It’s the Childer-Queen’s gold-fire gawking that pushes me to do it — to meet Linna at the statue of Rullun Harpermall. It’s the Festival of the Sea-Singer, too. I have to get away from picturing all those ribbons as slashed tongues, the sea swirling redder and redder. And Sorrowhall means facing Bly and all the questions he raises in my gut.

But there’s another reason, if I’m honest with myself. And it’s frightening, the reason, because —

I want to see Linna.

I want to feel as though I am made for my skin again. I want my soul to hum along with a song only Linna’s soul sings.

It feels as though the empty streets are getting narrower and narrower, pinching at my elbows. The sky lowers its clouds to catch me in a mist.

I take a seat on Rullun Harpermall’s golden boot, resting my head on my folded arms. Rain falls, filling the stone-gouged Featherrut, but I stay still. I don’t want to miss Linna.

Finally, I hear footsteps.

Linna is limned in starlight. She’s carrying a bunch of tongue-fruit. She looks impressed with herself. Impressed with her loot.

She looks impressed with me, too.

“You came,” she says, giving me the tongue-fruit and pulling me up. Her fingers are warm, as though she’s touched gold. Her pockets are full of fried and leaf-wrapped seaflowers.

Then her mouth opens like the Childer-Queen’s did — opens to the raindrops that glimmer around us, up to the heavens, as if she’s worthy of having the sky touch her tongue. As if she’s not afraid of it. As if she could swallow lightning. I sway, remembering the tree with keys for leaves, that look the Childer-Queen handed me, my belly so full of unspoken secrets that I couldn’t avert my eyes.

Don’t tell.

The Featherrut is filling up with rainwater.

“Does it always flood?” I ask.

“Always,” says Linna, rolling her eyes. “The water’s taken to the Childer for her morning bath — but if you rise early, you can slurp a handful from one of the buckets. It’s meant to be good luck.”

“Good luck?” Nothing to do with the Childer-Queen seems like good luck.

“It’s worked for me so far,” Linna says, winking. She looks around, then turns to golden Rullun Harpermall and pushes her finger into his right eye. The statue rises a little off the ground, then slides to the right, revealing a deep black hole.

“What’s that?”

Linna laughs at my gaping mouth. “First rule of hiding — camp out under your enemy’s nose.” She slips into the hole, her feet pattering down a ladder. A few steps and she’s gone.

I stare in, my toes at the edge.

It looks like a trap — a place I can’t crawl out of on my own. But Linna says my name, and I know I will follow her. Because no one’s ever said my name like that. As though it means something terrifying in an ancient language. As though it holds courage in it the way a fruit holds seeds.

“Throw the tongue-fruit down!” she calls.

I do. I hear her catch the cluster in her arms.

“It’ll close on its own soon,” she says. “It’s now or, um, not now.” A laugh bubbles up.

I climb down, my shaking fingers gripping gold, my right hand drumming with an almost musical pain.

“Watch out,” calls Linna in the kind of shout-whisper that only she can accomplish.

The statue scrapes on its track, clanking over the hole again, and darkness floods in.

I climb down, down, down.

A long way away, a song echoes. I feel like I’m in the shimmer-room again. I started behind stone and here I am — in a place without the sky.

Linna told me she lives in a cloister, but this — the walled-in damp. It’s as if I never left. I smell salt and pause, thinking for a moment that the sea has found this place — that it’s dripping its cold into the underground tunnel. When I listen closely, though, there’s no thrash or spray.

But there is music.

It’s a voice. And it’s singing a slow, sad song. A song that is a circle, like the cloisterwings’ singing. Coming back to the beginning. Over and over and over.

My feet touch the ground. I feel for Linna’s arm. “What is this place?” I whisper. “And who is that singing?”

“Singing?” Linna laughs. “That’s not singing. It’s just the way the wind moves down here — through all the cracks they didn’t close up when they built this place. We’re alone. I promise.”

“How do you know?” I whisper. I feel as though someone’s listening to us. Listening to me.

“Because these tunnels — they’re a secret the Ninth King never revealed.”

“Oh, but he told you about it?” My voice is slick with disbelieving.

“If you must know, my parents purchased the Ninth King’s journals at auction after his death. They were artifacts, never touched. Kept behind glass. No one ever read them, out of respect —”

“Wait. You read the Ninth King’s journals?”

“Every single one.”

The crying voice — what Linna calls the wind — fills my bones. “Weren’t you afraid you’d get caught?” I say.

“Of course I was,” says Linna, pulling me through the thicket of dark. “But that’s never stopped me.”

We run. We run.

The singing climbs to a crescendo, then stops.

“See?” says Linna. “It’s the wind — that’s all. No one ever comes down here.”

She leads me to a small room filled with crooked-lit hushingstone. We stand in the doorway, looking in. Potted tongue-fruit trees that have long since died line the walls, their dry, fruitless branches drooping. The pots are made of patterned gold, and the floors and walls and ceilings are stone, just like in the cloister.

“Wait out here,” says Linna. “I’ll introduce you after they’ve eaten. They can be a little cranky before they’ve had their dinner.”

They. But Linna said this was a cloister all her own.

Linna hops over hushingstone, rustling dead-bristle branches, the tongue-fruit tucked under one arm. “I’m here!” she calls. “I brought food!”

I hear a shuffling sound and then a squawk — the flapping of wings. Two shadowy shapes launch at Linna, landing on her free arm. She drops the tongue-fruit cluster onto the ground, then takes a fried seaflower out of her bulging pocket and holds her palm flat. The shadows perched on her arm peck at the salted petals.

Birds.

Not just birds, but —

“Cloisterwings!” I say, stepping inside, forgetting Linna said to wait.

The cloisterwings burst into flight. I fall to my knees. I hold out a hand, and one of them twists toward me, flaps its wings to land on my wrist. Linna moves to kneel beside me, tearing the tongue-fruit in half. The cloisterwings seem to prefer the seaflowers, though.

“Hey, save some for me,” she says, taking a bite of a crispy petal.

A pang of sadness strikes my heart. And jealousy. They’re mine, the cloisterwings. But these birds don’t even know me.

Linna points from bird to bird. “This is Mimm,” she says, “and Trick.”

“Are they girls or boys?”

“Both girls.”

“You named them?”

Linna nods.

“Mimm,” I say. “Trick.”

The cloisterwings stop eating and bend their necks to look at me.

“They know their names,” I say.

I never thought to give the cloisterwings names. I knew their eyes. Knew their feathers and cackles. The sounds of their beating hearts as I held them against my cheeks.

“Of course,” says Linna. “They’re the most intelligent birds ever to exist — at least that’s what the First Mother wrote. I’ll admit she’s likely to have been biased.”

“Because she made them,” I say, stroking Mimm’s back. “But how did these two end up here?” I pick up a seaflower petal and feed it to Trick. “Cloisterwings never leave the cloister.”

“The Sea-Singer asked for them,” says Linna. “That’s what the Ninth King’s journals said.”

She patters her fingers along the back of Mimm’s neck. She looks around the room, then back at me, her eyes wild with secrets. “This place,” she says. “The Ninth King called it Hiddenhall. He built it for the Sea-Singer. Because she didn’t want to marry him. So he made this secret palace for her, showed it to her one night when the whole city was asleep. And she loved it, loved that it was secret, that she could sing down here without anyone knowing, but there was one other thing she wanted — more than gold and pale silks — and that was a cloisterwing. She told him if he fetched one for her, she would marry him. So he got her two. He asked Mother Nine, and she let them out. But he had to keep them down here so that no one knew.”

“Who’s been feeding them?”

“I don’t know. But they seemed well-fed when I found them.” She nods at the trees. “Maybe they’ve been eating dry tongue-fruit leaves.”

“Strange. So you got this story from the journals?”

“It’s not a story. It’s the truth. He never thought anyone would be disrespectful enough to read his private writings.” A laugh claps out of her mouth. “Kings,” she says. “Honestly.”

I look at Mimm and Trick, their claws clicking on the ground, their feathers glossy as sap. Claws that touched the Sea-Singer’s skin. Feathers that knew the feel of her fingertips. These cloisterwings are the closest I have ever been to her — closer, even, than when I brushed my fingertips against her stone-etched curls. I scoot along the ground, edging nearer to them.

“I wonder if they remember the cloister,” I say, thinking of the closed-out sky, the damp stone, Mother Nine’s hammer-clang steps.

Linna looks at my bandaged hand. “I hope they don’t,” she says.

I bite my lip, but tears run down my cheeks in itchy streaks.

“Delphernia, I’m sorry. I don’t check my tongue before I use it —”

“No,” I say. “I was — remembering.”

Linna puts her arms around me. I can feel the starry brightness of her hair, wet against my neck.

“A secret for a secret?” I say.

She sits beside me, a smile flashes, and then her face is serious as sea. “A secret for a secret,” she says, wiping my tears away with her thumbs.

I look at the cloisterwings. “I sang to them,” I say. “When everyone else was asleep.” Speaking the words aloud is like loosing a round of hushingstone from my throat.

Linna frowns, pulls back as if she wants to see my face more clearly. “Really?” she asks.

I swallow, heat rushing from the tips of my toes to the lobes of my ears. But still I open my mouth. “Do you want to hear?” I say.

She nods — one small dip of the chin.

My voice quivers at the base of my throat — a croaking whistle. Linna squeezes closer to me. Her glittering eyes remind me of the First Mother’s, and I have to look away. I look at the cloisterwings instead.

Girls with singing throats are swallowed by the sea.

But the sea can’t get to me. I am hidden from the sky. All I have here is dark and wings and a girl who says my name like it’s a recipe for magic.

I close my eyes.

My voice leaps off my tongue and into the room — a squelchy, spit-shaped note, wavering like a seaflower in a guttering breeze. I let my song lope and roam, upward and downward, not knowing the next step until I get there. This is the only kind of singing I have ever done. It’s not as though anyone’s ever taught me how to sing songs that have a beginning, a middle, an end.

Mother Nine’s voice finds me, says I should have stayed in the hollow tree if I wanted to sing. But I can also hear the Sea-Singer. She’s saying, Don’t be silent. She’s saying, Sing. Her cloisterwings are here, after all, like messages from a locked-away past.

I keep singing. I open my eyes and pull strands of light from the air — each note with its own beating heart. I press the light between my palms. Little golden birds spin into being, brushing my ears with their wings. Linna watches them, eyes wide, mouth open. She holds a hand up, and they nuzzle at her palm.

“Mothers of All,” says Linna. “How do you do that?”

Mimm and Trick circle my head.

“I don’t know,” I whisper.

Then the little golden birds gather as one and fly out of the room, searching for the sky, just as they did in the cloister.

“Where are they going?” asks Linna.

“They did the same thing before — flying away. They can press through the tiniest gaps —”

Linna takes my left hand and squeezes. “Look,” she says, pointing at Mimm and Trick. “I’ve never seen them do that before. Flying like that — those slow circles. It’s like they’re dreaming with their wings.”

I swallow, looking up, nodding. “That’s exactly, exactly what it’s like,” I say.

“But the golden birds — they’re not shimmer,” says Linna. Her eyes are two quizzing moons.

“I can’t make shimmer.” Another secret, spat onto the ground.

“They haven’t asked you to make any? At Sorrowhall? The Prince?”

“The Prince doesn’t seem interested in shimmer.”

Linna folds her arms. “So he is as strange as people say.”

I shrug.

I’m about to tell her that she owes me another secret, since I’ve already told her two, when she throws a palm over my mouth and pulls me to standing, pushes me against the wall. The cloisterwings swoop at my neck, their beaks clicking.

And then I hear it.

Footsteps patter like the beginnings of a stuttering rain.

Linna drops her hand from my lips, and I mouth silent words: “Who’s there?”

But Linna only shakes her head. I struggle for air as though someone’s grabbed my throat, as though I can already feel the Childer-Queen’s fingers crunching the bones in my wrist. All my hurting places throb. My thumb, my ear, my cheek —

The footsteps come closer, closer, closer — we wait several sap-stretched minutes before they stop. I hear them again, but this time they’re getting softer and softer.

Then they’re gone.

And then there’s silence.

Silence that could strip the sea of salt.