'Because in the dark, your voice sounds silver.'
My face burned feverish hot, so hot I thought I might die of the mud fever at once, but the feeling eased as I kept talking.
'That's a pretty thing to say.' I forced my tone to sound light. 'I wish I could think of pretty things to say, too, besides that your ankles are skinnier than a jackrabbit's ribs.'
He cleared his throat. 'It's just the cut of these boots, I assure you. And no excuses, my lady. You've had a flowery tongue in your time. Don't you remember our first letters?'
'It's been so long,' I said, unhappy with the lie. 'What did I say?'
Her khan chuckled. 'Before coming here, I looked over all our letters, and the early ones, when you were thirteen and I fifteen. Well...'
'They were fairly ridiculous, weren't they?'
'In truth, you weren't so bad--more formal. You're very different to speak with in person. But I found some drafts of letters that I sent to you, and in one I wrote something akin to, 'When I think of you, my heart melts like butter over the bread of my stomach.' I thought it was very poetic at the time. Or in another letter I wrote, 'You are like a shiny red apple with no worms.''
I wanted to be respectful of his first words of love, but trying to hold in the laugh made me snort like a camel, and then he snorted, so laughs came rumbling out of me. We were trying not to laugh, of course--I didn't want to wake my lady and he didn't want to wake the guards, but that made it even harder to stop. How my side ached! I wheezed and said I couldn't breathe, which made him laugh harder, which in turn made me laugh harder because, truth be told, his laugh sounds like a yak's grunt. I told him as much, which was a mistake, because that brought up his laugh anew.
Can I describe what it felt like to sit in the dark, laughing with her khan through a bricked wall? The hard grayness lifted out of me like the bones from a fried fish. I felt strong enough to float, warmed as if by sunlight, my bones thrumming and my skin tingling. My mama used to say that the mightiest of the healing songs was a good laugh.
When we'd calmed down and I'd wiped the tears from my face, we sat in silence. I leaned against the wall, resting my head on the bricks. I could see by the angle of his boot that, outside, he was doing the same. It was almost like touching.
'My jaw hurts,' I said.
'I can't stop grinning. Some of my warriors are watching for the guards a few paces off, and they're sure to think I've gone crazy.'
'Maybe you have, did you think of that? You certainly sound crazy, laughing like a wild dog.'
'Careful with the accusations of insanity, oh my lady whose home is a tower with windows of brick, all for the sake of some skinny-ankled, laugh-prone boy of a khan.'
'If a lady is crazy to be bricked up in a tower, then what is a khan who sits outside to laugh with her?'
He sighed and groaned at once, the sound of his smile gone. 'I'm sorry I can't break you out. I can't believe you don't despise me for it.'
'Stop that. What's bothering you? I mean, besides this tower? I can hear your voice is tight, you've got an ache somewhere, nagging at you.'
'How did you know? Yes... you're right. It's my leg. I was injured at sword practice last year. When I stand for a time...'
'My maid, she's a mucker girl, she knows the healing songs.'
'The healing songs?'
'What a large world it is if there are people who never heard of the healing songs. Here, I'll have her sing to you. To work right, she should be touching your leg. Just you touch the leg yourself and listen, and close your eyes.'
I crouched by the hole, down low so I was as close to him as I could be, and I sang the song for old injuries and wove it with the song for strong limbs, singing up with the coarse chanting of 'High, high, a bird on a cloud,' and singing down with the low swinging melody of 'Tell her a secret that makes her sigh.'
When I stopped, he was quiet for a good long moment. I could hear his breath, up and down like a bird's wings flapping.
'Thank you, my lady's maid,' he said. 'That was...'
He didn't finish, leaving me wondering. Some say hearing the songs makes them tickle inside, some say they feel as if they've suddenly gone hot to cold or cold to hot. Some say it's like dreaming while awake, or swimming while dry. I wish I knew how it felt inside her khan.
'My lady's maid, where did you learn such things?' he asked.
I gasped and bit my knuckle and wished I were smarter than I am, but then I thought to say, 'My maid is shy.
She's a mucker and thinks she shouldn't speak to gentry, but she's grateful her song helped you.'
'How does that work? I mean, the songs sing about birds and secrets and sighing, not about healing, nothing like the conjuring words of the shamans.'
'What the words say doesn't matter. The sound of the words and the sound of the tune together speak a language that the body can understand... or so I've been told by my maid. The body wants to be whole, and when you sing the right sounds, you're reminding it how to heal itself.'
'Can muckers heal? Does she have the power to stop blood flowing and stave off death?'
'Oh no, only the Ancestors have power of life. The healing songs just ease suffering, whether of body or mind.
