"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.