And then he understood. “I’ll help,” he said, even though he was no longer my mentor. “Meet me here after your class tomorrow.”

Dirva is more mimic than I am, or at least a slightly different variant, because he picked up Droma in half the time it took me. He came with me to the markets, always close, protective, shepherding me away when curfew drew close. He spoke to me in Droma and helped me hone it. We took to speaking it at home. He told me he had been compelled by Vahnan Vinkenti the same way. He told me there are languages, sometimes, that feel like home. Some languages that have a siren’s call, and that Droma must be mine. He learned Droma, with its peculiarities, and he knew it was my home, and he did so without question or judgment. And it was a peculiar language: it was so very communal, with few pronouns and ways of speaking of the discrete, individualized self. There was little sense of “I” in Droma; much more focus was spent on an intoxicating and obliterating “we.” And there was the question of gender, too. It took me some time to parse it, but it became increasingly clear that the Droma did not understand themselves as men or women, but simply as people. The slaves in the city, likely as a means of survival, acknowledged that we divided ourselves as such, and they must have understood that we divided them that way, too, but in the conversations I overheard they only ever used variations on the word voe—the Droma word for “person”—to refer to other Droma and themselves. It fascinated me—how could something so fundamental and so obvious as gender go unseen among them? And what did it mean? How could I be myself without being a man? I wanted very much to understand it, but it was elusive and exotic and always just out of my reach. I couldn’t help but gender them while listening: that one is a male person who is speaking to a female person, went my thoughts.

It took me a month to absorb Droma, and another two weeks to regain my balance. After that I once again ventured to the Qin markets alone. I tracked the gold elves through the streets; I knew their rhythms, and I listened. And at first I was content to listen. Like elves everywhere, they traded gossip. This family broke Sabbath. This family’s Exalted Eye was not actually silver: it had been hocked to get a wayward son out of debt.

But on Saturday afternoons, when the markets teemed with Qin fresh from their devotions, many of the Droma found ways to get to the slave stages. You would not know they were there unless you knew where to look. They perched on roofs and awnings. They wedged themselves on window ledges. They slipped into the shadowed hollows under the stages themselves.