Chapter 18: The Song of Seven Sorrows

SHE CAME BACK on a Felling night.

I wasn’t at the Eolian—hadn’t been since my return, too wrapped up in research to remember simpler pleasures. But Simmon found me in my room, breathless from running, his face caught between excitement and dread.

“She’s here. Denna. She’s performing tonight.”

I was out the door before he finished speaking.

The Eolian was packed.

Not the ordinary crowd of musicians and merchants, students and travelers. This was something else—people standing three deep at the bar, filling every available space, craning their necks toward the stage. Word had spread about the dark-haired woman with the impossible voice, the song that made strong men weep.

I pushed through the crowd, ignoring protests, following some instinct that guided me toward the front. And there—

Denna.

She stood in the circle of light that marked the performer’s space, her lute held with the easy confidence I remembered. But everything else had changed. She was thinner than before, sharper somehow, as if whatever was being carved into her had pared away everything soft. Her hair was elaborately braided, patterns I could almost read woven through the darkness.

I noticed her hands as she positioned the lute. There were faint ink stains on her fingers—dark blue, almost black. Fresh. The kind you get from hours bent over texts, copying or translating. I’d seen the same stains on my own hands often enough to recognize them.

She’d been studying. Recently. Intensively.

And her eyes—

Her eyes held something I’d never seen in them before. A distance. A remove. As if she was watching herself from very far away.

She saw me. I know she did. Our eyes met across the crowded room, and something flickered in her expression—recognition, perhaps, or warning.

Then she began to sing.

The song was beautiful.

I say that without jealousy, without bias. It was objectively, devastatingly beautiful—the kind of music that makes you forget to breathe. That reaches into your chest and rearranges something fundamental.

But it was wrong.

Not musically—every note was perfect, every phrase shaped with exquisite precision. The wrongness was in the content. In the story she told.

Lanre, she sang, was a hero.

Not the dark lord of children’s nightmares. Not the monster who had destroyed seven cities in a single night. Lanre was a man who had loved his wife beyond reason, beyond death, beyond the boundaries of the possible.

When Lyra died, he had done the impossible to bring her back. And when that failed—when he understood that some doors only opened one way—he had made another choice.

He took the darkness into himself.

Not as a curse, but as a gift. Not as punishment, but as protection. He absorbed the evil that threatened to consume the world, wrapped it around his soul like armor, and became the thing he fought so that others wouldn’t have to.

The Chandrian, in her song, were not villains. They were guardians. Each of them had made the same impossible choice—had taken some fragment of the darkness inside themselves, had sacrificed their humanity to keep the doors closed.

They killed, yes. They destroyed. But only to protect the greater good. Only to prevent something worse from breaking free.

By the end, half the audience was weeping.

But I wasn’t.

I was watching Denna’s hair. Watching the patterns shift as she sang. Watching the way her fingers moved on the strings—not just playing music, but tracing shapes. Drawing bindings in the air.

The bone ring on my finger grew warm. Auri’s gift—the key to ancient conversations, she’d called it. And suddenly I could see it. Not with my eyes, but with the part of me that recognized names. The part that Elodin called the sleeping mind.

The braids weren’t merely decorative. They were Yllish story knots—I recognized them now from my studies in Vintas. But these patterns were complex, layered, speaking several things at once. The patterns in her hair weren’t static. They were moving, shifting, weaving meaning in real-time as she sang. Most told the story she was singing: Lanre the hero, Lanre the guardian. But woven through those braids, hidden in the knots like a secret signature, was something else. A single word, repeated over and over.

A name.

I couldn’t quite read it—the patterns shifted too quickly, and my Yllish was still imperfect. But I knew it was there. A truth hidden within the beautiful lie.

The song wasn’t just beautiful.

It was working.

I could feel it—the subtle pressure of magic brushing against my mind. The whisper of suggestion, of compulsion, trying to rewrite what I knew about Lanre and the Chandrian. Trying to make me believe.

But I’d named silence. I’d spoken with the Cthaeh. Whatever part of my mind the song was trying to reach, it found only cold iron and closed doors.

The song ended.

The applause was thunderous.

And Denna’s eyes met mine across the room, and I saw that she knew. Knew that I’d felt it. Knew that I understood what she’d just done.

She didn’t smile.

She simply nodded, once, and slipped away into the crowd.

I pushed through the crowd toward her. Bodies pressed against me---warm, applauding, unaware. Someone stepped on my foot. An elbow caught my ribs. By the time I reached the performer’s circle, it was empty.

Her lute case was gone. Her cloak was gone.

She was gone.

I searched for hours.

The alley behind the Eolian first, checking every shadow, every doorway. Nothing but empty crates and the smell of old beer. The side streets next, running from corner to corner, asking anyone I passed if they’d seen a dark-haired woman with a lute. Blank stares. Shrugs. One old woman who cackled and told me I’d find no luck chasing shadows.

The bridge where Denna sometimes stood watching the water—empty except for a drunk sleeping under his coat. The rooftops where we’d sat and talked—cold tiles and indifferent stars.

I went to the inn where she’d stayed before. The landlady remembered her but hadn’t seen her in weeks. I checked the Eolian’s back room, thinking maybe she’d left something, some clue. The owner gave me a pitying look and told me she’d been paid in advance by a man in a grey cloak. A patron, he said. Someone important.

Master Ash.

My hands clenched. The bone ring on my finger pulsed warm.

I stood in the empty alley as dawn broke, breathing hard, and tried to make sense of what I’d heard. What I’d felt. The bindings woven through her music like invisible thread. The Yllish patterns in her hair---patterns I could almost read but not quite, meanings that shifted just past the edge of my understanding.

The song was wrong. Beautiful, but wrong. And Denna knew it was wrong---I’d seen it in her eyes when she looked at me. That flicker of recognition. Of warning.

She had wanted me to hear it. And she had not wanted me to follow.

But I’d found something. On the performer’s circle, where her foot had been—a single strand of dark hair, still woven in that complex Yllish knot. I picked it up carefully, held it to the dawn light.

The pattern was clearer now, static rather than shifting. And I could read enough to make out one word woven through it:

Run.

I stood there for a long time, in the grey light of early morning, listening to the silence she’d left behind. It was a particular silence---the kind that comes after a song that changes how you hear the world. The kind that makes you realize the quiet was never really quiet at all.

I didn’t sleep that day.