Reck this: Once there was an aridkedi, a country Merchant who created pots for her small town, and so skilled was she that she was the sole seller of pots indeed not only to her community but also abroad, as well. So great was her talent, she promised to mend any pot that cracked, or replace one beyond repair, and such was her skill that she was not often called upon to fulfill her promise.
One day, the Servant of the lady of her atani brought her one of her pots, which had developed a fine, thin crack.
'How may I serve you?' the potter asked.
'My mistress's pot has broken,' the Servant said, handing it to her. 'We would be pleased to have it mended.'
The potter examined the pot carefully, fingers exploring the crack. And then, suddenly, she smashed it against the counter.
She gave the startled Servant a new pot and said, 'That one was flawed, and the repair would only have hidden its weakness. Take this one instead.'
The Servant left with the new pot, and the aridkedi ground the shards of the old pot into powder and used them to add texture to the glaze on a new work. For while the old one would not have borne more stress, thanks to its maker's wisdom it remained useful to the very end.
This is the tale of the broken pot. Reck it well.
Despite my blithe assurances to Seraeda and the physician, it was with trepidation that I settled under the covers that night. I had never been prone to illness, but I had never been under so much stress before, and I could still feel the cold and wet in my bones despite my dry pelt, as if the nightmarish journey had cast an interior shadow I could not shake. Yet I did sleep—the moment I closed my eyes, in fact, despite my fears otherwise—and when I woke, I felt clear-headed and warm, if oppressed by my concerns. I was not sick, no.
But Shame had a fever.
Aghast, I checked on him as Ajan maintained his ferocious vigil, unbent by its prolonged duration. "How long?" I asked him.
"It began two hours ago," Ajan said.
"I will send for the physician," I said, and I did, not without a knife-bright frisson of fear, one that did not dissipate as I watched the physician at work over my fallen companion. I dared not glance at Ajan either; the youth remained stoic, but the tension in his body was so distinct it was palpable, a radiation as oppressive as the sun in a cloudless summer sky.
"Is he... soul-sick?" I asked at last, when I could bear it no longer.
"What?" the physician said, measuring out a dose of some red fluid. "No, no. But he contracted something while running wild out in the hills."
"Him?" I said, startled. "But how... he is..."
"...younger than you?" the physician said dryly. "More sturdy?" He glanced at Ajan and said, "Your master, he was under a great deal of pressure prior to his visit here?"
"Yes, sir," Ajan said, his formality sounding alien to me.
The physician looked at me and said, "Stress makes even a young man vulnerable to disease."
"Then... it is not so serious," I said, allowing my shoulders to ease.
"That I did not say," the physician said, spurring the tension back into them. "The fever is very high... whatever has infected him is quite virulent." He glanced at Ajan. "You are standing watch... have you slept?"
"He hasn't," I said before Ajan could say anything.
"Take a two-hour nap," the physician said. "The Calligrapher will watch him while you rest."
"Sir—" Ajan began, but the physician cut off his protest with a sharp gesture.
"No arguments," the physician said. "You will be the one watching him for the balance of the day. You will have to check his temperature at intervals. If it grows much higher than this, send for me. Otherwise, let it work." Looking at me, he said, "Given how strongly his body is reacting, he will either be done with whatever has sickened him in a few days, or it won't matter. But before it grows that grave, we will intervene. Which is why—" turning back to Ajan, "—you must be rested. You will be the one who sounds the alarm if he needs aid."
"Yes, sir," Ajan said, and this time sounded the grim young lieutenant I had come to know, in flashes here and there, through his levity of manner.
"Here," the physician said, passing Ajan one of the doses, "is your insurance. Take it and lie down now."
"Yes, sir," Ajan said, subdued, and downed it in one swallow before heading straight to his own pallet. I watched as he curled up on it and, from all evidence, fell immediately asleep. I wondered if this was a discipline the Guardians learned, or if it was merely exhaustion.
"Your turn," the physician said, passing me my own little cup.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Something to strengthen your body against infection," the physician said. "It will not save you if you decide to bathe in the osulkedi's sweat, or drink his spit, but so long as you maintain your distance and wash your hands conscientiously, it should be sufficient for your turn at his sickbed."
I drank it, finding it bitter and floral, and passed the cup back to him.
"Two hours," the physician reminded me, packing his bag. "Then wake the Guardian."
"What happens in two hours?" I asked.
"The lord's sister will arrive," the physician answered, already on the way to the door. "And you will be needed to explain all of this... to her."
I grimaced. "Of course."
"Remember, if the fever rises, send for me at once." And with that he was gone, leaving me at Shame's side.
I looked down at him and sighed. "You are supposed to be the powerful one," I murmured. "So why am I the one still on my feet?" And then, feeling guilt for scolding him, I went to the main room and found my small book. With the work of a few moments, I had a comfortable stool and a few pencils, and there I sat to contemplate the face of the man I had come to the Bleak to save.
That was what Thirukedi had sent me for, was it not? To save him? I drew an idle line on a blank page, letting it turn into a spiral. To mend a broken pot... that did imply... rescue, in some sense. Or healing. But the Emperor had asked me which of the broken pot narratives I liked best, and while he'd approved of my particular choice, it was not the only one. I began drawing pots in various states of disrepair, each growing more and more flawed until at last I gave up in despair. I looked at the face of Shame, who had become Kor to me in rather less time than I had thought possible. He was drawn, something that did not serve him with such severe lineaments. It made the hollows under his cheeks all the more extreme.
And yet, for all that, it was a beautiful face. It had been born to the work his ishas had demanded he undertake, and that work had refined it... in the planes of his jaw and the severity of his brow I saw the years of toil. Kherishdar's sole Shame, the pinnacle of compassion in the face of weakness.
I could not bear to see him shattered. I could not allow such a matter to stand, if there was any power in me to mend it.
It was a defiance of all courtesies and rules then, for I had not been permitted... but some part of me whispered that it was an exception, for care of the sick grants many powers. The kiss I rested on his brow was perhaps more personal than that exception imagined, but I could not have helped delivering it if I'd tried. And truth be known, aunera, I did not try.
"Grow strong," I murmured to him. "We are watching over you."
Two hours later then, I rose from the stool, careful of knees that had stiffened, and approached Ajan. I was reluctant to wake him, who seemed so deeply asleep; the even rising and falling of his ribcage was so slow I could only imagine how much he needed the rest.
I should have known better, of course. I had no sooner stepped close enough to touch him than he sat up, alert and clear-eyed.
"Is it time?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "There has been no change."
He nodded and made to stride past me and back to the spot he'd been occupying since Shame's return.
"Ajan," I called. "If you'd like to wash, I can stay a little longer."
He paused and sniffed at his collarbone. "Am I so offensive?"
"Not precisely," I said. "I just thought you would feel better."
"I will feel better when my master wakes," Ajan said, and managed a lopsided smile. "Maybe my odor will prompt him to do so, if only to chivvy me into the bath."
There would be no drawing him away, I knew then. I didn't press and left him to his vigil.
After my own bath and toilette, I let myself out of our suite and went in search of someone who could tell me what to expect next. I was tired still; I no longer weather such long nights easily, and I could only imagine I'd be spending several more at Kor's bedside before this was all done. But I was also anxious over the house's tumult. I could feel it in the halls, the upset, even suppressed as it was. You might wonder how I might sense such a thing, and I wouldn't be able to tell you the exact method, but it was something about people not being where they should be, or hurrying too much, or clustering in nervous groups that broke apart like birds at the slightest sound.
I went first to see the physician, who looked up sharply at my entrance.
"It is not the osulkedi," I told him. "There has been no change there. I came asking after the lord and the observer."
The space between my question and his answer was only a few heartbeats long, but that was long enough for a wild hope to grow like one of the House's rainflowers, straight and tall and breathlessly strong. If the lord had recovered, we might yet avoid all the disorder, and more importantly, I might avoid having to discuss with the lord's sister all that we surmised—
"Still unconscious," the physician said, uprooting the flower of my hope. I imagined it trampled and sighed.
"I suppose I am not surprised," I said heavily. "The poison afflicting Qenain is significant. Do you know when the lord's sister is due?"
"An hour or so," the physician said. "You have time to break your fast, and I suggest you do so." He cocked his head. "By the by, thank you for sending the fathrikedi our way. She has been a great help."
I read his tone and managed a tired smile. "The house is truly distrait, isn't it."
"A fathrikedi serving as sickbed attendant?" the physician said. "Yes, I would say it is. They were intended to warm beds, not fidget at their sides."
I rubbed my face with one hand. "I will eat. Then I will tell the lord's sister what we know, when she arrives."
He nodded. As I turned to leave, he added, "Calligrapher. There comes a point in any disease's course where the body grows too compromised to survive."
A chill ran the length of my spine, nape to tail. "I know."
I went to the kitchen then to request a meal, and could not bear to take it amid the distressed workers. Instead I ate alone in one of the house's many sunny alcoves, and the food was delicious and nourishing and I barely tasted it at all. It was a miracle it did not go sour the moment it passed my lips.
I had only just finished the tea when a Servant appeared at the corner of my eye. I turned to him with an expectant look, and he said, "Osulkedi, the lord's sister is in the courtyard."
Gods and ancestors. At least I wouldn't have time to fret over the matter. I stood, smoothing down my robes and arranging the stole of my office more carefully over my narrow shoulders, then followed the Servant to meet the house's newest manager.
Some of you have recalled that the lord has a wife, and have wondered why she was not sent for; this is a fair question. You may know that we favor large families, and often have many siblings: depending on the caste, anywhere between two and five is typical, but it is not at all rare to have more, particularly in these days when medicine has made childbearing less risky. All families train up their children with the assumption that they will remain within the caste, doing the work of their parents, and this is sensible as most children do. Not always of course—that is why we evaluate the ishas of a child twice before maturity—but most of the time.
The practical result of this, then, is that the lord's siblings have been involved in the business of the House since they were old enough to pick up a basket of flowers and traipse after their aunts and uncles and parents and cousins. The lord's wife, having married into Qenain by choice, was relatively new to the business, and entrusted with the management of the flower shops in the capital. The lord's sister, however, was a principal of the House of Flowers, and empowered to make more broadly affecting decisions.
I had not met her; watching her slide off her beast and hand her riding gloves to a Servant, I could see at a glance what Seraeda had meant about her ishas. She moved like a woman of numbers. Perhaps you have seen something similar? The way the mind perceives the world affects the body's interaction with it. I could see her clear and incisive gaze even from a distance, so different from her brother's energy and passionate agitation. She moved with a crisp economy that disturbed her robes of state, as if they wanted more poetry and finish in her gestures and gait than she was prepared to waste.
And she was striding straight towards me. I straightened as she came to a halt in front of me.
"Osulkedi," she said briskly. "I was not expecting one of your caste-rank here."
"Lady," I said, deferential. "We were sent for by the lord."
"Oh were you," she said, frowning. "Does that have something to do with why I'm here?"
"I fear so, lady," I said.
She sighed. "Then we will discuss it." She summoned a Servant to her side with a flicker of her fingers. "Take the osulkedi to the study and have tea and a small meal sent there. I will join him once I've seen my brother."
The Servant bowed and I went with him, as I must. As I followed, I considered the situation in every possible wording, and in every possible style—florid, with historiated initials? Stark and bald, without decoration?—wondering how to explain in the most truthful way possible, without giving offense. Should I share the speculation as well as what was known? When the speculation was so unthinkable, and was unsubstantiated? The lady would not thank me if I told her that her brother might be in the beds of aunera... that was the sort of accusation that required proof, for his Correction would be grave. The act might even be beyond Shame's authority... and the only authority after his in that arena was Thirukedi's.
And really, what did we know for certain? Almost nothing!
The Servant left me in the study: from the neatness of the desk and the lack of any papers, I guessed this was the lady's for when she visited. I sat across from the desk and looked out the inevitable windows at the gardens; the room was upstairs and in the back of the house, and had a superb view of the plot the House kept at the Gate-complex, both for pleasure and use. I imagined there was some sort of trellis up the walls also, as there were climbing vines trained around the windows: a flower we call "formals" because their blade-like petals and white and black stripes recalled the crossed layers of robes we wear at our throats. Staring at them, I thought suddenly of Kor, and had this strange mad urge to paint him with them. Black and white, and black and white, and maybe a drop of red somewhere, or would that be too gauche—
The lord's sister interrupted my reverie, sweeping into the room and seating herself with the abruptness of a closed book. She startled me so obviously that she couldn't help but laugh. "Apologies, osulkedi," she said. "I did not mean to surprise you. But it has been a disturbing walk I've just made, and I do not like the looks of my brother." She lifted her brows. "So now, perhaps you will tell me what has gone on here."
"Lady," I said slowly, tasting the words in my mouth, "I wish I could tell you. The truth is... we are not certain yet."
"Well then, what you know," she said, waving a hand. She paused as the tea tray arrived and poured herself a cup. She offered me one with a gesture, but I declined in kind.
"The lord requested the aid of an osulkedi in the matter of the chief observer," I said, "who needed Correction. When we arrived—"
"—we?" she interrupted.
"I am accompanied by Shame, who is currently indisposed or he would also be here," I said.
Her ears flattened. "Continue," she muttered.
"When we arrived, we found the lord had attempted Correction," I said. "Following it, the chief observer became tsekil."
Her frown was growing more distinct, but she did not interrupt.
"Here it becomes more nebulous, lady," I said, using my most studiously courteous language. I imagined flourishes on the initials and very plain letters behind, painting out the words as I chose them. "We are not certain what was between the lord and the observer to occasion the Correction, though his staff reports that the observer was deeply distressed with some request of the lord's. The lord himself went through the Gate on business. When he returned, he met with Shame, and following that meeting, the lord became tsekil also. Shame developed a fever before we could ask over the matter—not a soul-sickness, but virulent nevertheless."
"So you mean to tell me that my brother and the observer made each other sick, and the priest cannot tell us why?" the lady said.
"That is... correct, yes," I said, ears falling. "Everything else is supposition."
She sighed. "Well, then, we will have to wait for the priest to wake. Or my brother, or the observer."
"Yes, lady," I said.
"Very well," she said. "Or at least, as well as can be managed at this point. You may go."
I rose and bowed, and left her to the meal. And on the way down the corridor wondered if it was a determination to see that all parties were treated justly and without slander that had motivated me to withhold the Decoration's accusation... or cowardice.
I stopped at the suite after my interview with the lady and found Shame's condition unchanged: both his fever and his attendant. I asked Ajan if he would like to have a moment to rest and he declined, as I perhaps should have expected. I left them there, then, and went to find my Qenain council, as I had begun to think of them. The physician would not be moved from the lord's chambers, so I sent a Servant for Seraeda and a different one to fetch something to eat. As we waited, I studied the lord's slack face.
"No change here either," the physician said. "My assistant is waiting on the observer now, as the fathrikedi is sleeping. As well she should, for she has been louring over her lord like some desperate lover from a ballad. I did not want to add her sickbed to my rotation."
"Do you think—"I began, alarmed.
"No, no," the physician answered, testy. "No, she is young, and not likely to suffer from a few sleepless nights. But one must take precautions."
I looked uneasily at the lord, then went to answer the Servant with the tray.
Not long after, then, we three met at the table in the lord's antechamber, in the sullen light of a midday gone patchwork with clouds and shimmery with humidity. I found the alternating glare and shadows mazing and pulled the cloth panels across the glass panes before seating myself with the other two.
"So," the physician asked, reaching for the pot. "How did the interview go?"
"About as one might expect," I said. "I told her that the observer and the lord had made each other tsekil, and that Shame who alone might know what went on, was not yet available."
"That's it?" the physician asked, arching a brow. "Nothing about the aunera?"
"We do not know that is the aunera who have caused the issue between them," I said, ears flattening. "And did I say it was, without proof..."
"Then who knows what the lady would have done, is that it?" the physician said, shaking his head. "I suppose you have the right of it. To be accused of false witness would have severe repercussions. I would not want to treat you for being bled in wine."
I shuddered at the thought. "I thought such things only happened in histories."
"Oh, it still happens," the physician said, tired. "Rare, though. I have treated it once, and only because I happened to be in the exact right place at the exact right time. It is a rough piece of work, though I suppose the wine's antiseptic properties make my duties a little easier."
"Well I said nothing of it," I said, not wanting to linger on the image. Accusations of perversity and wrongdoing are inimical to a social people, if they are wrongful. The punishment for false witness—for punishment it was, and not Correction—was a public whipping until bloody. "We will have to wait for Shame to wake, and perhaps he will put things right."
"Perhaps," the physician said, though he sounded skeptical. Before I could ask at his tone, however, he said to Seraeda, "You are quiet."
"Yes," she said. She stopped pleating her napkin. "I suppose I am."
"Because?" I asked, more gently.
"I am concerned about the lady's effect on our work," she said at last. "She swept through the laboratory after seeing the lord and I misliked her demeanor." She drew in a long breath and expelled it slowly through her month. "Too, I... went into Baran's locker."
The physician's brows rose. I glanced at her also.
"I was looking for evidence that might explain the problem," she said, ears wilting. "I felt it was my duty. We cannot leave the mystery unexplained. So I looked. There were notes there, and a refrigerated sample box, with several serums." Having given up napkin-pleating, she was now toying with the lid of her tea-cup, tracing it with nervous fingertips. "If his notes are correct, the aunerai flower, when combined with meadowchoke, may have a beneficial effect on the elderly."
Now we were both looking at her. She lifted her hands, palm out, and said, "I don't know yet. But the results are suggestive."
"And you think this may have something to do with their argument?" I asked.
"I don't know," she said. "On the surface, I can't imagine how finding an efficacious medicine would result in a disagreement. It's the purpose of our work in Qenain, to do so."
"Have there been other medicines based on aunerai flowers?" I wondered.
"Some," the physician said. "But from colony worlds, or dead ones. I don't know of any based on flowers from aunerai worlds." He looked at Seraeda. "Am I wrong?"
"No," she said. "We have traded with aunera before for flowers, but only from dead worlds. It is only recently that we have made deals for flowers from worlds where they live."
"So," I murmured. "This is new."
"Yes," Seraeda said. "But it remains our purpose, so how can it have created this discord?"
"That is what we must discover, it seems," I said.
"Hopefully Shame already knows," Seraeda said with a sigh. "I am becoming distressed over the matter. The more we find out, the less sense it makes. It makes the taint seem overwhelmingly powerful."
"You must keep hope," I said. "We will soon have this matter sorted. A few days... what could happen in a few days?"
"Anything," the physician said dryly, and stood. "I will return to my vigil. If you learn anything, you know where to find me."
We watched him vanish into the lord's bedchamber. Then I turned to Seraeda. "Are you truly so oppressed?" I asked her, soft. How tempting it was to take her hand.
"I am worried," she confided, her voice quiet in kind. "Not just for myself, but for my workers. And for ij Qenain—" using the word that denoted lord-as-House, "—I fear we have met an ending here."
"Don't say such things," I said, and offered her my palm in a moment of daring, so that she could choose if we would touch. "Shame will wake and he and I will put things right."
She trailed her fingertips over my palm, from heel to fingers' start, and the touch stung all my nerves, waking them. Ah, gods! I had forgotten what desire was like. I flicked my ears back to hide their flush.
"I hope you're right," she said softly, her eyes following her fingers as they stroked up my palm, over and over, so slow, so light. Another sigh. She traced a circle in the center of my palm and then stood. "I will talk to you soon, Farren. Perhaps I will learn something from further examination of the samples."
"All right," I said, my voice gone raspy. I cleared my throat. "Until then."
She left me then, with my hand still open and feeling burnt from her touch. I closed it with difficulty, my fingers trembling. My assignment to succor Shame had become personal the moment I had promised Ajan I would save him. Now my assignment to aid Qenain had undergone a similar alchemy... to fail Seraeda was unthinkable. My shoulders drooped. To be held so personally responsible for the outcome of a mission I had very little direct control over... it was enough to harrow the soul. And yet the web of interconnected personal responsibility was the basis of Ai-Naidari society, and written into our souls.
With a sigh of my own, I left the table. It took several hours in the gardens outside the house to restore my equanimity, and even then my hand felt different.
I returned to the suite prepared to paint, and checked first on Ajan and Shame... the youth might have been carved from stone, for he had not moved, even to change position. I marveled at his body-discipline but did not disturb him; he had his duty and I had mine. There would be time enough for me to relieve him after I'd finished my work, and he would not thank me for doing so early.
I cut my paper loose and set it up on the shabati, and there I perched, sharpening my quills and considering the day's word. I thought of the themes of the conversations, and of the lady's arrival... of Seraeda's fears. Some words suggested themselves to me: emas, for instance, our trust in authority not to abuse its powers; and manais, the duties a lord or lady owes those in her care.
And for once, nothing caught my imagination. I frowned at the blank paper and put my tools down. I looked again through the open doorway to where Ajan was bent over his master, laving his brow with a cool cloth. Were Shame awake, he would no doubt have some pithy comment for me, something to spur me to a choice. Were he awake...
...but his presence was available in other ways.
I went to my trunk and dug past the extra clothes to where I'd wrapped his journals, pulling one free and tucking it beneath my arm. At the door to the bedchamber, I said, in a slight Implacable—not too coercive, but definitively a command: "Go bathe and sleep a few hours. I will keep the watch."
He responded immediately, without comment, and in that I read that I had been right to send him away. Hardship conditions a young body, but wedded to worry it becomes corrosive. I had no desire to see Ajan laid low.
I took his place at Shame's side, then, observing my peer's troubled brow, as if even in fever, he was at work at some problem. With a sigh I brushed some of his dark hair from his brow, tugging it gently free where sweat had adhered it to his temple. And then I opened his journal and resumed reading, hoping to replace his immediate insight with a facsimile. This time, instead of reading sequentially as I had been, I skipped through the entries, looking for... what? For something. For a hint into a mind I might not have understood on my own.
Perhaps that is why I stopped on the entries with blood and punishment. Or perhaps I was merely recalling the physician's gruesome commentary on being bled in wine for false witness. Or maybe—ancestors hold me—Seraeda's touch had left me longing for some more visceral experience. Whatever the case, I stopped on an entry where Shame had threatened to rape a rapist, transfixed by his account of the necessary preparations. He had taken diqut, even, to be able to make good on his threat... what would that have been like, I wondered, uneasy. To be forced to rape in order to Correct a rapist? Who would have comforted him afterward? I turned the page and found his too-quick scrawl, dated a few days afterward:
Wasn't necessary to follow through. Am pleased with initial response, have set the others to watching. Diqut finally fading... will be glad to stop tormenting fathrikedi by my avoidance.
I could just hear the wry tone and flicked my ears back. To Kor's fevered countenance I said, "Even then you weren't letting people who are supposed to help you to help you. What good example is that, that you are setting?"
I half-expected him to answer me; it would have been like him, to come out of sickness so dramatically. But he did not. I resumed skimming, stopping on the account of another Ai-Naidari who had needed to give blood to find expiation from guilt. I stroked the edge of that page with a thumb, on the verge of turning it but unable to. We are a people who feel guilt deeply, so it is fortunate we have so many ways of healing it, from our formalized apologies and reparations through the depths of Correction. Perhaps it was guilt that had felled the chief observer; had not Seraeda said something about him protesting to the lord that what he asked was unnatural? Or perhaps it was the lord who suffered. And guilt among us is highly correlated with soul-sickness.
I had my word, then. Instead of retiring to the shabati to work, and perhaps exciting Ajan's protective impulse by leaving my ward's bedside for too long, I brought the paper and materials to the bedchamber and sat alongside Shame on the floor. But once there, I could not decide which type of guilt to depict, for among us we name two kinds: fada, which is improper guilt, taken upon oneself in defiance of the situation; and rul, proper guilt, felt at wrongdoing for which one is judged responsible.
I hear that among aunera there is a belief that guilt is an internal matter, caused by some sort of mystically implanted moral compass that one perhaps develops in a social vacuum, and I confess I find this notion altogether absurd. Guilt and innocence are born of their effects on others, and cannot exist without a society to rule between what is rightful behavior and what is wrongful. There is no magical internal knowledge of these things; it must be learned. And either one accepts those rules into oneself, creating that interior knowledge... or one decides one is not subject to society.
In Kherishdar we understand this implicitly. Society judges the lawfulness of one's guilt, just as society creates the rules by which that lawfulness is ruled. It is one of the ways we prevent sickness, by offering a perspective outside of one's own, narrow and often prejudiced, view. In this way, we absolve those who would sicken themselves with self-loathing, and Correct those who need help, and all Ai-Naidar bow their heads to these judgments and let go of whatever blame they might otherwise cling to, and shred themselves with.
It is a sensible path. The guilty are aided, and returned to society clean of stain; the innocent are confirmed and reassured. I began to paint.
It was a very strange thing, keeping the dareleni alone. Shame remained unconscious; Ajan was sleeping on his pallet near the door. I sat on the floor, bent close over my work, and listened to the syncopated pattern of their breathing: slow and deep and even on one side, quick and irregular and labored on the other.
I missed the company.
Loneliness was not new to me; I had spent years in my studio, working in silence and what I felt certain was solitude. Not chosen, perhaps, but not resented either. I began to wonder if I had been fooling myself on that account, now that I realized how only a few days of company had made me long for it. But I had survived those few years, and no doubt would for the days left before Kor shook off his fever.
As usual, I became involved in the painting. When I finished and leaned back, Ajan scared me out of several years of my life by murmuring at my shoulder, "Evrul. Seems appropriate."
"Gods and ancestors!" I said, pressing a hand to my chest where my heart was thumping hard enough to be felt against my palm.
"Sorry," he said, smiling faintly. He came around the other side of me with a tray. "My belly woke me a while ago and I ordered food for us both. You didn't even notice."
I grimaced. "You were supposed to be resting."
"You were supposed to be guarding!" Ajan said.
"I was," I said. "I used to paint while my infant daughter slept, and the moment her breathing changed I was at her side. There are some instincts that never fade from you."
"You didn't notice me waking," he said, passing over a bowl of broth.
"You're not sick," I said, unperturbed, and thanked him for the bowl. I set the painting out of reach of spills and we both studied it. I had painted a city street in a long strip from one side of the page to the other. On one half of the painting, I had used no black: the city was all golden light and shadows in lilac and mauve, with bright pale greens for the trees, speckled with pink and white highlights and deepening to blues and purples in the shade. Everything there was sunlit and brilliant and full of color.
On the other side, I had used shades of gray, sucking the life and power out of the buildings, fading them into memories and fever visions, raddled with regret and melancholy.
The division between these was the word evrul: to judge, to assign blame and innocence correctly. I had written it vertically in gold leaf, lined in lamp black and edged it, gruesomely, in the little white blooms of the citrus fruit used for the ceremony of false witness.
"You put a lot of work into this one," Ajan observed.
"I had time," I said, sipping the broth and realizing how hungry I was. As usual I had missed dinner in my fugue.
"Do you really think guilt and innocence is so clearly defined? One or the other?" he asked.
I smiled at him, tired. "I think it feels that way to the soul who suffers."
"Oh!" he exclaimed and fell silent. After some time, he said, "Yes. No matter what it's like on the outside, it really does feel that way on the inside, doesn't it."
I made a polite noise of agreement and took a vegetable roll from the tray.
"You have been reading Shame's journals," Ajan said.
I glanced at the table and grimaced at the sight of it on the stand beside the bed, abandoned in the moment of inspiration that had driven me to my work.
"You forgot to put it away," Ajan said, smiling one of the first real smiles I'd seen out of him since Shame's flight. "I won't tell, then. Did the Emperor give them to you?"
"Yes," I said, surprised. "How did you guess?"
"He's the only one with the authority to do so," Ajan said, reaching for a roll filled with fish and spring greens. "Other than my master, and I know he didn't."
"I think he wanted me to know something of how Correction proceeds," I said, hesitant.
"You don't have to explain," the Guardian said. "Before I attached to the temple I knew nothing of it either. How much work it needs, and what it's like, and how different people are, their needs. If the Emperor wanted you to read it, you needed to understand too." He glanced at me. "It's helped, hasn't it?"
"I think so," I said, and added, "It has been somewhat intimidating."
Ajan chuckled, his voice low. "Yes. For us too, even though we're involved in it. There is a madness in my master's genius."
"He'll wake, you know," I said quietly.
"I know," Ajan said. "He would not leave those who love him bereft." He glanced up. "Will you rest?"
"In a little bit," I said. "It has been an agitating day."
"Eat, then," he said. "And have the tea. Then lie down, whether you're tired or not." He grinned faintly. "I seem to recall this advice being used on me."
I snorted. But I did finish the food and tea, and I did lie down, and I did sleep.