The following morning I considered my options. Shame had gone to his prowling after I had begged off to bathe, leaving me to wake alone, as usual... alone, save for his accusations. It would honestly never have occurred to me to think of myself as better than every other Ai-Naidari artist. The very notion was distasteful. We were none of us more necessary than the next; a superlative talent might be selected from amid the populace to be made more easily available to more people, but that didn't make it more necessary, or its bearer more special. To fall into that trap was a great moral danger. It creates unrest, the belief that one is more worthy than one's fellows.

Such a belief can lead to ambition... and ambition is a terrible burden on society. The goal of one's life should not be to find the best place... but to find the right place. I hope you perceive the difference. I pray, anyway. To be invested in any other philosophy is to bar contentment from one's life.

biret [ bee REHT ], (noun) – ambition: defined among Ai-Naidar as a desire to be superior to others by accruing more wealth, achievement, power or fame than is appropriate for a person of one's caste and rank. Considered a sickness that requires Correction.

I decided after some consideration to paint a small word and bring it to the damaged Ai-Naidari overseer. An hour later, then, after a quick breakfast, I asked one of the Servants for directions to where he was recuperating and took myself there. At the door to the suite I was met by a testy physician's assistant, doing his best to suppress his reaction when confronted with one of my rank. To spare him further distress I began the conversation by saying, "I have not come to discommode your patient. Only to bring him this, for his bedside."

I offered the prayer-word to the assistant. I had painted the word for body-peace onto a stiff piece of paper and folded it into a triangle so it could stand on its own. Paper prayer-words are not as common as shaped incenses or (of course) flowers as gifts for the convalescent, but they are a kind custom, and pleasurable: one burns them when one is healthy, as an acknowledgement of what was and is no longer.

The assistant stared at the gift, then accepted it with cupped hands. "Hold, please," he said, more gently, and disappeared into the sunny room.

A moment later, he opened the door. "Enter, please, osulkedi," he said with greatest respect.

Surprised, I went into the room. The observer was on a couch in the sun, blankets tucked around his still form up to his collarbones; at his side, perched on a stool, was the physician, who rose when I entered.

"Physician," I said, as a caste-peer to another, "I did not expect the invitation..."

It was a question, and he answered it. "I thought you had come to interrogate my patient."

I glanced at the unconscious observer. "He does not seem capable of sustaining such a thing."

"He is not!" the physician said with a sigh.

"Are the wounds so... dire?" I said cautiously. Surely Shame would have mentioned if they hadn't been healing well? And yet the male was obviously ill...

"He is sick," the physician said, and the word took all doubts away: tsekil, which some of you will know of. It describes a sickness of the spirit that has resulted in a sickness of the body. "Not long after his wounds began to close, he fell into the torpor, and I have been hard-pressed to keep the fever at bay since."

"How terrible," I murmured, stricken with sorrow on the observer's behalf.

"Terrible, yes," the physician said with some heat. "And evidence, I believe, of an ill-considered Correction." At my startled glance, he met my eyes and said, fierce but controlled, "I have tended to many patients in the wake of a difficult Correction, Calligrapher. In even the most frail, the spirit was so animated by the grace of the Correction that they healed twice as quickly. This..." He looked at the observer, ears flattening, "this is nothing less than proof of the observer's innocent spirit, and the inappropriateness of the lash."

My own ears swept back at these bald words, and for a moment I could barely speak for shock. "You make accusations," I said.

"It is my right," the physician said. "My calling gives me that right—that duty. We must all speak when we see something done inappropriately, osulkedi."

"Why are you telling me," I said. "And not Shame?"

The physician hesitated, then said, "Because Shame already knows." He colored at the ears.

"...so you tell me?" I said, torn between pleasure at the flattery and a vague queasy feeling, that I was someone stepping outside my proper role. "Because I brought a prayer-word?"

"Because your thought was solely for the observer," the physician said. "It was a kindness."

"You thought I would be outraged," I said suddenly. "And then you might have the relief of sharing that burden. A catharsis."

My insight silenced the physician, and then humbled him, from the set of his shoulders and the way he looked, guiltily, away. Studying his profile, I thought that it was beautiful—a very classical face, he had—and also that I would never have realized his ploy before I met Shame. I was absorbing some of his way of thinking, perhaps. Did that mean he might draw some of mine from me? And was that good? Perhaps this is how potters mended pots... with little bits of themselves. The ancestors know that I do it thus myself, with my art.

I let that silence sit a while, partly to honor the insight and partly in the wake of making it, I had no idea what to do next; I was not Shame, to know how to draw normalcy back into a room after piercing it with truth. At last, I recalled myself and said, "You do not offend, Physician. I am distressed at the situation, and I'm glad you shared your understanding of it with me."

"I'm glad," the physician said. And sighed out. "Sooth, Calligrapher, I am concerned. Soul-sickness in the elderly is not a minor matter."

"No," I said, glancing at the observer with fresh compassion. "I imagine not." I inclined my head to him. "I will leave you to your vigil, Physician."

"Thank you," he said. "For the prayer-word, and for listening. You are welcome whenever you wish."

I left the two Ai-Naidar to their work, disturbed... both at the revelations of the physician and my own behavior. It was sufficiently distracting that I wandered the manse for the better part of an hour until I found a bright room to sit in. I looked out the windows until the vista blurred, lost its meaning save as colors I could mix on a palette. It was this, in the end, that brought me back from my uneasy contemplations... if I was still me enough to be deconstructing a landscape like this into component pigments, then I was me enough to stop fretting. So I rose and went back to our rooms, there to cut another page and ponder the word of the day.

I had just enough time to begin feeling overly satisfied with myself when the door opened, without preamble, and the Decoration entered. She shut it behind her with a great and final noise, putting her back to it and meeting my eyes boldly.

"I've come to talk," she said.

The fathrikedi was overwhelming in a space the size of this room. Even with her spine to the door, she filled it, a domination as understated as it was inevitable. She remained nude, with only a slight spray of flowers at the base of her throat, climbing up one collarbone: agrasiln, we call those flowers formally, but they are nicknamed 'bead-of-blood' for their size, and their brilliant hue, so startling against the thin black twigs from which they spring. I found myself noting how well they complemented her intensely-colored eyes, and that gave me the strength to meet them rather than to look down at her and once again note her nakedness, and her unwelcome presence.

It seemed amazing that I found words at all, given the way she had addressed me in two kinds of violation of courtesy and rule. "Fathriked don't speak."

"Fathriked choose not to speak," she said with a noise that would have been indelicate in anyone else. How she contrived to give a snort an air of refinement was beyond my unschooled power of imagination. "But we do, and we can, no matter what has become customary to expect of them." She advanced into the room then, her soft curls trailing her like the wisps of mist her gray pelt evoked. "It just so happens that at this point, silence is considered a form of grace... that's how we planned it. It suits most of us."

I stared at her as she perched on the arm of the chair Shame had used during our game. "You are remarkably forward," I said. "You are a Servant—"

"And not even a highly-ranked one?" she finished for me. "There are many exceptions that apply to fathriked, osulkedi. Somehow I doubt you are familiar with them. You do not seem a man who has had much truck with my kind."

"You make it sound as if I disdain the Decorations," I objected.

"You don't disdain them," she said. "You dislike them." She lifted her brows. "Since you don't seem the sort to desire a Decoration of your own, and to have thus been denied... you must have lost a family-member or friend to our ranks. Am I right?"

Aghast, I stared at her.

"Who was it?" she asked, more gently. "Parent? Sibling? ...wife?"

"You speak of unspeakable things!" I exclaimed, ears flattened.

"Yes," she said with a sigh. "But not as unspeakable as the things I've come to discuss, about the lord of Qenain."

"Excuse me?" I said, distracted from my distress by the directional change of the conversation.

"The lord of Qenain," the Decoration said more clearly. "Is in grave moral and spiritual danger, and unless I am mistaken you osulked are here to rescue him. Yes? I have come to tell you that time is growing short if you wish to redeem him."

"He... you..." I stopped myself, gathered my thoughts. "You are coming to me and not Shame, why?"

She laughed. She had a beautiful voice... just a touch of huskiness, rich and varied in tone. There was great animation in it, in her use of it, one that made me question how she could bear to remain silent as was the... custom... of her rank. "I have my reasons," she said. "And are you not here for the same cause? Are you somehow less capable than the priest?"

"At Correction?" I said sharply.

"At serving the needs of other Ai-Naidar," she said.

I narrowed my eyes at her. She was grinning at me in a way I found insolent... but also, somehow, more endearing than her sultry looks. It made me realize her youth... and that reminded me too much of my daughter, also young.

Watching me, her ears flicked back. "Ah," she said. "Wrong tack... I'm sorry, osulkedi." She rose and approached me, before I could step back, and then she was there in my space, too close for me to reject or remonstrate. Looking up at me, she says, "You are a rare individual, that I haven't been able to read how to make you comfortable. Your dislike is that deep? Was there no fathrikedi ever who soothed you?"

"I met one," I said at last, because her question seemed in utter earnest, and it was her work, her duty as fathrikedi to put me at ease. I did not want to contribute to the unhappiness of a balked Ai-Naidari. "She massaged my arms..." I paused, remembering. "It was a great kindness."

She met my eyes, serious. "It is not my intent to discomfit you, Calligrapher. But if you can, please put aside your reaction to what I am, and listen to what I am saying instead. I need your help. Qenain needs it."

"And you come to me instead of Shame," I said.

"Yes," she said. "No doubt you will share what I tell you with him, and that is well with me."

I drew in a breath. "Very well."

She stepped away from me then, and resumed her perch on the chair, waiting for me to compose myself. Ancestors alone knew what multiple cues she read in my body to know when I'd concluded the process, but she knew to within an instant of when I had. "ij Qenain," she said then, "has set me aside."

"Pardon?" I said, startled. "Did he not say you were his only Decoration, and the only one he needed?"

"He did, didn't he?" she said, with a flicker of a smile that touched only one side of her mouth. "He has changed his mind."

Looking at her, I managed to say—and mean—, "I cannot imagine that happening."

"Yes, I know," she said, with a casual acceptance of her own worth that I found strangely reassuring. She slid off the chair and began pacing, the curls off her tail fluttering like streamers as she walked. Even her nervous energy was imbued with grace, and I found it somewhat distracting. Her youthful body held no charm for me, but it was part of my nature to be susceptible to beauty, and to want to trammel it on paper. "He has been my lord for four years, and they have been good ones... we are well-suited to one another. And we were fine while we were in the city, but this move to the Gate-house..." She stopped, folded her arms over her chest. "I fear he is infatuated with the alien. They are replacing me in his heart."

Of all the things she could have said, she could have picked nothing more shocking. More frankly unbelievable. To even state it, she had to contort the grammar of our language into a shape that was only barely comprehensible. You recall my disquisition on the word we use for aliens; you will perhaps understand, then, that one does not use the words applied to persons—love, heart, infatuation—to a class of words considered to be inanimate objects. Unlike you, we do not 'love' our tools, our favorite foods, our beasts or instruments. One might become used to a tool, or one might say of another that he cannot get along without a particular food, but it is not the same word one uses for other people.

I am aware the translator has blurred this distinction. I must again make it clear so you can understand how wrong, how inconceivable the fathrikedi's statement was. And from the look on her face as she met my eyes, she knew it.

Indeed, once she saw the look on my face, she nodded and rose, heading for the door. It wasn't until I saw her hand on it that I realized she was planning to leave after this shattering revelation, without further explication. I held out a hand and said, "Stop!" and in it was all the shear between our castes. I had never in my life commanded someone in the Implacable, as was my right with those beneath me, for I had never in my life encountered a situation where I was bound by duty to compel someone's obedience in order to prevent catastrophe. There are many, many problems that afflict us from day to day, aunera. But to use the Implacable, the grammar of empire, of the Emperor Himself trickled down into our language and our lives, is unthinkable for anything save the most dire of circumstance. This surely applied.

And yet it still hurt to use it. I felt as if I had burned my throat on the word.

Its effect on her was appalling more than gratifying, that abrupt halt. She didn't look at me, just... held there, against the door, waiting.

"I am sorry," I said, and I was. Sorry, and demeaned somehow. "Please. Stay. Talk to me, fathrikedi. You cannot leave it like that."

"Maybe I wanted to give you a chance to see if I was right," she said, and though her use of the Abased was polite and correct, somehow it felt as if she was groveling, and she did not seem the type. "Without poisoning your observations any further with my perspective."

I had not been expecting such a... reasonable motivation for her silence. In fact, I am sorry to say I mistrusted it. "And that's all."

She looked over her shoulder then, eyes shadowed by her thick gray lashes. "Maybe I did not want to lay out my humiliation for your dissection."

"Is that why you didn't want to bring this to Shame?" I asked. "You thought I wouldn't pry."

"I had my reasons," she said, turning to face me and resting her shoulder-blades against the door. "They have nothing to do with why you're here, so I don't feel I need to discuss them with you. Unless you wish to compel me in that as well?"

I stared at her, aghast. "You resent this? You, who are fathrikedi, and trained to empathy with others? Can you not see what your information would do to me? Has done? Do you think I like to evoke the privileges of rank?"

She eyed me, assessing... in much the way Shame would have, even. "No... no, I think you hate it." She sighed and looked away. "Osulkedi, I make no jest when I say it is... mortifying. But since you require it. When the lord first began his negotiations with these particular aunera, there was nothing amiss. But he wished to show them his most valued possessions, of which I am one. And that was reasonable. Their questions were bizarre and prurient, but what can be expected of aunera? The lord educated them on the proper duties of the fathriked, and then they wanted... a demonstration, and those were mild enough; I care little if aliens wish to stare at me while I am drowsing. The kissing was a little stranger, but I have been stared at by far more eyes. But after that... he began retiring with them after they observed us. And then he stopped bringing them by at all. I fear he is now in their beds."

I said, slowly, "In their beds."

"Warming them, or copulating with them... Shemena alone knows," she said, tail lashing. "But he no longer takes comfort with me."

"His wife," I began.

"—is away, managing the House's interests in the capital," she said. "And they were never intimate that way." At my look, she said, "Oh, great love there is between them, but they never took comfort in one another's beds." A smile flirted with the curve of her mouth. "Not even minor comforts... my lord tosses and steals blankets. His lady-wife likes it warm and still. They have kept separate beds since before they were wed. In all other things they are perfectly suited, but I have served the lord's sexual and skin needs since he was affianced."

I sank to a seat, facing her, and felt her regard like an unwelcome heat.

"You find that uncomfortable," she said. "Were you so lucky then, in your own wife? That all your needs were met?"

What came out of my mouth, all unlooked for, appalled me. "It hardly matters, since she died young."

Her ears flicked back. She left the door then and sat on the table across from me, close enough that our knees nearly touched. "Calligrapher," she said, her voice gentler. "If you had her for even a single season, you were lucky. Love... love is not rare, but to have it in a manifestation so ideal... that is."

I looked up at her, wondering when I'd hunched into this shape. "Somehow this doesn't comfort me."

"Permit me," she murmured, so deeply Abased that she startled compliance out of me. She cupped my face in an act terrible in its intimacy, so much that I gasped. I could not remember the last time a woman had touched me thus, young, old, in-between.

"In His wisdom," she said in the gentlest voice I'd heard yet, "Thirukedi has shaped civilization to permit as many manifestations of love a lawful outlet as possible. The ajzelin, the touch-lovers; the Decorations; the Trysts, both Summer and Winter; the formalized relationships that create family, and those that do not. Because it is rare beyond price for any two people to complete each other so fully. If that is what you had with your wife, then it is no wonder you remain alone now, and why you still bleed. I am sorry, if I pricked you with my ignorance. I didn't know." She drew in a long breath and managed a smile. "I have been fathrikedi all my life, osulkedi... and I have yet to have seen a relationship like the one you are describing. Most of us never will."

"I miss her," I whispered.

"Yes," she said, soft. "I imagine you do." Her thumbs brushed my cheeks, a caress softer than the touch of a breeze.

I permitted her to comfort me... or perhaps she forced me to allow her... I couldn't tell. But it felt... as if for a moment, I shared the burden of grief with someone else, someone with a distant chance at understanding what I'd lost, and so at last the fathrikedi had the chance to discharge the duties of her caste. She had eased my spirit.

When at last she drew back I could breathe again, and think. Which was fortunate, since the first thing she said, not without tenderness and a little wonder, was, "You must understand, Calligrapher, this gives you a blind spot in matters of the heart."

"Farren," I said, tired. "Farren Nai'Sheviet-osulkedi."

"Farren Nai'Sheviet-osulkedi," she said. "And this is, without a doubt, a matter of the heart."

"Do you propose, then, that it is because I loved my wife too well that I fail to understand that an Ai-Naidari could love an alien?" I said.

"No," she said, mouth twitching into a wry shape. "No, that remains unthinkable no matter how lucky one has been in love. But I suspect one must understand that one's heart can still be... unfulfilled... in some ways while seeming so filled in others, to even guess that such a thing might be possible. Perverted still, but possible."

I shuddered. "Ancestors preserve us from some as yet-unnamed need that could only be met by the alien."

"I suggest no such thing," she said. "But there is some disease there at work, and I don't know its name. Perhaps you and Shame will have the truth out of him. I surely have not."

I sighed. "I will tell him."

"Good," she said. "May I go, then?"

"Yes," I said. And added, "Do you have a name in the house?"

She smiled. "Not here, no. There is only one fathrikedi here, and so no need. The lord has love-names for me, as you might expect."

"Then what shall I call you?" I wondered.

She grinned then. "You will have to choose. It is the custom." She inclined her head. "Good afternoon, Farren."

I watched her let herself out and sighed again, rubbing my chest. It ached as if something had been ripped from it afresh. I wondered a little at her words. Had I really been so lucky?

I returned to the paper I'd cut from the block in preparation for the afternoon's work, and for the life of me I couldn't remember what I'd been planning to paint. So instead I sat down with all my most precious inks and began on the word that was ringing in my heart in the wake of the conversation with Qenain's sole Decoration: shemailn. Preciousness. Treasure. Rarity.

When Shame returned he found me on the window-seat, wrapped in my robe and my thoughts. He went to the shabati to look at my work; I opened my eyes just long enough to observe him there, the intensity his entire body illustrated with the rigidity of his spine and shoulders, the stillness of his limbs, the unbroken regard of his gaze. Then I closed my eyes again. I heard him moving in the suite not long after. The sound of water warming, the smell of the leaf.

Then he sat on the other side of the window-seat and set the tea tray between us. I roused myself to look at it, and to accept the cup he offered. When I spoke, my voice felt worn to knots and frays. "That's it? Tea?"

"Shall I press you for more?" he asked.

"I expected it," I admitted.

"Then perhaps I should ask what conversation you had today that so strongly reminded you of your grief," he said, holding his own cup in both hands. Some part of me unwound enough from my numbness to be moved at the sight: the delicate rust-brown cup, the grace of his strong hands with their square-tipped fingers and broad wrists.

"You knew," I murmured.

"How not?" he said, honestly surprised. "Did you not see what you painted?"

"I paint a great deal, Kor," I said, more in candor than tact, "that very few truly see. I can put my heart on a canvas and others will see their own there, and the more tears I paint into the lines, the more they mistake them for their own."

"Yes," he said. "That is the way, with art. When it is great."

I glanced up at him, then.

He smiled. "The petty artists paint themselves, and all you see is their wounds and their triumphs, Farren. Their work is about them, and they permit nothing more intimate than an audience. The great artists paint themselves with open hearts and arms, and invite us to a communion. And if we sob in their arms, it is because no one else has seen our trials and secrets so clearly, and sanctified them by making it plain that they are shared by others."

"You make of me more than what I am," I murmured.

"I make of you exactly what you are," he corrected. "You make of yourself less than you should."

I sighed and sipped the tea. "So why then do you see me in my art, if I am such a great artist?"

"I too have a nature," Shame said. "To see beyond the obvious."

"And to never take comfort when it's offered?" I said, lifting a brow.

He laughed. "Yes, you would say that."

"Why?" I said, challenging him... perhaps because I was smarting yet from the Decoration's observations. "Because I'm weaker than you are?"

"No," he said. "Because you're right, and so far you've been unafraid to point my face at it." He smiled at me over the cup. "At some point, Farren, you will have to accept that I respect you."

"With all that implies," I muttered, thinking of his comments about my humility and their bordering on ambition.

"With all that implies," he agreed. "So, then. Shemailn. The lost treasure. Was it the fathrikedi who prompted the memories?"

I looked up at him for a few heartbeats. Then extended one finger from my cup to point at him. "That is unfair and uncanny."

"Not a long leap," he said, lifting the teapot high to refill my cup. "From one woman to another."

Thinking of the lovely observer, I said, "You don't notice everything."

"I hope not," Shame said. "Gods save me from omniscience. I would go mad. So... the Decoration came by."

"How do you know I didn't go to see her?" I asked.

"You wouldn't have," he said. And at my expression, added with an amused smile, "Besides, I smell perfume."

I squinted at him. "You can smell anything in this room past the scent of linseed oil and salt?"

"I haven't had my nose in my paints for the past hour or two," Shame said. "What did she come to tell you?"

"That she believes the lord is... in love... with the aunera," I said at last.

His eyes flicked up to meet mine, pale shards in his stark face.

"I only repeat what she tells me," I said.

"An interesting supposition," Shame said at last. "If true..."

"If true, then you will have work to do," I said.

"Yes," he said.

I almost asked him how he would Correct such a sin, but I feared he would tell me, and that it would involve blood and knives and terrible things; or worse, that it would involve forgiveness and tenderness beyond my ability to bear. It made me wonder a little, what I feared in myself, that I should find such things so difficult to witness. A normal, healthy Ai-Naidari would have been uplifted by the spectacle of such compassion.

Perhaps the fathrikedi was right. Perhaps I still bled from a wound that not many Ai-Naidar were equipped to understand, and held my inability to heal as a secret shame. I wondered, glancing across the tea tray at my companion, if Shame knew... if he could know. What had Shame known of love?

How could I possibly ask?

And yet... "You have not said how the painting told you of my grief."

He looked up at me, surprised. "Do you do these things without conscious intent, then? The artistic choices?"

"Tell me what you saw," I said.

He canted his head, as if he perceived my attempt to understand him and was allowing it. "You choose the word for a rarity, but you didn't paint the word. You painted a floor of flowers around it, leaving it the white of the page. And the flowers you chose were sovereigns."

"So they were," I murmured.

"Pale sovereigns," he said. "As if they had already begun to wilt. A flower used for temple festivals celebrating youth and newness, grown old and indistinct, like memories, and unspoken, unpainted, shemailn, visible among them only by its absence."

"You perceive clearly," I murmured.

"You reveal too much," he said, not without (I thought with some surprise), fondness.

"If what you said was true, and I am a great artist, then I have revealed nothing," I said. "What will the average Ai-Naidari take away from that painting, then?"

"That treasure is fleeting," Shame said. "And their hearts will contract over those they have lost... or beat too quickly over those they have and fear they will lose."

"And if they have no treasure yet?" I asked, studying his face for his answer, thinking in my hubris that I knew it.

"Then they will wonder, a little, if they will be up to the challenge when it comes to them," Shame said. "Will they be able to accept loss when it inevitably arrives? Or will it diminish them?"

"I wonder," I murmured.

"Do you?" he said. "I would think you already knew." He rose, leaving the tray with me, and went back to the shabati, where he lifted the painting free.

"Where are you going?" I asked, surprised.

"To put this away," he said, stern and gentle both, "before you regret having painted it."

I stared after him, my spirit struck like a temple bell, ringing, ringing. There, I thought, goes the priest.