But I was restless, so I asked, “Why is Stone the second most important storyline?”

Old Song’s mouth moved, but the words I heard reverberated only in my mind. “Because Stone supports the Song that must issue forth, for us to exist and continue. Without Song, we leave no trace, we disappear. Without Stone, we cannot be protected, cannot be anchored, we drift and we drift apart. I cannot let myself drift. My song must be here.”

I wanted to know more, but I knew that we came close to bonding already, Old Song’s words in my mind, the feeling of them in my bones. It was as intimate as sharing bodies would be, but through stories—like two waves coming together, water and water distinguished by nothing but the primeval force that pushes both waves to meet and merge. I could resist this. Cast my mind elsewhere. But already I learned from Old Song, and the desire for more was a tidal pull. Bodies were unimportant. When my body died, I would still be bonded to this elder, still a part of their song.

“Kah,” I said. My single-syllable deepname.

Ulín gasps, and I feel the corners of my mouth twitch up. “You are surprised I utter my deepname in your presence?”

“This is not done. It is dangerous to share—”

I shrug. “What would you do with it? You are nameless. You have suffered nameloss. Did you give your deepnames out to strangers?”

She shakes her head. “No.”

“Of course not,” I say. “Whoever did this to you did not know your deepnames, and yet they harmed you.”

Ulín swallows, about to protest something, but then she looks away. What did I even say? Ah. Perhaps it wasn’t a stranger. I say, “You did give your deepnames to someone?”

“No, no,” Ulín says. “It doesn’t matter.”

“But . . . it wasn’t a stranger.”

Ulín nods, speechless.

“A loved one. Of course.” Why else would she hesitate, having come all this way, to name her target and bargain with me for a contract? I do not want to say, but it usually is a loved one. Especially for women.

I tell her, “I belong with the Orphan Star now. If I decide to take your commission, I’ll kill the one you want me to kill. They, too, will feed the Orphan Star. Many students come to this court and are killed here in training, and those who survive to graduate accept contracts and kill. All these perished souls are devoured by the Orphan. This is the true cost of the contract, the heart of all that happens here. The knowledge of my deepname will not serve you.”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“For what?”

Ulín replies, “For interrupting your story. For implying you did not know what you were doing.”

Her words do something to me, warm and sharp and hard to define. “I accept your apology.”

“Thank you,” she murmurs. “I want to know more. I want to learn more words. Could you teach me the siltway words for toward, and below, and across?”

“Why would you want them? To speak like we do? You cannot. This is a translation. I translate and I am translated, and so you will only translate these echoes.” The story I tell will move further and further away from the Shoal. What will remain, once the story is moved all the way to Ulín’s side? Untruths. An echo of that old feeling. To exhale mist, to inhale vapor. In and out with the tension of breath.

“I spoke and spoke,” I say. “I want to hear your story now.”

She gulps. I see her throat move. “It is a story of despair.”

“Listen,” I tell her. “It is not wrong or shameful to despair. This is the deepest meaning of the Orphan Star. It feeds on our despair, and those disdained by the world will always have a place inside it.” All over the land people flee from despair, deny it exists, seek to silence it. Except here. People, yes: nameway and dreamway and siltway alike. Most are afraid to acknowledge the power and pull of despair. But those who do, come here, and they are embraced by the vast Orphan Star that lies underground, and become a part of its shining.

“So tell me your story, Ulín. Please.”

A story of pain

There was a tall stone house on a shore, built by Ulín’s ancestor Ranra when she arrived to the Coast in her ships, steering her people away from disaster. This ancestral home was called Ranra’s Towers. It was built of gray stone and embraced by thick vines, like lichen with leaves climbing from its foundational boulders to the very top of the outlook, so that the Coastal people could gaze at the sea. To the west was a beach of fine sand—like the desert, but colder, and swept by the wave.

When the tide receded, Ulín would go there to look for shells. The shells had once housed small sea creatures, mollusks and crabs that had joined their ancestors, leaving their houses for her curious fingers to find. When she put a conch to her ear, she heard the eternal and restless voice of the sea.

It is there that Ulín saw the prince.

He had a long body of glistening green, with fins of saltwater. He moved effortlessly in the wave, like a language that promised new meanings that she did not yet know. His three companions—smaller than him but also illustrious—followed him in the wave. Since that day Ulín would spy on them, gazing from afar at their games. She observed them from the crumbled outlook atop Ranra’s Towers.

She would hide behind rocks on a beach, curious and charmed, until one day the serpents stepped onto the shore in the bodies of young men with long hair of braided seaweed and shell.

They were the dreamway people of the serpent, who lived in the sea, not far from the shore. The dreamway magic is different from the magic of deepnames. Those with the strongest magic were shapechangers. One shape was human; another that of a sea-serpent, attained through the mastery of the dreaming sea which stretches wide and vast above the waking lands. In those dreaming wilds, neither the nameway nor the siltway people would venture. And he was a prince of his people, a shapechanger powerful in the domains of waking and dream. Ulín’s people and his were enemies once. In the past.

Ulín wanted to befriend him, and so she resolved to learn his language. How else would she know him? How else to know anything? Language is the gleaming heart of all things—for nameway, and siltway, and dreamway. When Bird brought the stars to the land, she must have brought language, too.

When Ulín walked toward the youths of the serpent people, her younger sibling—her brother—observed from the shadows. She did not know it, at first.

Again and again, Ulín would go out in secret to meet her sea-serpent prince, with his eyes of emerald green, and his hair of seaweed braided with carved bone. His name was Laufkariar. Like a caress of the wave. He wanted her to come with him, to visit his realm under the sea.

It is not easy for a nameway person to breathe underwater, but Ulín had powerful magic back then. Two deepnames, like two stars in her mind, an explosion of pain and power. This structure is known among the nameway as the Princely Angle, a combination of two deepnames, a single-syllable and a two-syllable; its magic is that of adventure and daring.

And so Ulín called on the power of her deepnames, and created for herself a bubble of breath. It would not last forever. Just a few hours. But Laufkariar wanted to show her life in his palace under the tide. There was a dreamway city beneath the serpent-shaped gate of ivory and emerald that juts out of the sea, dividing the expanse of the water between the ancient, lost Sinking Lands and Ulín’s homeland, the Coast. A long time ago her ancestor Ranra had been allowed to lead her ships through that gate, at a price of betrayal. Ulín wanted to know the serpent side of that story more even than she wanted his embrace. She wanted words—words themselves—the sounds and meanings they make, and the shapes of them strung together. It is beautiful, she thought, to know that languages live in their people like serpents that molt and change shape in each generation, regrowing new words and new sounds, and people are simply the carriers, the many-breathed bodies of it. She wanted to carry that serpent of the tongue, to possess all treasures which shine only when they are clothed in gesture or sound.