"Kor," he corrected.

"Kor," I allowed, still cranky. "I do not believe I'm better than everyone else."

He looked up then suddenly, and there was nothing intimate in those coronal eyes. I felt pinned by them, breathless and exposed. "Tell me that again, Calligrapher."

I swallowed past a narrowed throat and could not speak until something in his face changed, some crease around his eyes, some intensity there dying to banked coals. And then I scowled at him and said, "That was entirely unfair!"

He laughed. "The pursuit of truth, osulkedi."

"Is often inimical to an easy friendship," I said, folding my arms over my chest.

"Is ours to be an easy friendship, then?" he asked.

I studied him and said, "No... I don't think you ever do things the easy way. Do you."

"It's in my nature," he murmured, and I thought I saw a tint in the skin beneath his eyes, where the white pelt was thinnest. A blush? He surely had earned it.

Mollified, I set down the first of the river pieces. And if he won that game, well... I hardly expected any less.

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.