Tau-indi pressed their cheek up against the cold stone.

“Tell me,” Kindalana said. Their voice rolled out of the cave like something old and far away. “Tell me like I’m Tau. It’s a beautiful thing to hear.”

“I want to say, Tau-indi, it’s the opposite of what you think. You didn’t kill your twin so you could be Prince alone. Something was wrong, over in the place where people live before they’re born, and you couldn’t both make it through the Door in the East. So your twin sacrified themself to help you make it into the world. They gave up a chance at life because they knew we’d need you over here, Tau, you in particular.

“And that’s why you’re the bravest, Tau, that’s why you’re the only one who’s brave enough to talk to Cosgrad and learn all these terrible things. That’s why you can keep your house together when your mom’s gone and you’re sick with snails. That’s even why the griots come to you to learn. Because your dead twin gave their life to set your trim. You have a gift we don’t.

“You’re the only one on Prince Hill who knows how to be alone.”

The jungle dripped and murmured with life. Tau-indi clung to the rock so they wouldn’t reel off and hit their head and die like a fool for not knowing what to think or how to feel.

From the cave came a murmur and a soft choked sound. “It’s okay,” Kindalana said. “Hush, Abdu, it’s okay. Don’t cry. It’s okay.”

“I don’t want to lose you,” Abdu said. “I don’t want to lose Tau.”

“Everything’s going to change.” Their voices were very close together. “We can’t stop that. We just have to figure out how to be strong.”

“Like Tau.”

“Like Tau.”

*   *   *

TAU fled. They fell on the way down the wet rock and cracked their left knee and skinned a huge peel off their right side and stumbled on weeping silently and making agonized oh, oh, oh faces.

In a tangle of kudzu near the trail they found Cosgrad Torrinde.

He was sitting with his face in his hands, a rock balanced on his left knee, a tiny frog on his right. He’d tried to peel some of the leeches off. His legs were covered in huge red scabs and the tiny black remnants of leech-mouths, still attached.

He looked up at Tau-indi with hopeless frustration, and Tau-indi looked back at him with quavering dismay.