Zitqín Yáng was a songweaver, or possibly a threadsinger; translating was a challenge, both because she didn’t speak a word of any Alqari language and because she would only speak Tagata with Hitz and Tayir. She wasn’t from there, and she also spoke middling Kando with a half-dozen of the more scholarly Kibosh types and also Kelly, but she was from much farther away than that.

She was also an unbelievably talented musician, on an instrument that nobody other than her had ever played on Shemmai soil, and it showed no matter how much she downplayed it.

From the very first ringing, soaring sound of that first strike on the strings, she was the centerpiece of the band. Slow or fast, loud or soft, it didn’t matter; even when she wasn’t playing, the absence of her instrument defined the conceptual space of the song.

The warmup number was about a minute and a half long. She started with an expression that was more eager than anything else, transitioning into serene and then blissful as she started to get into it. By the time the song was over she was dancing in her circle of strings as she kept four hammers in the air and played with two of them, and everyone else was in the same zone.

Even Hitz was dancing, albeit just with their upper body as they swayed to the beat and picked up the pace on the drums.

It was… eerie. If I’d had to describe it in terms of instruments that I was familiar with, I’d have said something along the lines of Safra being a symphony’s worth of woodwinds and Hitz playing a set of timpani with an accompanying couple of drums—the big ones someone might play shirtless, standing up and ideally with sweat trickling down from her shoulder muscles to soak into her breastband. Muscles in her thighs bunching as she moved explosively from stillness to striking the head of the drum and then back to stillness, body alternating between readiness and a pure expression of physicality?

This time, instead of those drums, that was the hammered threadsong. Zitqín Yáng, Zing for short, was driving me to distraction and digression, because holy shit—once she’d dramatically thrown off her jacket, it was clear she had a physique rivaling Ketka’s.

Also, one of her spinning hammer tosses had caught the jacket in its arms and carried it onto what were probably invisibly-tiny pegs on the strings behind her, where they’d stayed even as her hammers rebounded upwards and returned to her hands in an overhead arc. That was how I learned that, along with being able to play in harmony with itself via overtones and being able to hit notes low and high by pinning a string with the head of the hammer while you struck above or below it, you could also mute it with a cloth like it was a brass-mute.

Ellana’s fiddle wailed in between two- and three-part harmony, providing a low plucked note for every beat in which her bow flowed among the strings. Kan’s bells rang and chimed, and the pipes droned beneath it all as a sort of foundation and contrast at the same time.

And through it all, Zing danced and played a mind-shatteringly beautiful, impossibly complex melody and multi-part, polyrhythmic counterpoint. It meshed perfectly with everyone else’s music, elevating it and endorsing it rather than supplanting it, much as Tamaya’s voice had done with mine and Tizpa’s, but it wasn’t enough to avoid being the absolute center of attention… until she slowed down, coming to an absolute physical stillness.

The music slowed with her. It was no longer a rolling thunder of sound that swept me up and away, a howling melody that burned in my heart and drove all thought out of my head. Now it was something still somewhat harsh and jagged, but it strolled instead of gamboling, Safra’s multi-oboe-clarinet-horn and Ellana’s spike fiddle taking center stage while Hitz sat and switched to softer, simpler rhythms.

Eight seconds or so after the switchover stabilized—there was a sort of hitch, a half-bobble, but they recovered—James and Meredith Morei strolled out into the center of the open space, arm in arm. They were dressed in stark simplicity that nonetheless spoke of an utter perfection of craft, severe clothes in complementary monochromes of blues and grays. There didn’t seem to be an inch of loose fabric on either of them, but when they pressed their palms together and stepped first towards and then away from each other, they somehow had their full range of motion without causing a single crease.

Also, the sheer intensity and joy of their locked gaze was almost palpable as they paused for a full musical phrase, grinning like… not like newlyweds, like a married couple who’d had their love do nothing but grow from that day forward.

And then, without preamble, they started dancing.

If I had to guess at a time signature, I’d say it was in five-eighths time, a sort of one-two one-two-three pattern, but I hadn’t studied much in the way of music composition. Regardless, they moved slowly and formally, moving in patient circles that took them along the arc of the watching crowd, always with one palm or another in contact.

For all the slowness, for all the formality, it was deeply intense. They danced like they were alone on the field, like every step was a love letter and every time their hands touched was a moment stolen from time. It was both the most Meredith dance possible—clinically perfect, every minute movement controlled and kept to the minimum, spine straight and balance maintained, every inch the Captain—and the most James dance possible, the most Clerk Administrator dance possible, threaded with obvious joy while still doing exactly the correct thing in exactly the correct way.

Every motion was the smallest necessary to bring their partner with them, sentences described in the shift of a foot; every movement was imbued with a complete confidence and an utmost faith in the other.

At the exact moment that they traversed their way back to the center of the arc, six more people stepped forwards in time with the beat. They matched up in couples as they advanced to halfway between the now-frozen married pair and the crowd, and they inclined their heads to each other and raised their palms in various degrees of grace and smoothness.

Zrodne and Esse, respectively the Tower and Delve Pillars. Urlirah and Theodora Plainsheart, respectively the Crafts Pillar and the embodiment, inasmuch as anyone was, of Kibosh’s herders. Cleric Veil and Kan, and wasn’t that a fascinating thing because it meant that Kan was the embodiment of whatever the not-the-herders community in Kibosh would be referred to, because with Veil being the fifth Pillar that meant Kan was the equivalent of Theodora.

It made sense, though I hadn’t realized it until he started walking out there with Veil. I’d been having the best nights of sleep in my life under the quilted products of his third Class, and that meant he’d been at the peak of Third Tier for a while.

Unlike Meredith and James, the community leaders didn’t touch palms. They circled each other with their hands at their waists instead, stopping once they’d switched places, and the dance began anew.

If I hadn’t known that the initial dance had been improvised, I would have thought the recapitulation to have been practiced as a group. Knowing better, it was deeply impressive; not because it was perfect, because it wasn’t, but for how smooth it was all the same.

Esse was a meticulous machine, but she couldn’t dance much better than I could and Zrodne’s peacock-bright robes caught at her legs every time she was close, threatening to throw the Magus’s stride off. Kan was so much larger than the slighter Veil that their moves lacked a sort of aesthetic balance, and Urlirah was trying, but while he moved smoothly enough it was often the wrong move.

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They were still almost perfect, just because of how well their flaws were balanced by each other’s strength. Zrodne moved with smooth mastery and only a minutely sour face, Theodora’s surety came with a willingness to physically override Urlirah’s missteps, and it all flowed together smoothly as they moved steadily with slow, long steps across the grass. Their patterns were simple in terms of each person’s movements, but all together they formed spiraling, evolving patterns that seemed to be larger than their physical positions could have possibly justified.

Through it all, the music was subtle and almost unobtrusive, drawing the attention away from the ear and towards the dancers. It supported them instead of calling attention to itself, to the point where I hadn’t even realized that Zing was playing her threadsong again, this time leaning forward to softly, gently tap the strings with short, wide-headed mallets. Hitz was doing something similar with one of their drums, casually making slow strokes with a two-headed tipper, and the other instruments were similarly restrained.

It drifted towards a close, somehow signaling its intention to end well before it ended despite my having no idea about the musical traditions in play. The dancers wound up in a frieze for twelve seconds as the musicians traded around a sort of this is the end riff, with Zing having the last iteration of it.

Once she’d taken it and put it to rest with something that carefully didn’t show off—not even in that I’m so good that I can show off with something simple way—the dancers rose from their final poses, a sort of half-lunge, half-bow whose significance I had absolutely no context on. Everyone other than James and Meredith drifted towards the still-silent crowd, but even those two had something change dramatically in their body language, and suddenly there wasn’t the slightest bit of formality in them. They turned towards each other, sharing a kiss that was intense for all its brevity, and then the Clerk Administrator was twirling under the Captain’s lifted hand as he tucked himself against her chest.

He tilted his head back, eyes closed, relaxing in a way that stirred up all sorts of uncomplicated longings in me—for touch, for the easy physical intimacy he was showing, for the relaxation that came with complete faith in your partner. Opening his eyes back up a long moment later, smiling at the crowd, he stepped forward with visible reluctance out of his wife’s arms and straightened his posture into one of oratory.

“I am not,” he said in a casual, carrying voice, “going to give a long speech. For all the many pleasures I find in doing so, it would be inconsiderate.” James paused, and the crowd gave him the appropriate chuckle. “But there are two matters whose subjects are present, and which, with your forbearance, I will address.

“First, the Village, Duchy, and Kingdom are enriched by the growth of one of Kibosh’s own as he rises to the occasion of his next life’s stage. Tayir, it has been our pleasure to be the place you chose to make your home, and it is our delight that you choose to remain to be Kibosh’s resident artist and painter.

“Even when you leave, as we all know you will in time, you will still have a home here; if ever you need the aid and comfort of family, find it in these quints which you have painted and the company of those who have known you these two dozen years—the hundreds of us who have come to hold you as one of our own.”

The cheers were loud and hearty, with the people I’d come to think of as city-folk cheering the loudest. Not that the herders weren’t cheering, but they weren’t erupting in a wall of ululating joy the way they had for Tizpa’s song when the shy, reserved girl had sung in a duet with Singer Tamaya in the refectory.

Still, I caught a glimpse of Tayir being immediately mobbed by well-wishers and dragged out of the crowd by a strikingly-dressed—or rather, under-dressed—Matis. I’d seen the delver in heavy armor with shortsword and enormous, round shield before; I hadn’t seen him in a tunic that gathered at one shoulder and the opposite hip, leaving most of his chest and thighs as bare as his arms.

From the look on Tayir’s face, he appreciated the look far more than I was ever likely to.

“Second, we take this Ease to welcome someone new not only to Shem and Alqar as a whole, but to Yelem itself.” An expectant silence pooled across the crowd as James locked eyes with me, smirking beatifically. “Step forwards, please, Sophie.”

“What if I don’t please?” The words spilled out of me before I could stop them, but it wasn’t like my face could flush any harder. The eyes of every single person in the crowd were on me, and it was mortifying, and all I could think was that if I tripped over my own two feet I would probably unlock a Feat by pure embarrassment.

I walked forwards anyway, with more surety in my step than I’d expected.

“Miss Nadash, Traveler and Alchemist Kibosh and a thousand other things besides.” James paused, looking almost like he didn’t know what to say, like he had to gather his words. “There are blessings for when someone comes into the world, but they are for the newly-born. There are blessings for those who come to us from far shores or through short roads, but they are in context of the choice knowingly-made.

“We lack a benediction for the unknown so firmly grasped, nor for the way you honor us in doing so. But we have one among us in whose remit such a thing lies. Cleric Veil, if you will?”

That worthy took three steps away from the rest of the crowd, turning towards me and performing something vaguely like the beginnings of a bow. When they spoke, their voice was in an astonishingly clear chorus, five voices blending as one.

“May all our lives be enriched by your presence,” Veil intoned. “May the faith you have placed in us be returned as joy threefold. May this be the home you would have chosen, had you all the Sundered’s understanding of the present and future.”

One by one, Veil’s voices were going silent, leaving their ringing tones vibrating through the fabric of reality—which maybe wasn’t silent per se, but it wasn’t auditory, it was something else.

“May you create, both within and without these walls, such friendships as will last until you should grow to three hundred and sixty years. In all those years, may your friends never fail to be your benison and balm, nor you theirs.”

My vision was a watery mess. I’d been prepared for a lot of things, but not that, not from them, so I only vaguely saw Veil make a gesture that I probably would have caught or understood if I could only see them. They continued single-voiced and sounding more like their normal self over the thrumming, singing overtones of the other four blessings.

“May you, who have come from shores so distant that one might travel there only through the void-between-voids that is the liminal realm of the Gods, find in us a place of healing, such that you will lay down the pains of your past and take up the Path of your future as the self you choose to be.”

The crowd exploded into an ear-shattering din of celebration and cheering. I dimly noticed Veil heading back into the crowd, an incongruous smile on their usually taciturn face, and then my forearms were clasped just above the wrist by a familiar strength.

“If you’re saying anything,” I practically screamed at the blur in front of me, voice hitching in a way that was more embarrassing than getting called up by James had been, “I can’t hear you. Also, I can’t see you!”

“Sophie.” Ketka’s joyous voice rumbled across my wrists, practically shaking me with its vibrations. “Take so much time as you require, but when you have recovered, might I have your first dance?”

“I practiced for hours so I could say yes,” I managed, grinning despite the tears still streaming down my face. “Please tell me you have something I can wipe my face on.”

“Girl,” she said dryly, “you wear clothes which could stem blood and fire and be still unmarred. Wipe your eyes with your sleeve.”

Blushing harder, I did, and Ketka led me out of the crowd.

She was hotter than the fires of creation, and she held me so gently and lightly I knew I could break away if I was enough of an idiot to want to. And as the band struck up the first notes of the song and I slipped into the starting pose, I realized something that had me laughing and pressing myself up against her to feel the way she was laughing with me.

“Get some, girlie,” Rafa’s voice hollered from behind me, and Ketka blushed, because even if I was the blessed of the hour, she was the darling of the crowd and the woman they were cheering on.

And if I was the prize she’d courted, if this was her moment of triumph, well.

I had practiced for hours to be able to dance with her.