the thistles purpling all the wood,

the starling-polished skies,

the bees in honeyed hum at noon…”

Alba, grasses hush-ing and tickling her legs, insects startling and shimmering into the space around her, approached slowly, uncertainly, but the heir broke off when she saw her.

“Alba.” Rae’s eyes grew wide. “I thought you were too far away to hear me.”

Drip.

Overcome, Alba gestured to Rae, to the wolf. Shaking her head, she sat beside her. I thought you were gone, she wanted to say, I thought they’d ended you. Instead, when she found her voice, she could only ask, “Those words—what were you chanting?”

“Oh.” Rae’s smile showed a bright gaggle of teeth. “I was singing. Mop”—she pointed down the hill, where, far in the distance, two figures could be seen outside a small hut—“he taught me.”

Drip.

“I’ve never heard words like that—arranged like that. Images and…” Alba hesitated, unsure how to describe the chanting. Listening to Rae, she’d almost smelled the dense pine, almost tasted the rich honey, almost felt the thistle prickling her skin. “Images and patterns,” she said at last, lighting on it. “I could hear them. Like the patterns the oracle taught me to see in birdsong or even… bird flight… But your song… it’s not augury, is it? It’s not showing the future. Just…” Alba glanced at the meadow, the sheep, the little hut in the distance, the shifting gold-and-silver light of the field. “Just your world,” she said finally. “The world as you see it.”

Rae kept her eyes on the distant figures. “Birdsong,” she repeated. “Mop always wished his singing to be more like that. Easeful as the skylarks’, he said. He used to sing all the time, but his words are”—she frowned, and for a moment, the hillside turned stony and gray—“no longer his own.”

Drip.

While Alba watched, Rae scratched in the soil, pulling a grub from the dirt. She held it flat on her palm, and the wolf took it gently with his teeth.

Alba thought of the man she’d helped from the mud, the way he’d struggled to speak. “I remember him,” she said gently. “From the market.”

Rae, meeting her eyes, nodded. “I remember you. I remember you helping him.”

“Can you sing one of his?”

Drip.

Rae, tilting her chin, began quietly—

“For you, I’ll sing

of times before the age of men, when first

the world… the seeds of earth and wind and sea

and fire… this tender orb…”

—but grew quickly flustered. “I can’t remember,” she said, pinching the corners of her eyes. “My mind is so cloudy right now.”

Drip.

“You should write it down,” Alba said. “For you and for your father, to give him his words again.”

“Writing…” Rae shook her head. “I don’t know how. Just once I saw it, at the market—but I don’t know the shapes.”

Drip.

Alba looked about. An overturned bowl lay beside the wolf. “Here.” Reaching, she took the bowl into her lap and selected a sharp rock from the stones scattered around her. On the underside of the vessel, she scratched into the clay.