"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."
