"She wouldn't have denied him," Ajan added. "Especially after he guessed about the messenger."
"The messenger," I said. "That he came?"
"That he brought news that Qenain acted without sanction," Ajan said.
I glanced at Kor. "It was true? You guessed."
"It was the only guess that made sense," Kor said. "Her reaction confirmed it." He eyed Ajan. "You should not be volunteering this information so easily, Ajan."
"The osulkedi is family now," Ajan said. "Isn't he?"
There was a long pause. You have all perceived with remarkable insight, aunera, the depth and importance of being ajzelin. But you perhaps do not know that our highest indicator of significance for a relationship has to do with whether it creates the expectation of family bonds or not—whether with it, one undertakes the responsibility of caring for one another and one another's relations... or if one holds oneself apart. Perhaps you understand: to break bread with a person is one thing. To give the last of your bread to your beloved's hungry grandmother... that is another.
Kor and I had not discussed whether we were willing to be family or not, and Ajan's question had pierced the core of our peculiar circumstance... for neither of us really had a strong family anymore. I had been divorced from mine by distance and death. He had never had one, by virtue of his orphan status, and his choices thereafter.
"Well?" Ajan said.
Kor glanced at me, his voice just... so slightly... tentative. "Farren?"
I sighed. "Ajan, you are too bold. And you will not be young enough to be easily forgiven for it for much longer."
"You see, I must be right, or he wouldn't be lecturing me like a son," Ajan said with a grin. To his master, "So I don't see why I should hold my tongue around him."
I felt Kor's gaze on my face, though I kept my eyes doggedly on the street as seen between my mount's pricked ears. Partially because I wasn't sure I was ready to look at him... and partially because I was not so good a rider to hold long, significant looks with someone while still keeping my mount walking forward.
"I should cuff you," Kor said to Ajan with a faint growl.
"As my master wills it," Ajan said, rather too cheerfully.
"Don't oblige him," I said, smiling a little. "We will discuss the family matter later. I'm not unwilling."
"Neither am I," he said quietly.
The mounts filled the ensuing silence with the clap of their hooves on the street, and I heard it as the chime of Ereseya's temple bells, like a shiver in my bones. How ironic to go from Qenain's laboratory and my shattered hopes of a possible family relationship, to the wind-swept byways outside it and the lifting hope of that possibility.
Thinking of the confrontation in the laboratory reminded me of the jar. "There was something else..." I took the vial from my pocket. "Seraeda found this jar of ink in the senior Observer's desk in a locked drawer."
"Ink?" Kor said, frowning. He extended his hand, drawing his mount alongside mine until our legs were almost bumping. I carefully handed it over and watched with no little awe as he undid the cap and smelled the inside without dropping the reins or losing control of his ride.
"It seemed a strange thing to have locked in a drawer," I offered. "I have pigments valuable enough to require protection, but I can't imagine what an observer would be doing with one of them, and it doesn't look like anything I have...."
"That's because you would not have it," Kor said, voice low. "And could not, without incurring serious punishment, Farren."
"Punish—but... what ink would..." I stopped, my fingers tightening on the reins and my eyes dropping to the figures on their backs. The figures drawn onto them...
...with ink that burned.
"The lord gave the chief observer a vial of the merethek ink?" I asked, shocked. "But that is never to be handled outside the rituals! And it is certainly not for those who are not lords to ever handle!"
"I know," Kor said, his voice still low.
"So what was it doing in the laboratory?" I asked, the fur on the back of my spine lifting.
"That," Kor said, "is what I believe we are about to discover."
viridity, n.1a:the quality or state of being greenb:the color of grass or foliage2:naive innocence
aunera, n.1:a color—emerald green, very lush and deep, with a slight tint of blue2:anything alien, from people to worlds to emotions to thoughts.
This time the Guardians at the Gate with their brightly-sleeved weapons examined the permit produced by Shame and let us pass on. I was expecting more ceremony, perhaps, but there was none, only that careful check and then a wave of a hand. So we kept riding, into the breeze out of the Gate with its coolth and increasingly, its fragrance... something unknown to me, but that felt like the essential definition of cleanliness... or emptiness. Or newness...
I was still trying to find the word when we passed through the film and out of it, instantly, into the colony's bright, hot afternoon. My eyes began watering at once: the colors were so sharply delineated by that hard white sun that I could not find any gradients at all. Each blade of grass was its own, distinct color and I saw them all as separate things. That together those separate things should have made a gradual shading of the brilliant green at the top of the hill to the shadowed brown in its lap never seems to have occurred to any of them.
My first impression, then, of an alien world... was that it was quite intrinsically, poetically, and completely aunerai.
It also smelled liked flowers, and a high, dry smell like dust, though I felt nothing particulate against my skin with the Gate wind blowing at my back.
The Gate on this side was, like its face on our world, paved toward with roads and set about with buildings. Though there was more of it than there was on the opposite side, most of the architecture was familiar: on the right, I saw our warehouses, Guardian barracks, and Gate-houses, with the roads connecting them winding around the short hills in a way I found harmonious; there were, of course, the inevitable gardens, though the familiar flowers looked bizarre beneath the foreign sunlight. But on the left, connected by straight roads laid on a grid pattern, there were buildings made in a fashion unfamiliar to me: utilitarian things with slab sides in plain gray or white paint. They came in different sizes and heights, but that was the only clue to their use for they were otherwise identical, as if they had been upended in place out of similar molds.
Well, not the only clue. As Shame showed his permit yet again to a new set of Guardians, I saw plaques on the walls next to the doors, and my ears flattened to my head.
"Kor," I said, once he'd rejoined me. "They speak a different language."
