"Is it that you can't imagine learning here, then?" Kor asked. At my look, he rested his fingers on the lip of his bowl and turned it slowly, watching the tea shimmer in the foreign light. "You use your art to incorporate what you know into what you are and what you believe, Farren. Is your rejection of what is not Ai-Naidari so deep?"

"Henej," I murmured. "You looked at the painting."

"Of course I did," he said.

"But that was about... Qenain. And the lady's touch," I said.

"All of which returns to maien," Kor said. "To an alien taint. We are here at last, Farren, and the answer to all our questions is within reach. What will you do with the answer?"

"Why are you asking me?" I said. "What about you? What will you do with the answer?"

He chuckled again, softly. "What I always do."

"And that is?" I asked.

"Think about it," he answered with a smile. "For a long time."

"You think too much," I muttered. "It broke your pot."

He started laughing again, and after a moment, I did too. I supposed I was making a habit of inciting laughter in Kor Nai'Nerillin-osulkedi; this seemed a fine thing to me, though I didn't ordinarily think of myself as a very funny person. But then, other people always see in us things we don't see in ourselves. That's why we need them so much, isn't it?

We drank the tea, then, in the quiet of the room, with only the proprietor for company, and I wondered a little at her: she sat behind her counter, but did not clean or work or consider books. Nor did her stillness have any peaceful quality. Instead, she stared out the window fixedly, as if there was some lodestone there that drew her.

When she brought us a refill, I asked, gentling the difference between our castes so she could choose whether or not to respond, "Does something trouble you?"

"Trouble is a strong word, osulkedi," she said, pouring into my empty bowl. "Was the tea adequate?"

"The tea is excellent," I said.

She poured for Kor, then, and said, "The aliens also have something like a tea house. But they serve a different beverage. A stimulant."

"A stimulant!" I murmured. "How does that serve the purposes of a tea house?"

"I suspect the purpose of their tea house is different from ours," she said. "Purportedly they serve a host of beverages, but all of them are variations on the same stimulant. This I learned from an observer who had been asked to test this infusion for compatibility with our digestions."

"Someone gave some of this beverage to a lord as a gift," Kor guessed.

"Just so," she said, "and he wanted to know if it was safe to drink. The observer reported that it was, and so the lord drank it."

Her silence then was abrupt, and we both sensed her frustration at the lack of ending to her story.

"You want to know what it tastes like," I said suddenly, sensing the shape of her discontent.

"I do," she said after a moment's restraint. And then, ears flicking back. "I think."

"You think?" I said.

"It is, after all, an alien drink," she said.

We understood, of course.

"But I have smelled it, betimes," she said. "The smell... intrigues." She set our fresh pot on the table and took the old one with her. In the space she left behind, I saw the magnitude of what lay before us.

"This alien influence is a poison," I said.

Kor cupped his bowl. "Sometimes a bowl of tea is just... a bowl of tea."

I scowled at him. "And sometimes, it is an alien taint, and we take it into ourselves. And then what?"

"And then, perhaps, we are changed," Kor murmured.

I stared at his dipped head. "You cannot honestly be suggesting what I think you are."

"...and that would be?" he asked, looking up at me through his lashes. Did he know he could distract me with the tint and clarity of his eyes? It frustrated me, because I suspected he did. Not that he tried to distract me, but that he knew and didn't do anything to help me move past it—

I sat back, disturbed.

"You see," Kor said, low. "It is also in us."

The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. "What do we do?" I whispered.

"You," he said. "Should draw."

This time I could tell he was using his eyes, and my weakness against beauty, on purpose.

"Draw, shinje," he said. "And make sense of it."

"I should cuff you," I said after a heart's-pause.

He cupped my face with his hand, thumb near the corner of my mouth. And smiled with his own, while showing me his unease with his eyes.

What could I do? I leaned a little into his hand and let myself feel it. The power in his square palms. The calluses on his fingers. Their strength; their tenderness. The fact that they touched me.

And then I went for my paints.

shelv [ SHEHLV ], (verb) –to cuff; to discipline. In its original meaning, referred to literal corporal punishment, usually smacking the face or the back of the shoulder, though it was used only for warnings or light disciplinary action. Currently is used almost entirely to refer to verbal discipline.

It had litsilver blossoms in it, of course. And tea... not intentionally, but because in absent moments the brush went into the bowl, which was probably more often than I noticed. My mind was on the page, and yet I could not focus. The light was wrong. The tools felt too heavy in my grasp, and my hand was reluctant. I felt the strangeness of the world like an assault, and my shoulders hunched. To take tea in this place allowed me to pretend to normalcy. To make art in it was to expose myself to its dangers... to invite them to view my secret self, undefended. For the first time in years there were maledictions beneath my tongue, trapped in my mouth: I thought them, as protection against the taint, even though I could not speak them.

Shame was silent. I perceived his attention, though, one that reminded me of Ajan's in its patience and its concentration. The proprietor, too, moved until she could sit somewhere that allowed her to see the brush.

Normally to be watched did not distress me. But this situation was anything but normal. To have my own tools fight me, to have the world itself fight me...

The sun moved, and I hissed as everything changed yet again beneath my fingers. The sharper light and harder shadows made mockery of the techniques that were so harmonious on the homeworld. But I could not back down from the challenge that Shame had not issued me.