Despite all this, the act of singing remained something of an improvisation that leaped from all those hours of study and took on a life of its own. Though this frightened her—sometimes waking her from dreams in which her song had suddenly turned to nightmare—the act itself was a thing of such enraptured beauty that she could no longer be away from it long. Aaden wanted her to sing; truth be known, she hungered for it even more than he.

And sing she did. Her words—unintelligible, beautiful, and infused with an almost physical power—filled the alcove. Sound danced in the air as if the small chamber were laced with invisible ribbons, like snakes airborne and slithering, circling. As Corinn continued, the circle grew ever smaller. She pulled the spell in, drew it tighter, filled that invisible bowl with sounds that shrank into greater substance. Soon the words of her song swam like hundreds of sparkling minnows, a seething globe of them getting denser and denser. Within this, a form began to take shape.

Something that nobody has ever seen before: that’s what Aaden asked for. And that was what she was singing into being. She would let it live there before them for a few moments, and then she would sing its unmaking.

C HAPTER
T HREE

The guards at the lower steps of the palace grounds made the mistake of barring the young man’s passage. One of them asked him what he was about; the other hit the stranger’s chest with the flat of his palm, his knife hand ready to pull his dagger from his waist sheath; a third sounded a whistle of alarm. They all expressed indignation that a laborer, a peasant—whatever the new arrival was in his tattered clothing, with unkempt hair, calloused hands, and bare feet—would dare try to gain entry to the royal residence. He could be executed on the spot for it. They held this fate off, the first guard said, only because they wished to know the nature of his insanity before doing the deed.

In answer, the intruder took a step back. He set his hands on his hips and stood smiling. He knew his garments were worn thin, grimed by what looked like years of wearing, patched in places and shredded in others. His toenails were black crescents; and the creases of his elbows, neck, and forehead were drawn with thin lines of dirt. He stood with easy confidence, however. His white-toothed smile asked them to see the person behind these outward trappings. See the mirth in his eyes and wonder at it. See the etched musculature beneath the rags. See his face for what it was, not what it appeared to be. It was a tense moment, although everyone but the young man seemed aware of this.