Tayan felt sick, but he pushed it down. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll think of something to get away. In a, a month or so.’ She nodded and tears pricked suddenly at his eyes. ‘And tell Lilla … tell my husband I’m sorry and I love him and I’ll see him soon.’

‘Well,’ Betsu murmured. ‘Turns out you’re braver than you look after all. Ancestors guide you.’

‘And you. Under the—’ he paused, both of them aware of what he’d been about to say. ‘It really does get into your head, doesn’t it?’ he finished weakly.

Betsu gave him another of her inscrutable stares and then left. Just went, no more words, no supplies or weapons, just a blanket around her shoulders and through the window into the night.

Tayan knew the guards wouldn’t see her if she didn’t want to be seen. He sat on the bed, lower lip caught between his teeth. Around him, the song pulsed and arced. More and more, he’d found himself caught up in it, drifting away on its liquid seduction. It lived inside him, a watchful, ever-present thing coiled in his guts that never got any quieter or more distant, or louder or closer. It didn’t react to worries or fears or joys but instead inhabited them, so everything was experienced alongside and through the song. It was just there, heard not with the ears but the whole body, a musical resonance stringing through his soul and connecting it to something bigger, wider.

He wondered for a second if it was anything like how Xessa experienced the world, how she could turn suddenly and know he was there, even though she couldn’t hear him, as if the wind or the earth had told her of his secret approach. As if her skin tasted him.

It’s as if there’s a message in the song that I can’t quite understand. The same as with the Drowned. If I can learn their language, I can understand them. I could weave a peace with the Drowned.

The audacity of the idea, the scale of it, took his breath away. But if he could do it, if he could take this knowledge back home, then once the war was over, everything, everything could change.

If he could get Enet to tell him the origins of the song and the link between it and the Drowned … She said they were the Singer’s ancestors, he remembered as the memory slid from behind the horror of the slave’s death. She said all the way back to the first Singer in unbroken line …