“They’re mostly sad. You might prefer a happier song. I know lots about the night sky, and travelers who found their way home. Or I could sing you one about Ven, if you’d like. It embarrasses him, but I like it. I wrote it.”
Naelin was sure it did embarrass him, but she was equally sure he’d never stop his sister from singing it. Not if it made her happy. “What was he like as a child?”
“Always serious. Always trying so hard. I think he believes that if he’s strong enough and fights hard enough and runs fast enough and leaps high enough, death won’t catch him. Mother believes that too. She taught it to him.”
“But not to you?”
Sira lifted her arms up, letting go of the thin branch she’d held. “I know we’re all stardust, shining in the darkness for a while then winking out. I’m not afraid of dying.” She said it so matter-of-factly, and she looked so fey, a blue shadow against the even darker blue sky, that Naelin believed her.
Naelin looked to the north. “I used to be afraid of so many things. But everything changed when Erian and Llor were taken.”
“I felt the world change when they were lost,” Sira said.
“Thank you.” It seemed the right thing to say. But she couldn’t stop thinking about Bayn. “You said the songs you knew about the untamed lands were ‘mostly’ sad. Are there any that aren’t?” It would be nice if she could think the wolf was all right. He had tried so hard to protect Erian and Llor.
Opening her mouth, Sira began to sing again, this time with words that flowed out of her like a waterfall:
Beginning—
We are here in the darkness, unfolding.
Opening—
We are waking in the wildness, molding
Ourselves into shapes with names.
Speaking—
Not alone, we answer, echo, echo,
We tell the nothingness we came,
And it embraces us, unfolds us, molds us, names us.
And then her voice shifted, becoming a tone that did not sound human, and Naelin shivered at how closely she echoed the odd cadence of a spirit:
You, who have come where you do not belong,
You, who have come before your time,
You, who were formed from the formless,
You, who have called out your name,
When you should have been nameless,
We will rip you, rend you, tear you from our world,
Heal what you have sickened—
“I thought this one wasn’t a sad song,” Naelin murmured.
Sira looked startled, as if Naelin had poured water on her head. She broke off her song. “Oh! I’m sorry! I didn’t think! It has hope at the end—the First, our first queen, wasn’t alone. When all seemed lost and the few people who were left alive were surrounded by spirits bent on their deaths, the First went back into the untamed lands, where we were formed, to pray to the Great Mother, and when the First came out again, she was accompanied by a Protector.”
“She went into the untamed lands and came out again?” Naelin repeated. She’d never heard a tale like that. “But that’s not possible. No one’s ever done that.”
“It’s a very old song. It wouldn’t surprise me if only canopy singers know it.”
