As before, the aunera did not stop me nor question my errand, even when it took me back to the beautifully appointed building at the far end of the street. I entered through the side door and hurried down the corridor to the grand room where we'd found the lord of Qenain, and there stared a moment at the door before reminding myself that no Servants would appear to introduce me formally. So I pushed it open, and found within the aunerai male, sitting behind the desk.

How I startled him! He rose from his chair with a hitch of his gait, very nearly a stumble, and I had the impression that such clumsiness was unwonted in him. He looked very much a lord in his own right, now that I had him alone and could form such impressions separate from the circumstances in which I'd first seen him: the clothing he wore was obviously some kind of uniform, tailored and well-fitted to a frame I imagined must be elegant in the aunera, given their relative lack of height. The rich, dark red fabric went well with his... hair, I suppose I must call it, though there was so little of it and in odd places, what I have since learned is a beard. But it was a good color, a dark gold, threaded here and there with white. And his face was stern, the kind of stern I associated with those above the Wall of Birth. Strange to think I could read it despite our being different species.

But at the sight of him alone, my errand foundered, for I had expected the female also, with her facility for our tongue. I glanced around the office, not seeing her behind him or at the low table, and inclined my head, as an osulkedi would to one of unknown caste. Then said, hesitant, "...Serapis?"

"She... is not here," he began. "She... is not work."

"She is not working today?" I asked, trying not to be frustrated.

Apparently I was not the only one, for he held up a hand with a frown and picked up one of the devices on his desk—truly, the aunera never seemed to be without exposed devices—and dragged his fingers over it several times until he perhaps found what he was looking for. Which he showed me as he said, "This."

I looked at the screen and saw it divided. On one half, what I assumed to be aunerai writing. And on the other... letters I understood, for it was our tongue. And the word he had chosen was tsekil.

It was as if I had been struck, hard enough to be felled.

"This," he said again, pointing. And then looking at it, sounded it out. "Tseh-keel."

"You are saying she's soul-sick? Maybe you mean body-sick?"

He frowned a little, then tapped the device and waved a hand, as if to encourage me to speak. So I asked again, and when I had done, he looked at its surface and shook his head. This time, he said, "She... is not... body-sick. Sick here." He touched his breast. "Heart. Heart-sick. Tsekil, yes?"

"Yes," I whispered.

He nodded.

"You are not?" I asked, and watched in uneasy fascination as alien words sprang onto the screen a few moments after my speech.

He looked away, jaw hard. Then said, "Must work."

"Will you fetch her?" I asked, quieter. "Please? There is something I must say—ask—of you both."

He read the translation, then looked at me with a faint frown. Then said, "Wait, please." And as he turned to go, stopped and then offered me the device. I took it only because it seemed rude not to, and sat on one of the chairs to wait.

It was, I saw from glancing at its surface, some kind of dictionary. It seemed incredible to me to think that there existed such a thing. Not because we are unfamiliar with dictionaries; we have Ai-Naidar whose sole work is to maintain dictionaries across all the worlds, or else how would an empire our size ever maintain a single language? No, as I stared at the unreadable orthography marching in such regular rows down the screen alongside its Ai-Naidari counterpart, I felt powerfully, irrevocably the truth of Kor's observations. Animals do not make dictionaries.

The two aunera returned not long after. I set the device carefully on the male's desk and rose to face them, and if I had been entertaining any doubts at all as to my course of action the sight of the female put paid to them. She and Haraa could have been painted with the same brush; their depression did the same thing to their eyes, their faces, the line of their spines.

"Osulkedi," she said, her voice a soft rasp, to match the exhaustion of her movements. "The administrator said you wished to see us?"

"Yes," I said. "I was wondering if you'd be willing to come to the tea house with me."

"I... I don't understand," she said. "Why?"

"Aunera," I said, having no other idea how to address them, "I do not know when the message will come for the lord of Qenain, nor what it will say. But I think he needs the support of those who mean most to him while he waits."

The female paled as if to faint, and the male grew very still, as if not entirely sure he'd heard correctly.

"You... are saying... that you wish us not to be separated?" she asked, her voice trembling.

"That is exactly what I am saying," I said, and wondered at myself even as I did so. "Though the lord will have to abide by Thirukedi's decision, it may be several days before we know what it is. And... he... misses you. A great deal."

They looked at one another, one long pause... then they both began speaking at once in their own tongue. And then stopped, and laughed, a broken, helpless sort of laughter that made my heart hurt to hear. But I had given myself over to the purpose and so I stood fast, and waited.

"We would be honored, glad to come," the female said.

"Pack bags," I said. "If your duties permit, I think he would prefer you to stay until he has to leave."

That is how I came to escort two aunera across the street to our side of the Gate-town, and unlike the aunerai side we were stopped and I explained that the gray-cloaked aliens were with me and that we were expected. Which was not a lie, aunera... for while the lord was not expecting them, and I doubted Ajan or Haraa were either, and most surely the tea house proprietor would be shocked at the very notion... Kor would be completely unsurprised to find the aunera there. I had faith in his preternatural understanding of the Ai-Naidari heart—this Ai-Naidari’s in particular.

As we approached the tea house, the two drew closer; the female seemed to notice what she was doing and tried to open the distance between us again, saying, "Apologies, osulkedi. We have never been here, and it is disquieting."

"Disquieting?" I asked.

She kept her eyes on the ground as she paced me. "We are only allowed in certain parts of the Ai-Naidari area, osulkedi. This tea house is not among them."

Of course, it made perfect sense. Except, "You find this disquieting? The aunera on your side of town seemed quite assured about being there."

"Ah, but we know we are here because we have done something wrong," she whispered. "That is very different, osulkedi."

I hesitated before answering quietly, "Loving another is not wrong, Shemena."

She looked up at the building as we entered its shadow. "It is in this case." She stopped in front of the door and added, "You call me 'maiden'."

"Yes," I said, wondering if she knew all the connotations of such a name, for the Maiden is both the sweetness of innocence, and its naïve hope that the rules will not apply to it. "You seem one to me."

"You honor me," she said softly. And bowed. "My name is Lenore. Lenore Serapis. Among us, the second name is the family name. The man with me is Andrew Clarke. He is my superior. Like a caste-peer, but above me in rank."

"Lenore Serapis," I said. It had almost an Ai-Naidari sound. And to the male. "Andrew Clarke. Come, the lord is waiting."

As I suspected, the proprietor of the tea house was stunned into silence by the arrival of two aunera. To her, I said, "They will be staying in the second guest room," and released her thus from the necessity of finding something appropriate to say in a situation in which there was nothing of the kind. I led the aunera up the stairs and knocked softly on the lord's door.

As before, Ajan opened it for me. "Osulkedi?" And seeing the alien faces past me, "What is this?"

"All the way, penokedi," I said, quiet but firm, and to that tone he inclined his head and let the aunera inside. I led them to the bed-chamber and said at the door, "My lord? You have visitors, come to stay until you are remanded to the Emperor."

He lifted dull eyes toward me… and then stumbled out of his chair, incredulous, his hands already lifting toward his beloveds, who were moving past me with the breathless urgency of a poem in the mouth.

I turned my back on their joyous reunion. I had finished this painting and now I had to live with it.

“Is this wise?” Ajan asked me as I passed him into the corridor.

“If there is a course in this that leads to wisdom, penokedi, I pray you tell me where it lies,” I said.

He shook his head and gently closed the door, leaving me in the corridor with my discomfort. And yet, for all my tension, I knew I could have done no different.

I ate a light lunch alone, mostly fruit and broth and tea; I found I still had no stomach for anything more. In the silence afterwards I fell to going through my materials, trying to decide if the day had yet produced a word or if I would be reduced to losing at Rivers and Bridges during the dareleni. But any thought I had to producing a new painting were dashed when I discovered Kor’s hiding place for the works he had secreted from my passions. I was hunched over them when he found me, naturally.

“So,” he said. “You finally uncovered the cache.”

“You hid them… in my own trunk!” I exclaimed, torn between laughter and indignation. “In my own trunk!”

“Where else would I store paintings that needed to be kept flat?” he said reasonably. “I put my journals on top of them, I thought that would be sufficient impediment to your finding them.”

“I began this enterprise while reading your journals,” I pointed out. “How were you to know I would not take up that habit again?”

“Because I knew you felt shame at doing so,” he said. “Particularly after we had come to know one another better. A man might reasonably contemplate the writing of a stranger, who might find it uncomfortable in an intimate.”

“You hid my paintings… from me… in my own trunk,” I murmured, shaking my head as I paged through them. “Because you knew I wouldn’t look.”

“Yes,” he said, with a hint of the amusement that I had not heard often enough lately.

“You are incorrigible,” I said with a sigh.

“Yes,” he agreed, and weathered my mock-glare rather well. Then, he added, “Will you destroy them now that you know where they are hidden?”

“No,” I said, slowly. “No, the art is yours. I will not retract a gift, no matter how poorly I gave it.”

“So you don’t believe, yet, that they are worth keeping,” he said.

To that, I said nothing, and of course my silence spoke more than eloquently enough for Kherishdar’s Shame.

“What you did,” he said, voice soft, and I knew he was no longer speaking of the art. “That was generous, Farren.”

I stared at the stack of hidden paintings, slowly brushing my thumb against the paint-stiffened surface of the topmost: agathe, that was. The light spilled down the bright scarlet letters as my touch shifted the parchment. "You approve, then."

“Of the situation? I can’t begin to say,” he answered. “But of you? Wholeheartedly.”

I looked over my shoulder at him in surprise.

“I didn’t think you would be capable of it,” he admitted.

Now I did look at him, fully, turning to do so. “Is Shame admitting to having been wrong about an Ai-Naidari’s probable actions?”

“Yes,” he said, with an ease I found remarkable. “I did not think you would be able to encompass both their difference… and their personhood. I thought you still too bound in your own mind; I thought it would be possible for you to eventually come to a new opinion, but that it would take longer. And I was wrong.”

“You almost weren’t,” I said, turning to put the paintings away again. “I still am not entirely sure of my reasons, and I am deeply discomfited by what I have done.”

“But you did it,” Kor said, joining me. He took me by the shoulders and turned me gently around. “You did do it. For that you are to be commended.”

“For changing in response to taint?” I said, meeting his eyes, wanting to know the answer.

“For being the tree that bends before the wind that would otherwise uproot it,” Kor said. “When the wind has passed, it remains whole.”

“But changed,” I murmured.

“A little, perhaps,” Kor said. “But the wind is brief, and trees live a very long time. And that is Kherishdar, Farren. Don’t doubt it.”

I murmured, “I could never doubt Civilization.”

“Then don’t doubt yourself,” he answered, gentle. “For you are Civilization also.”

I considered that for several heartbeats, then looked at him directly and said, “And now I know my association with you is changing me.”

He laughed. “How is that?”

“Because my first thought was not to thank you, nor to be relieved or thoughtful,” I said. “But to hear your voice in my head, as if it was my own.”

“And what did my voice say?” he asked, smiling.

“I am Civilization,” I said. “…but so was the lord of Qenain.”

He mmmed. “Then it is for me to play your part?”

“Yes,” I said gravely, for I very much wanted to know.

“Then,” he said, “I suppose I would paint.”

“Very good,” I said and went for my brushes.

“Wait, wait!” Kor said, laughing. “I was extrapolating!”

“Then make good on your extrapolations,” I said, and handed him my box of tools. “Tonight, you will be making the dareleni’s painting.”

“I am not the artist,” he said.

“And I am not Shame,” I said. “But a little of Kherishdar’s Shame is in every Ai-Naidar who ever transgresses... and a little art is in every Ai-Naidari who lives and admires beauty. So, osulkedi...” I tapped the box. “Paint.”

He looked in the box in my hands, then took it into his own, saying, "Very well. But if I do this, I will do it in my own way."

"I expect nothing else," I said. "In fact, I look forward to it."

I expected to help him with the set-up, but he waved me aside, and truth be known I was not sad to sit down... and also to observe. What I observed foremost was how closely I had been observed. For while Kor's movements had the slight hesitations of someone who is doing something for the first time, he was never at a loss for the next step. He went into my box and withdrew the knife; he found the paper block and looked in approximately the right place for the section lacking glue, and slipped the knife into it to cut the paper free. He brought it to the table and set it down with the proper side up, and then considered the tools available before choosing a pen and a jar of ink and setting them alongside. Remembering the towel to blot with, I might add, and the plate one sets the ink jar on.

Indeed, so fascinated was I by the minutia of his movements and how clearly they demonstrated his expert memory that I didn't see until too late that he had lifted the knife and set it to his wrist—

"KOR!" I cried, and did not realize how far I'd lunged until I stopped. The slice was seeping, only, not running. "What in the name of all the gods and ancestors are you doing?" I said when I found my tongue.

"I," he said, "am painting." And then he set the nib of the pen to the smear at the side of his wrist and went to work.

I slid back onto the chair, thinking that I had earned this queasiness: I had told him to make art, and so he was. I should have remembered all the stories of blood and grief in the journals of his Corrections, and his comments about his ease with knives... ancestors! I had not thought he'd be capable of turning one on himself...! But truly, I should have known better. A man who'd undergone a scourging in order to be permitted to scourge others was not going to have a weak stomach. Not, apparently, like his ajzelin, who was having trouble even watching. Particularly when he went back to the smear at the side of his wrist to refresh the pen.

"There's no need to be distressed," he said absently as he worked. "The side of the wrist, between the end of the arm bone and the beginning of the wrist bones, is poorly supplied with blood. You can cut there and not bleed almost at all."

"Which, of course, you know."

He looked up then. "Of course I know."

My mouth ran ahead of my thoughts too often, particularly with Shame. "When we first met, in the Bleak. You said a body can only bear so much. Is that what you were doing? Bloodletting?"

He set the pen down and rested his hands on the edge of the table. And said nothing at all, until at last I said, "I'm just trying to understand."

"For some things," he said at last, "to bleed is the only way to be reborn."

"Always the knives," I said, ears slicking back.

"Don't be so literal, Farren," he said, taking the pen back up. "There are other ways for a spirit to bleed. If an actual knife will do the job, then I use a knife. But you can't tell me that you haven't bled yourself in your art."

"I have never," I whispered. "Until I came here."

"Are you sure?" he asked, head still bent. "Sometimes the cut is deep, and gushes, and everyone sees it. But sometimes the cut is shallow, and seeps, and it may be years before anyone realizes it. And then they look back on it and say, 'how could I not have seen.'"

I shuddered. "Kor, for the sake of the gods."

"You were depressed," he said. "Didn't you bleed into your work?"

I looked away, and thought of a piece here and there... including one that now hung in the study of the heir to my city district, which had been painted initially without people until that youth, in his innocence, noticed its emptiness.

Kor was kind enough not to press. Or perhaps he realized he had made his point. More likely both; I have yet to meet an Ai-Naidari in whom compassion and candor mixed so easily. Most of us have to grind that pigment almost to particulate to distribute it into the binder.

We kept our silence as he worked, until he set the pen down and said, "There." He turned it on the table to face me and blotted his wrist with the towel, leaving me to my perlustration.

I am told that one of your great writers, aunera, once said that perfection is achieved only when there is nothing left to take away. To us this is an important principle, sufficiently that we have a word for it. We have spoken earlier of habits and customs and traditions that no longer serve us, something we call vuqerin, and that the act of removing them is uvrel, to cull. But the concept that civilization needs such refinement is known as ukulij... and the act itself, as udar vabanil. The literal translation of the latter, aunera, is "the Correction of society." It is strange that I never truly thought about it... to wonder at the name, and at the notion that Thirukedi was the source of all Correction long before there was a Shame. Perhaps it is no wonder that Shame is His osulkedi, and has always answered directly to Him; for if Shame Corrects the people of Kherishdar, he does so only as a reflection of the hand that refines civilization itself.

The word Kor had chosen, then, was ukulij, and he had painstakingly written it in his blood. Let it not be said that he had no sense of artistry, either, for he wrote it much as he had some of his own notes in his journal... long past when the ink of his blood was opaque, so that the letters seemed to be seen through the eyes of someone on the verge of fainting, fading in and out of consciousness. It made me realize that from an individual level, the act of Correcting society—of refining it by paring away all that did not belong to it—would feel, a great deal, like vertigo to one being pared away.

I looked up at Kor and met his eyes across the paper. I could not even give voice to what I learned from that piece of calligraphy, rendered so starkly in his simple, bold handwriting... and in his own blood.

He knew how it would all end. Perhaps not the particulars. Perhaps not the nuances or the reasons. But he was Kherishdar's Shame, and he had spent his life Correcting the wayward so they might return to the arms of society; had, in effect, been Thirukedi's helpmeet for so long that indeed, he had become something like the master.

It would hurt. It would hurt past all bearing. But civilization must be given primacy over the individual, or society will serve no one. Perfection is only approached when there is nothing left to take away... and for that something must be removed.

"How will he bear it?" I asked, soft.

"Perhaps he won't," Kor said, and finally I understood the depth of his grief. He watched my face and nodded slowly, then offered me the pen. "Do you have anything to add?"

"No," I said. And then, "Yes." And uncapped the ink. With lines that started out tinted in rust red I described the shape of the black blossom: the alien bloom that had begun all of this, and drawn us here and entwined us in this grief, the flower that represented all that would have to be culled for Kherishdar to remain.

When I was done, Kor said, "So... is it different when it is someone else's ugliness that is on the page?"

"Your grief is not ugliness, Kor," I said. And then sighed, shaking my head. "Gods, you are doing it again."

He laughed and leaned over the page to kiss me on the bridge of my nose. And that was the end of our first collaborative work; it was not the last, though the ones to come would be executed in media far less tangible than paper and ink, and more lasting.

The knock on the door drew us from our communion, and then the bells jingled as the door opened.

"May I enter?" Haraa said, head lowered.

I rose immediately and went to her, concerned. "Haraa? I thought you would..." And then trailed off. Frowning, I said, "Did he send you away?"

"No," she said. She stood with her hair parted in front of her shoulders, like a stole; she even folded her arms over the curls so that they remained flat in place on her breast. "No, osulkedi. He did not." Looking up at me with her burning-ember eyes, she finished in a flat voice, "But I have some pride. If they do not even notice you leaving, then you aren't really there, are you."

This took me aback, for fathriked were often installed in rooms as living statues, and while you were aware of them, it was not always the intent that they draw your attention actively. I have heard that the point of such exercises is difficult to explain to aunera, but suffice to say that Haraa's comment was... not something I would have expected from the mouth of a fathrikedi, and from her eyes she knew it.

"I'm sorry," she said, softer. "I just... I can't watch anymore. I can't... be excluded, when I wasn't before. They don't need or want me there. I would rather be useless here, where I never expected to be useful, than useless there, where I used to be... the lord of Qenain's only fathrikedi, for he needed no other."

"You are useful here," I said firmly.

"I doubt I am even welcome here," she said. "Given my behavior earlier." She looked past me at Shame. "I am sorry."

I expected some dissertation on how he understood that her actions had been affected by the extremity of the situation. But instead, he merely inclined his head, and beside me Haraa breathed out so softly I would have missed it had I not been so near her.

I closed the door behind her firmly and said, "You are welcome here, and we are glad of your company."

"He speaks for you?" Haraa asked Shame.

"You don't belong there anymore," Shame answered, quiet. And that was both reassurance, and doom, and well we all knew it.

She hung her head again. "I won't trouble you," she murmured. "If I can just have the blanket from the massage table."

Kor met my eyes over her bowed head, and with them asked a question.

Do you have a word for this, aunera? The wordless communication between those who are close? We call it banaj. The verb form is baneje, to speak without speaking; that is a word only used to describe that silent communication when it is exchanged and understood between two people. It is a good sign, a relationship that has trustworthy banaj. I knew implicitly what Kor was asking, and what he was permitting by making the question, so I said to Haraa, "You should sleep in the room, with us."

She glanced up at me, startled. "Osulkedi?"

"Farren," I reminded her. "You should not be alone."

"I..." She began, then stopped. "All right. Yes, please. I'd like that. And thank you."

"Go prepare," I said, and she went, too dispirited to argue. Once she had vanished into the bathing chamber, I glanced at Kor. "You don't mind?"

"No," he said, beginning to put my materials away.

"Even though she called you impotent?" I said.

He chuckled. "Don't worry, I don't hold her words against her." More seriously. "To do so would be to hold her pain against her. And she is suffering, Farren." He looked toward the closed door. "More keenly than anyone else in this."

"Even the lord?" I murmured.

"The lord of Qenain remains the lord of Qenain," Shame said. "It is his fathrikedi whom his actions have condemned to being rakadhas. His heart is broken, but he has shattered her spirit."

Put that way, the whole of it raised the fur up my arms. I rubbed them under my thick sleeves as I joined my gaze to his and wondered at the woman behind the door.

"Come," Kor said, touching my wrist to bring me back from the reverie. "Let's prepare for bed."

"I don't like that Ajan is alone," I said. "When will he sleep, if no one can relieve him?"

"The same way he did in the Merchant hall when we first met," Kor said. "When he tires, and lying across the door with his sword naked under a palm. That is the way, with Guardians... and we will not deprive him of that when everything else is so out-of-place."

I thought of Ajan's gift to the lord of Qenain and my feelings about the nuance of it and found it appropriate that Kor had just made the same sort of gift to his lover. Truly they were well-matched. It made me smile, and I had need of one then. "Very well," I said, and repaired to the bedchamber. Given the day, I was ready.

Being ajzelin was new enough that Kor and I did not yet have a routine, and truth be told, aunera, even years later we would still lack one, for the demands of our work often took us from one another at awkward and unexpected times. The closest we have come is an ability to fall into a comfortable position together no matter what has transpired; many a night has seen me only barely wake when Kor has joined me long past the hour, and yet I know how to make room for him and the weight of his arm is familiar.

In these days, when we were first learning one another, we were more involved in the minutia of making such sleeping arrangements work (yes, that has a word too: lavash, how one sleeps with another person, or several other people in the case of families, in order to be comfortable both emotionally and physically; when Haraa spoke earlier of the lord not sharing a bed with his wife because of their divergent comfort-needs, that was lavash). Haraa entered before Kor, and it took some time for the two of us to settle before I realized... that she was on the floor.

On the floor. It could not be suffered. The poor woman had already been discarded once; the thought of exiling her to the floor like a Guardian standing his watch in a room with his wards, but not truly in the room... it was not fair. And yet, if she was truly rakadhas, to ask her onto the bed as one might reasonably do when one is addressing a fathrikedi, would be... awkward.

For a long time—too long, really—I stared at the wall in the dark, feeling the weight of Kor's arm over my waist and the warmth of his breath on my neck. By the speed of it, I knew he was not sleeping yet. By the speed of my ribcage rising alongside his arm, he knew I wasn't yet either.

"Haraa?" I said finally. "It is a family-style bed. It is long enough for you to sleep near us in comfort."

Utter silence. Kor's was the considering, waiting silence I later learned to associate with the constant observation of others that allowed him to execute his ishas with such consummate grace. Haraa's... I could not interpret at all.

Mine, I am sorry to say, was mostly fear. That I had done the wrong thing, or said the wrong thing, and made things worse.

"You wouldn't mind?" she said, at last.

"I would mind more to have you remain on the floor, isolate," I said.

"Your ajzelin is silent," she said. "Is this well with him? He has barely spoken to me this evening."

"He has barely spoken," Kor said, quiet, "because he knows that anything he says will be taken poorly."

Another quiet. I tried not to grow queasy with anxiety, and wondered at the strength of my reaction.

"We did not start off well, we two," Haraa said at last, and from the sound of her voice she had sat up. "When you arrived at Qenain, I did not want you to like me too well or speak to me too long for fear that you would learn my lord's transgression, and my own."

"Your fear was a sensible one," he said. "But your reticence revealed you all the same."

She sighed. "I worried about that possibility, too."

"And yet you came to me anyway, to tell me of Qenain's acts," I said, puzzled. "Why?"

"It was too late," she said. "I worried more about his fate by then than I did about my own." A pause. Then, to Kor, "I am guessing you feel some supernatural compassion for my situation which makes it possible for you to forgive my rudeness, and that my unease at accepting that forgiveness is what's coming between us right now."

Kor's latent amusement, always awaiting an opportunity to surface, was quite obvious in his voice by then. Even so, one had the uncomfortable feeling that he was also being completely serious when he replied, "Would you feel better if I whipped you?"

Worse, she considered it before replying. "Once, maybe."

There was no laughter then; that would have been a relief. Nor was there any charge to the silence that followed; that would have been a warning. What actually happened was for one moment, everything was just as it had been, with Kor's arm warm over me, the sheets settled, everyone in the same place, and in the next Shame was across the room and I heard the hiss of his belt leaving the chair and the sudden, shocking snap of it breaking the air. Haraa cried out, more in shock than pain, and then it was over and Kor was once again in bed, sliding into the depression he'd made at my back.

I was stiff in surprise and no little horror until Haraa said, voice husky, "A woman could get attached to the hand of Kherishdar's Shame."

Kor snorted, his lips curving into a smile I could feel on my neck. "But not this one. Come, Haraa. Be quit of your guilt and climb onto this bed before my ajzelin fetches you up himself."

"If only to be sure of your condition!" I exclaimed, struggling to sit up.

Haraa laughed, still husky. "Be at peace, Calligrapher. Shame never misjudges a blow. Does he?"

"Given the consequences if he does, he would be well not to," Kor said, and from his tone and his relaxation against me he was quite pleased with himself. Haraa was also, if the way she poured into the space near me was any sign. Indeed, I thought she was purring, just a little, under her breath.

"You are both mad," I said.

They both laughed, and I accepted it, and we slept... and that was the end of the awkwardness between Haraa once-Qenain's-sole-fathrikedi and the osulkedi who served Shame.