For several minutes, it was just her voice. No images. No colors. Just her voice, like she sang with her eyes closed. But it was enough, and he stood, enraptured, listening. Rejoicing. Then the song ended and he heard her speak. He heard her ask a question, but she was not talking to him.
“Why will no one look at me?” she asked.
“Ghisla?” he whispered, afraid Arwin would hear. He scrambled down the path to the beach, needing distance and space and the roar of the water to muffle his voice.
He was almost running, moving too quickly on a path that would never be clear enough for a blind man to run down; he could not hear rocks, after all. He broke out onto the beach without mishap but stumbled in the sand.
“Ghisla?” he said, louder, terrified she was gone again.
“Hod?” the word was so faint, it was hardly there, but he shouted in response.
“Ghisla! I heard you singing. I heard you singing, and it was so beautiful.”
“Hod?” His hand was still burning, and he cried out again, babbling in joy and disbelief.
And then her voice was there, as clear as if she stood beside him, and he fell back on the sand, his face to the sky.
That day, he’d made her promise to use the rune again, to call out to him when she was able, and she had, many times since.
She didn’t tire of his questions, and she never refused him a song.
She gave him so many songs.
With her songs, he saw Elayne of Ebba with her fiery hair and her gentle ways, but he didn’t just see her, he knew her. He knew them all.
He knew Bashti; he saw the brown warmth of her skin and the bright flash of her mind. She was a marvel at mimicry, both mannerisms and voices, and she made Ghisla laugh. That was a wonder too—Ghisla’s laugh. Rare and rippling, it never failed to rob him of breath; he loved Bashti for that, for giving Ghisla laughter.
He knew dark-eyed, little Dalys and experienced all her colors. Ghisla composed songs as Dalys painted, just so he could see them too.
Through Ghisla’s music, Juliah danced in his thoughts with her sword and shield, pouncing and punching, and he delighted in her antics, though she and Ghisla were often at odds.
“She does not understand me,” Ghisla said. “And I don’t know how to make myself understood. We are very different.”
“I think it is more likely that you . . . are the same,” he suggested gently. “You are both warriors. Both fighters. You just fight in different ways.”
“I’m not always certain who I am fighting. Who the enemy is. All I know is that you are my dearest friend, Hody.”
“And you are mine.”
“I could not bear it if I could not talk to you.”
Hod often wondered how he’d borne a single day before she’d washed up on his shore. When Ghisla sang he saw the world. Her sisters and the keepers, the castle and the king. He saw the gardens and the gates and the wall that separated them all from the rest of Saylok. He saw the sea and the sky and the mountains and the trees. He even saw himself.
It was a beautiful world to look at, though he knew, for Ghisla and her sisters, it was not always a beautiful world to live in. Sometimes Ghisla’s songs were washed with grays or infused with shadows. Sometimes her loneliness and despair made the images she drew for him waver like the sands after high tide.
And yet she kept on singing, and he kept on listening, doing his best to shoulder her sorrow and speak relief to her soul.
He did not tell her how he missed her or how he suffered when she could not visit him. He did not tell her how the darkness wore on him, and how he worried there would never be a better day, a better Saylok. He did not tell her that he fought his own hopelessness and could not see his own path. He did not reveal that he feared the reason for his existence and begged each day that the gods would make it clear.
He greeted her with only joy whenever he heard her voice and made her promise to not give up.
PART TWO
10
LULLABIES
“You have grown so much, Liis. You hardly look like the same girl I met two years ago. There is some flesh on your bones, and your cassocks are so short, your ankles are showing,” Ghost remarked one morning as they worked side by side in the garden.
“I will let the stitches out of my hems,” Ghisla said.
Her sleeves were too short too, and she’d begun to bind her breasts in a length of cloth to keep them from swaying beneath her shapeless frocks, but she didn’t mention that. She thought Ghost had probably noticed. She was sixteen summers now, and she’d begun to look her age, though no one commented on it. She was still not as tall as Elayne—she never would be—and she was still too thin, but the swell of her breasts and the curve of her hips was much more pronounced; she would not pass for a child any longer.
“I will ask Dagmar to fetch the seamstress again. All of you girls are growing,” Ghost said as they shook out their aprons and washed their hands. Ghost never ventured out of the temple or down into the village. She rarely even walked the mount. She was afraid of the king. They all were, but even when the king was gone and Temple Hill breathed easy, Ghost did not change her habits.
Ghisla was not the only one who had noticed Ghost’s tendencies. Bashti had a theory and shared it with her sisters—as they’d begun to call each other—while they prepared for bed.
“She doesn’t want to be seen because she thinks she is ugly. People stare . . . and it makes her sad.”
“People stare at all of us, Bashti,” Elayne said. “But at least our hair has begun to grow.” Elayne had surprised them all when she’d refused to cut her hair again. She’d promised to keep it covered until it was long enough to weave into a tight circle around her head, and the Highest Keeper had relented. The chieftains had complained to the Highest Keeper and the king that they were ugly; Ghisla had heard it in a keeper’s thoughts. She’d clasped his hand at mealtime with a song of worship still ringing in her head, and his voice was loud and clear.
“They are girls. And the people want them to look like Daughters of Freya, not keepers. They are hideous this way.”
Their hair had all grown long enough now to braid it around their crowns. It did not flow down their backs like that of most women in the clans, but it set them apart from the shorn keepers, and it was a vast improvement from the early days. Even Ghost wore her hair thus, though she continued to blacken her eyes like the keepers. Ghisla thought her magnificent, regardless of what Bashti claimed.
Bashti rolled her eyes. “They do not stare at us for the same reasons, Elayne. They stare at you because you are beautiful.”
Elayne smiled, pleased, but Bashti was just getting started.
“And you will soon be old enough to wed. They stare at Liis because she is beautiful too, and everyone is hoping she will sing. But people stare at Ghost and me because we are outsiders. We can’t pass for clan daughters. She is too pale, and I am too dark. Yet here we are.” Bashti folded her arms with a harrumph and stuck out her lips, daring the others to disagree.
Elayne stood and coaxed Bashti to take her hands. “You are Bashti. You are not an outsider. You are one of us. A Daughter of Freya.”
“I am Bashti, but I am not of Saylok. I do not even remember where I’m from.”