As if, when they were of one mind, the world shifted and bent to their will.
When Desta asked the two sisters who broke the mirror, one or the other would tell her: “It wasn’t us, Mama. It was the hum.”
“The hum?” she’d ask. “What is that?”
The two girls stared at their mother.
“The warm, bright thing that links you like a string. Don’t you and Papa have one?”
No. She and their father did not. But when Desta told her husband, he shrugged it off as the wild imaginations of children who spent too much time together. After all, the two sisters played together, studied together, slept together... there was hardly a moment when they were apart.
“It would be good for them to have other friends,” he told his wife.
Desta agreed. She wrote her oldest friend, Amina, whose son, Dax, was falling further behind in his studies every year. His tutors had given up, declaring him illiterate and unteachable, and Amina was sick with worry. Desta told her friend to send him to the House of Song for the summer.
Perhaps that will cure my daughters of this hum,thought Desta, who was tired of her roses dying.
Perhaps, if they had other friends, she wouldn’t need to keep buying new mirrors.
Two
No one understood the bond shared by Roa and Essie. Before the accident, people thought their connection strange—or worse, to be feared. For Roa, though, it was something that had always simply been. She didn’t know how to be without it.
Essie was the one who named it the hum, because that’s what it felt like: something deep and bright, almost like a song, vibrating inside them.
After the accident, the hum changed. They were no longer able to keep out each other’s thoughts and feelings and—most especially—pain.
They were one.
For nearly eight years now, Essie had been in Roa’s head, and Roa had been in Essie’s.
Which was why her sister’s silence felt so wrong.
Maybe she went back to Song,thought Roa as Poppy’s ragged breathing filled the silence of the night.
Roa fixed her gaze on the jagged massifs in the distance,rising out of the earth, each one a darker shade of blue than the last. Above them, a half-moon rose, flooding the plains with silvery light and making the sweat gleam on Poppy’s coat.
Every now and again, shadows passed overhead.
Dragons, Roa knew.
Once, dragons had been plentiful here. Not so long ago, Dax’s people rode the fierce creatures through the skies. But under his grandmother’s reign, draksors and dragons turned on each other. Former allies became bitter enemies. Until Asha, Dax’s sister, put an end to a corrupt regime.
The dragons had been returning ever since.
It was past midnight when they trotted into the familiar stables of Song. The softwhuffing of horse sighs and the flick of tails greeted them. The stalls had been cleaned at the end of the day and smelled of dried mud and fresh hay.
Roa quickly untacked Poppy, then walked the lane up to the house. Except for the heart-fire in the central pavilion—which burned through the night—the lights of the House of Song were out.
“Essie?” she called, reaching again for that normally bright hum.
The dogs—Nola and Nin—were the only things that answered her, barking as she approached. When they realized who she was, they bounded up to her, trying to lick her to death. Roa slipped past them, through the rows of ropy warka trees, and stepped into the house.
All was dark inside. Roa followed the dusty stone walls with her hands. Stone. So different from the whitewashed plasterof the palace. Roa preferred the simplicity of her home’s dirt floors and roughhewn windows to the palace’s elaborately cut and mosaicked tiles. She preferred the smell of smoke and acacia to the smell of mint and lime.
It was a different world here. It washerworld. The one she’d be leaving behind tomorrow—for the second and final time.
Again, she called for her sister.
