Mara stared blankly at the figure that was rising from the ground of Caer Krea’s remains.

  Moonlight filtered through the collapsed rafters in long white ladders, laying stripes across the stone floor where ash had settled like a thin winter. Pillars lay fallen and split; one had cracked in such a way that it resembled a pair of clasped hands, fingers shattered. The walls still carried remnants of fresco—angelic faces chipped away by heat and years, halos reduced to pale rings that didn’t quite encircle anything anymore.

  In the middle of it all, a woman stood beneath the ruin of a mosaic. What had once been an enormous eye of colored glass—blues and greens and the gold of a pupil—now presented itself as a broken iris against the apex of the back wall. Jagged coins of glass remained set in mortar, but even broken, Mara could tell what the image once depicted.

  Krea, she thought, recalling the lessons about Kaedmon’s Angel. The Angel of Kaedmon’s mercy, the first Lightborn, the watcher. Or was it the judge? And where was her face? Gone—the center had fallen out, and only the suggestion of wings and a brow lingered.

  Under that torn mosaic, the woman sang.

  Her skin was the deep brown-black of rich earth soaked with rain. Her hair was bound with a strip of faded teal cloth and fell in coils that caught the light like thread dipped in oil. At her side leaned a long instrument—half-shattered, the neck splinted with leather and twine—and in her hands she cradled a small drum shaped from a cooking pot and skin. She held herself upright but at ease, the way water stands at rest in a bowl.

  Mara risked a quick Appraisal to see if this woman posed a threat. But she did not run. Curiosly, she did not feel fear as she saw the woman’s title:

  [Praise-Singer], LVL 12

  Praise…Singer?

  Her voice filled the hall the way a hearth fills a cold room—not all at once, not with heat alone, but with a steady presence that turned jagged things soft around the edges.

  She sang in a round, each line meeting its own echo along the broken roof:

  “O Krea, count our days in ash; we carried water jar by jar,

  O Krea, count our names in stone; we carved our grief on every spar,

  O Krea, keep the watchers’ eyes—from shaming light, from punishing star—

  And teach our hearts to beat as one, though torn with grief, though full of scars.”

  The simple drum kept time. Her body moved in small sways. In the gaps where the mosaic had fallen, the sky framed her—one star pricked the darkness exactly above her head and trembled.

  Mara did not realize she was crying again until her tears tasted of the dust that crawled the air. She wiped at her face with the back of her paw and sniffed, the sound louder than she wanted it to be.

  The woman’s voice did not break. She knew she had an audience. Mara could tell by the way the Praise-Singer turned her head slightly on the next line, as if to include the doorway in her litany.

  “O hearts that stayed and hearts that fled,

  O hands that broke and hands that bled,

  O mouths that cheered and mouths that pled,

  Gather here, be counted.”

  She finished with a hum that dwindled until it sank into the bones of the floor. The drum stroked twice, lightly, as if the song itself needed a good-night pat.

  Then the woman lifted her face toward the doorway, to Mara, and smiled a smile that felt like the last warm corner of a blanket.

  “You’re far from your burrow, little rabbit,” she said.

  “I—” Mara’s breath snagged. She looked over her shoulder, as if the forest might have followed her into the ruin and could lend her an escape route. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I just—ran.”

  “Running is a holy act,” the woman said lightly, “in a world where what chases you is not holy.”

  She set the drum gently on the floor and folded herself to sit near it, patting the stone beside her. “I am Agna. What are you called?”

  “Mara.” Something in the way this adult asked—soft, with the assumption that Mara’s name was something whole and worth carrying—made it easier to step forward. She still did so cautiously, picking her way around a splintered beam and a circle of roof tiles that had fallen in a perfect ring, like a crown someone had dropped.

  “Your skin,” Mara said slowly. “Your skin is darker than most humans I’ve seen.”

  The woman flashed a smile. “And your skin is fluffier than most Hybrids I have seen.”

  When she reached the clear space, she sat where Agna had indicated. Kimi swept in through a hole in the roof, circled, and perched on a bent iron strut. He let out a scolding chirr as if to remind Mara he was still here and watching the world for her.

  “You sing pretty,” Mara said, surprised at how small her voice sounded in the big room.

  “I sing so I can still hear myself.” Agna smiled without showing teeth. “Pretty follows on after, if it wishes.”

  Mara looked up at the broken mosaic. “Is that Krea?”

  “It was. Once.” Agna tilted her head. “Now it is glass and mortar and a story with a hole in the middle.”

  “Miss Fauna says Krea is the Angel the humans used to pray to when they were sad.”

  “Some did,” Agna said. “Some were told to. Some pretended to and saved their tears for when no one watched.”

  Mara’s ears turned at that: not the shape of a lesson, exactly, but something like the taste of a new word.

  “Do you…do you still pray to Krea?”

  “I sing to everyone and to no one,” Agna said. “To the dead. To the living. To my own rib cage so it remembers how to rise.” She tapped lightly on her sternum, then the drum. “The old words called her the Angel of Mercy. The new words say mercy is a lie. My words—” She lifted her brows. “My words say mercy is sometimes just the quieter name for breathing.”

  Mara pulled her knees up and hugged them. She didn’t pretend to understand what the woman was saying. But it was not the substance of the words themselves that fascinated her. It was the tone – the musical quality to her speech – that pulled at the young Hopla’s heart. Her dress, dusty now, made a soft whisking noise against her fur. She thought of the boys’ faces, one wide with hurt, the other with horror; she thought of Rory’s hand offered forward and the blade she had seen where his fingers were.

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  “I—hurt someone,” she blurted.

  She didn’t know why she said it. In response, Agna waited.

  “I didn’t mean to,” Mara hurried on. “I saw—my bird—that’s Kimi. He thought— I thought—” She stopped, tongue heavy with apology she didn’t quite know how to pitch. “I saw a bad thing where there wasn’t a bad thing.”

  Agna’s eyes lowered to Mara’s paws. “The body remembers what it learned in the dark and in the ground,” she said. “It is often late to meet the new day.”

  “I know the Mandate, though,” Mara said quickly, as if that might counterbalance the clumsy panic. “Archon Ethan told everyone. We have to build a new world. We have to do it with the humans who stayed. We have to be good.” She grimaced at her own words; they sounded like a lesson she was parroting for a recitation. “I want—I mostly want to be good.”

  Agna nodded, as if that was the most reasonable declaration a person could make. “A desire like that is a river with its mouth full of rocks,” she said mildly. “It will find a way, given time.”

  Mara followed the line of broken colored glass above them until the shards arranged themselves into something like a wing tip and then dissolved back into scattered gleam. “Why are you here?” she asked. “Why don’t you come down and join everyone? There’s food and games and school and…and people.”

  “And people,” Agna echoed, sounding like the word was a stitch in her tongue. “I have met a lifetime of people, little Mara. And I have sung for them—for both the ears that wished to listen and the eyes that only watched my lips to make sure they moved correctly. I sang for the people who lived here, once. I sang until they took their last breaths, and their ears turned to dust in the fire that claimed them.”

  “You could sing for us,” Mara said, tipping her head. “At school. Miss Leela would like it. The human children would like it too. Even the adults who make frowny faces would like it after a while.”

  Agna chuckled. “Frowny faces are an audience,” she conceded.

  Mara pressed on, unable to help herself. “And the Mandate says you can stay if you want and help. Or leave if you want and not be hurt. You can choose.” She spread her paws, then folded them quick at the knees. “So. I guess. I’m asking why you chose…this.”

  Agna looked up into the mosaic-hole where the Angel’s eye had been, as if the missing gaze made it easier to think. “Little one,” she said at last, “choice is a door that swings both ways.”

  Mara frowned.

  “The Mandate says I am free to choose to join your New Westerweald.” Agna’s voice stayed kind, but there was a timber under it now, a piece of wood struck true. “If I am free to choose, then I am free to choose not to join it.”

  “But—” Mara’s mouth opened and shut. The words didn’t line up. “But why would you choose not to?”

  Agna’s eyes softened, like she’d watched a child lift a pot too hot and wanted to help but also wanted to let them learn. “Because the path I walked to get here was not paved by your Mandate. It was not laid by your Archon. It was laid by footsteps I cannot un-take.” She folded her hands in her lap. “I was born near here. I was raised on these songs. When the Greycloaks took this city, I sang ‘Glory’ until my throat bled. When the Greycloaks fell, I sang ‘Memory’ until my eyes dried out.”

  She gestured lazily around the hall. “These shards keep my records better than any council scribe. They don’t mind if I sing badly some nights.”

  Mara glanced at the skull she’d nearly stepped on and retracted her paws a little closer under her dress. “Miss Fauna says Kaedmon’s ways were bad,” she said, as if confessing for her teacher. “And that bad people followed him. And that the Lightborn is dead.”

  “The Lightborn is dead,” Agna agreed simply. “Some of the people who lived under his light were bad. Some were worse. Some were ordinary and afraid and did bad things because someone told them the dark would eat them otherwise.”

  “My friends’ parents were killed by humans,” Mara blurted. “Slaughtered. They were doing what Kaedmon told them.”

  Agna did not startle. “Some were killed by hybrids, too,” she said. It was not a correction; it was a hand held out to balance. “Some were killed by their own who saw betrayal around every corner. Blood has many authors. But the song of pain always sounds the same.”

  Mara’s eyes stung. She laid her chin on her knees and peered sideways at Agna. “Are you…afraid of us?”

  Agna considered that the way a baker considers a dough—pressing it inside herself for spring. “I am careful of everyone with weapons who says they come in peace,” she answered. “And I am careful of songs that promise a single harmony for a thousand different throats.”

  “But are you afraid of me?”

  Agna’s smile returned. “You? You are small and you came crying and asking questions. You are not my fear.”

  Mara let out a breath that had been marinating in her lungs. Kimi ruffled his feathers like a shrug.

  “Would you sing again?” Mara asked in a rush, as if the question might fly away if she didn’t net it quick. “A song about—” She flailed. “Not being afraid? Or about being together.” She swallowed.

  Agna nodded as if that was a very good shape of word to hold in the mouth. She lifted the drum again and adjusted the twine on the cracked instrument by her side. When she spoke, she did so to the ruin as much as to Mara, as if the hall itself were a third listener in their circle.

  “This is an old village song,” she said. “Older than Kaedmon’s priests, or so my grandmother told me when she wanted to make the priests scowl. We sing it on the day when we make bread together. We sing it when someone marries. We sing it when someone leaves. We call it the Sharing Hymn.”

  She hummed the first line; the drum answered. And she sang:

  “Bring your bowl and bring your wheat,

  bring the water, salt, and heat,

  bring your hands with all their scars—

  we will knead beneath the stars.

  Bring your grief and bring your straw,

  bring your empty, bring your awe,

  bring the names you cannot say—

  we will bake them into day.

  If your tongue knows other prayers,

  lay them out like summer chairs;

  sit beside me while we rise,

  count our breaths, not all our ties.

  Not one mouth and not one voice;

  hear the many, make your choice.

  Eat the loaf and say its name—

  mercy, freedom, never same.”

  Mara felt something unclench under her ribs. There was an ache to the song that did not insist that ache must stop before meaning could begin. It offered her a corner to sit in and did not ask whether she’d earned the right to warm herself.

  “Again?” she whispered, not trusting her voice to carry the request through the bigness of the room otherwise.

  Agna did not sing it again. Instead, she let the last words hang and die their small death in the dust and then picked up another tune, lighter, as if to show Mara that songs could change clothes without changing their bones. Between lines, she spoke as though they had been speaking all along:

  “You ask why I do not come down,” she said, tapping the drum’s rim. “Because I have a question I want to answer without a hand on my wrist.”

  “What question?” Mara asked.

  “Who am I when no one tells me?” Agna’s gaze flickered to the missing eye of the mosaic, then back. “I want to know what my voice sounds like when it is not asked to sing one song only.”

  Mara thought of Elise’s frown when the boys found them; of the way Rory’s freckled face crumpled with hurt; of Bruce’s big nose and bigger shock; of Kimi’s beak slick with blood. She thought of the Mandate, of its thunder-soft insistence, and of how it had slipped into her dreams and rewritten the part where she had to be afraid all the time.

  “Archon Ethan,” she began, feeling the weight of the title in her mouth, “he wants people to choose. He says—he says we can be together and not all be the same.”

  “He says a true thing, then,” Agna replied. “If it remains true when it is heavier than a song and can no longer be sung without breath.”

  Mara tilted her head. “What does that mean?”

  “It means a promise is light when it is just air,” Agna said gently. “When it becomes road, and school, and tax, and soldiers, and laws, is it still light?” She shrugged one shoulder. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. It is for the ones who live under it to say.”

  Mara pressed her lips together, then let the words out because she couldn’t keep them. “Would you teach me a song?” she asked. “One I can sing that is not like a lesson. One I can sing when I feel…wrong.”

  Agna’s smile this time had teeth in it, bright in the low light. “Ah. There you are. Yes. We will trade, you and I. I will teach you a song that can hold a frightened heart and not spill. And you—” She tipped the drum toward Mara with a mock-gravitas flourish. “You will tell me what your teachers teach you. Old women like me with cracked lips are still hungry for new thoughts.”

  “I can do that,” Mara said, feeling her cheeks lift. “I can try.”

  She leaned forward, and as she did, a new sound folded into the ruin—the quiet scuff of boots against stone.

  Agna’s eyes shot to the doorway. She did not move otherwise. Mara followed the glance and saw a figure filling the hall’s opening, his silhouette cut by the moon behind him. A man, tall, robed in something that looked like a forest turned into cloth. His hair was braided with small feathers and leaves, his beard wild but tended. He held a gnarled, oaken staff in his hand.

  “Mr Malak!”

  The old druid bowed his head to the Hopla child, though he kept his eyes trained on the figure sitting crouched beside her.

  “I’m sorry, I – I have been away from school too long. I’m sorry if I made you worry.”

  Mara’s stutters died in her throat as she saw the serious look on Malak’s face. He had his eyes fixed on Agna, and she, in turn, stared right back at him.

  “It is not you who I have come for, child.”