Morning fills my sleeping-room with brilliant shrieks of light. I watch the walls, hoping there’s something I didn’t see before — a piece that makes all the pictures fit together. But the twisting patterns only twist more, muddling my vision. I blink until my eyes clear.

And then I hear the stone-flute.

I follow the sound and find Bly in a dust-coated room.

The ceilings and walls are covered in dirt-edged gold — gold that has been carved with images. Gardens flooded with jagged waves, books with keys dangling from their pages, girls with flaming lungs.

Hanging on the gold-carved walls are rectangles of polished stone with portraits carved into them.

Cold settles at my neck like a scarf.

They remind me of the portraits of the Mothers in the whisper-room. But these show men and boys holding stone-flutes, women with their hands in their laps, their dresses swallowing them in folds of white silk the way water swirls about rocks. There’s even a portrait of the Sea-Singer. I recognize her — painted black eyes filled with fight. Her belly is round as a full moon. Beside her, a tiny Childer-Queen stands, her hair adorned with seaflowers. The portrait must have been carved shortly before the Sea-Singer sang in the Garden of All Silences.

I turn to Bly.

He’s sitting on a scuff-cracked chair, playing a rambling, quick-footed song. He hasn’t looked up since I walked in. It’s as though the music is holding its hands over his eyes.

I sit down on a flickermoth-eaten cushion. A filigree of dust blooms around me and settles again before Bly flicks his eyes up to meet mine.

“Oh,” he says, embarrassed. “I didn’t see you.” He lowers his stone-flute.

I clear my throat. “Good morning, Prince Harpermall.”

“I have many names, but that one I hate the most,” says Bly. “I see you found the clothes I left out for you.”

“Yes,” I say, feeling as though all the carved faces on the walls have turned their eyes toward me at the same time. I’m wearing a shirt that is softer than my own scrubbed skin. It buttons at the back instead of the front, and it took me forever to bend into it. Then there are trousers and a thick silk jacket with cuffs that ripple like the crests of waves.

It’s strange to be wearing trousers and a jacket. Even stranger to be wearing pale silks. But it’s a comfort, too. I’m dressed like Bly — though my clothes have swirls of embroidery on them, and his are plain as clouded heaven. I want to feel that this is a kinship, but Mother Nine’s voice is in my head, pounding like a fist against a door, saying that it’s only Bly’s way of reminding me that I’m different from the othergirls.

That he knows I sing.

I won’t, I won’t. I won’t lift my voice. Ever. I will hide my desire for music like a cloisterwing sitting on her egg.

There’s a bowl of tongue-fruit at Bly’s feet. I reach for one, unthinking — I hate tongue-fruit, but I’m starving — when Bly lifts a hand.

“Wait,” he says, and Linna’s voice fills my mind: Wait, wait, wait. I can’t imagine her in a cloister. I picture her dancing under stars. I picture me dancing with her — singing, too. Making a glow in night air. Feeling like a tree among trees.

“There’s a tradition,” says Bly.

Linna evaporates.

“A tradition?”

Bly places his stone-flute in an open case and stands. I can’t help but stare at the instrument. It’s carved out of hushingstone and etched with the wings of flying birds, its keys a line of curling waves. I think of Linna’s stone-flute. I should have picked it up. Should have taken it with me. But music doesn’t belong to me. Never has. Never will.

Bly takes a tongue-fruit from the bowl. He tears it in half. The red juice drips on the floor, mixing with dust. He squeezes some into his palm, motions that he’d like to do the same for me.

I hold out my hand — the one without the bandage. I do not want to think of blood, but the juice runs along creases, making a crooked M in my palm as though someone’s sliced the skin, and then I am standing on Teeth Row again, and Mother Nine is coming with her wooden clamp —

“A licked palm is a token of surrender,” says Bly. His words draw me back into the room of faces. “I will keep no secrets from you as long as you don’t keep any from me.” He licks his own palm, nods at me to do the same.

I can’t promise that. Even if he’s already heard me sing.

But I lower my eyes and suck the juice off my skin. My palm tastes of salt.

Bly hands me both halves of the tongue-fruit, then sits again and lifts his stone-flute carefully from its bed. He begins to play. I’ve always thought music is what it sounds like to ask the world a question. But Bly’s music sounds more like a telling — like he’s telling a story about all that he’s lost.

The eyes of Blightsend’s kings and queens prickle my cheeks.

I turn to glance at the Sea-Singer again. I whisper a prayer to her. A short prayer. One word: “Please.”

A clatter. I turn to Bly. He’s let his stone-flute fall to the ground.

“I’m sorry,” he says, picking up the instrument.

“What is it?” I say.

“I told you I wouldn’t keep secrets,” he says. “Delphernia?”

“Yes?”

“There’s something I want to show you.”