of pasta, but how we talk about this is meaningful. Even when we sleep, the neurons responsible for motion are firing, producing dreams of chases and abrupt relocations.
Human languages describe motion in many ways, but most commonly through verbs; verbs are ubiquitous in human languages. How exactly motion events are coded varies, sometimes greatly, from language to language, and is a robust area in linguistic research. I’ve done some of this research myself. As a linguist in graduate school, I began wondering about an idea of a verbless language—the existence of such a language would imply a completely different way of moving, of thinking, and of interacting with the world. (Much later, I discovered that there is a constructed language, Kēlen, built to engage with this question—but I do not know anything else about it. I wanted to continue thinking my own thoughts.)
The idea of a verbless language compelled me to write my first short story, in which an exile ends up at the school of assassins. That first story was never published, and it’s a good thing—I did not have the tools, or know my own mind back then. But the story continued to percolate in my mind. I realized I wanted to write not just about a community with a very different way of thinking, but about bilingualism. And it wasn’t just about bilingualism (that is, about knowing and speaking two languages)—but about exile, about translating oneself away not just from one’s culture, but from one’s language and community.
Stone Orphan is an exile. They wanted to leave, and they were also kicked out. This happens to some of us. When I was fourteen, my family fled the Soviet Union during the last months of its existence, among hundreds of thousands of other Soviet Jews. As an out queer, nonbinary person born in Soviet Ukraine who came out in the U.S., I felt unrooted and disconnected from my often heteronormative diasporic and birth communities.
But while I was in the West, things evolved for both Ukraine and Russia, where I had also lived as a child. Queer and trans people gained freedoms and recognition in both countries, and both Russian and Ukrainian developed language innovations for nonbinary people. During Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine, Putin’s regime cranked down on the LGBTQIA+ community, with overwhelming and total persecution of queer expression and outlawing of gender transition. My birth country, Ukraine, is perhaps moving the other way. Just a few months before writing this, my poem cycle, “Stone Listening,” was translated into Ukrainian by Mykhailo Zharzhailo and published in Litcentr. My correct gender pronouns were used in the bio; just a few years ago, I would not believe it would be possible.
Diasporic and migrant experiences of LGBTQIA+ people are also a special interest of mine and a topic in my linguistic research. It’s a painful thing. Migrating from country to country is difficult to begin with, but queer and trans people are often liminal—both within their birth and host communities. The new country we enter may seem welcoming at first, but that can be deceptive and temporary. Stone Orphan discovers this the hard way when they come to the school of assassins. Their sense of liberation does not last just because they migrated; but the hope for liberation persists. For a long time, the U.S. seemed like a haven to me in terms of my queerness, but now the wave of discrimination is rising again. My home state of Kansas just passed cissexist legislation that we are resisting as a community. Is any place safe? Is any place good? I don’t know, but what we can find is each other.
When Ulín and Stone Orphan connect, they are speaking Burrashti, a language which both of them learned in adulthood. Both of them are translating, and both of them are hiding parts of their stories. Stone Orphan does not want to reveal everything to a person they just met, and even at the end, their friendship with Ulín is still tentative. Ulín is driven by her curiosity. She is traumatized, but through all this she is propelled forward by her special interest in languages and the people who speak them.
