“Oh, professor, that’s a slave stage. Come on, I know a man who’ll give us good pomegranates for cheap.” She started off, east, I think, and only noticed I hadn’t followed when she was some distance away. “It’s a slave stage!” she called out.

But I couldn’t turn away. The first one I saw was nahsiyya, probably whore-born, and probably sold back into a brothel while I watched. The next was a gold elf. Now, I’d heard of them, but I had never seen one. We don’t have enough gentry Qin in Ardijan to warrant exotic house slaves; that’s a game for the urbanite wealthy to play. The gold elf had skin the color of mahogany and a thick mane of yellow hair. The gold elf sang as the slavers led him up to the stage. And I felt it. By virtue of the gift I felt the fatalism, the loss, the bleakness of it. Shayat appeared next to me. She sighed. “I hate it when they sing.”

“Do they usually sing?”

“I don’t know. I swear it feels like they sing every time. Come on.”

I followed her away, but two days later I wound up in the Qin markets again after my classes ended. It was a strange detour, one that took me an hour’s walk out of the way, but the song had lodged itself in me and refused to leave. The gift nagged me, needled me, whipped me into a frenzy to seek it out to understand it all the way. There were no slavers that day. I wandered the markets, aimless, listening. Auditory gifts can be demanding. And then I heard it. It wasn’t a song, it was speech this time. A soft patter of words, and more words in a different voice. It led me around a corner, and there I found a clutch of three gold elvish house girls congregated around a public water pump. One filled a jar that held orchids. The other two conversed.

They didn’t seem to notice me, and for that I am glad, because I would have looked a deranged fool or worse standing there like that. The language hooked into me; there was a richness in it that I could feel before I even understood it. Premonitions crept through my bones. It was one of those horrifying moments where your life changes, where suddenly the course you’ve tendered veers in a new and dangerous direction.

It was after curfew when I got home. When I slipped in the door, Dirva let out a sigh of relief and hugged me. It caught me off guard. “Do not tempt fate, Ariah,” he said, and his voice was hard and tender at the same time.

“It was the gift.”

“What was?”

“I have to learn Droma.”