"Beauty affects the rest of us," he said. "You, I think, it concusses."
I eyed him with a wrinkled nose and he laughed.
Together we washed Shame, and the eye-watering smell rising off the waters seemed to ease him. I left Ajan to dry his master and changed the sheets with the spares beneath the bed-table. After that I sent the Guardian to use the remainder of the bath-water for himself and spent the time profitably in untangling Shame's mane and braiding it. He would probably not thank me for it, as I had never seen him with it bound, but better ridiculous than knotted.
"I'm ready," Ajan said, returning shortly after.
"Good," I said. "I will be back when I have put paid to my errands."
And so saying, I went out on the first of those errands... to find the fathrikedi.
There is a small note clipped to the page here that reads:
unil [ oo NEEL ], n.quiet. Particularly, a quiet one cultivates in order to calm the spirit and silence the busy mind and its voices.
The fathrikedi was indeed on the pedestal, and quite a picture she made there; she had been arranged in an arc, on her toes with her arms lifted and her tail completing the curve of her spine. Bells had been hung from it; another bell depended from the delicate handle of the gag she held between her teeth. Such bells were typical in both living statue poses and in Corrections, in order to betray any movement on the part of the individual.
Naturally, none of the bells was so much as shivering. The pose she'd been asked to hold—or had chosen, for all I knew—required great strength, but she made it look effortless. Such is the training of the fathriked: I have noted that aunera have a tendency to think of the Decorations as weak, kept creatures. It would be closer to the truth to think of them as athletes. Their discipline is one of stillness rather than movement, most of the time, but stillness no less than movement demands grace and power in it.
They dance also. We all do. But they, particularly.
The pedestal had been placed in one of the central chambers, a great round room with arteries leading to other parts of the house. The light falling on her from the central skylight was muddy: it was another cloudy day, so dim there was barely a highlight to be found on the curve of those hanging brass bells. It was not a day that would have agreed well with most Ai-Naidar, but her gray pelt seemed to smolder in the storm-light in a way I found uncomfortably arresting. I thought of Ajan's observation about beauty concussing me and wondered, not whether he was right, but how he'd noticed so easily.
When I moved in front of the pedestal to see her face, her eyes flicked to mine. She had not been blinded with the pearl-in-the-eyes drops, as living statues often are. I supposed the lady had wanted her to know she was seen, and to see in return. To communicate her shame and penitence with her gaze.
I doubted the lady had realized that the fathrikedi would use her eyes to communicate her outrage and pride instead.
I sighed and said softly, "Would it not have been better to be more discreet?"
She pulled her lips back from her teeth in a sneer, and there at last I finally saw the gleam of light reflecting off something: in this case, her wet teeth, bearing down so properly on the metal plate of the gag. Such a ferocious creature, to have the ishas of a Decoration! And yet it was hard not to admire her spirit. There was perhaps something compelling in keeping as tame something so obviously wild. Like a feral thing that permits itself to be caged... for as long as its whim so moved it, and not a moment longer. I understood a little better why the lord might have adored her, and wanted no other.
On the pedestal there was a notation: she was to remain there until the dinner hour. I could not imagine holding such an uncomfortable position for so long, but had no doubt she would manage, and that not a whisper of bell-song would sound until the lady came to end her Correction. I looked up at her again and said, "We will make things straight again in Qenain, fathrikedi."
Her lashes lowered, until I could see only a sliver of her bright red eyes beneath it. I accepted that acknowledgement and left her to her durance.
From the pedestal, I walked to the lab, and presented myself to its inhabitants in search of Seraeda. There I found her scowling at several vials, one of which she was measuring some clear fluid into with a dropper.
"I come at a poor time?" I guessed.
"Somewhat," she answered, and the expression she leveled on those vials put me in mind of the fathrikedi's snarl. Seraeda set the dropper down a moment and turned on her chair to glance at me. "The notes were incomplete and Baran's penmanship was horrendous-bordering-on-illegible. I've been reduced to duplicating the work to make sense of it."
"I see," I said, coming to her side and halting abruptly at the arm she put up before I could approach the table.
"Don't," she said. "Some of these materials are caustic, that we use to treat the samples." She lifted her hands to show me her gloves, extending past her wrists. Then went on to say, irritated, "Also, I am half-afraid that if someone breathes on them wrong, the results will be contaminated and I'll never figure out what it was Baran was talking about."
"Is it so important, then?" I asked.
"I don't know!" Seraeda exclaimed. And then, ears flattening. "It is at least as important as Qenain's spreading taint, though. Surely that's enough significance to be laying at the feet of a few flowers."
"It would be flowers that save or destroy Qenain," I murmured, and she looked at me sharply.
"Come back later, Farren," she said after a long moment. "Maybe I will know something then." With a sigh and a wan smile, she added, "Maybe I'll be better company to you, also."
"You are fine company even when you are all snarls and claws," I said, winning a better smile from her. "I will return later."
I was left then, with little to do and the louring mystery of Qenain on my shoulders. It seemed ridiculous that what should have been a minor matter could be so unclear to any of us, much less of such painful import that the fate of the House might credibly rest on whether we could resolve it. So much responsibility. How could Shame bear such things? I would have to ask him when he woke.
My pacing brought me to the gardens outside the house, beneath a low sky thick with clouds torn by a quick wind. I stood at the edge by the low wall, resting a hand on it and looking past it at the spars of the great Gate.
Somewhere, through that Gate, was the source of all this suffering. Was an aunerai—maybe several?—who were responsible for the creation of this situation.
The temptation to walk out of the garden and through that Gate was so powerful that I leaned toward it, hand tightening on the wall. How little effort it would take to slide over the wall and start walking...
...except I would have to know where I was going, once I arrived. And who to talk to. Which aunerai was it that had captured the lord's attention so? And would I ever know, in a sea of aunera, which was the key?
I did not go to the Gate. But I spent a very long time in the garden, standing at that wall beneath a sky that promised storms, and stared at it.
When I returned from the garden I was surprised to find the Guardian at the door back into the house looking at me, instead of past me. That looking-past expression is so well-known it has its own name, Guardian-gaze, so to have that mask broken startled me.
"Yes?" I asked, coming to a halt. A Guardian can initiate speech to a caste-better; there were several exceptions to that effect, mostly involving the safety of other Ai-Naidar. But better to save him the trouble of deciding to invoke those exceptions, and sooth, if that was the reason he'd broken his Guardian-gaze I found I did not want to know.
"Osulkedi," the Guardian said, inclining his head. He was a warm gray with eyes a clear green, so light I would have had to add water to the paint almost to the point of obliterating it to achieve the right tint. "May I ask after Ajan's master?"
"Sleeping through a fever," I said, wondering just what Ajan had been doing in his own wanders. Befriending the House's Guardians, apparently. "The physician says he should see the end of it within a few days."
"That is well," the Guardian said. "Please convey Shardan's well wishes to Ajan and his master."
"I will do this thing," I said, mystified at the exchange.
"Thank you," Shardan said, and I took this to mean that our discussion had ended, and passed through the door. But behind me, I heard the Guardian say, "Osulkedi."
I looked over my shoulder. The Guardian was once again facing forward, scanning the gardens with the practiced competence of his kind. When he spoke again, it was without turning to me. "We Guardians serve the master of the house."
For a long moment, I did not move. When I did, the nervousness of my limbs felt like flight. And I did not stop moving until I gained the safety of our rooms.
It occurs to me that some of you may wonder at my distress. I suppose living outside our society you would find our communication opaque at times. But perhaps some of you, those of you who seem most agreeable to our ways—or very likely, those of you who are Guardians yourselves—will understand the warning I was issued, for I am told that among aunera Guardians must also deal with political considerations. We live in a complicated social tapestry, and one cannot separate the political from the social, and Guardians no less than other Ai-Naidar are subject to those forces.
So a warning he had given me, this acquaintance of Ajan's. That the lady had her own notions about the goings-on in the house, which might not agree with the lord's, or ours as we'd been developing them. And that, if it became necessary, the Guardians of the house would do their duty: to the house, which is to say, to the Noble currently charged with its oversight. The lady, not the lord. Had Shardan meant otherwise, he would have said the House, indicating that he was empowered to serve what he felt was the best interests of Qenain, not its local mistress. I knew then that there were no Guardians of sufficient rank to act strategically, rather than tactically, which put us at the mercy of the lady's opinions.
Ah, I see I have encountered a translation issue: house and House. Let me briefly say they are different things: gadare, "house" is a building or place with a group of people of and serving the same family, while eqet is "House," an abstraction of the concept that encompasses the family entire and all its works and properties, and used invariably for those above the Wall of Birth. Nai, which you might recognize from our names, is merely "family," or more specifically, "belonging to a family," family-proper, the noun, is dare, as you may recall. There are many families within a House. So you may remember my name, prior to my ascension, Farren Nai'Sheviet a'Neriethen-jakkedi: which is to say, Farren, of the family of Sheviet, who serves the House Neriethen.
