He told Wrenna first, because he had promised her honesty the night before and found, in the grey light of morning, that keeping a promise like that got harder rather than easier the longer he let a piece of the truth sit unspoken in his own chest. She had come to check on him at first light, still in her sleeping clothes, her hair loose and uncombed in a way she rarely allowed anyone but him to see, and she'd taken one look at his face before he'd said a single word and gone very still.
"Something happened last night," she said. "After I left."
"I said something," Corren told her, and heard how strange the sentence sounded even as he built it. "Not a word I know. Not any language I've ever studied, corrected, forgotten, anything. I was trying to remember my own first words, from before, from the life before this one, and instead of remembering them I said something else instead. Three sounds. I can't repeat them now. I've tried. They're gone the way a dream goes, present enough to know you had it and completely unavailable the moment you try to actually hold it."
Wrenna sat down slowly on the edge of the bed, and Corren watched her do the thing she always did when frightened news arrived, which was to reach immediately for the practical shape of the problem rather than the feeling of it, a habit he suspected she'd built over years of managing a household that couldn't afford her feelings getting in the way of the actual work. "Did it hurt you," she asked. "Whatever it was. Did it leave you weaker, the way the chant drain does."
"No," he said, considering it honestly. "If anything I feel more awake this morning than I have in days. That's the part that frightens me more than the sound itself did, if I'm honest. I keep expecting to feel like something was taken from me. I don't. I feel like something knocked, very briefly, on a door I didn't know I had, and then left again before I could get to it."
"The candle," Wrenna said. "You said it guttered."
"Nearly went out. No draft in the room. I checked the window myself, twice, after, once I trusted my hands enough to hold a candle without dropping it." He met her eyes. "I don't think I imagined any of it, Wrenna. I want to, badly. I don't think I get to."
Wrenna was quiet a moment, her hand finding his over the blanket the way it had the night before, and when she spoke again her voice had dropped into the same plain, unmanaged register she'd used telling him she was tired of watching him be strong for everyone else. "Then we tell Voss and Elandrie this morning, before the day gets its hooks into either of us and makes it easier to put off. I know you'd rather sit with it a while first, turn it over in private the way you turn everything over before you're willing to hand it to anyone else. I'm asking you not to, this once. Whatever's knocking on that door of yours, I don't think it's the kind of thing that gets smaller for being carried alone."
They found Voss and Elandrie in the small library again, the same table, the same scarred surface, though the three books from the previous evening had multiplied overnight into a small unsteady tower stacked at Voss's elbow, and Elandrie herself looked as though she hadn't slept at all, her composure held together this morning by something closer to sheer will than to any actual rest behind it. She looked up when Corren and Wrenna entered, and something in her face read the shape of the news before either of them had said a word, the particular skill of a woman who had spent a lifetime learning to read her own father's moods before he'd finished walking through a doorway.
"Something else happened," she said. Not a question.
Corren told them both, plainly, the way he'd told Wrenna, watching Voss's careful scholarly stillness deepen with every sentence into something that looked, by the end of it, almost like recognition, an expression Corren had learned over three months to distrust precisely because it meant Voss had found the shape of an idea he wasn't yet ready to say out loud.
"Say it," Elandrie told him, echoing, deliberately or not, the exact demand she'd made of him the previous night in this same room. "Whatever you're currently deciding whether to frighten me with, Voss, say it now. I've had considerably worse mornings than the one you're about to give me."
Voss set down the book he'd been holding and folded his hands together on the table in the particular way he did when he wanted his own next words to arrive slowly, deliberately, without the momentum of an unguarded reaction carrying them anywhere he hadn't intended. "The old scholar I trained under," he said, "the one whose private collection I keep drawing from, used a phrase I hadn't thought about in years until this morning, sitting with the almanac again. He called it a soul's first grammar. Not a language exactly, he was always careful to say, not a tongue you could study the way you'd study Persian or Latin. A shape a soul makes when it first arrives in a body, before it has learned anything at all, before it has any words to borrow from the world around it yet. He believed every soul carries one, whether it ever gets used again after that first moment or not, the way a hand carries the shape of a fist even in the years it never once needs to close into one." He looked at Corren directly, and Corren saw, for the second time since he'd known the man, something that looked uncomfortably close to fear sitting behind Voss's careful composure. "I think what came out of you last night may have been exactly that. Not a language you forgot. A shape you were never meant to consciously produce again after the very first time, surfacing because something asked you, directly and specifically, to reach for it."