[Issue 2026.77]

“A Word, and Its Keeping”, Gwendolyn Hicks

Art © 2026 Leyelle M.G.

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Once, very long ago, the gods whispered sacred Words, and from these Words came the world. High in the hills at the edge of the Akshu Province, there was a temple. The herders and growers would make their way to this place to greet their gods each season, and leave them tributes decadent and humble, that they may be moved to speak the words for rain, or snow, or sunlight. The climb was steep, and the pilgrimage was three days’ journey, but from the temple one could see all the land laid out like a plate, pale and beautiful, crowned by a sky blue as Taranisian cobalt—for some, this was blessing enough.

From the valley of Kei’t there was a girl. Wild-hearted and strong, she fell in love with Mwepesi, the seventh of the god-brothers, who first spoke the Word for wind. Mwepesi’s beauty was cutting, and mortals amused him—but he was fickle. To him, the small heart of a mortal girl meant nothing: her short life would hardly pass as a glimpse for a being as infinite as he. Still when the time of leaving was upon our makers, and they visited their children for the last time, the girl made her way to the temple and begged Mwepesi to bless her with the Word for wind, so that her family’s fields could dance in it forevermore, so that their seeds could be scattered each season and their crops could flourish far and wide. Mwepesi considered the girl’s entreaty. Her boldness touched him, in its way, and he could sense her love for the land that he and his siblings had made. But when the time came, he could not bear to yoke the wind to a mortal. He took the Word away with him—setting his companion free, untamed, uncalled. To this day it still chases him at the harvest’s end, searching, yearning. Without a keeper. And without a cage.

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The storm would make landfall within an hour, but there would be no rain. That simply didn’t happen anymore. As Karga walked across the coastal hills, sore and parched, she watched the dark knot of clouds taking shape due east of Daia. It looked deceptively motionless, stranded in the distance, but the shadows that it cast on the ocean slid swiftly forwards, darkening the white-capped waves to the color of iron. It certainly had the look of a rainstorm, but Karga knew better. She and everybody else on Braathu had known better for nearly a year.

Karga was hungry. She had been walking for ten days. She had left her valley with nothing to her name but her body and her prayers—crept out of her uncle’s house by starlight and told no one where she planned to go. This far out, there were only hills and scattered scrub, miles of dry grass shimmering in the wind. She had passed a herd of cows that morning, the last sign of the farmlands; they had been gathered under the shade of an oak tree, haunch to haunch, waiting for the afternoon to end. It had been all too tempting to join them, but Karga had taken one look at the oak’s roots jutting out of the cracked earth and walked on: one step and then the next, and the next, and the next. She hoped that the Word-Keeper would have food.

It stood to reason that the Word-Keeper needed to eat to survive, Karga thought. After all, every living thing did—the gulls, the beetles, the goats and the crows—and stories aside, Karga was reasonably sure that the Word-Keeper was a living thing. Still, it was hard for her to imagine what food one could turn up in a place like this. Crabgrass porridge, maybe. Gopher. She supposed she would learn the answer soon enough.

The night before, she had caught sight of the lighthouse. The fog had concealed its approaching shape during the day, but once the sun had gone down she’d begun to make out a light blooming in the dark, northwesterly. Now it was in full view, a crooked white shape jutting up from the land like an exposed bone. There was a lone cypress tree beside it, shaped by the wind so that it seemed to be reaching toward the sea—toward the distant, hazy shape of their sister island, Daia; toward the ungiving storm.

Karga spat the taste of dust from her mouth. Her waterskin was nearly empty—but this, at least, she was used to.

She picked her way through the coastal sage and chaparral until she arrived at the edge of a thin dirt pathway, which ended at a marlstone altar some thirty feet from the lighthouse. As Karga passed the altar, she stopped mid-step. It was piled high with objects—silver cups and bolts of silk; woven baskets, ornamental vases; bronze jewelry, withered flowers, rotten stonefruit. They spilled onto the ground in excess, untouched.

Karga’s gut twisted. Those offerings accounted for six villages, at least. She had brought no tribute of her own; it had seemed pointless, knowing what she planned to ask for. Not the finest honey or the freshest goat milk or even her grandmother’s abalone bracelet could measure up to that. Even now, her humbler self entreated her to turn back, to put her faith in her makers, as she had been taught—but she had come this far, hadn’t she?

She marched the rest of the way to the lighthouse’s front door, tense as a hare. She used her walking stick to knock, and when there was no answer, she leaned the stick against the wall so that she could turn the knob and step inside.

There was no one there that she could see. She looked around the room. It was dim at the ending of the day, and all of the curtains were drawn. To the left there was a little brick kitchen, its countertops stacked with unwashed wooden bowls, and a stove with a cauldron and a kettle on top. To the right was a small bed, unmade: a strip of golden light slid in under the hem of the curtain and grazed the wrinkled sheets. There was no ceiling, so Karga could see all the way up to a platform where the light was kept. The air was dense with the smell of lamp oil.

Uncertainly, Karga cleared her throat.

“Who’s there?” called a voice from above. It sounded cobwebbed around the edges, like it hadn’t been used in years.

“Hello,” Karga called back. It felt better than giving her name.

She heard a clanging sound, then a series of quick thuds, descending. She craned her neck to see a figure making its way down the white stone spiral staircase that jutted out from the wall.

The figure stopped over the last stair. It was a girl, perhaps equal to Karga in age—a few summers past twenty, no more. Her hair was black and coily, in numerous braids, tied behind her back. Her skin was the color of good earth. She had a soft, round, timeless sort of face, dotted with moles. She was not smiling.

“You came into my house,” she said. “Without asking.”

Karga licked her dry lips, terrified and awestruck all at once. Her hand was sweating. She struggled to unstick a sound from her mouth.

“Do you know who I am?” the girl asked.

“The—” Karga’s voice returned to her, and her sense with it. She bowed her head. “The sight of you humbles me, Word-Keeper.”

The girl’s thick eyebrows drew closer together. She glanced up and down Karga’s lanky frame. Her garments were patterned in a dull blue Braathish houndstooth.

“You’re an inlander,” she said at last.

Karga nodded. Her freckled skin and barley-pale hair gave her away, no doubt. “From Kei’t.”

“Goat-herders. Yes. Not many of you left, or so I hear. You’re a long way from home. How did you find this place?”

“Stories,” mumbled Karga, feeling foolish.

“You shouldn’t put much stock in those.” The girl finally took the last stair, but her right hand stayed upon the wall. “Who sent you?”

“No one.” This was the truth. Karga’s uncle would be horrified if he knew just where she had gone.

“What do you want?”

What Karga truly wanted was to set down her pack and walking stick. Their weight had begun to assert itself all up and down her body, in a dozen trembling muscles. Even so, she expected that this answer might see her turned away—and so she kept standing.

“For you to say the Word,” she said.

The Word-Keeper stared at her. There were bags under her dark eyes, which lent that stare an immense gravity. Her face betrayed nothing, but Karga saw the way her fingers pressed against the stone wall at her side.

“Oh, that.” She turned her head away, toward the window, so that Karga could not see her expression. “I might have known no one would knock on that door for the pleasure of my company.”

Anger throbbed swiftly in Karga’s chest. She struck the base of her walking stick against the floor, then spoke the words that she had practiced in the valley so many mornings ago. She had carried them with her, hill by hill, here, to the rim of Braathu—reciting them to herself between breaths, a spell against terror.

“I,” she said, “am called Karga. I come to you on behalf of the herders and growers of Kei’t, and urge you to invoke the Word, that the rains will return to our lands, where they have not fallen for eight seasons. Do you deny me, Word-Keeper?”

She was winded at the end of it, having forgotten to breathe between sentences—if she were out with the goats, she would do it over, enunciate more clearly, but the mercy of practice was now past. She clamped her mouth shut, tried to even her breathing. The silence was crushing.

The Word-Keeper breathed in, slowly, and then back out again—closed her eyes, as if in deep thought.

Finally she said, “Do you know I’ve got a name, just as you do?”

Karga stared as she tipped her head back, gazing up to the lantern room as if to address some listening ghost.

“Before they gave me a Word to keep, I was called Rode.” She uttered the syllables with an accent not like Karga had ever heard, a fluttering consonant and two arched vowels, rho-dthay. “Is that not strange? It’s a kind of desert flower, from the mainland. The moment that it rains, the fragile roots are smothered, and it drowns. Do you think my mother knew all along what would become of me?”

Karga hardly cared about the Word-Keeper’s name, but she knew better than to say so. Her heart was folding itself into smaller and smaller pieces, and within a moment or two more she was sure there would be nothing left. If the Word-Keeper could see that, she made no indication of any sympathy.

“Rode,” Karga said, feeling, somehow, more helpless than she had speaking her sacred title. “Do you deny me?”

Rode’s eyebrows arched, and her eyes shone faintly, as if she were hearing herself in her name for the first time.

She gave a tiny nod, the corners of her mouth moving downwards, and said, “Forgive me, but I do. I do deny you.”

The weight of the answer felt to Karga like the weight of a corpse dropped on her back, almost buckling her knees. Her mouth fell open, but she made no sound. She was suddenly very cold. She was shivering. The Word-Keeper didn’t seem to care. She turned to make her way back up the staircase without looking back.

“Go back to your valley, goat-herd. Tell them when you came upon the Word-Keeper, there was nothing you could do. She had already leaped from her tower and killed herself. But take heart, there will be another—”

The words were blurred in Karga’s mind except for killed and self, which at first would not make sense of each other. By the time that they did, the Word-Keeper was already halfway up the staircase. In a flash of instinct Karga flung aside her walking stick and followed, and because her gait was wide from chasing goats and little brothers, she was upon her in only a moment.

“You can’t.” She stumbled over the next stair, legs aching. “The land would die.”

The Word-Keeper tossed a puzzled look over her shoulder, but said nothing. Karga’s arm lashed forward before she could know its want. She halted the Word-Keeper by the sleeve, dragging her back.

“You’ve got to tell it to me!” she shouted. Courage surged within her, foolish and ablaze; she gripped the Word-Keeper’s sleeve until her knuckles blanched. “I will not see my valley go barren! Tell me the Word—I will not leave this place without the Word!”

As the rainless storm met the shoreline, the Word-Keeper looked into Karga, and Karga looked back. She had never seen eyes so dark or so ageless with knowing, eyes that seemed to witness each stitch of her being and identify at once the loosest thread by which to undo them. These were the eyes, Karga thought, that could unmake the world. She wondered how she must look to them—sunburned, dirt-caked, impudent, a nameless stick of a girl with nothing to give or trade. She wondered if she was about to be killed, or cursed, or sent away to Kei’t with spit on her face.

“You ‘will not leave’?” echoed the Word-Keeper in a strange voice. Karga could intuit no danger in it, but no kindness, either. When she did not reply, the Word-Keeper came down one stair. “Suit yourself, if you want it so badly,” she whispered, looking Karga up and down.

When she’d drawn closer, the fabric of her sleeve had slackened in Karga’s hand—her simple, stubborn hand; the only hand that she had ever had—and Karga held onto it still. The Word-Keeper’s skin smelled of palm oil, an assertion of life in the dusty air.

“Are you—” she blurted out. “Do you mock me?”

“Not in the least.”

“For how long?”

At that, the Word-Keeper scoffed and at last tugged her arm free of Karga’s grip. Karga’s hand hovered half-open in the empty space where it had been. She couldn’t help feeling that she’d just had a bluff called, though it hadn’t felt like a bluff when she said it. It had felt like the last thing keeping her alive.

“As long as it takes you,” said the Word-Keeper, “to give me a reason to say it.”

Then she stepped back again—lingered, for a moment, closing her hand over the patch of fabric Karga’s palm had touched—and made her way back up the stairs the way she’d come.

Karga stood there for a moment, breathing hard, until she was gone. She clutched her walking stick tighter. She was still shivering. The low rumble of the ocean, the shifting of dust through light: these were the only sounds that pushed back against the beating of her tiny, folded heart, deprived of words.

---

By the time that Karga finished making camp beside the cypress tree, the empty storm had passed, and the sky was white with stratus clouds. It was clear enough that Karga could still see Daia. Even from such a distance, its greenness was evident, lush as a jewel.

Braathu was just one of the fourteen islands in the Taluy Archipelago—Karga had never visited another—and Daia was at the center, visible from all directions. It was the Daians who had kept the sacred knowledge of the Word since time immemorial; each generation sent their children to the outer isles, where they would live in hidden places as bringers of its blessing. When a clay-trader had come to Kei’t in the spring, Karga had overheard him speaking in low voices with her uncle; he had said that on no other island had he seen the rains so absent. What’s driven Braathu’s Word-Keeper to forsake her? the man had wondered, resting under the shade of a hackberry tree beside her uncle, smoking a thin pipe. Karga’s uncle had been as dry as ever. Pride, like as not.

Many possibilities had crossed Karga’s mind on her long walk from Kei’t. She’d imagined the Word-Keeper dead or ill or lost—incapacitated somehow—blinking at the bottom of a ravine with a broken ankle, like so many goats she’d rescued in the valley. She’d imagined an old man or woman delirious with fever. She’d imagined an empty house, a ransom note. What she hadn’t imagined was Rode. She hadn’t imagined that kind of heartlessness—and yet, when she tried to hate her, the feeling was hollow in her chest.

She kept to her tent for the rest of the evening, resting on her bedroll with the flap tied open. Without the sun’s arc to follow through the overcast sky, she struggled to mark the hours. It was nothing like Kei’t.

Guilt gripped her. She tried to tell herself that her people had gone countless sunsets without the blessing of the Word—near a second year, now, though a generous harvest and some groundwater reserves had lessened the thirst. A handful more would make little difference. Besides, if she succeeded in coaxing the Word out of Rode’s stubborn chest, then her swift return would make less difference still: the rains would find Kei’t before she did. She closed her eyes and tried to picture it: the rich clouds bursting over the valley, the goats hurrying for the trees, her brothers running and laughing—the look on her uncle’s face when he realized what it meant, that she had ventured where none dared to go and fixed things, that she had saved them. The ololuge of the old women—that joyous, trilling burst of sound the Keitish made with tongues and throats in moments broader than speech could accommodate. It was almost too much to bear.

She opened her eyes again to look upon the lighthouse. She wondered what such a structure was doing here at all. They were nowhere near a port, and the cliff face was a sheer drop to the sea, no boulders or shoals to speak of. She couldn’t imagine any ship running aground in a place like this. Braathu’s shores were gentle, its beaches low. She was almost sure the island had not seen a shipwreck in an age.

She shifted to lie down on her stomach, propped up on her elbows under the tent’s eave, and scanned the sea’s expanse for vessels. She saw nothing. Yet, as dusk fell, she could swear that on the distant rim of Daia there was the tiniest glint of light.

---

Through the foggy night, Karga did not sleep at all—playing out conversations and arguments with Rode in her mind; waiting for some foreboding sound or movement, for a body to pitch into the sea. At the first faint note of dawn, she slipped back into the house, opened the curtains, and, for want of something to do with her restless hand, began to clean.

She pulled a broom from the closet and swept the clay floor, watching the dust spiral out with the wind. She filled a basin with a modest amount of groundwater from the pump outside—staring at it in jealous wonder as it flowed, clear and clean, and slurping up the smallest taste from her palm—and washed the plates and bowls slowly with a block of lye soap, her thumb red against the rim.

Late morning settled. The fog began to burn off. The right side of the room still was not clean, and Karga was not given to resting, so she wiped her soap-raw hand on her trousers and moved on to the next task. The bed was still unmade—Rode seemed not to have slept in it—and a scattering of objects were strewn on the floor beside it, as if they’d been knocked from the adjacent table in a fit of pique and not picked up again. Karga knelt down to examine them: a little wooden carving of an animal she did not recognize; a conch shell, paled by time; and a strange coin, which she bit. She put them back upon the table, one by one, and then sat and looked at them a while.

“You wake early.”

Karga flinched and looked up. Rode was squinting down at her from halfway up the staircase, huddled in a gray wool blanket, as if trying to decide what to do about an itinerant mouse. She was aglow in a slanting block of sunlight.

“And,” she said with a yawn, “you are still here.”

Karga swallowed a retort: Where would I have gone?

As Rode shambled down the remaining stairs, Karga tucked her hand under her knee, strangely ashamed of having been caught touching her belongings. Rode made her way over to the table by the western window, her back turned to Karga.

“You know, if you hold it up to your ear, you can hear the sea,” she said. She nodded slightly to the conch on the windowsill. “I brought that from home. It was my treasure. My grandmother used to say that if you listen very carefully, you will hear something true. When I was a child, I would do it all the time.”

She surveyed the rest of the room, all the areas that Karga had cleaned up. When she was through, she scoffed, as if Karga had done something very strange. Karga’s stomach twisted with a growing panic. Uncertain of whether or not it would be disrespectful to stand, she remained on her knees.

“Not the cunning sort, are you?” Rode asked without facing her. “Why bother with my housework? Wouldn’t it have been quicker to just kiss my feet and beg?”

Karga flushed and ducked her head, swallowing more words, more arguments. Rode paced the room, continuing to look over Karga’s handiwork appraisingly; when she turned enough that Karga could glimpse her face, her unsmiling expression was difficult to look at.

“Believers have always brought tributes to the Word-Keeper. But you know that, don’t you? Strangers leaving bread at my door, and fruit, and linen—hoping for their fields to be blessed, for their rivers to run high. I don’t want for much in this place.”

Karga thought back to the overburdened altar outside and held back one last remark: It seems like you don’t even want what you have.

“This is your finest tribute, then?”

Karga chewed her lip. Calling it a tribute felt disingenuous; this was simply what her people had taught her. The burden of one is the burden of all. When her father had died—years before the drought, born with a failing heart—their house had been filled at all hours with some visitor or another, someone to cook or labor or listen.

She glanced at Rode unsurely. The note in her deep voice was not scorn but sounded almost like jealousy. “Yes,” she said at last with a nod, eyes still fixed on her knees. Her voice felt bruised. “It is.”

Rode’s laugh was harsh. “You’ve truly brought me nothing else?”

“I’ve brought you all that I have.” At Rode’s silence, she pinched her trousers, rubbing the fabric together. “My body. My work. For the Word, I’ll do whatever you ask of me, whatever you desire. For…”

She cast her memory back to a sun-blanched afternoon on the Akshu Trading Road, her father speaking congenially with a northerner who bore baskets of pine nuts; she had studied his bartering, even as a child, gripping the rope leashing a nanny’s neck in one sweaty hand.

“For a month.” And she held up a finger, as she’d seen him do. “One month. My people can spare no longer. Cooking, cleaning, washing—any repairs you might have—I’ll do it.”

“And if after a month,” Rode said, “I still won’t say it?”

Finally, Karga looked up at her. She was suddenly astonished by the soft shape of Rode’s body. On the night she had left the valley, she had glanced just for a moment at her uncle’s paring knife on the table, small and clean. She had opened her fingers, and at once her throat had burned as if with bile—and so she had closed them again and hurried out into the dark, bladeless.

“Then I’ll ask you why,” she said. “And I’ll ask again and again until you answer.”

“Because you are owed an answer?”

“Because we all are.”

Without rain, Kei’t would lie fallow. Those still holding on to the land would pack up what precious few things they owned and leave it behind forever, and they would grieve, but they would live. Their roots could grow strong again, with time. They would find other islands. Other valleys.

But Karga could never belong to another.

“Do you deny me?” she asked again, barrenly helpless on the clean floor.

Rode gazed back at her with an expression on her face that Karga had not yet seen. Her eyebrows furrowed, making a small crease in her forehead; her eyes seemed to deepen, as if a veil had been pulled back to reveal a dark and endless room.

“I do not deny you, Karga,” she whispered.

Karga, all her limbs suffused with a peculiar, delicate warmth, opened her mouth to whisper something back—but she didn’t know what—but she was interrupted by a sudden violent growl from her empty stomach.

She slapped her hand over her middle, wide-eyed. She’d gotten so wrapped up in cleaning, and arguing besides, that she’d forgotten to eat. The imminent likelihood of Rode pointing out her hunger—yet another weakness to be lorded over her—was mortifying.

But Rode only stepped past her and went toward the windowsill. From a basket, she produced a loaf of dense brown bread—acorn, by the look of it—and tore off a piece in awkward silence. Karga expected her to eat it, perhaps to mock her—but she turned around and held it out to Karga with one hand.

Karga’s stomach rumbled like a sack filled with stones, aching in the empty places. She snatched the piece of bread and crammed it into her mouth. It was tasteless.

She started, suddenly, to cry.

Rode stood beside her as she ate, revealing and demanding nothing. The remnants of their argument were crumbling until they were too small to notice or recall, and in the silence Karga was overcome by weariness. The ocean wind pushed the door where she had left it ajar while sweeping. She could hear seagulls outside.

“An offering from four days past,” said Rode. “It isn’t very good.”

But Karga shook her head, hot tears still spilling from her eyes. When had her body made so many? How did it still have so much water to give?

She wiped her nose with her inner wrist and glanced at Rode, cautiously. Her countenance was so much gentler, as if a different girl had slipped into the room to take her place. Karga’s arm twinged. All of a sudden, she wanted to hug her.

But that was foolish.

She pushed the last piece into her mouth and said, thickly, “It’s delicious. Thank you.”

Rode looked around the house, her gaze sweeping across the surfaces and corners that Karga had rearranged and left clear. The quilt. The shell. She was quiet. Karga scrubbed the last of her tears from her face, trying to collect herself.

After that, the afternoon wore on, and the two of them spoke little across the hours. Karga tried to make herself useful brushing cobwebs from the corners of the ceiling and sweeping the stairs, though Rode would only let her climb them so high. The wooden window shutters needed washing, too, and what might once have been a garden on the lighthouse’s southern side was thick with weeds. There would be plenty for her to do, and a bale of days in which to do it.

---

Four days passed. Karga patched a crack in the wall by the bed to keep out the wind. She pulled the weeds from the plot outside. Rode rarely showed her face; she kept to herself upstairs, where Karga was not permitted to go. They ate acorns and wild plums and sometimes fish; on two mornings Rode walked alone down to the beach to catch perch. The nights were balmy for a stretch, and Karga slept comfortably in her tent.

On the fifth morning, she woke early as usual and was surprised to find that Rode had, too: she was at the door, pinning a shawl under her chin, with a basket hanging from her arm. She asked Karga, blunt in a way that was almost self-conscious, if she would like to come with her to pick samphire. Karga’s stomach was light and sour with a just-waking hunger. She did not know what samphire was. She agreed.

All the world was still and pale, shrouded in fog, and Karga stuck her tongue out as they walked, relishing the mist. She breathed in the salt smell of the sea, the sagebrush, the dry grass.

“Your arm,” Rode said when they reached the bluffs, and nodded to Karga’s right shoulder. “You’ve only the one.”

It was the first word she’d spoken since they’d left the lighthouse. Karga had learned from the time she was young that folks outside of Kei’t almost unilaterally felt compelled to comment on her amelia, more often than not with a galling amount of entitlement, but Rode’s tone was conversational, as if she were observing Karga’s freckles or her height.

“I haven’t missed the other,” Karga said comfortably. “I was born without it. My father was clever, he built me tools to work the land, tend to the house, milk the nannys. He would have been clever enough to get the Word out of you, my pa. You’d have sent him home with a pot of honey.”

Rode’s black brows furrowed. It seemed she was not familiar with the expression.

“Only the luckiest folk have honey in the province,” Karga explained. “No one in my valley has tasted it in years. I might have, once, when I was small, but I’ve forgotten. If you send somebody home with a pot of honey, it’s sort of like—giving them everything they want, and then some.”

Rode nodded. She had pulled her shawl up over her head when they had set out from the lighthouse, and a few coils of hair had fallen loose, fluttering with each step she took. When she veered west toward a trail leading down to the beach, she pinched Karga’s sleeve between her thumb and forefinger and tugged her gently along.

“Tell me more about Kei’t,” she said. “Your valley, your family.”

The trail was thin and steep, but Karga kept her footing. The sound of the ocean was right upon them, and the nearness of the crashing waves made her shiver.

“There… isn’t much to tell. It’s wide and the grass is gold, and the days are hot. Most of the people I knew left last year, when the rains did. The rest of us look after each other, because—well, because that’s what you do. There used to be a river but now it’s just a trail of boulders. The goats are always bickering about something, wandering, grazing—although there aren’t many of them left now. Our herd is small, but I still follow them through the fields every day, dawn to sundown. We trade their milk with northerners for mountain spring water…”

Rode gave her no cause to stop, and so she didn’t—they gathered the samphire, a pearlescent green succulent that Rode said would taste fine steamed, from the narrow spots along the bluffs that the fog kept wet. As they went, Karga let her love for her home spill forth undammed; she told Rode about the sweet grass, the big sky, the lizards on the rocks, the late dusk, the stone fences. And all the while Rode said nothing, her hands caked with wet sand, her motions slow with listening.

They walked back to the lighthouse in the afternoon, windswept. It was only hours later, at the dimming of the sky, that Karga realized she’d not done a single chore.

“Not much to be done,” Rode said when Karga told her. She was steaming the samphire at the stove, her sleeves rolled up past her elbows, her braids tied at the nape of her neck. For the first time since Karga had met her, there was a smile on her face, arresting in its simplicity. “If you’re restless, listen. I will tell you a story.”

---

Long ago, when the world was pink and new, the winsome god Batir fell in love with a mortal man. Batir was the youngest of our makers, and the gentlest, and the Word for rain is his. When he first spoke it, and the rain answered his call, the land rejoiced; from the rain that Batir crafted, life grew in gorgeous excess. So many green things, and so many rivers.

It was Batir’s Daian lover who adored the rain the most. The two of them would meet each day on that beautiful island and amble through the jungles together, hand-in-hand. Batir would speak the Word again and again, calling down the rain from the sky until it drenched them, and they laughed and kissed, and the leaves and the fruits and the flowers grew and ripened around them. For this reason, Daia was always the greenest and loveliest of all the islands, blessed by Batir’s love.

When Batir prepared to leave the world that he and his siblings had created—when the making was done, and there were no tasks left for them—rather than jewels or bounty, he left his lover his most precious gift: the sacred Word. He taught him the shape, the weight, the melody. This is why the Word survives. Generation upon generation, the descendants of Batir’s lover held that Word and passed it to their children. These children became our Word-Keepers.

The language of the gods is long dead—Words lost and discarded or set free. But the Word for rain endures in sound alone, a relic of an ancient love. And the rain recognizes its name to this very day, so that when the Word-Keepers call for it, it still answers, following the sweet sound home.

Karga from the valley, I would ask you something. Have you ever loved someone that much? Enough to give them everything and trust that they would not destroy it?

---

Soon enough, it had been two weeks—slow, unremarkable, the time peppered with hours of weeding or sweeping or washing. After that excursion to pick samphire, Karga rarely saw Rode during the day; this was when she tended to sleep, or so Karga assumed, in the lantern room high above. By twilight she would come sleepily down the stairs and appraise Karga’s handiwork, whether it was a mended pair of trousers or a basket of foraged seaweed. There was a chair at the kitchen table that was uneven; Karga whittled down the legs until they matched. Dirty clothes and linens had accumulated in assorted corners; Karga washed them and hung them out to dry. Each time Rode beheld the fruits of Karga’s labors, she would tilt her head, and her eyes would gleam just slightly in the low light, and she would say, Fair work, Karga. I accept it, and move into the kitchen to fix them a meal.

In Kei’t, meals were always a sociable affair, where even the humblest food was seasoned with hearty conversation; as a consequence, Karga could not conceive of staying silent at supper, and so she didn’t. It helped that she was already bursting with questions for Rode: about the Word, and Daia, and her life, and her memories. Rode was wary of the questions at first, seeming more at ease interrogating Karga, although she did even this with a kind of reluctance, as if embarrassed of wanting to know at all. Still, between bites, Karga encouraged her as best she could, attuned to the Keitish awareness of which paths to follow into the next topic, the coaxing rhythms of listening. There were moments when she nearly forgot the heavy particulars of their arrangement and felt as easy as she would if she were stooped over a pair of bowls with a girl from the valley, trading anecdotes and stifling laughter.

But, each time this would happen, Rode would seem to catch herself, and would go out of her way to remind Karga of what divided them: their bargain and what it meant. It seemed she always had some cynical comment or interrogation tucked away in her pocket, incapable of taking kindness for what it was. Karga wondered who had taught her that.

“Why did your people send you to me?” Rode asked her abruptly on one such night, lowering her spoon. “Surely there were more strategic choices. Someone trained in the ways of force or bartering.”

Karga hid a puzzled smile; there was no one in her peaceful valley who fit that description. Rode seemed to see potential threats everywhere, all hearts and minds rooted however loosely in some manner of transaction.

“They didn’t send me,” she confessed, thumbing the rim of her cup. “They didn’t even know what I planned to do.” Her brow pinched as she remembered the argument with her faithful, frustrating uncle, the anger bursting from her mouth: So you would shrivel up and die, then, if the Word-Keeper willed it? “Their faith in the Word-Keeper was so pure, so worn-in… they trusted there was a reason for the drought. That this was only a test, and that the rains would return when the time was right. We only needed to wait and tend the land and pray.”

“But you,” Rode said unreadably, “had no such faith.”

Karga chewed her lip. She could not meet Rode’s eye, focused instead on a burl in the surface of the table. She weighed her words, separating them out in her mind.

It was difficult to tell an outsider what the drought had done to Kei’t. The land did not know itself without the rain, and so her people had begun not to know it, either. Most had left—gone to other islands or villages closer to the sea. The fields went barren. The creeks ran dry. The prayers were met with silence. When Karga, thirsty and angry, had asked why no one would seek the Word-Keeper and demand an answer, the old folks still left had looked at her with pity. You do not ask for life, little wheat stalk. You wait for it to be given.

“Your will would not have been that we should suffer,” she said at last. “That was what I believed.” Shakily, she drew a breath. “Was I mistaken?”

Rode drew subtly in on herself, almost a flinch. Karga turned her head to gaze out the window, even though night had fallen and it was too dark and foggy to make out much of anything. Not even the light she’d spotted on Daia that first night was visible. She’d found that Rode tended to open up more if she were not looked at when it happened—if she felt something were expected of her, she hid from it as one would from a blade.

“No,” Rode whispered. “I would not have willed a moment’s hardship on your people, Karga. I only thought…” The words were growing softer, almost impossible to hear. “I thought—I thought that if I stopped speaking the Word, then maybe they—” Her voice thickened. “Maybe someone would…”

She did not finish. Karga did not need her to. Comprehension stirred in her mind; she forgot her humility and looked across the table at Rode.

“You—” She faltered, overcome by a mix of disbelief and anger and, between the two, an impossible understanding. “You thought to see if you’d be missed?”

Rode smiled at her, a sad, stilted expression on her dark cheeks, hard for Karga to look at.

“Oh, how foolish would that be?” Her laugh was hollow, without edges. “If that were true, the world would only miss the Word—what worth is the one who says it?”

Then, she rose from the table and began to clear the dishes as if nothing of note had been said. Karga opened her mouth, searching for an argument, a spell for convincing. Her throat was raw, and her head was beginning to ache. She could sense Rode’s heart retreating from her again, locking all its doors and windows up tight against a comprehending wind. And again, she could conjure no offering.

---

Another week unwound itself, and another after that. The month was nearly done. Some days Karga’s homesickness was so potent she felt as if she were bending under it, and some days it was as though she had never lived anywhere else but Rode’s silent lighthouse by the sea, where the hours were thin and the gulls swooped low.

As their time together grew, so too did their camaraderie. Karga began to ask Rode plainer questions and coaxed out plainer answers. “What does it feel like, saying it?” she asked one bright, sun-whitened morning; Rode, arranging blackberries at the table, answered without lifting her head, “Like the sky has opened her hand and let you kiss it.” The details of Rode’s life on Daia, before the lighthouse, before the Word, remained elusive. Most times Karga drew close to something like a childhood, a home, Rode would say that she had to go tend the light, log and measure the tides, search for ships—yet, she paid enough attention to Karga’s life that she began to speak of her brothers by name.

“It must rain every day on Daia,” Karga mused on one occasion, gazing out at the green island while she took the laundry off the line. “Big fat droplets, more than anyone could ever hope for. It must be beautiful.”

Rode, who had been standing in the doorway watching the evening draw in the fog, turned away from Karga to go back inside. Karga could not see her face when she said, lovingly, mournfully: “It is—it was.”

One overcast afternoon, there was a sharp knock at the door. Karga was so engrossed in shucking oysters for her and Rode’s lunch, blanketed by silence and unmeasured day, that the intrusive sound shot straight through her ribs; she gave a start like a skittish goat and nearly dislodged the shell from the makeshift wedge she had carved for this very task a few days prior.

(She had felt glad when it was finished, as if her father’s ingenious love had worked through her; privately, with Rode absent with the light, she had stooped over the completed tool and wept.)

Collecting herself, Karga set aside the shucking knife and went with some disbelief to the door. Apprehension was sparking in her chest as she turned the knob. She half-hoped the noise had only been a passing ghost, but a being altogether more startling greeted her in the untextured daylight.

It was a man.

He was dressed in finely made traveler’s clothes: a jerkin of some animal hide with green ribbon fasteners, and a dark purple mantle that concealed his right arm. His hair was dark, gray-threaded, and windswept, combed back from a sun-reddened face—reddened, Karga suspected, because it did not see the sun often at all. He was an older man, near Karga’s uncle in age; he was chewing some kind of herb, his narrow jaw making rote, decisive movements. When the door was open all the way, he looked Karga up and down appraisingly, then gave her a well-tailored smile that wrinkled the corners of his eyes—though the eyes were shrewd and silver like fish, and did not seem to catch the expression.

“I’ve followed a long trail of rumors and hearsay to find you, Word-Keeper,” he said.

Karga stared. She had forgotten what it was like to speak to anyone except for Rode. She was so preoccupied with reconciling his existence with the doorway that it took her a moment to notice his mistake.

“Oh,” she started to say, “I’m not—”

“Four seasons it’s been since a drop of rain fell on Braathu. Near a year, by the scholars’ system. Yet here you stand, alive and well. Oh, don’t bristle so, I left my tribute, same as any lowly herder or grower.” The man gestured to the altar down the path, where Karga saw a bolt of vermillion satin propped up against the stone. “Here I was expecting you to have gone mad, like the Word-Keeper of my great-great-grandfather’s time—hoarding the rain for, what, near a decade? Shameful display, that was, but she was dealt with.”

He sniffed, looking Karga up and down again. The herb that he was chewing smelled sweet and grassy. He raised his eyebrows.

“On second thought, you look more like an Akshu boy than a Daian god-loved woman. What goes on, then? Is the true keeper of this tower dead, and you just happened to come by a bed and a stove?”

“Karga, is someone there?” Rode called.

Karga’s heart jumped in relief. She craned her neck over her shoulder. Rode had appeared at the foot of the stairs in a clean lavender linen shirt and plain trousers. Karga tried to convey the situation through her eyes alone—her unease, the man’s simmering disdain—and was not sure if she succeeded.

Rode came to stand beside her in the doorway. As she faced the man, her countenance betrayed nothing. He might as well have been a seagull foraging for scraps.

“Ah, there she is,” the man exclaimed, spreading his arms. “The Daian trogon herself. Your beauty—”

“You will address me by the title given to me by our gods,” Rode said, “or you will not address me at all.”

“Of course, Word-Keeper, of course. I forget myself. My name is—”

“I have no need of your name.” Karga almost winced on the man’s behalf. If Rode had spoken to her that way at their first meeting, she may well have turned around and flung herself from the bluffs. “Speak plainly. Why have you come?”

“Straight to the point.” The man was amused. “An admirable quality in Muhria. You’ve a trader’s temperament.”

Subtly, Rode’s nostrils flared. Karga doubted that the man noticed, so absorbed was he in the sound of his own voice.

She knew of Muhria—it was on the mainland, connected to the high court of Taranis like an artery. The finest things were made there, dishes and fabrics and spyglasses. It was said that if a Muhrian dying of thirst were offered a goblet of water or a goblet of wine, he would ask first for the name of the goblets’ maker.

The man laid his left hand over his heart, a gesture common with the mainlanders to prove one’s sincerity. Karga had seen it once or twice before.

“Word-Keeper, I’ve traveled far to furnish you with a proposition. To speak plainly, as you request—I represent a contingent of merchants on the mainland who have taken quite an interest in your Word. To speak even more plainly… we have pooled our resources and would like to pay you for it.”

“Pay for the Word?” Karga exclaimed, and then cringed at her presumptuousness. Neither Rode nor the man seemed offended, only concerned with the other’s face and what advantage its reactions might give them.

“We can make it well worth your while,” the man said to Rode. “You would never want for comfort or luxury again.” He narrowed his eyes, as if glimpsing something in her expression, his smirk widening by an increment. “Had the thought never occurred to you?”

Rode did not hesitate. She put her hand on the door and began to shut it in the man’s face. At the last moment, he lunged forward and wedged a foot in the jamb; and, with a grunt, he forced the door back open, nearly knocking Rode aside—but she kept her balance, straight-spined and defiant. As if she’d known, all along, that the impact would come.

Karga slammed her palm against the side of the door, pushing back with Rode against the man’s strength. Any further and he would be across the threshold, in the lighthouse, in their lighthouse. Karga wouldn’t allow it; she would knock him to the ground before allowing it, and still—

Still, it was the work of a moment. The man needed only to heave himself forward once more and Karga stumbled, her concentration set askew by the glimpse she caught of Rode’s face beside her, the clear-eyed fear which had not been there a moment before. Her arm gave out, bending awkwardly, and Rode cursed, and then the man was inside.

He was inside, and Karga’s heart was in her teeth. She took frantic stock of the room in her mind’s eye, the weapons she might improvise; the ladle the chair the sewing needle. Could she reach them fast enough?

She regained her footing, prepared to scratch at the man’s face if she had to—but he only stood there, deliberate, seething, waiting for her and Rode to right themselves.

“Name your price,” he commanded Rode.

“I haven’t one,” Rode said.

“Don’t be coy.”

“We neither of us have the time for coyness.” Karga was astounded at the evenness of Rode’s voice, its inarguable grace. “The Word cannot be bought. I would die before telling it to you.”

A harsh sound burst from the man’s mouth that Karga realized, belatedly, was laughter or some hateful cousin of it. He threw his hands in the air, as if to cast Rode off into the sea.

“Bought? Bought? What a small word! You could make a fortune, you stupid mule of a woman! The most powerful of kings would throw himself at your feet!”

“I’ve no interest in kings,” Rode said, daring to punctuate it with a laugh of her own. “If they stand or they fall, it makes no difference to me.”

“Treason,” the man scoffed. “You will long for the sight of me when one of the souls you’ve forsaken comes to take the Word from you by the knife, or worse.”

“You forget,” Rode said, “even the sharpest blade could only take what I would give it.”

Her clear and vicious stare could have split the man like lightning through a tree. Were Karga in his place, she doubted she could muster the nerve to go on standing. The man took a single step back, as if he needed a better vantage point from which to believe what he saw. His eyes gleamed with disdain.

When he had flung up his arms, it had opened his cloak, and now Karga could see what hung from his belt. A cold clarity raced through her at the sight of a dagger in a wood sheath, set against his right hip. The blade was as long as Rode’s forearm. The handle was pristine, bronze or some other metal, not worn down from much use.

Karga glanced frantically at Rode, who did not sense her wanting, did not look back. Karga could think of no way to signal the threat to her—but like as not, she had already seen it.

After all, she saw them everywhere. How often Karga had wondered, these strange half-hostage days, what for? She was overcome by a sudden recognition of Rode’s courage; it seemed to fill the room like the blistering heart of a forge, so bright that it could not be looked at comfortably. How could so much courage fit in this lonely place, in the soft edges of that body? How could it not kill her to hold it?

Karga’s blood was drumming in her veins, carrying a little of that wondrous courage to every part of her that it could reach. She stepped in front of Rode to shield her from the man’s line of sight. Her hand shook. She had frightened off her fair share of roving wolves in Kei’t and this could not be so different, though she was without the sling her father had made for her—nevertheless, she looked the man in the eye, gathered her voice in her chest to make whatever wild sounds she could.

What the Muhrian man saw on her face, she could not say—but at the sight of her he only held her gaze for a long, precarious moment and then sneered, shouldered his cloak shut, and waved a gloved hand at the both of them in disgust.

“Wordless hells take you, then,” he cursed Rode. “We shall see just how much it is you’re willing to give, Daian, when your people forsake you.” He shot one last look at Karga, so bitter her tongue curled in her mouth. “Not all of us are like to follow you like a stupid Akshu lamb.”

Rode breathed in, slow and deep. She grazed Karga’s elbow with her hand, and Karga heeded that touch in an instant, light as it was. She stepped aside. Rode came to stand beside her, not ahead, not behind. Her eyes looked just as they did on that first day, when Karga had faced her on the staircase and seen her unmaking in them.

“You were never my people,” Rode said. Her voice was soft. “Get out.”

The man spat at her feet. Then, he left. When he was gone, Karga sank shakily into the chair where she had, years ago, been shucking oysters. A prickling sensation crawled across her hand, her feet, her face. She felt, strangely, like bursting into laughter, but there was no air in her lungs to do it with. She kept glancing at the door, even after Rode silently crossed the room to close and bolt it. Even though she knew, somehow, that the man would not come back.

It was not the same lighthouse that she and Rode had shared that morning. Something was staining the walls now, and Karga did not know how to wipe it clean. She didn’t know how long she sat there, listening to Rode move carefully around the room. Was she straightening up? What was the point? Nothing had been disturbed or moved or broken. The man had not touched a thing. Eventually it began to grow dark, and Rode lit a lamp, and brought it to the table.

“I’m sorry,” Karga thought to say as Rode sat down across from her. She pointed vaguely to the oysters. “They’ll need to be thrown out, I—I’m sorry.”

“Those unshucked may yet survive,” Rode said. She tilted her head until some of her braids slipped past her shoulder, and thoughtfully she ran her hands up and down them one by one. When she was through with it, whatever it was, she folded her hands on the table. Karga stared at her short, even fingernails. “Put them in a basket. I’ll carry them back down to the sea.”

Karga looked up swiftly. One side of Rode’s face was bathed in flamelight, and Karga took in her eyebrow, her sloping cheek her soft, full, unsmiling mouth. She was moved again by the rich soil color of Rode’s skin. It was the color of life.

As the last of her terror cracked away, Karga realized that she had never seen anyone look so beautiful. She would have protected her from anything, although she doubted the favor would be given in kind.

“It’s nearly night,” she said. To her own ears, her voice sounded clumsy. “Don’t go.”

She expected Rode to argue, but Rode gave no sign of it. She unfolded her hands, laying them flat on the wood. She seemed to be gazing through the table, through the floor, far away from Karga again—farther away than Karga could ever follow her.

“At least he spoke plainly,” Rode murmured. “I’ve no patience for cunning.”

Karga reached her own hand across the table, but did not have the courage to touch it to Rode’s. She only laid it down upon the wood beside Rode’s little finger. Rode’s eyes landed on their two hands, side-by-side, and she looked at them for a long time. Eventually she looked up, looked at Karga—right at her. She breathed in, opened her mouth around a word that didn’t come, breathed out. Then in again.

“I don’t wish to rule the world,” she whispered. “Only to love it. Why can’t I love it as you do, Karga? Am I so poorly made? What love can I have for a world when it is the walking-place of men like that? How can it be,” and she let out a brittle laugh, “that this world could send me such men, but also send me you?”

Karga did not know what to say. Her gaze slipped thoughtlessly to Rode’s mouth, its sweet rich slopes, the subtle glimpse of teeth. She ached. After a long moment, perhaps emboldened by Karga’s silence, Rode turned her hand by an increment, and her knuckle met Karga’s in the flickering dark. The touch echoed deeply up Karga’s arm, to her shoulder, her collarbone, her throat and cheeks. There was no thin layer of pretense between them now—the space across the table was open, wide open.

Karga turned her wrist over, slowly, and opened her hand. Rode skimmed her palm with her fingertips, tracing the lines.

“That man offered you riches,” Karga said, working the words over in her mouth like a river to stones. “Power. Freedom.” She closed her eyes, too ashamed to watch Rode touch her. “I offer you nothing.”

Rode did not argue, but neither did she agree. Softly, she bent her middle finger, and moved it up the length of Karga’s, until the touch reached its end. Karga had never in her life been touched like this, like a ship to a shoreline. She couldn’t understand where it came from, how it reached her. She wanted to go home, to dance in the rain. She was like those heavy clouds that Rode would not unbind, aching with the weight of feeling.

“Maybe you offer me everything,” Rode whispered. “A pot of honey, too. How are you to know?”

Her face seemed closer to Karga’s, though Karga didn’t know when they had drawn so close to one another. Her gaze dipped to Karga’s mouth. A small, involuntary noise sprouted from Karga’s throat, brought to life by water and light and heat. Her eyes burned. Her want, her shame, her fear, her love—they burned.

“Will I ever give you a reason, Rode?” Karga asked, made small by doubt. “Or will I only disappoint you, as he did?”

Rode’s mouth went flat and tight, dimpling her right cheek. She withdrew her hand from Karga’s. Again, in the empty space, Karga’s stayed open.

“Let’s bring the oysters home,” Rode said dully and stood up from the table.

Karga followed her down to the wind-lashed beach, holding the lantern for her to see by. Neither of them spoke. There was a storm coming in from the sea, like a bruise on the horizon. It would be there before they knew it.

---

That night, Rode told Karga to vacate her tent and sleep in the lighthouse. She offered her the bed that she seemed to never use, and that Karga always made sure was properly made, its sheets clean and unrumpled. Karga was just slightly too tall for it and had to curl up like a cat to fit, but the mattress was such a welcome change and the pillowcase—which she was almost positive was made of pure Taranisian silk—smelled so pleasantly of cedar oil that she fell asleep within a handful of breaths.

In Rode’s bed, for the first time in many nights, Karga dreamed. All around her the air was wet and green, and broad-leafed plants that she had never seen before towered over her, vibrant in the sunlight, gleaming with huge crystalline droplets of water. From behind a frond came Rode, her naked body dark as the richest life-giving loam, the secret rolls and folds of skin at her hips and back so known to Karga that their bareness did not take her by surprise. Her body was so healthy, so well-loved, that Karga could have wept. Her expression was one of a plain and long-lived peace. She was not angry. She did not grieve. She turned to Karga, framed by the lush plants of the jungle, and reached out her hand. She craned her neck to the sky, closed her eyes, and a Word sprang from her gorgeous mouth.

The Word was

---

The storm was upon them in the morning. Karga stood in the doorway and stared up at it a while—that same iron-dark color it had been on the day of her arrival. She could smell the rain in it, taunted by all the lushness held captive right above her head. She wanted to reach up her hand and scoop it out and drink it.

She worked for a while around the house, trying to sweep out any invisible trace of the man’s intrusion. She had no appetite and couldn’t muster the energy to go foraging for a meal. There were no dishes to wash, no clothes to mend, no sills to dust. She spent the hours of the morning in aimless discontent, first wandering along the bluffs, then crouched at the edge of the cliff overlooking the ocean, craning her neck to the rain clouds and whispering unanswered prayers. Then she went back to the lighthouse, expecting to see Rode up and about, but it was as empty as she had left it. There was no sign that Rode had even come downstairs.

Karga looked up the staircase. She chewed her lip. All these days and she still had not gone upstairs—surely the lantern room needed tidying up, too. If she were truly to earn the Word, she had only a scant few days now in which to do it, and she didn’t want Rode to have any excuse to call her labor lacking. There was an uneasiness gnawing at her, too, a dull fear of what she would find, a parting note, an empty bottle of poison or…

She chewed her lip harder. On the other hand, Rode might punish her for disobeying a rule, although they had never agreed outright that the lantern room was off-limits. When Karga would dare to climb the stairs, Rode would usually meet her halfway with a dirty look and a grumble of I’m awake, I’m awake, and they would go back down together.

Karga’s palm was sweaty. She wiped it on her shirt. If something had happened—if Rode needed help, if she had fallen or was sick… or if, somehow, the Muhrian man had crept back in the night… Karga swallowed, but her throat was dry. She steeled herself. Protecting Rode meant protecting the Word, and she was resolved to do both.

She kept her steps slow. She could hear wooden beams faintly creaking overhead and the sound of wind through an opening. Her thighs were burning by the time she reached the top.

Daylight filled the room through its many paneless windows. A wooden balcony wrapped around the outer walls. In the center of the floor an enormous mirror had been built to reflect the eastern sunlight; a ladder at the north end of the room led, Karga presumed, to the brazier for the flame to be lit at night. It was flanked by stacks of crates labeled with the Braathish rune for fuel.

Karga crept forward, taking care not to make a sound. The view from the seaward side of the tower was wide: endless miles of choppy gray sea, crowned by the distant shapes of a few sister islands with Daia at the center. Karga squinted as she drew closer to a window, trying to make out the light that she had seen that first night in her tent—after a moment, she spotted it, flashing across the waves like a pinhole in the fabric of the world. It was much more visible from up here, even in the darkness of the storm, blade-like in its clarity.

Karga blinked, hard, in an attempt to sharpen her vision, for she was not sure, at first, of what she saw. But no, it was unmistakable. There were small lights on their sister islands, too—so faint at a distance that Karga could make them out clearer from the corner of her eye than head-on, like certain stars. Other lighthouses? But what for?

Before she could make sense of it, there was a movement in her periphery, accompanied by a quiet breath—she almost jumped. She craned her neck around and saw, across the brazier, a small desk pushed up to the opposite window. Rode was sitting there, slumped over.

Quietly, Karga crossed the room to Rode’s side. Rode did not move at her approach, but her back rose and fell in the stormy afternoon shadows. Her left cheek was resting on her arms. She was asleep. She had tied her braids loosely in a knot and a few of them had slipped free of the arrangement and were now in repose along the surface of the desk. She was bundled in a blanket that might once have been brightly colored, but was now faded by years, vermillion to an ashen pink. All around her were half-finished drawings of plants, broad-leafed and gigantic. Karga stared at the pages, stunned: they looked just like the plants that she had dreamed about.

Her eyes fell to Rode’s face, which was turned toward her. Even in sleep, it was faintly haunted—there was a tiny indentation between her eyebrows—but it was the most peaceful that Karga had ever seen her. The line of her mouth was slack, her dark lips parted. Drool trickled onto her sleeve.

Karga’s heart swelled almost cruelly. Right then, she felt the impulse within herself to wake her and make her breakfast and watch a day go by together, and she was gutted by such confusion and shame that she might have been sick. What was the matter with her? All their kind days aside, this was the Word-Keeper holding her people hostage; this was Rode, Rode and her evasions and her tender pride, Rode and her mythic Word and her stories without lessons. Rode was her friend, her keeper. Karga knew her and did not know her at all.

Perhaps all of this made itself evident on her face. Perhaps that was why, when Rode stirred, opened her eyes and saw Karga leaning in beside her, she let out a frightened gasp.

“Karga! What—” Rode recoiled, the legs of the chair scraping harshly against the floor. Her eyes darted to Karga’s hand. “Get back!”

Karga’s body obeyed before her mind could recognize the words. She backed away, bare feet stumbling, showing Rode her open palm in a gesture that she hoped came off as a promise rather than an admission of guilt. Rode’s stare was wild and angry; she rose slowly from the chair and kept one hand braced on the back of it. She reached blindly behind her, grasping between the papers on the desk before producing a small, dull-edged knife.

She leveled it at Karga.

“What were you after?” she demanded, her voice breaking. “What have you been after, all this time?”

“I—nothing, I—” Karga stammered, even though it was a lie. “It’s afternoon, and I—I was worried about you…”

“Worried about your Word, more like,” Rode spat. “We neither of us have time for coyness—remember? Show it to me, then. Don’t hide it. Show me your blade.”

“I haven’t got one,” Karga said helplessly. “Is that all you’ve made of me in our time together? Why would I bother with any of it if I could have just cut your throat?” Her voice splintered, growing angrier. “Can you think of nothing else for someone to carry?”

Rode’s teeth were gritted. The blanket she had wrapped herself in so gently was now crumpled on the floor. She ran both hands up her forehead, clutching her temples, her eyes gleaming, about to weep light. Karga had never been looked at like this before. Like she was the only thing in the world worth hating.

“Get out,” Rode said in a low, cruel voice.

Karga’s pulse hammered in her face, in her stomach, all terror and heat. Her eyes filled up with tears. Although she was shaking, she set her jaw and shook her head.

“Leave me!” Rode screamed. “If the light goes out, they’ll send another sorry Keeper! You’ll have your Word within a day!”

“What are you talking about?” Karga asked. She was shaking her head again. She didn’t know why or what it meant. What was she refusing?

The storm had begun to roil outside, a furious wind rattling the window panes. Overhead, the wind howled through the eaves, as if Mwepesi himself had come to shake the lighthouse loose from the world. The clouds were so dark, so heavy with rain, that Karga could smell it in the thickening air, could almost hear them crying out for release. But Rode would not give it to them. She was facing down Karga, terrible and divine, and letting them suffer. Letting all of Braathu suffer, as she had been for months upon months.

“What do you think this place is for, Karga? The light—this wretched light—it’s a signal, don’t you see? They can see it from Daia. They can see it from everywhere! We… every Word-Keeper, on every island… we keep the flame lit to assure our watching teachers that we yet live. If they see that it’s gone out, they’ll know what it means—that the Word-Keeper’s life has reached its end, and a replacement must be sent at once. They’ll curse another child with the Word, tear them from their island and their family, fling them to some godforsaken rock to say it each day until they die.” Rode broke into a laugh, coarse as a sob of agony. The smile on her face was wrong, all wrong. “Like someone else’s prayer. Until their lips go raw. Anyone can do it. If that light went out, you’d have your rain again in three sunsets—you never needed me, whether I live or die is meaningless! Meaningless to them! Meaningless to all the men who chew on greed! Meaningless to you! I might have said it at thirty days’ mark, sent you home, and thrown myself from the cliff right then and there, and you’d have had no reason to even turn your head! No need for you to stay now, is there? Never was! So get out, go home, get out!” Her scream was so loud, so full of self-hatred, that the words were barely whole: “GET OUT!”

She might have struck Karga across the face and it would not have felt so different. Karga longed for something to hold onto, steady herself by, but she was stranded, kept upright by nothing but an inconceivable heartbreak. She tried to make sense of what was happening, and her mind could hardly make the edges meet: Rode would not tell her the Word, Rode had never needed to tell her the Word, maybe never even planned on it, maybe always intended to make a game of Karga for a month and then cut her own throat when she got bored of it, maybe spent each day laughing at her or hating her or not thinking of her one way or the other, not at all, for Karga had never even mattered. Kei’t had never even mattered. Rode was nothing but a lonely, petulant outline—choking back the Word for attention that she didn’t even want—if there was indeed anything, anything at all, that she wanted or cared about. The indignity that Karga had suffered at her hands, the worthlessness of her love, was annihilating; Karga wanted to run and hide, hide her face, hide her heart, take it all back—all that she had given—all that she had felt. Rode had never wanted it. Rode had only ever wanted the power of being needed.

And so Karga did as she was told. She pushed past Rode, raw dry sobs catching in her throat, crossed the room, and stumbled down the stairs. It seemed to take hours to reach the bottom. Her face was burning when she fell against the wall, her shoulder crushed against the stone, wheezing in the empty room. For a long moment she stood wrecked in the home that the two of them had shared, that false place, and then she gathered her wits and began clumsily to clear out her things. They had found little nooks and crannies for themselves, mingling with Rode’s things, which Karga hated so much that she wanted to tear all the walls down bare-handed. She sobbed openly as she pulled her pack from the foot of the bed. She had to wipe her running nose each time she crammed something back into it: socks, hose, salt-box, flint and tinder, her oyster-tool; a little piece of abalone shell, which Rode had tied to a piece of twine for her, and given her to wear. She was moving carelessly. Her elbow knocked into something, sending it to the floor with a clatter.

It was the small collection of objects Rode kept on the windowsill. The carving of the animal, the pale conch shell, the copper coin—all were now scattered over the floor. Karga looked at them hatefully, her breath coming back to her in gulps.

What right did Rode have to love anything, to see any object and think it worth keeping? It was just detritus—just worthless trinkets—and yet…

Karga wiped her nose again. Her hatred began to break off into pieces, duller by the moment. She picked up the carving and put it back in its place. She did the same with the coin. The pane of the window rattled against the storm’s wind, which sounded now more like a plea. Finally, Karga picked up the conch shell. She turned it over in her hand; the aperture was a rich, rosy pink, fading at the lips to milky white. Alone, on her knees, Karga lifted the shell to her ear. She cradled it there and listened.

---

Once there was a Word. The Word lived inside the mouth of a girl who did not want it. She lived alone with the Word, alone on the rim of the world, alone but for the gulls and her sorrow, alone with an heirloom love; each day she woke with the Word and slept with the Word, and sat with its taste and its weight, and though she was hungry and thirsty, she could not take pleasure from food nor drink, not until she spoke the Word, not until its longing unshackled her tongue. When she spoke it there were celebrations and great harvests. Many were the wanters and believers who journeyed to her door, herders and growers, maidens and scholars, and once even a king. They came bearing fruit and fish and many gifts; there were paeans from the verse-makers, and dances and flute music and drums. All of this for the Word. But not for the girl.

The girl longed to dive into the ocean, and set loose the Word in her wake, and swim home to her island. She longed to be no one, to begin again, to know no words at all but the name her mother gave her. But she knew she could not abandon the Word without abandoning the world, for her body and its knowings held it captive, just as the fruit and fish and gifts did, all the tokens left by those for whom her loneliness was something to be worshipped. And so all that she could do was hide herself away, silent, unspeaking, until the silence swallowed any love she had for the world at all, until she decided that if she could not swim, she would drown. For without the Word, which the world so loved, she was nothing.

On the morning that the girl prepared to throw herself from the cliffs, a strange visitor arrived. She was a goatherd from a valley in the Akshu Province. She bore no gifts, no offerings; no bargains or tricks. She was tall and graceless and kind. She opened the door. She asked for the Word. She stayed with the girl for many sunsets, helping her to live: this was what they each of them had decided that the Word was worth. As the days passed, the girl began slowly to find her way back into herself, into the parts of her that had existed long before the Word, into the hidden corners where the goatherd might make a home. She began to dream of setting the Word free. And one fine day…

Come now, Word-Giver. You already know the end.

---

Karga ran up the stairs. She ran without grace or pride, stumbling, hurtling, gasping. She was upon the lantern room before she knew it, blinking her eyes fiercely against the invading wind. She could barely make out the light, near-extinguished as it was, a throbbing orange defiance in the dark.

Rode’s desk had been knocked on its side. Her papers and drawings were long gone, blown away into the night. The storm’s howl was deafening, but when Rode shouted wordlessly through the din, Karga heard it.

One of the crates was pried haphazardly open; Karga stumbled toward it, for the flame needed fuel and the rest could come later. There was ample dried seaweed inside and a hammered tin scoop to gather it in and so Karga began rushing back and forth to heap seaweed onto the struggling flame. The air was hot. Sweat thickened in her hair, streamed down her face and neck. Her arm swiftly began to ache. She moved on sheer instinct, overwhelmed by the need roaring in her blood to keep the flame alive. If it went out—if it went out—

“Karga?!” Rode’s voice rose over the storm, and Karga was compelled to look up: and there, across the brazier, Rode was facing her with disbelieving eyes, messy and frightened and beautiful, the firelight gleaming on her sweat-bright skin. Karga could have crawled through the flames and kissed her. “Damn you,” and there were tears, and her voice was breaking, “damn you, the Word is forfeit, let the flame go out! Let me go!”

“I don’t care about that!” Karga shouted, with all her lungs, all her body, all her soul. “I came here for the Word, but I am staying here for you!”

The wind whipped Rode’s braids across her shining face, her shining eyes, for only a moment. Karga didn’t have time to watch her any longer; she went back to heaping fuel onto the struggling flame. She refused to let it die. The wind would have to throw her out itself.

Suddenly the flame leaped, its body doubling. It was Rode, piling fuel onto it. She was fighting through the storm, too, cursing and crying, keeping the light alive.

The thunder rolled like the bones of an old and angry god. All night the lighthouse fire kept going out, and the two of them had to relight it so many times that Karga’s hand smelled for hours of seaweed, and her whole body ached, her garments soaked through with sweat. In the clear, sun-scrubbed morning that came after, she followed Rode into her bed.

They pulled the old quilt over their heads, small and shivering, bare ankles brushing, and listened for a while to the breathing of the other.

“I release you, Karga,” Rode said, eventually, in a quiet voice. “The rain will follow you home.”

Her palm lay open on the pillow that they shared. Karga ran her fingertip down the span of it, then pressed down, straight into the lifeline. If she concentrated, she could sense a pulse there, or perhaps it was only her own. Through the dark, she looked over Rode’s mouth, her dark lashes, the tiny curls along her hairline. She and Rode each breathed in at once, exhausted and inexhaustibly alive.

---

Karga woke, in tides, to an empty bed.

A cold shard of panic jutted into her heart. She threw off the sheets, calling Rode’s name like a bleating spring kid, and stumbled for the stairs when no answer came. She took them two at a time, rushing into the room where the light was kept.

Rode was outside on the balcony, her hair undone. Countless gulls were circling her, crying out as if in joyous urging. Karga choked back a ruinous sound and ran to her.

“I thought—” She stammered, trying not to cry. “I thought…”

There was a smell gathering upon the earth that took her back to Kei’t in spring. She thought of her uncle laying his weathered hand on the damp soil, whispering encouragement to seeds. She thought of her brothers bobbing corklike in the river, sticking out their tongues to catch new raindrops. She thought, overwhelmingly, of her father, his silhouette suspended over the dewy wild grasses at sunrise, his walking stick—the same that she had walked with here—in one hand, whistling an ancient song to the goats. She thought of the wild anchusa, the thyme and the acanthus, and the valley going green again, bending joyously to the downpour. She thought of running out of the house, barefoot, and dancing in it.

She thought of watching Rode dance in it, too.

Overhead, a herd of dark clouds had come in from the ocean, drawn to Rode as if coaxed by the promise of an apple. The sky was a strange color, dusky, pink—Karga glimpsed a pale thread of lightning, just for an instant. She slowly came to stand beside Rode, craning her neck in wonder. The clouds swirled above their tiny bodies. The smell grew stronger—the heady smell of earth and pine and stone and sea, the cool sweet smell of things about to live again. Little birds were in the air overhead, all of them darting out of the tall grass and the cypress at once to catch a hundred scattering insects.

A long, open note, clear and piercing as light on water, sprang up from Rode’s throat. She tipped back her head and offered it to the sky. She held it longer than Karga had known human breath could carry voice, and then it began to change: first a lowering, a deepening, then an arcing like gullflight. Rode’s song eluded structure, and yet Karga found that her blood followed it before her mind could—there was something deep inside her body that had been taught by that sound, long ago, how to be alive. Goosebumps rushed up her arm, her neck, into her ears. As Rode sang—for it was singing, just as it was speaking—there was a blurring of the distant sky, a veil which seemed to billow closer, and closer, mile by mile.

“Listen,” Rode whispered. Karga tore her eyes away from the glorious storm about to make landfall and turned them to Rode. Unthinking, she took Rode’s hand, tangling their fingers. “I’ll say it as many times as you need, Karga, until you learn it. And you can tell your children, and your children’s children. And they can give it back to the world, as you gave the world back to me.”

Something light and cold and wet struck Karga’s cheek. Then something else, another, another, pinpricks of the sky’s vast love. The rain, the rain, the rain. She held tightly to Rode’s hand.

“We can tell them together,” she said.

In her bare feet, at the edge of the world, Karga closed her eyes to welcome the rain. It spilled from the clouds, streamed down her face, remade her body from the surface inwards—the rain, the rain!—she lifted her and Rode’s joined hands to the sky and began to laugh, jubilant. She stamped her feet and danced and let loose a long, sweet ololuge from her tongue, until the sound transcended her body and she was bursting, infinite, she was the land and she was the gods and she was her ancestors and she was Rode, too—and she spun Rode around, and the rain splashed about their ankles, and the thunder roared above them like the triumphant beating of a heart. Karga knew that, down the long road inland, there would be ololuge in Kei’t, too. There were words for living everywhere.

© 2026 Gwendolyn Hicks

[Issue 2026.77]

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