I took to singing to keep myself company. It had practical uses, too. The sound carries in the grasslands; there’s nothing to block it but a handful of trees here and there, and the songs, I’d found, tended to keep at bay the wildlife who might otherwise have been attracted by the smell of food. I am an artless singer: the mimicry means I’m technically competent, but the best I can hope for is an accurate reproduction of someone else’s art. I sang songs Sorcha had sung to me in his voice. I sang songs I’d overheard at the slave markets. I even sang the wordless, senseless melodies the satyrs in the City sang. It was the songs that brought the gold elves to me. I sang one evening in the winter, used to the solitude, while I built a campfire. I’d caught two perch in the river and looked forward to eating them. My qualms about eating the flesh of animals were long gone by then. I sang a Droma song overheard years before at the Rabathan slave markets. It was one about a river. It was cyclical, verses returning again and again to the river in the same summer afternoon year after year. I sang it thoughtlessly. Halfway through the third verse I felt the pull. It was unmistakable. It was a peripheral count.

I looked over my shoulder. Instinct propelled me to keep singing. Maybe it wasn’t instinct; maybe it was the gift, the connection. I’m not sure. In any case, I kept singing. The tall grass shifted. I heard the bleat of goats.

“A Hradata walking song this far west?” A half-grown gold elf emerged from the grass. Ve was not quite as tall as me and whip thin. Ve was burnished a mahogany brown from the sun, with a kinky mane of yellow hair. Goats sauntered around vim, chewing at the grass, peering at me in haughty disinterest. The Droma child blinked at me and sucked in a lungful of air, eyes wide, nostrils flared, on the verge of panic.

I held out my hands, watching vim closely like one watches a wild animal. “It is just me here. There are no others. Just me.”

I took a very small, very slow step towards the child. I remembered the strangeness of Droma gender. I tried very hard to ignore all the signs of biological sex, to see the child as a person, as voe. If I was to encroach on their lands and ask for their help in survival, I felt the least I could do was get this one basic thing right. The words were easy, but the seeing was hard. It took a very long time before it was natural, and even then it was hard.

Ve stumbled back and fell over a goat. Ve scrambled upright and held vis walking stick up like a weapon. “Stay back, settler!”