The Merchant hall in the colony was maintained by the colony's lord, though in design it more resembled a guest-house than the place we stayed our first night in the capital. It was much smaller, and much, much emptier, as might have been expected: while Merchants can travel freely in Kherishdar, to conduct business on the colony world they needed special permits, and that only to deal with the Ai-Naidar there. To cross the street to do business with the aunera... that is a matter that goes all the way up the chain of responsibility. Such a Merchant would have the backing of a House above the Wall of Birth and would ordinarily be staying at its Gate-house, not in an unaffiliated Merchant hall.

In practice, then, the hall was a tea house that had lodging on the second floor, and catered only to the occasional visitor—osulked like us, most probably, or couriers. Which was a pity, as it was a beautifully designed space; perhaps the colony shared a penchant for mild weather with the capital, as three of the walls were nearly entirely windows, and all of them open. Shame and I sat at a round table near, but not in, the aggressive sunlight, and enjoyed the Gate breeze that passed uninterrupted through the room. It teased the smell of the litsilver blooms planted just outside back within, fresh and new, a perfect accompaniment to the delicate smell of the tea the proprietor herself brought us.

When we thanked her, she said, "It is good to have company."

"Is it always so bright out?" I asked. "The weather feels so fair, and yet the sun seems otherwise."

"It's just the way it shines," she replied, with a courteous level of Abasement. "One grows accustomed to it presenting itself as something more cruel than it is."

"A sun that lies," I murmured.

"A sun that speaks a different language," the proprietor suggested, respectfully, and withdrew.

Shame chuckled, and at my glance said, "It was a well-turned phrase."

"Everything here is a metaphor," I said with a sigh, looking down at my drink. She had served it in very traditional bowl, small and shallow, a beautiful bisque color with a hint of green at its thin brim.

"I would worry less about the sun and more about the world-weight," Kor said. "It is similar enough to fool the body, but by day's end we'll both be more tired than we expect." He glanced at me. "Something to consider if you want to paint later."

"I can't imagine painting here," I said. "In this alien place."

"Is it that you can't imagine learning here, then?" Kor asked. At my look, he rested his fingers on the lip of his bowl and turned it slowly, watching the tea shimmer in the foreign light. "You use your art to incorporate what you know into what you are and what you believe, Farren. Is your rejection of what is not Ai-Naidari so deep?"

"Henej," I murmured. "You looked at the painting."

"Of course I did," he said.

"But that was about... Qenain. And the lady's touch," I said.

"All of which returns to maien," Kor said. "To an alien taint. We are here at last, Farren, and the answer to all our questions is within reach. What will you do with the answer?"

"Why are you asking me?" I said. "What about you? What will you do with the answer?"

He chuckled again, softly. "What I always do."

"And that is?" I asked.

"Think about it," he answered with a smile. "For a long time."

"You think too much," I muttered. "It broke your pot."

He started laughing again, and after a moment, I did too. I supposed I was making a habit of inciting laughter in Kor Nai'Nerillin-osulkedi; this seemed a fine thing to me, though I didn't ordinarily think of myself as a very funny person. But then, other people always see in us things we don't see in ourselves. That's why we need them so much, isn't it?

We drank the tea, then, in the quiet of the room, with only the proprietor for company, and I wondered a little at her: she sat behind her counter, but did not clean or work or consider books. Nor did her stillness have any peaceful quality. Instead, she stared out the window fixedly, as if there was some lodestone there that drew her.

When she brought us a refill, I asked, gentling the difference between our castes so she could choose whether or not to respond, "Does something trouble you?"

"Trouble is a strong word, osulkedi," she said, pouring into my empty bowl. "Was the tea adequate?"

"The tea is excellent," I said.

She poured for Kor, then, and said, "The aliens also have something like a tea house. But they serve a different beverage. A stimulant."

"A stimulant!" I murmured. "How does that serve the purposes of a tea house?"

"I suspect the purpose of their tea house is different from ours," she said. "Purportedly they serve a host of beverages, but all of them are variations on the same stimulant. This I learned from an observer who had been asked to test this infusion for compatibility with our digestions."

"Someone gave some of this beverage to a lord as a gift," Kor guessed.

"Just so," she said, "and he wanted to know if it was safe to drink. The observer reported that it was, and so the lord drank it."

Her silence then was abrupt, and we both sensed her frustration at the lack of ending to her story.

"You want to know what it tastes like," I said suddenly, sensing the shape of her discontent.

"I do," she said after a moment's restraint. And then, ears flicking back. "I think."

"You think?" I said.

"It is, after all, an alien drink," she said.

We understood, of course.

"But I have smelled it, betimes," she said. "The smell... intrigues." She set our fresh pot on the table and took the old one with her. In the space she left behind, I saw the magnitude of what lay before us.

"This alien influence is a poison," I said.

Kor cupped his bowl. "Sometimes a bowl of tea is just... a bowl of tea."

I scowled at him. "And sometimes, it is an alien taint, and we take it into ourselves. And then what?"

"And then, perhaps, we are changed," Kor murmured.

I stared at his dipped head. "You cannot honestly be suggesting what I think you are."

"...and that would be?" he asked, looking up at me through his lashes. Did he know he could distract me with the tint and clarity of his eyes? It frustrated me, because I suspected he did. Not that he tried to distract me, but that he knew and didn't do anything to help me move past it—

I sat back, disturbed.

"You see," Kor said, low. "It is also in us."

The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. "What do we do?" I whispered.

"You," he said. "Should draw."

This time I could tell he was using his eyes, and my weakness against beauty, on purpose.

"Draw, shinje," he said. "And make sense of it."

"I should cuff you," I said after a heart's-pause.

He cupped my face with his hand, thumb near the corner of my mouth. And smiled with his own, while showing me his unease with his eyes.

What could I do? I leaned a little into his hand and let myself feel it. The power in his square palms. The calluses on his fingers. Their strength; their tenderness. The fact that they touched me.

And then I went for my paints.

shelv [ SHEHLV ], (verb) – to cuff; to discipline. In its original meaning, referred to literal corporal punishment, usually smacking the face or the back of the shoulder, though it was used only for warnings or light disciplinary action. Currently is used almost entirely to refer to verbal discipline.

It had litsilver blossoms in it, of course. And tea... not intentionally, but because in absent moments the brush went into the bowl, which was probably more often than I noticed. My mind was on the page, and yet I could not focus. The light was wrong. The tools felt too heavy in my grasp, and my hand was reluctant. I felt the strangeness of the world like an assault, and my shoulders hunched. To take tea in this place allowed me to pretend to normalcy. To make art in it was to expose myself to its dangers... to invite them to view my secret self, undefended. For the first time in years there were maledictions beneath my tongue, trapped in my mouth: I thought them, as protection against the taint, even though I could not speak them.

Shame was silent. I perceived his attention, though, one that reminded me of Ajan's in its patience and its concentration. The proprietor, too, moved until she could sit somewhere that allowed her to see the brush.

Normally to be watched did not distress me. But this situation was anything but normal. To have my own tools fight me, to have the world itself fight me...

The sun moved, and I hissed as everything changed yet again beneath my fingers. The sharper light and harder shadows made mockery of the techniques that were so harmonious on the homeworld. But I could not back down from the challenge that Shame had not issued me.

Yes, you heard rightly. He had not issued it me, though he could have. He could have taken me by the chin and used that voice of his, that commands through timbre alone. 'Do you fear, then,' I imagine he might have said, or 'are you without ambition after all?'

Instead, he had shown me his vulnerability. Faced with that uncertainty, and with his willingness to let me see it, I could not back down.

So I painted, in weak greens and silvers and grays and splashes of unsettled pale brown, thin as veils, so many washes. I painted flowers first, and no words, because there were no words in my head. I let the painting lead me... I believed him when he said there was an answer in it.

When I was done, I had a word. Qil: pure. Clean. Unstained.

It sat on the messiest ground I had ever painted, a thing of chaos, as if I had spilled paint and tea and left it in rings and spatters on a used table.

Almost I wept with frustration and anger, for having created such un-sense. But Shame checked my hand in the moment when I would have raised it against my creation.

"No," he breathed. "It's perfect." At the flex of the muscles in my arm, he pressed, and I felt the strength in his hand. "Kava," he said—peer, true peer—"leave it. It is perfect."

"I don't understand," I said, my voice shaking.

"No," he said. "That is how it is with true art. One perceives truth before one understands it."

I flushed, but the praise only made me angrier. "It's ugly," I said.

"It's honest," Kor said. "About life and about struggling with all its complexities. Farren—" he caught my hands around the edge of the table, careful of my paint water and the drying page. His thumbs rubbed circles onto the backs of my hands until I started to relax despite myself. "Farren. Life is not always beautiful."

"I know that," I said, pained. "But I make it beautiful. That is my work. And this... this is ugliness. I have lost my way...!"

"Sometimes we have to lose our way before we are capable of a deeper understanding of it," Kor said, his eyes intent on mine.

I drew in a breath to answer when two shadows, harsh and thin and gray, fell over us. I looked up to find Ajan bowing with an unmistakable air of triumph.

"Masuredi," he said. "As you commanded."

I could only stare in shock, for behind him... stood the fathrikedi. Alone, without escort or Guardians.

You must understand, aunera. Fathriked do not have a proper context outside the houses where they are kept. They do not even have singular names; each person within a household has a different name for a Decoration, so once a fathrikedi is outside her assigned dwelling, what could one even call out to draw her ear in a crowd? What name would one give to a Guardian to help one locate her if she is lost? That is why the Decorations never leave their compounds without escort; we detach a bit of their context to surround them, to make sense of their presence in the world outside.

For this Decoration to be here in this fashion...

"Take her upstairs, please, menuredi," Shame said, and I became aware of the proprietor trying very hard not to stare at us all. "It is the last door on the left."

Ajan bowed again to him and led the fathrikedi, who followed him like a trailing edge of a storm. As she passed me her ember eyes seized mine, and I saw in them... her restlessness, her amusement, her angers. My short fur lifted as if that passing storm had been charged with lightnings, and then she was gone.

"You knew," I said, as soon as they had vanished up the stairs. Turning back to Shame. "You knew she would come!"

"She knows the aunera that have bewitched her lord," Shame said. "She has met them several times... more times than the aunera have been reported seen by the house's irimked."

"She has been here before," I breathed.

Shame inclined his head.

"But you knew she would come...!"

"Of course she would," he said. "She loves him." He began carefully capping my paints. "Come, we will be wanted."

I watched, surprised, as he neatly put my materials away, in just the right order, even to remembering where in the box I had stored each color before removing it. He handed me the materials before carefully covering the new painting and taking it himself. I found myself standing, awkward, holding the paints and wishing I could wrest the evidence of my failure away from him.

"I should—"

"I will carry the painting," he interrupted. At my look he transferred it to one hand and used the other to slip around my shoulder. By that he pulled me to him, until we were lightly pressed together, the box trapped between us.

The smell of him, like temple incense and tea... I found my nose in his hair and sighed, head dropping.

"Farren," he said, voice husky. "Trust me."

I breathed carefully, and knew he felt the tremor I tried to still. And then I let my pain go, for the moment at least.

"Incorrigible priest," I murmured.

"You would find me the less fascinating if I were elsewise," he answered, and I could hear the smile in his voice.

I snorted and drew back, just enough to look at him, and that made him chuckle, low.

"You can touch me with your fingers, you know," he said. "Not just your eyes. Though you touch with your eyes far more acutely than many people can with their hands."

"One day, Kor Nai'Nerillin-osulkedi," I said, mock-stern. "One day..."

"Soon, I hope," he said, with an insouciant grin.

We turned for the stairs and found the proprietor stopped still beside her counter, all her heart in her eyes and a fullness of spirit welling there.

"Ajzelin!" she whispered.

Kor pressed his free hand to his chest and bowed just enough to allow his ink-spill hair to fall over his shoulders, leaving her staring wide-eyed.

On the way up, on the step behind him, I said, "You must leave a trail of the swooned in your wake when you go out."

"That is why I rarely do," he said, resigned.