Halaavi nodded. Ve looked over at me and smiled. Halaavi’s smiles were transformative: vis face was angular and in repose looked harsh, and a smile shattered the angles and made vim young and full of humor. “They see you now like I see you, Vrala Ariah.”

“Oh, you just like me because you think I’m chaotic.”

Halaavi laughed. “Who says I like you?” I pointed at Halaavi, then at the clan, and smiled. The gift was an ever-present thing then. Old Idok Arvada took to bringing me into vis yurt when ve trained Kishva. I was a noted empath among the Avolayla. Halaavi laughed again. “Yes, fine, I like you.”

“No secrets in the clan.” The Droma word for secret is indistinguishable from the Droma word for lie, and both have roots in the Droma word for chaos. I ran the shuttle back and forth, back and forth through the loom. “Where I come from, we hold the truth to ourselves.”

“We all hold truth to ourselves,” Halaavi said.

“No, I mean…where I come from, we are all like islands. We’re all like our own separate clan, a clan of just one person, and we hold truth just to ourselves, just to that singled-out clan.”

Halaavi raised vis eyebrows. It intrigued vim. Ve was not secretive, not the way you and I think about it, but ve was an oddity among the clan. Halaavi had perfected a way of thinking, a way of feeling that, though shared, was at times impenetrable to the rest. Halaavi was a voice of the Yavinaha, a band of ascetic monks whose spirituality was deeply embedded in the land. Halaavi had been born to the Yavinaha, raised among the faithful, and joined the Avolayla as a sort of spiritual adviser to the clan. Part of vis raising was a deep tradition of meditation; Halaavi could make vis mind absolutely blank, absolutely still, and absolutely empty, which ve did whenever ve was troubled and did not want the rest to know. There was no judgment from me. I knew of Yavinaha teachings only what I could glean, and I’d lived such a bounded life that Halaavi’s questioning, restless mind never struck me as a danger. Halaavi could be intrigued by such things in my presence. Ve worked a while embroidering a lefta. “There are times,” ve said finally, “that I wonder about the old ways and how useful they are in this new world. The Yavinaha, the root is change. The world changes: the seasons change, the land shifts, and so must we. I worry about those of us who are taken, who can’t hold truth to themselves, and who can’t ignore the truth of others. I worry how they fare on their side of the plains.”

“The ones taken lose luster quickly. They adapt, or they die.”

Halaavi nodded. “And yet the cities birthed you, and here you are, accepted by the Avolyala.”