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?"
