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Chapter 1
Chapter I — Cisterns of Dust
At noon the streets of Arasin rippled like a kiln. The copper mouths of fountains wore collars of coins, greened and brittle with the last wishes of a thirsting city. Children played in cisterns of dust and traced rivers with their fingers, lifting ashes to make clouds. Shopkeepers scowled and set out bowls for the sky, and when no rain came, they turned them upside down with the weary care of extinguishing a candle.
Beneath all this, something vast breathed.
Ilyra felt it when she leaned against the old scriptorium wall, the stone warm under her ear—not breath, not truly, but a pulse slow as continent time, a drum-beat of a heart that remembered the sea. She closed her eyes and heard water as it had been: the lap of barges against pilings, the slosh of amphorae, her mother’s laughter cutting through spray like a bright oar. Then the heat knifed back, the riverbed a cracked tongue, the barges bone-dry.
She had failed her Offering last spring, when the river first forgot its name. She had stood with the Watersingers on the Steps of Oaths and lifted her voice with theirs—old consonants, vowels rounded like moon-bowls—and her voice had split on the high note, a stone thrown through a thin window. The song had gone on without her, braided and fine, and the river had sunk an inch.
“Dreaming again?” a child asked, sticky with figs, peering at her. Ilyra smiled and flicked the dust from his hair.
“Listening,” she said, though listening had become a kind of penance. Everyone knew what lay under Arasin. It was taught with your letters: the city’s foundation stone was a shell older than kings. Korr, the city’s guardian, had swum to this valley when the world was a cradle, and settled with his heavy patience and let people build temples on his back. In exchange the Watersingers had sung the Oath that kept his sleep deep and the waters round.
Now the Oath was a dry bell.
When the bell in the Night Market tolled to call off midday, Ilyra turned toward the Silent Well. If anyone could hear what she heard, it would be the one who kept vigil over the well’s throat: an old man who had been singing to water longer than Ilyra had been alive.
