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She’s just told me the thing I most want to be true about myself. I don’t know how to receive such a compliment, so I bow my head. Then I remember what my voice is. The voice of a monster. A voice that heals but also manipulates and drives people mad.

“It’s better that you can’t hear it,” I sign.

I’ve told her this before. Now her reaction is different. She tilts her head and watches my hands finish signing.

“Why?” she asks.

I could tell her. What she’s seen of it so far is the kind part: the bruises closing, the burns gone. There’s another part. People who hear enough of it begin to want it, then they begin to need it. I’ve witnessed what that need does. I could tell her that.

I look at her face, at the eyes that have never once gone soft and empty for me, and I imagine how her expression wound change if I did.

That isn’t even the worst of what I’m keeping from her. She asked me on her knees to give her back her hearing, and I told her it was beyond me. If I explain now what my voice does to the people who can hear it, she’ll ask the next question, and then the one after that, and I’ll have to lie to her again or tell her everything.

I’m still thinking of an answer to her question when, far above us, the lift begins to move. I can hear the counterweight take the load and the platform start down the guide rails.

I point at the door.

“The platform is coming down. Would you like to come with me and see what the people have sent?”

She cocks an eyebrow and regards me with mild suspicion. Finally, she nods.

Chapter Twelve

Aveline

Nearly two weeks have passed. When we talk, he doesn’t need to write anything down anymore. I speak freely and make the signs with my hands at the same time, so he keeps learning. He knows the names of every room and most of what stands in them. When he needs a word I haven’t shown him yet, then he writes it down so I can read it. He asks me for the sign and remembers it on the first try. His memory is impressive.

We spend much of each day in the padded room behind the tapestry. He told me he calls it the Silent Room. He lights the wall lamps, closes the thick door on its iron latch, and we sing together. I’ve learned the first two of his pieces, the Litany and the Nocturne. I can’t hear him, but I feel the floor thrum under my feet when he joins me, and a warmth that spreads from my chest into my throat that doesn’t come from my own breath. He stands close but never touches me. I watch his lips move behind the grille of his mask and fit my breathing to his as much as I can. I love it more than I know how to tell him. I loved the Lyric House, and I loved the applause, but no one in Rosemere ever sang with me like this.

What I don’t understand is why it has to happen in this room. The house is quiet, the lake is quiet, and nobody lives on this island but the two of us. Once, I ask him what the room is for, and he only signs, “Sing here.” When I ask why we can’t sing by the hearth, he distracts my attention with something else.

Mordred says I may do anything I like in his home. He wrote it when he was still writing things down, and he’s signed it since. I believe he means it, but I’ve started to see the limits he never puts into words.

He comes with me to the library every time. He doesn’t follow me there, not quite; he happens to have work at his desk whenever I want a book. He reads his journals while I read one of his many fiction novels, and when I put my book back, he closes his and walks out with me. The last time we were in there, I reached for a book on the third shelf, a thick one bound in dark cloth, and his hand closed on it before mine did. He took it down and held it against his chest.

“You wouldn’t like it,” he signed with his free hand.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Trust me.”

“You keep saying that.”

He simply nodded, set the book on a shelf out of my reach, chose another from the same row, and gave me that one instead. I took it. I wanted to tell him I’m not a child, but I said thank you instead. Because that’s what comes out of my mouth, always. I read the book he gave me by the hearth, and I didn’t take in a single page.

I know he keeps the letters from the people of Nivallia where I can’t see them. Every time we go to the platform and there’s a new stack of them, he places them in the box. I’ve noticed the box isn’t full yet, which means he moves them from there to some other box he keeps somewhere in the house. Maybe in his room, where I haven’t stepped foot yet.

I don’t want to overstep his kindness. On the rare occasion when he’s out in the garden, I keep to my room, or the living room, or the kitchen corner of it. I don’t go into the library, the workshop, or the music room without him. He’s never asked me to mind where I go alone, but I do it anyway. I’m a guest in his house.

The simple days with him have become the best part of my life since the fire, and that makes it harder to ask him anything that might spoil our easy companionship. It also means that every time I decide to let him distract me, I know it’s my choice. I fold my hands in my lap, so they don’t ask what my mouth won’t.

We’re by the hearth after we sing the Nocturne together, with his scores across his knee and the book he chose for me across mine, when he lifts his head and tilts it toward the door. I know what that particular tilt means. The lift is coming down over the lake.

He stands and signs, “Platform. Come with me?”

“I’m tired,” I say. “I think I’ll stay here this time, if that’s all right.”

He looks at me for a long moment. I’ve never refused his invitation before.