Yes, you heard rightly. He had not issued it me, though he could have. He could have taken me by the chin and used that voice of his, that commands through timbre alone. 'Do you fear, then,' I imagine he might have said, or 'are you without ambition after all?'

Instead, he had shown me his vulnerability. Faced with that uncertainty, and with his willingness to let me see it, I could not back down.

So I painted, in weak greens and silvers and grays and splashes of unsettled pale brown, thin as veils, so many washes. I painted flowers first, and no words, because there were no words in my head. I let the painting lead me... I believed him when he said there was an answer in it.

When I was done, I had a word. Qil: pure. Clean. Unstained.

It sat on the messiest ground I had ever painted, a thing of chaos, as if I had spilled paint and tea and left it in rings and spatters on a used table.

Almost I wept with frustration and anger, for having created such un-sense. But Shame checked my hand in the moment when I would have raised it against my creation.

"No," he breathed. "It's perfect." At the flex of the muscles in my arm, he pressed, and I felt the strength in his hand. "Kava," he said—peer, true peer—"leave it. It is perfect."

"I don't understand," I said, my voice shaking.

"No," he said. "That is how it is with true art. One perceives truth before one understands it."

I flushed, but the praise only made me angrier. "It's ugly," I said.

"It's honest," Kor said. "About life and about struggling with all its complexities. Farren—" he caught my hands around the edge of the table, careful of my paint water and the drying page. His thumbs rubbed circles onto the backs of my hands until I started to relax despite myself. "Farren. Life is not always beautiful."

"I know that," I said, pained. "But I make it beautiful. That is my work. And this... this is ugliness. I have lost my way...!"

"Sometimes we have to lose our way before we are capable of a deeper understanding of it," Kor said, his eyes intent on mine.

I drew in a breath to answer when two shadows, harsh and thin and gray, fell over us. I looked up to find Ajan bowing with an unmistakable air of triumph.

"Masuredi," he said. "As you commanded."

I could only stare in shock, for behind him... stood the fathrikedi. Alone, without escort or Guardians.

You must understand, aunera. Fathriked do not have a proper context outside the houses where they are kept. They do not even have singular names; each person within a household has a different name for a Decoration, so once a fathrikedi is outside her assigned dwelling, what could one even call out to draw her ear in a crowd? What name would one give to a Guardian to help one locate her if she is lost? That is why the Decorations never leave their compounds without escort; we detach a bit of their context to surround them, to make sense of their presence in the world outside.

For this Decoration to be here in this fashion...

"Take her upstairs, please, menuredi," Shame said, and I became aware of the proprietor trying very hard not to stare at us all. "It is the last door on the left."

Ajan bowed again to him and led the fathrikedi, who followed him like a trailing edge of a storm. As she passed me her ember eyes seized mine, and I saw in them... her restlessness, her amusement, her angers. My short fur lifted as if that passing storm had been charged with lightnings, and then she was gone.

"You knew," I said, as soon as they had vanished up the stairs. Turning back to Shame. "You knew she would come!"

"She knows the aunera that have bewitched her lord," Shame said. "She has met them several times... more times than the aunera have been reported seen by the house's irimked."

"She has been here before," I breathed.

Shame inclined his head.

"But you knew she would come...!"

"Of course she would," he said. "She loves him." He began carefully capping my paints. "Come, we will be wanted."

I watched, surprised, as he neatly put my materials away, in just the right order, even to remembering where in the box I had stored each color before removing it. He handed me the materials before carefully covering the new painting and taking it himself. I found myself standing, awkward, holding the paints and wishing I could wrest the evidence of my failure away from him.

"I should—"

"I will carry the painting," he interrupted. At my look he transferred it to one hand and used the other to slip around my shoulder. By that he pulled me to him, until we were lightly pressed together, the box trapped between us.

The smell of him, like temple incense and tea... I found my nose in his hair and sighed, head dropping.

"Farren," he said, voice husky. "Trust me."

I breathed carefully, and knew he felt the tremor I tried to still. And then I let my pain go, for the moment at least.

"Incorrigible priest," I murmured.

"You would find me the less fascinating if I were elsewise," he answered, and I could hear the smile in his voice.

I snorted and drew back, just enough to look at him, and that made him chuckle, low.

"You can touch me with your fingers, you know," he said. "Not just your eyes. Though you touch with your eyes far more acutely than many people can with their hands."

"One day, Kor Nai'Nerillin-osulkedi," I said, mock-stern. "One day..."

"Soon, I hope," he said, with an insouciant grin.

We turned for the stairs and found the proprietor stopped still beside her counter, all her heart in her eyes and a fullness of spirit welling there.

"Ajzelin!" she whispered.

Kor pressed his free hand to his chest and bowed just enough to allow his ink-spill hair to fall over his shoulders, leaving her staring wide-eyed.

On the way up, on the step behind him, I said, "You must leave a trail of the swooned in your wake when you go out."

"That is why I rarely do," he said, resigned.

We found Ajan sitting in a chair facing the door, honing a dagger on a sharpening steel with an air of concentration that fooled no one; no doubt if anyone else had come through the door he would have been on his feet and barring them before they'd taken their first step over the threshold. As it was, he ignored us politely so we could focus on the climax of the room: the fathrikedi, who was perched on the bench beneath a window, framed by its arch above her and by a spray of white flowers from a vase alongside. It was a perfect piece of artistry, that placement. She had posed herself for greatest dramatic impact, and knowing that all fathriked were so trained did not make me resent it the less.

"So," she said, very bold. "You have caught me."

Shame set the painting aside and then folded his arms and rested against the back of Ajan's chair. The sharp sing-sing of the blade being aligned filled the silence as they studied one another, the woman with lifted chin and half-flattened ears, daring much with her lack of abasement on top of the outrageous act of fleeing her House.

Kor, of course, was inscrutable. As always.

I wondered if they would ever break their war of wills and ignored them to put my paints away in my trunk. When I straightened, the fathrikedi had risen and stalked to Shame, close, closer, so close now that too deep a breath would have broken a thousand rules of courtesy and dragged the entire front of her naked body against his.