Kor was fond of his dramatic comments, but even for him the last one was egregious. We had no sooner settled the lord of Qenain in the tea house under Ajan's watchful eye than I cornered him in our bed-chamber. “What did you mean by it? That you didn't expect it? You can't be serious!”

He was seated on the edge of the bed, much as he had been the night before. Had my sensibilities been less outraged by his revelation I might have paid more attention to the fact that he was not taking off his shoes, as he had been then, nor beginning to undress... but rather just sitting there. Perhaps I might have been forgiven for not noticing such a small, crucial detail in those days before living side-by-side with Shame honed my powers of observation. It does not seem such a small detail in retrospect.

“Farren,” Kor began.

“They are aliens,” I said.

“They are alien people,” he said, horribly distorting our language just to put the notion into words.

“They are alien aliens,” I said, and the memory of the female’s anguish spurred me. It had to be true that they were entirely different from us, or what had we done? “They are not Ai-Naidar—“

“—on that we are agreed,” Kor said.

“—but they are not people!” I finished. When he did not speak, I said, “Kor. You are Kherishdar’s Shame.”

“…and I just separated a man from the loves of his life, possibly for the balance of it,” Kor said, voice as sharp as a slap.

I’ve lived with him for decades, aunera, and I still don’t know how he does that with his voice.

I stared at him in shock, finally seeing him… seeing the way he was sitting, the dejection, the exhaustion.

“Farren,” Kor said. “Please. If you will not try to understand, then leave me alone.”

I drew myself up, every limb aching. And then took myself out. But before I left, I stopped at the door and said, “I’m sorry.”

And then I found myself in the antechamber. The very empty antechamber. Ajan was across the hall standing guard in the lord’s room, and Haraa... was not here. No doubt she too was in the lord’s chamber, though what she thought she might accomplish there I could not guess. Nothing, I thought... save to offer him the balm of a familiar presence.

Couriers are swift, and have their own lanes on roads so that they might travel unimpeded. Even so, a message to the capital and back... we might be here several days. Several days in this unforgiving atmosphere under this too-bright sun and on this heavy soil; several days in this oppressive melancholy, with the lord drooping like one of his own flowers, parched, and all the rest of my companions distrait. Truly, Qenain’s maien had taken us all.

The thought would have made me angry a few days previously. On this evening, all I could do was look at the barren sitting room and feel acutely my loneliness, and the emptiness of the coming hours.

So I did the only thing I could, that I knew how to do.

You wonder, perhaps, that I could paint. In truth, it hurt. It hurt my wrists and the fine little bones in my fingertips, and the joints where they bent, holding the brush. It hurt my eyes, which blurred with wetness that I refused to notice, but which I knew the secret name of anyway. It hurt my heart, which did not want to speak through the ink.

But the hand, the eye, and the heart are yoked in an artist. When one is invoked, the others follow, unless something is desperately, fatally wrong. Since it was inevitable, I surrendered; I took up a brush, and with that committed to the examination of a distressed spirit. By the end of it, I had salted the paper with my tears, and the brush had worked the dilution into the art.

So many words I could have chosen. Grief. Regret. Oppression. Taint, again, now that I understood it better.

But I painted shul.

Change. Personal change. The kind of change that a paisathi creates, the breaking, shattering, world-upending sort, that can mean everything to a single person and yet not make any sense to anyone else. A small thing. An ending and beginning thing, inside the self. Shul. Shul. The sound of breaking pots. And I would like to say that I made a great thing of it, that I drew some beautiful masterwork. And indeed I planned it so... but what I ended up doing was... writing the word. My own handwriting, without ornament, without color. Black on cream parchment, spattered with water that fell in beads from my eyes as I bent close.

Shul. I put my head down on the table when I was done, and knew nothing more but the smell of the ink and the salt... and my own confusion at feeling so undone. So completely undone.

The next awareness I had was of Kor’s hand on my shoulder, and very swiftly after that, the ache of my body; I was kneeling on the ground before the low table where I’d been at work, a pose I had not felt while in my artist's fugue but that I now felt in every groaning joint. I lifted my head; he had sat on the divan behind me and was staring past me at the page.

“So,” he said. “You understand.”

“No,” I said. “No, I do not. And Kor… it frightens me.”

“It does me as well,” he said, and drew me into his arms. I tucked my head against his chest and felt his hand on my hair, and there we abided for some time.

When I spoke, it was for the regrettable sort of words which often break such silences. “If I don’t rise now, I don’t think I’ll be able to move for cramping.”

“Up, up,” he said. “I’ll put in a bath for you.”

“Let me come with you,” I said. “I don’t want to be alone.”

In the bath I watched him at work; the confidence of his movements remained unimpeded by the world-weight, but he was more deliberate than usual. He felt it too, I thought, if not as dearly as I did. The sight of his grace soothed my spirit all the same, just as it was pleasing when he helped me undress; it felt good to be taken care of. I went into the bath and there I reposed, eyes closed, until the steam loosened some of the muscles in my legs and arms and chest.

It was the latter release that freed me enough to speak. “Tell me. Why you knew they would not be animals.”

“It is in the books, if you look for it,” Kor said, sitting cross-legged at the edge of the bath.

“You cannot be serious,” I said, startled. But he was, so I said, “Where?”

“In the histories describing our first experiences with aunera,” Kor said. At my expression, he said, “I had cause to look, for one of my Corrections was interrupted by one. Afterwards, I did the research.” He smiles, lopsided. “You will find that is often my answer to many things.”

“I cannot fault a man for seeking the wisdom of books,” I said, thinking of my own long association with the librarian of the capital. Then, looking up at him again. “But what aren’t you saying, Kor?”

He sighed and smiled, and it was a very tired smile. “The lord’s male lover… he was the aunerai I saw that day. I suppose it makes sense, for the number of aunera who would be allowed ingress are few and one associated so closely with a nanaukedi lord would be a likely candidate. But it was… a surprise.”

“Did he recognize you, do you think?” I said, astonished.

“I don’t know,” Kor said. “How could I? Does he know enough of us to know that I am unusually colored?” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, Farren. What does matter is if you read the books you will learn we did not give the aunera their designations in order to diminish them to the status of animals. We did it to make clear that they stand outside the hierarchy of Kherishdar, that the hierarchy cannot apply to them.”

“But—" And then I stopped.

“You understand,” Kor said, no doubt watching my thoughts course over my face. “We cannot assign them a caste in order to speak politely of them in our language, because that would make them a place within our society. We cannot even remand them to the unspoken caste, because even a slave, historically, was an Ai-Naidari with a value within the system: a negative value, perhaps, but you would know as well as I do that the negative space creates a shape."

"Yes," I murmured, lost in the image, and the... well, the alienness of the discussion.

"The only way to exclude them, then," Kor finished, "is to speak of them as un-people.”

“But why would we make that choice?” I said, ears flattening. “Why not just create an alien caste, to which only aliens can belong, and then make rules to govern how they are treated within Kherishdar?”

“That is a very good question,” Kor said, quiet. “To which I have only one answer.” I looked up at him and he replied, “ ‘We’ did not make that choice, Farren. Thirukedi did.”

I paused, taken aback. Then said, “What?”

“It’s very clear in the histories,” Kor said. “After we first met the aunera. Thirukedi told us how we were to speak of them. The decision was handed down directly from Him.”

I recognized the look on his face. He was waiting for me to pry more out of him. I was unfortunately too intent on having the answers to take him to task for it. “But?”

“But there are no copies remaining of the proclamation,” Kor said, watching me. “The histories speak of the notice, but do not record the exact wording. They mention it, that is all.”

I let the steam rising off the water distract me while I considered the implications I could understand... and the ones I could only imagine. At last, I said, “It is perilous to guess at the mind of Civilization.”

“Yes?” he said, and I did not detect the usual hint of humor that accompanied such questions.

“But it almost seems as if… He knows something about the aunera we don’t,” I said slowly. “And that, perhaps…in either case…He did not want an irrevocable decision.”

“It is perilous to guess at the mind of Civilization,” Kor said. “But the servants become like the master. We are His own… perhaps we might dare to guess, now and then, at His thoughts.”

“And this guessing is how you came to your conclusion,” I said, and paused to give voice to my exasperation. “Kor… must you really do this conversational gambit with the leading questions? Do you derive some bizarre pleasure from it?”

I startled a laugh from him; he still seemed tired, but I was proud of that laugh. Vexed at the foible, yes, but proud of the laugh.

“I am sorry, Farren,” he said when he recovered himself. “It’s hard to curb one’s habits. I am used to drawing people out during Correction, sometimes to lance a wound they cannot reach themselves, and sometimes to lead them toward the answer they need but will not accept without effort. It’s my experience that most people value more the answer they have to work for.”

I studied his face, becoming so well-known to me, and marked the fatigue in it still, and the shadows in his coronal eyes.

“You don’t have to be Shame for me,” I said at last.

“I know,” Kor said, quiet. “And I value that. I equally value that I don’t have to stop myself from being Shame for you. It’s as much a part of me as your art is a part of you, Farren. And yet, fewer people are discomfited at the exercise of your work.”

I chuckled softly. “I hope you will have less need to Correct me than I have need to paint.”

“You, need Correction? Rarely, I am guessing,” Kor said with a smile. “But I can’t change the way I react to the world.”

“Which is as a priest,” I said.

“Yes.”

“So what you’re saying,” I murmured, looking up at the ceiling with exaggerated patience, “is that I have committed to a lifetime of your practicing on me.”

He did not laugh, but his eyes were bright with it, and with the poignancy of his gratitude. “Yes.”

I like to think that my sigh would have pleased even a jaded audience. I gave it such zest that it made the surface of the water ripple. That won me another laugh, at last.

“If I promise to pose for you, would that soothe your pain?” he said.

“More than once,” I said.

“Regularly,” he promised, solemn.

“Very well,” I said. “I am appeased. I would demand my first session tonight, but regrettably I am too tired.”

“I am also,” Kor said, quieter. As he helped me from the bath, he said, “I will check on the others and then return here. And we should eat before we sleep, Farren.”

“You have an appetite?” I said, accepting the towel from him.

“Not at all. But we should try.”

We did try, though neither of us managed very well. The matter of the aunera remained with us like a lingering incense. Afterwards, when Kor took my latest painting away, I allowed it; I had become accustomed to him standing guard over the evidence of my grief. Perhaps that was a form of Correction itself: a gentle reminder that the alchemy that transforms pain into wisdom and growth does not happen on its own, that it must undergo a process and that this process has worth… and that the evidence of the process might itself trigger the same alchemy in someone else. It has taken me a great deal of time to truly accept that Kor was right to preserve my uglier works. At times, it is only by seeing the footsteps of others on the path that we know to keep walking… or that any journey is possible at all.

So, he spirited away the painting, and we prepared for bed. As I slipped under the hissing sheets—now clean of the scent of Ajan—I said, “Do you miss him?”

“Of course,” Kor said. “But we have time, Farren.”

Oh aunera. Such infamous words. Never again did I hear a similar sentiment from Shame.

“I don’t mind, you know,” I said. “Being displaced from bed for it. Any time.”

His fingers were spread on my solar plexus, and had seemed very relaxed there. He chafed the thumb against my fur, distracting me, then said, “Actually, he said he would be honored if you would be ajzelin-jzene.”

When I answered with absolute stillness, he finished, voice low, “I would be, also.”

Truly there are moments when the silence that follows words seems to echo all the way into the heart.

Among us the role of witness is sacred. Perhaps this is because in our society we truly rise and fall by our relationships with others, and so to see and speak the truth we have seen is important. Earlier in this account I mentioned how harshly we punish false witness in Kherishdar. But we also enshrine the role of those who stand outside and watch, so that it can be told how it was… indeed, some of you know the name of our most famous witness, the Exception.

It is true also, aunera, that to see truth so clearly brings with it an element of awe and fear. But if the Exception is notorious, she is also revered. Even one who stands outside society can be lauded for service, if their service is to bear witness.

To be ajzelin-jzene, touch-lover witness, meant that Ajan and Kor were willing to have me with them when they were together. It is not a usual thing, but when it is possible, when it happens… those moments are the subject of verses of poetry—both romantic and spiritual.

“You don’t have to,” Kor murmured against my shoulder. “Though if you do, we would welcome you.”

“Thank you,” I said softly, and brought his hand up so I could kiss the back.

I did not give him an answer then. I wish I had. But I am also grateful that I was not punished irrevocably for my hesitation, no matter what I would feel in the days that followed.

Some say that we are vessels, and that we must make ourselves empty in order to be filled with all that is good and worthy. That there can be no love without an attempt at perfection of self: that a cracked pot cannot hold, and that this is the reason we have loss and jealousy and fear.

But I believe that love is the vessel, and we are the thing formed by it. Love is always perfect. If there is loss and jealousy and fear, it is because we have not allowed the pot to shape us, but have in our hubris decided that we know better how to fill the empty spaces.

—Ereseya, Observations from the End of a Life

I would like to say I slept well, that Kor’s presence and the newness of being ajzelin were sufficient to soothe any troubles I might entertain. But while I hesitate to use the word ‘torture,’ my dreams wrenched me from sleep several times that night, and they were not deep-dreams, what we call yulun, the voice of the spirit as it makes sense of the world, the day and one’s place in it… but rather jiliqil, the restless almost-dreams of a mind that cannot settle, the hateful ones that make one feel as if one has not slept at all.

And all my jiliqil were of the aunera… of the female’s haunted eyes, and the stern mask of the male’s face.

I was not the only one disturbed, for when I sat up at last in the morning, even more exhausted than I had been before lying down, Kor remained lying on his back, one hand on his chest and his eyes on the ceiling.

“I’ll run you a bath when I’m done,” he said at last.

“Thank you,” I said.

We broke our fast in silence, and again he checked on the others. When he returned it was to take his stole off and carefully fold it before setting it on the table. “I think,” he said, “I will go for a walk.”

“All right,” I said. “The others…?”

“As well as can be expected,” he said. “You might check, if you wish.”

“I think I will,” I said.

“I’ll be back for the dareleni,” he said, and left. I looked at the stole for quite some time before rising myself. I did not begrudge him the setting aside of his mantle, not at all. But it concerned me that he felt the need, for it was very much not like him. We were all sorely afflicted, I thought, by these matters. I prayed Thirukedi’s message would arrive soon.

The lord of Qenain was down the hall. I tapped lightly on the door, which Ajan opened for me, and if Kor had unsettled me with his abrupt departure, it was nothing to what the sight of Ajan did to me… for the youth was grim and stern and it did nothing to hide the distress in his eyes. He let me in and I joined him in the antechamber.

“He is in the bedchamber,” Ajan murmured. “And has not moved from the chair beside the bed since he arrived. Haraa came and knelt at his feet, and she has not moved save to fall asleep against his leg.”

“May I…?” I asked, and to this day I am not sure what moved me to make the request. It is easy to blame the artistic spirit of voyeurism, but I sincerely, deeply, did not want to look. And as much as I worried over Haraa, I knew that her welfare was not the sole reason either. I wonder, sometimes, if I knew that I had to see in order to make sense of the unsense in my head… if, like a painting lacking cohesion, there was some single line I was seeking by instinct, one I knew would give form to the shape of it and release me from the effort of seeking.

“Go, if you wish,” Ajan answered, resigned. “I know I have tired of looking.”

I went slowly to the edge of the door, keeping myself out of sight… to no purpose, I saw the moment I glanced in the room. The lord of Qenain had no eyes for anything outside his own memories; he stared listlessly at the wall across from the chair, drawn and wearied and old, and this I said of a man who had claimed kevej for his esar, who had lived kevej, the passion, the zest for living, for experimentation, for daring much. And he had dared much, too much, and the shadow-side of his esar had cut him down. Completely. If there was life left in the lord of Qenain, it had been arrested. Sitting in the chair this body breathed, but it did not live.

At his feet, Haraa had wilted like a parched flower, her storm-gray curls scattered over his insteps and her face hidden. At some point she had gone from kneeling to lying down, her body tightly curled and only the spine visible from the door, a hard chain of shadowed dimples.

I stared at this tableau and something in me found the line that made sense of the painting, and though the painting it formed in my mind hurt me and stretched me in ways I did not think I had the elasticity to bear, still, I could not help but complete it.

I stopped at the door on my way out. “I don’t think he’ll move, Ajan. Surely you can rest.”

“Surely I could,” he said. “But I will not.” At my look, he said, soft, “It is the only gift I can make him, osulkedi. I treat him like an Ai-Naidari in his situation would be treated, and so assure him that he is still one of us, and due all that an Ai-Naidari is due.”

His generosity moved me… as did his subtlety. I would have thought that by then Ajan would no longer surprise me with his subtleties, but I continued not to expect them of one so young. I should have known better—anyone Kor would take as a lover would have to be capable of appreciating such nuances, since he is a man who lives by them.

So instead, I touched him lightly on the shoulder, as I was allowed as one higher-ranked, and more importantly, as one he had called family and given himself to in life-debt. And the touch spoke all that was needful. He bowed his head briefly, accepting it, and then I left him to his duty, and I went to mine.

For I had identified my duty at last, and as shocked as I was to find myself executing it, I still went… without pause. Without delay. And without—strangely—second thoughts. Out of the tea house, under the too-bright sun, into the street… and across it, into the aunerai part of town.