Chapter 5

Three years is enough time to become someone else entirely, if you let it.

I no longer thought of myself as a girl who had woken up nameless in the back of a wagon, though I still had the scar on my knuckle to remind me, when I needed reminding, that Rael hadn't always existed. Now I was the one traders came looking for, the one packs sent formal invitations to, gold pressed into Toven's hand along with polite requests that I bless a failing river or coax a stubborn harvest back to life. The Songstress of the Windborne. A title I'd earned one dying field at a time.

I'd grown taller since that first fevered morning, filled out into a body that finally felt fully mine rather than borrowed, and my voice had deepened with practice into something steadier, more certain of the space it was allowed to take up. Even Deshi, grown into a gangly near-adult himself, had stopped teasing me about being new to the clan somewhere around the second year, once it became clear I wasn't going anywhere.

I wore the veil for every performance now, thin and shimmering, hiding my eyes from anyone who might have looked too long and wondered. My auburn wolf never showed itself outside the clan. My scent stayed masked under the herbs Mira taught me to burn each morning, sharp and green, covering whatever I used to smell like before I became someone new. I had gotten good at being invisible to anyone who might have known me before, which was a strange kind of safety, built entirely on the fact that nobody was looking for a dead woman wearing a stranger's face.

I still didn't know whose face that had been, exactly, or why the bond-ache still visited some nights, quieter now, worn smooth at the edges the way grief gets worn smooth if you carry it long enough. I'd stopped fighting it so hard. I'd started, instead, to build a life loud enough to drown it out.

That evening we camped outside a coastal town, waiting on a festival two days off, and I slipped away from the fires to practice alone the way I liked to, before an audience existed to perform for. Dusk had gone the color of a bruise healing, purple fading to gold at the edge of the water, and I stood barefoot in the wet grass and hummed the way I used to hum for dying herbs, except there was nothing dying here to fix. I did it because it felt like breathing. Because some part of the girl who woke up nameless three years ago had never stopped needing to sing just to prove to herself she still could.

I didn't hear him arrive. That was the thing about Toven. He'd learned, over three years of teaching me to breathe from beneath my ribs instead of my throat, how to move like the Song itself, present without announcing itself, there before you noticed it had come.

"You dance when no one's watching," he said, from somewhere behind me, quiet enough that I nearly missed it under the sound of the waves.

I didn't startle. I'd have known his voice anywhere by now, low and unhurried, the same voice that had spent three years correcting my breathing and never once raised itself to do it.

"I sing when the land listens," I said, not turning around yet. "There's a difference."

"Is there."

"The land doesn't judge my footwork."

That got something out of him, not quite a laugh, just a low sound of amusement he probably thought I couldn't hear over the tide. I turned then, and found him a few paces off, arms loose at his sides, watching me with an expression I'd learned to read carefully over three years and still couldn't fully name. Not the watchful patience of a teacher assessing a student's progress. Something slower than that. Something that had been building for longer than I'd noticed, the way a tide comes in so gradually you only realize how far it's risen when you look down and find the water already at your knees.

"How long were you standing there," I asked.

"Long enough."

"Long enough for what?"

He didn't answer right away, and the not-answering said more than words would have. He looked at me the way he looked at nothing else, not the horizon, not the fire, not any of the pack leaders who came to bargain for my voice. Just me, standing barefoot in wet grass, humming to no one, and something in his face had gone quiet and unguarded in a way I'd never seen it go before.

I felt it land somewhere under my ribs, a warmth that had nothing to do with the Song and everything to do with being looked at like that, like I was worth watching even when there was nothing to gain from it.

"You should get some sleep," he said finally, which wasn't at all what his face had been saying a moment before. "Early start tomorrow. The coastal roads flood if we wait past sunrise."

"Toven."

"Rael."

We stood there a moment, the space between us doing something neither of us was naming out loud, and I understood, with the sudden clarity of stepping into water that's colder than you expected, that something had shifted between us tonight that hadn't been there yesterday, and neither of us had agreed to it happening, and neither of us was going to be the one to say so first.

He left before I could decide what to do with that understanding. I stood alone on the beach a while longer, the tide creeping higher around my ankles, and told myself it was nothing. Told myself the way I always did, that I was imagining warmth where there was only patience, reading meaning into a look that had probably meant nothing at all.

I didn't believe myself. I hadn't believed myself in a while now, if I was honest, and I was trying, lately, to be honest with myself more often than not.

Word reached camp three days later, carried by a trader passing through on his way north, the kind of casual gossip men share over ale without knowing which ears are listening.

"Blackthorn's in a bad way," he said to Mira, not knowing I stood close enough to hear every word. "Land's failing worse every season. Crops thinner than a starved wolf. Half the pack's talking about leaving for better territory, if their Alpha would let them go, which he won't, proud as he is."

"Shame," Mira said, mild, giving nothing away.

"Word is he's sent for the Windborne. Heard your Songstress worked wonders for Ironveil last spring." The trader laughed, easy, unaware of the way my whole body had gone still at the mention. "Man's desperate enough to invite performers now. Never thought I'd see Blackthorn beg."

I stood very still, a basket of drying herbs forgotten in my hands, and felt the old ache under my sternum stir for the first time in months, faint but unmistakable, like something that had been sleeping had just cracked one eye open at the sound of a name it recognized.

Blackthorn.

The word moved through me like cold water, and somewhere behind it, unbidden, a half-formed memory surfaced. A dark room. A window. A voice that used to say goodnight in a tone that meant nothing at all.

I didn't know yet why the name felt like a hand closing around my throat. I only knew that when Mira glanced over at me, something in her face went carefully blank, the way it did whenever she suspected more than she said, and that the trader kept talking, oblivious, about an invitation I hadn't yet been told was coming.