"Yes," Seraeda said. "But it remains our purpose, so how can it have created this discord?"
"That is what we must discover, it seems," I said.
"Hopefully Shame already knows," Seraeda said with a sigh. "I am becoming distressed over the matter. The more we find out, the less sense it makes. It makes the taint seem overwhelmingly powerful."
"You must keep hope," I said. "We will soon have this matter sorted. A few days... what could happen in a few days?"
"Anything," the physician said dryly, and stood. "I will return to my vigil. If you learn anything, you know where to find me."
We watched him vanish into the lord's bedchamber. Then I turned to Seraeda. "Are you truly so oppressed?" I asked her, soft. How tempting it was to take her hand.
"I am worried," she confided, her voice quiet in kind. "Not just for myself, but for my workers. And for ij Qenain—" using the word that denoted lord-as-House, "—I fear we have met an ending here."
"Don't say such things," I said, and offered her my palm in a moment of daring, so that she could choose if we would touch. "Shame will wake and he and I will put things right."
She trailed her fingertips over my palm, from heel to fingers' start, and the touch stung all my nerves, waking them. Ah, gods! I had forgotten what desire was like. I flicked my ears back to hide their flush.
"I hope you're right," she said softly, her eyes following her fingers as they stroked up my palm, over and over, so slow, so light. Another sigh. She traced a circle in the center of my palm and then stood. "I will talk to you soon, Farren. Perhaps I will learn something from further examination of the samples."
"All right," I said, my voice gone raspy. I cleared my throat. "Until then."
She left me then, with my hand still open and feeling burnt from her touch. I closed it with difficulty, my fingers trembling. My assignment to succor Shame had become personal the moment I had promised Ajan I would save him. Now my assignment to aid Qenain had undergone a similar alchemy... to fail Seraeda was unthinkable. My shoulders drooped. To be held so personally responsible for the outcome of a mission I had very little direct control over... it was enough to harrow the soul. And yet the web of interconnected personal responsibility was the basis of Ai-Naidari society, and written into our souls.
With a sigh of my own, I left the table. It took several hours in the gardens outside the house to restore my equanimity, and even then my hand felt different.
I returned to the suite prepared to paint, and checked first on Ajan and Shame... the youth might have been carved from stone, for he had not moved, even to change position. I marveled at his body-discipline but did not disturb him; he had his duty and I had mine. There would be time enough for me to relieve him after I'd finished my work, and he would not thank me for doing so early.
I cut my paper loose and set it up on the shabati, and there I perched, sharpening my quills and considering the day's word. I thought of the themes of the conversations, and of the lady's arrival... of Seraeda's fears. Some words suggested themselves to me: emas, for instance, our trust in authority not to abuse its powers; and manais, the duties a lord or lady owes those in her care.
And for once, nothing caught my imagination. I frowned at the blank paper and put my tools down. I looked again through the open doorway to where Ajan was bent over his master, laving his brow with a cool cloth. Were Shame awake, he would no doubt have some pithy comment for me, something to spur me to a choice. Were he awake...
...but his presence was available in other ways.
I went to my trunk and dug past the extra clothes to where I'd wrapped his journals, pulling one free and tucking it beneath my arm. At the door to the bedchamber, I said, in a slight Implacable—not too coercive, but definitively a command: "Go bathe and sleep a few hours. I will keep the watch."
He responded immediately, without comment, and in that I read that I had been right to send him away. Hardship conditions a young body, but wedded to worry it becomes corrosive. I had no desire to see Ajan laid low.
I took his place at Shame's side, then, observing my peer's troubled brow, as if even in fever, he was at work at some problem. With a sigh I brushed some of his dark hair from his brow, tugging it gently free where sweat had adhered it to his temple. And then I opened his journal and resumed reading, hoping to replace his immediate insight with a facsimile. This time, instead of reading sequentially as I had been, I skipped through the entries, looking for... what? For something. For a hint into a mind I might not have understood on my own.
Perhaps that is why I stopped on the entries with blood and punishment. Or perhaps I was merely recalling the physician's gruesome commentary on being bled in wine for false witness. Or maybe—ancestors hold me—Seraeda's touch had left me longing for some more visceral experience. Whatever the case, I stopped on an entry where Shame had threatened to rape a rapist, transfixed by his account of the necessary preparations. He had taken diqut, even, to be able to make good on his threat... what would that have been like, I wondered, uneasy. To be forced to rape in order to Correct a rapist? Who would have comforted him afterward? I turned the page and found his too-quick scrawl, dated a few days afterward:
Wasn't necessary to follow through. Am pleased with initial response, have set the others to watching. Diqut finally fading... will be glad to stop tormenting fathrikedi by my avoidance.
I could just hear the wry tone and flicked my ears back. To Kor's fevered countenance I said, "Even then you weren't letting people who are supposed to help you to help you. What good example is that, that you are setting?"
I half-expected him to answer me; it would have been like him, to come out of sickness so dramatically. But he did not. I resumed skimming, stopping on the account of another Ai-Naidari who had needed to give blood to find expiation from guilt. I stroked the edge of that page with a thumb, on the verge of turning it but unable to. We are a people who feel guilt deeply, so it is fortunate we have so many ways of healing it, from our formalized apologies and reparations through the depths of Correction. Perhaps it was guilt that had felled the chief observer; had not Seraeda said something about him protesting to the lord that what he asked was unnatural? Or perhaps it was the lord who suffered. And guilt among us is highly correlated with soul-sickness.
I had my word, then. Instead of retiring to the shabati to work, and perhaps exciting Ajan's protective impulse by leaving my ward's bedside for too long, I brought the paper and materials to the bedchamber and sat alongside Shame on the floor. But once there, I could not decide which type of guilt to depict, for among us we name two kinds: fada, which is improper guilt, taken upon oneself in defiance of the situation; and rul, proper guilt, felt at wrongdoing for which one is judged responsible.
I hear that among aunera there is a belief that guilt is an internal matter, caused by some sort of mystically implanted moral compass that one perhaps develops in a social vacuum, and I confess I find this notion altogether absurd. Guilt and innocence are born of their effects on others, and cannot exist without a society to rule between what is rightful behavior and what is wrongful. There is no magical internal knowledge of these things; it must be learned. And either one accepts those rules into oneself, creating that interior knowledge... or one decides one is not subject to society.
In Kherishdar we understand this implicitly. Society judges the lawfulness of one's guilt, just as society creates the rules by which that lawfulness is ruled. It is one of the ways we prevent sickness, by offering a perspective outside of one's own, narrow and often prejudiced, view. In this way, we absolve those who would sicken themselves with self-loathing, and Correct those who need help, and all Ai-Naidar bow their heads to these judgments and let go of whatever blame they might otherwise cling to, and shred themselves with.
It is a sensible path. The guilty are aided, and returned to society clean of stain; the innocent are confirmed and reassured. I began to paint.
It was a very strange thing, keeping the dareleni alone. Shame remained unconscious; Ajan was sleeping on his pallet near the door. I sat on the floor, bent close over my work, and listened to the syncopated pattern of their breathing: slow and deep and even on one side, quick and irregular and labored on the other.
I missed the company.
Loneliness was not new to me; I had spent years in my studio, working in silence and what I felt certain was solitude. Not chosen, perhaps, but not resented either. I began to wonder if I had been fooling myself on that account, now that I realized how only a few days of company had made me long for it. But I had survived those few years, and no doubt would for the days left before Kor shook off his fever.
As usual, I became involved in the painting. When I finished and leaned back, Ajan scared me out of several years of my life by murmuring at my shoulder, "Evrul. Seems appropriate."
"Gods and ancestors!" I said, pressing a hand to my chest where my heart was thumping hard enough to be felt against my palm.
"Sorry," he said, smiling faintly. He came around the other side of me with a tray. "My belly woke me a while ago and I ordered food for us both. You didn't even notice."
I grimaced. "You were supposed to be resting."
"You were supposed to be guarding!" Ajan said.
"I was," I said. "I used to paint while my infant daughter slept, and the moment her breathing changed I was at her side. There are some instincts that never fade from you."
"You didn't notice me waking," he said, passing over a bowl of broth.
"You're not sick," I said, unperturbed, and thanked him for the bowl. I set the painting out of reach of spills and we both studied it. I had painted a city street in a long strip from one side of the page to the other. On one half of the painting, I had used no black: the city was all golden light and shadows in lilac and mauve, with bright pale greens for the trees, speckled with pink and white highlights and deepening to blues and purples in the shade. Everything there was sunlit and brilliant and full of color.
