The older Droma laughed. “You speak Droma, but you don’t know about echoes?” I shook my head. Ve came into my camp with the little goatherd trailing behind. Ve surveyed my camp, and ran a hand along the thatchwork roof of my shelter. “Where did you learn to do this?”

“Experimentation,” I said.

Ve took my wrist and turned my hand palm up. “You have a weaver’s hands. Have you worked a loom?”

I laughed. Ve gave me a curious look. “I worked wool factories in the towns.”

“Not the same,” ve said.

“Not at all.”

Ve dropped my hand. Ve studied my face, and I studied vim. Ve was full-lipped, with a wide, flat nose. Vis eyes were large and almond-shaped, Semadran-shaped, but the pupils were ringed with a ruddy gold instead of violet. Ve was small, about an inch or so shorter than me, and thinner, too, despite the fact that I’d turned to skin and bone in the months since I’d been taken from Rabatha. Vis hair was identical to the goatherd’s: a thick, kinky spray of yellow hair in all directions. Ve smiled. “Say something in your settler tongue, and I’ll show you an echo.”

“Say something?”

“Yes.”

“In Semadran or Qin?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

One hand kept the sackcloth in place. I held out the other. “My name is Ariah,” I said in Lothic.

The Droma pointed at my hand. “You want me to do something with your hand, Ariah?” Ve spoke, and it sounded Lothic to my ears, but something was off. I watched vim closely when ve spoke, and it was like the words I heard and the words ve said did not quite match up. I am no lip reader, but the movements of vis mouth seemed disconnected from the words that came out of it.

“Do you know what language this is?” I asked.

Ve smirked. “That depends on who you ask.”

“I’m asking you.”

“I speak to you in Droma,” ve said. “Whatever you hear it as, that I can’t say. You speak, I hear Droma. I speak, you hear what-have-you. This is the echo, see?”

The only way I can describe it was as an auditory mirror. The way red elves can use magic to alter what a person sees, gold elves can do it with what a person hears. It seems to me to be rooted in the same process, built on connections, built on something like a charm. I am no magicologist. All I can say is it is a powerful thing, that it gets the Droma hunted and captured by Qin and pirates alike, and that it is incredibly disorienting. I never got used to it, the mismatch between what I heard and what I saw. I never really had to since I spoke Droma. I switched to Vahnan and spoke again. “This is magic?”