Rae watched the lines shift on Mop’s face, trying to understand.

“Light and shadow,” he said. “One day.” He patted her shoulder, then pushed himself up with his staff.

Rae stood to go with him, but shaking his head, he gestured for her to stay. He made his way unsteadily across the meadow, back to the house to rest.

Rae, watching his limping progress, felt a wave of grief. Remembering Mop as he used to be, when he swung her on his shoulders and sang her lullabies at night—she could not help but miss him. Even when he was right beside her, she missed him, missed him as he was before. And this grief… was lonely. She could not share it with him; she could not share it with Nessa, who had her own sadness she tried to hide from them both. And Mop, too—white sleeve always reaching… even though he was so rarely alone—he, too, must feel trapped in his own kind of loneliness, his words never reaching others in the way that he’d hoped.

Once she’d wondered whether songs could make something real—whether her song had brought the wolf from the mountains, whether Mop’s songs had brought her from the mountains. Do songs have such magic as that in them? Mop once asked. And so much? No, there was no song, no word to make things right, to summon health or better days… no word to stop the king searching. Plucking a clover bloom, Rae tossed tufts of the white blossom ruefully. All along, it seemed, she’d overlooked the everyday miracle of words—that a person could share his thoughts with another and not be left alone in his mind.

“Wolf in the den,” she whispered. “The dark of the earth.”

She closed her eyes. Beyond the sorrow she felt with Mop, she still missed the wolf, too—even after all this time. She pressed her fingers against her palm, ashamed by the memory of the stones she had thrown at him. How she hoped he was still in the mountains—padding over mica-flecked stone, sliding though pine-prickled shade. If he was still alive, would he remember her at all now? The sting of rocks she had thrown? The coolness of the water she had carried? The yellow taste of the eggs she had brought? What was memory without words?

“Burdenless beast,” she murmured, the ridges blurring in her gaze.

Yes, that was right. He was a burdenless beast.

Unbidden, more words came to her as though they had been forming silently since that day she’d first sung in the meadow. She could feel their sounds shifting the air, syllables rippling invisibly in the clear spring sky.

“Burdenless beast,

a nothing-full mind,

the dense ragged shape

of hunger and hide.

Form of the mountain

just shadows and trees,

stony bare crags

the ravening teeth;

all-nature, all-wind,

all barren and stark

to the nothing-full beast,

its hot-bellied heart.”

She held the words against her lips, feeling their rhythm. She wouldn’t sing them… but something in them felt true. She wondered what that would be like, to be all-nature, all-wind. To be empty, with no thoughts at all in her mind. Nothing-full.