Ulín smiles. It is so open, warm, and their eyes are shining again. “I want to learn your language.”
“What?”
“I am a language scholar.”
I don’t think anybody had smiled at me like this before. I am confused by Ulín, confused how they use feminine forms when they speak Burrashti, how much they—she—they, I cannot be sure—how much Ulín reminds me of Old Song. A younger Old Song. Burrashti is not their native tongue, I remind myself—neither is it mine.
I ask, cautious not to reveal my turmoil. “What is a language scholar?”
Ulín says, “I like to learn about languages which are not my own. It is important to me to understand another person in their own language. To learn a language, one must change oneself. I value that.”
Now the whole thing does not make sense to me. “You have come all this way to the School of Assassins.” To the court of sandstone terraces Ladder has built above the buried Orphan Star. “You must have exerted your body for months just to get here. To the desert, where there are no siltway. All this to ask me about my language?”
“No.” Ulín lowers her head. “No, you’re right, I had no idea you’d be here. To tell you the truth, I came here because I heard the song. It was a melody of red that beckoned and summoned me.”
This makes no sense, either. “All would-be assassins hear this melody,” I say. “I heard it too. Have you been accepted to train?”
“No!” Ulín is startled. I want to know if Ulín is a woman like Old Song, or if I am mistaken. Should I use the language of they or the language of she? Perhaps something yet different? It shouldn’t matter. I just need to graduate.
I say, “I am trying to understand. You are here for some reason. What for, if not to train or to hire?”
Ulín’s voice is sad now. A sound like dusk, like the surf striking stone. “I did come to purchase an assassination, I’m just not sure about the target. The Headmaster thought you could help me.”
Not sure about the target. “More than one person harmed you.” It is not a question.
Ulín does not look at me. “Not . . . at the same time.”
“May I ask,” I say. “Are you a woman? Forgive me.”
“Oh yes,” she says. “And you?”
“I’ve been told I’m a woman, too.”
She nods at me, warm, and I think that I want to help her. This has been the strangest of conversations, but I missed this. Talking. Just being with another person, even a nameway.
“How about we trade stories?” I say. I’d had this arrangement with someone before, someone who looked a bit like her, but it’s hard for me to distinguish between nameway. “Let’s exchange a story for a story. That’s fair.”
“Mine are painful,” she says, grimacing.
“That’s what stories are,” I say. Old Song taught me that. “Stories are yearning and pain.”
Ulín gulps. “Forgive me—I am not sure that’s all that stories can be. But mine—” She turns her head halfway toward the light. There is something strange going on with her head, her magic, but I am not ready to pry.
She says, “I am sorry to ask but . . . would you mind starting first? Tell me how you came to learn Burrashti.” I blink, and she explains, “Burrashti is the name of the language of the desert. We are speaking it now. It is not my first language either, forgive me. So my words are simple.”
“It’s fine,” I say. Fine is not the right word for this feeling, but I don’t know how to name it. We are both strangers here, speaking a language not our own. But Ulín is nameway, so for her another nameway language is just different-sounding words. I had to twist my whole being into a new shape to learn to speak like the nameway do, and now I cannot become untwisted.
I explain, “When I spoke my own language, I could not imagine how your people lived. Learning your language, being able to speak it means that I myself changed. Now I don’t understand how my own people live.”
“Because your language has no verbs.” Ulín’s eyes are bright, but I do not know how she knows this, and it alarms me.
“I first learned this from a book,” she explains. “It endlessly fascinated me, but I could not figure out how it works. A language with no verbs.”
I sigh. “We mark directions. Up, above, down, across, back, forward, sideways. Directions are bonds between words.”
“There’s more to it.” Ulín is smiling, but I do not know why she is happy.
I say, “My people don’t move like you do. We flicker, siltway soul from siltway soul, one bonded person to another. Up, above, down, across, back, forward, sideways, into the deep. Even the stones of our isles are not fixed in place—they are floated, supported by a net of soul-bonds. Alive or dead, we are bonded in the Shoal.” It does not make me happy to explain it, or to think about it.
Ulín nods, her face is serious now, matching my mood. “And do you still . . . flicker, Stone Orphan?”
My shoulder twitches. I school my features into assassin smoothness, throttling any visible trace of bitterness. “I use my feet. I walk. I speak, using verbs.”
She struggles, I can see, maybe guessing that I am struggling, but in the end she cannot stop herself. She is curious, and this reminds me of myself, before I came here.
“Forgive me, Stone Orphan . . . Do you translate then, in your mind? I find that translation is a kind of bridge for words.”
“I do not know this word.”
“A bridge,” she says, “is a structure built over a body of water, so that people can cross.”
I snap, finally. “What people? My people have no use for such structures.”
Ulín looks distressed at my reaction, and ashamed, and I take pity on her. “I think that translation is a departure. A pushing-away-from. One is trying to leave. And arrival is always uncertain.”
