After another hour of being unable to sleep, Yuna crept outside the cottage, past the room full of brown glass bottles of tinctures and potions, while Zizi stayed on her shoulder. As a precaution, she grabbed an empty glass vial from the pantry and crept out into the moonlit garden.

She went straight to the hole in the wall. Just to check for rakkons, she thought to herself. Under the silvery light, the garden took on a purplish hue. The nightshade flowers were drinking in the cool evening, paper white and lovely. The trickling water of the irrigation channels sounded like bells in the darkness. Here she might recall the moments of her small adventure, to rethink the words that were spoken and knit them back together after a delicious unraveling.

She sat down by the hole, and Zizi nuzzled her cheek. The crickets sang merrily, the breeze calm. It almost sighed. Yuna sighed too.

And the night sighed louder on the other side of the wall.

Yuna froze. Tentatively, as if offering a small rice bun on her ancestors’ shrine in the kitchen, she slipped her hand into the hole in the wall.

Her fingertips touched cool stone, solid and irregular beneath her hand. Rubble bits were there too. She reached farther. Her fingertips brushed something that was neither crumbled stone nor sandy mortar.

A hand.

A hand, waiting for her. A hand, ropy with scars that felt like twisted vines. On a tree, it would be beautiful. On a hand, perhaps beautiful too, now that she thought of it.

This time, the boy’s hand quickly withdrew. She heard a small knocking sound, and then “Ow!”

“Oh! What happened?” Yuna whispered.

“You surprised me. I hit my head against the wall. I’m all right.”

Yuna laughed low. She heard Himil rubbing his head rapidly to ease the hurt.

“I didn’t think you’d come out again,” he said.

“I thought the same.”

There was a long pause. Yuna needed it, her heart was so full. Strangely full, and beating quickly.

They stayed in silence for a while. Finally, Yuna could bear it no longer. She was used to the disappointed glances of the Silendars in the town square when she shopped. She saw the boys and girls sneer at her, at the scarlet sash she wore under the cloak that was part of a traditional garment worn by unmarried women of Bando. “Like blood!” the sneering boys would say. “She’s bloody poisonous! Stay away, and take your nasty wares back to your land.”

Zizi sensed her tensing at the memory and cooed a burbling noise.

“What is that?” Himil asked.

“It’s Zizi, our scorpion bird.”

“Aren’t they dangerous?”

“Only if you try to hurt them.”

“You mean, they’re like people?” Himil said. She could almost hear him smile, if that were possible, from the other side of the wall.

“Some people like to hurt for no reason.”

“True.” Himil sighed again.