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I’m alone. Through the window, I watch the field go by, the bare trees, and the road I walked this morning, with the carriage taking me the other way along it.

A man has bought me. A human man, as far as I can tell, with gold on his hands and a harp at his shoulder. Human men don’t come to monster bride markets. Human men don’t buy the Bellflower Fire Girl. But he raised his paddle when no one else did, he paid, he signed his name, and now I’m in his carriage on my way to a place called Nivallia.

I don’t know what I am to him. I don’t know if he means to make me his wife or his servant, and I realize, watching the trees go by, that I should’ve asked before I signed. I had the pen in my hand, and the question right there, but I signed instead, because the paddle had gone up and I was afraid that if I asked anything at all, he might change his mind.

I hold the pouch in my lap and watch the road. I decide I’ll ask him when we reach Nivallia.

Chapter Three

Mordred

Air moves through the ruins far above me, pushing down through broken passages and open shafts until it reaches the water.

I stand in the boat and row. The lake spreads out from the hull into a darkness that has no far shore. The surface holds so still that each stroke of the oar carries across it and comes back to me, echoing off stone I cannot see.

I’m in no hurry. Water parts around the hull. The oar dips and lifts. Somewhere above, wind passes through a gap in the old walls, and the sound carries down through the caves and stops. Then there’s nothing again, except me.

The platform is already down. It hangs at the end of its rails over the middle of the lake, an iron square lowered from the orchestra pit of the old performance hall, down through the broken remains of the lower vault, to where the rails stop just above the water. There is no landing under it and no shore near it. The people above lower it, but they never come down with it. They’ve never seen me.

I bring the boat alongside and tie it off to one of the rails. Today they’ve sent glazed donuts, a meat pie, and baked potatoes wrapped in cloth. I take the donuts. I have a sweet tooth, and I’ve never pretended otherwise. I leave the pie and the potatoes where they are. I don’t feel like eating much.

Most days I do, but I don’t need their food. My body works perfectly well without it. But something a person made with their hands, kneaded, baked, and wrapped for me, puts me a little closer to them while I eat it. I’m one of the most dreadful monsters to have walked Alia Terra, and I know it, and a donut doesn’t change it. It only lets me forget for the length of a meal. Lately, even that has stopped working. Part of me looks at what they keep sending down and thinks I have no right to it.

There’s a book. I turn it over in my hands. I haven’t read this one before. The cover shows a man with a pack on his back and a road ahead of him. The words on the back say he’s a wanderer, a hero of sorts, and that the one thing he wants more than anything is to see the ocean. I put it in the boat.

There’s a knitted blanket, blue and white. I leave it because I have more blankets than I need.

Then I finally reach for the cards. The children of Nivallia have sent a bundle of them, folded, thick paper, tied together with string. I gather them and put them on the seat beside me where they won’t get wet.

I take hold of the hauling line that hangs down next to the platform and pull. The old pulleys take the weight, the counterweight drops somewhere in the dark, and the platform rises with the pie, the potatoes, and the blanket still on it. It climbs past the vault and out of my sight. I know how they’ll read it up there. Every gift that comes back is a message, and I have no way to tell them it means nothing more than a full stomach and enough blankets.

I untie the boat and row for home.

A century ago, I found this place. The performance hall had been magnificent once. Anyone could see that in what was left of it, in the height of the auditorium, the carving on the boxes, and the scale of the machinery under the stage. The Shift had brought most of it down, and almost no one living understands what it was built for. I understood enough. Its ruined hall, its backstage passages, the caves beneath, and this lake gave me what I’d been looking for. No one lived near it, and no one came for a long time.

I’d already spent centuries moving from place to place.

I’m a Cantor. We are rare and we live alone, because our songs act on bodies and minds. Mine can heal, but they can also do many other things. They can draw grief out of a person or pull a confession out of them. My songs can make people devoted to me. They can bind a vow so it holds, and even call the dead. They can soothe, punish, or give a body more pleasure than it can stand. Turned on myself, the healing songs keep me alive and young, as long as I keep choosing to sing them.

Every one of these songs is safe when it’s brief and dangerous when it isn’t. The longer I sing, the farther the song reaches, and the less it stays what I mean it to be. Healing makes people need the healer. Comfort turns into surrender. Devotion turns into obsession. When humans find a Cantor, they are curious at first, then they want him, then they need him, and finally they worship him whether he asked for it or not.

I can’t go to my own kind for company either. Two Cantors singing together make a song neither of them can control. I learned all this the way my kind learns everything – by getting it wrong and living with what it cost.

So, I chose these ruins when I found them. And I meant to stay hidden here for good.

I can make out the island in the dark ahead of me, and I pull toward it.

People built near the ruins anyway. A few houses first, then a village, then the village became the city of Nivallia. I thought about leaving. I was tired of running, and by then, I’d watched their lives long enough that I didn’t want to. I told myself I could stay as long as no one found me.

When the old hall was empty, I’d come up from the caves and stand in the shadows of the stalls, or in a private box with the front broken away and watch them. They never saw my face. I saw children learn to walk. I saw those children marry, have children of their own, and bury their parents. I know every name up there, whose grandmother is whose, which family argues at supper, and which doesn’t. I liked them then, and I like them still.

They found out about me anyway. I don’t know a place I’ve settled before where it went differently. They made a religion out of me without asking me. They turned the ruined auditorium into a place of worship, and they started lowering gifts through the pit. I take some. Some are useful. The children’s drawings I would take if they were the only thing sent. And if I refused all of it, that would only be one more way of wounding people who already believe I’ve abandoned them.

For six months, I haven’t sung for Nivallia.

They’re in pain. I know that. They want my voice, they ask for it, and the longer I stay quiet, the harder they ask. I won’t do it, because it will pass, and they’ll be well again. I’m certain of it, and I say it to myself with each stroke of the oar, the way I’ve been saying it since I stopped.

I don’t go up much anymore. I can’t stand in the dark and watch people I’ve known since they were born hurt while I hold back the one thing they beg me for. So, I stay down here and row to the platform when the platform comes down.