Chapter 91: Gaia
I learned to listen to the wind before I learned to speak.
That sounds like something a poet would say, but it’s true. In the courtyards of the Celeste palace, wind came from three places—off the mountain spine to the north where the air thinned into stars, up from the river stair that braided through the valley, and down the great avenue from the city gates where our people moved like constellations you could touch. Each current had a voice. Each voice had a weight. When I was small, I would sit on the balustrade with my toes over the blue-tiled roofs and try to tell them apart, as if one day the wind would carry me an answer I needed and I wouldn’t mistake it for weather.
The day my mother died, the wind stopped speaking.
People told me later that it was only still b
