They sat together a long while after that, the candle burning down toward its final inch, neither of them speaking, both of them turning the same unfinished sentence over in their own separate silence, and it was Elandrie, finally, who rose to leave, pressing a kiss to Corren's forehead with a gentleness that had nothing performed left in it at all, and let herself back out into the corridor to find whatever sleep the rest of the night might still be willing to offer her.
Corren lay alone in the dark a long while after the door clicked shut behind her, the candle guttering low, his own thoughts circling the same unanswered question Elandrie had left him with: the mouth that first cried, the breath given at the beginning. He thought, unbidden, of a hospital room half a world and one entire life away, fluorescent lights and the specific antiseptic smell he hadn't consciously remembered in months, a language he'd once called his first language, before this one, before Persian and Latin and a dozen corrected dead tongues had crowded in on top of it and made it feel, some days, like something he'd read about rather than something he'd lived.
He tried, half asleep, half testing himself the way he tested any grammar he suspected he didn't fully understand yet, to remember the very first word he'd ever spoken in that first life, the mouth that had first cried in whatever hospital room had waited for it, and found, reaching for it, only a strange, formless static where the memory should have been, no word at all, not even a language it might have belonged to.
He opened his mouth in the dark, some instinct he didn't examine closely enough to stop it in time, and a sound came out that wasn't English, and wasn't Persian, and wasn't any of the dozen corrected chant-languages he'd spent three months learning to speak with a scholar's careful precision. It was low, and strange, and entirely unfamiliar even as it left his own throat, three syllables that felt, in the half second after he'd spoken them, less like something he'd said and more like something that had briefly used his voice to say itself, and the candle beside his bed, with no draft in the room to explain it, guttered once, hard, and very nearly went out.
Corren sat bolt upright in the sudden near dark, his heart hammering, his own mouth still faintly tingling with the shape of a sound he had never once studied, never once heard, and could not, try as he did for several long, frightened minutes afterward, remember clearly enough to repeat.
He did not wake Wrenna, asleep down the corridor in her own room for the first night since the attack. He did not send for Voss, or for Elandrie, already gone to whatever restless sleep the rest of the night could offer her. He sat alone in the dark with the candle's low, recovering flame, turning the strange, absent shape of those three syllables over and over in a mind trained for exactly this kind of puzzle and finding, for the first time in longer than he could remember, that the puzzle refused entirely to translate.
Whatever the crown had asked him, standing in that gold and marble hall, it had not, apparently, finished asking.
End of Part Seven, First Half.
There is a particular kind of dread that belongs only to translators, and I do not think I understood it fully until the night I opened my own mouth expecting nothing and produced a sound I could not own. Every language I had ever corrected, every dead root I had ever coaxed back into its proper shape, had at least belonged to somebody, somewhere, some scribe or priest or frightened villager who had once meant something specific by it, even if that meaning had gone crooked with centuries of careless copying.
What came out of me that night belonged to no one I could name. It did not feel foreign the way Persian had once felt foreign, a system I simply hadn't learned yet. It felt closer than that and further away at the same time, the way a word on the tip of your own tongue feels closer than a stranger's whole vocabulary and still refuses, infuriatingly, to arrive. I have spent a great deal of my life being the person in the room who can tell you what something means. That night I learned what it costs to be, for once, the only person in the room who cannot.
Corren sat with the candle a long while after it stopped guttering, watching the flame settle back into its ordinary, unbothered shape, as though it hadn't very nearly gone out over nothing at all, as though the room hadn't briefly held something in it that wasn't him and wasn't Elandrie's ghosts either. He tried the three syllables again, once, deliberately this time, his mouth shaping the memory of the shape rather than the sound itself, and produced only silence, an ordinary human throat failing to reproduce something it had never actually agreed to learn in the first place. He tried a second time and got the same nothing.
By the third attempt he had begun to suspect, with a coldness that had nothing to do with the hour, that the syllables hadn't been his to keep. That whatever had used his voice to say them had borrowed it the way a man borrows a coat he has no intention of returning in the same condition he found it, and had given it back to him afterward exactly as empty as it had been before, only now with the specific, unbearable knowledge that something had been in there at all.
He did not sleep. He lay back against the pillows and stared at the pale gold canopy Wrenna had teased him about that first disoriented afternoon, and turned the whole of it over with the same patient, methodical attention he gave any grammar he suspected he hadn't fully diagrammed yet: subject, verb, the shape of a sentence he could feel the edges of without once being able to read the words inside it.
He thought of Elandrie's crypt fragments, the mouth that first cried, the breath given at the beginning, and he thought, with a specific ache he hadn't let himself feel clearly until this exact quiet hour, of a delivery room he could no longer picture with any real confidence, fluorescent light and antiseptic and a first cry that belonged, by every account his own memory could still offer him, to a man named Kael Richards who had died of something ordinary and stupid decades and an entire world away from this bed.
He did not know anymore, lying there in the dark, whether the crown had been asking after that cry, or after Corren Ashvale's, the one that had actually happened in this world, in this body, to two frightened young parents in a hunting lodge that later became a villa. He did not know which cry, if either, his own throat still remembered how to answer with. That, he suspected, turning it over one final time before something like exhaustion finally pulled him under, was very possibly the entire and precise shape of the question he had failed.