Rin might have said, The way is a riddle. How would Esther solve it? They might have said, You sang your way out of Arcadia once; sing your way back in. Or Rin might have said, If the river has roots, it has branches, too; learn to climb them, and find your sister. It all returns to grammar. There is the grammar of a sentence, which can mean an arrangement of subjects and verbs, or can mean transformation into a tree that bleeds red where it’s cut. There is the grammar of grammarians, refined and removed from its source, and the grammar of witches, daily conjugating water into bread. There is
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