Songstress said, speaking up for the first time. are a memory singer, whether you have claimed or accepted the duties of one or not, and this is something you know as well as I. If it would have been wrong or unjust of Sun Leaf Clan’s elders and memory singers to deny you the right to bond with a human, was it not also wrong of you to refuse the responsibility to your clan which comes with the mind voice and the depth of memory you own?>

A mental hush hovered at the memory singer’s forthright demand. Among humans, Branch Leaper had been told, such a query would have been considered an insult, or at least insufferably rude, but that was something he had never truly understood. Among the People, there was no real point in not asking it, or in trying to conceal the emotions which went with it, for there was no way one of the People could not know that another harbored that question or those feelings. There were questions the People simply did not ask of one another, but they were few and fell into areas which had been considered deeply private in even the oldest of memory songs. Personally, Branch Leaper had always assumed that that was because the People’s ancestors had learned the hard way that those areas—like the reasons a couple chose to mate—were the most likely to provoke conflict. A people who heard one another’s thoughts and tasted one another’s mind glows could not possibly have put all potential areas of conflict off limits, however, and outside those which had been sanctified by iron custom, the People addressed one another with a frankness which would have been devastating in any mind-blind society.

Yet for all that, the challenge and disapproval of Bright Water’s second ranking memory singer hung before Golden Voice like a set of bared fangs. The younger female turned her calm regard on Songstress for several long breaths, then flicked the tip of her tail in acknowledgment.

she said then.

A stab of grief ripped through her mind glow, the subtle sorrow Branch Leaper had tasted from the first exploding to the surface. It was only for an instant, yet all who tasted it flinched before it. It was a memory singer’s grief, with all the vibrant power of a memory singer’s mind behind it, and in that searing instant all within the reach of her mind voice were one with her, sharing the agony of loss and bereavement as her adopted human died and the bitter knife of death slashed the delicate binding and interweaving which had made Golden Voice and her human both individuals and one being. It was as if the very sun above them had exploded, destroying all the world—not in fire, but in freezing cold and utter desolation, and Branch Leaper cowered down on all six limbs, pressing his belly to the branch beneath him as the perfect reproduction of that moment of loss and torment took him by the throat. He tasted Golden Voice’s need to follow her person into darkness, the need to cling to his mind glow’s glory wherever it went… and the desperate need to escape the dreadful emptiness his death had left in her soul and mind.

Yet there was more than simple despair in that shared moment. There was another mind glow, one which clung to her even more desperately than she had hungered for the peace of nonbeing. It had gripped her fiercely, refusing to release her and blazing against the darkness. It was not like her human’s mind glow had been. For all its power, it was weaker, almost muted—a subtler beauty, in more delicately blended colors, without the unbridled strength of the human mind glows. Yet also unlike the human mind glows, it engaged hers on all levels, merging with it, anchoring itself within her even as she had anchored herself within it.