One day, the daughter of a Farmer brought her such a pot, which had split down one side and cracked open. The potter took it from her hand and brushed dirt from the inside surface.

"I should have known better," the Farmer's daughter said. "I put a seed in it, knowing that the roots would grow beyond the breadth of the pot."

"A seed does not always live up to the promise of its predecessors," the potter said. "One cannot count on it thriving. But when it does, one must not begrudge the pot it breaks when it grows too large to be held by it."

And with this, she gave a new pot to the Farmer's daughter, who did her best from then on to transfer her plants before they broke their vessels. Most of the time she succeeded; the times she did not, she did not begrudge the crack.

This is the tale of the broken pot. Reck it well.

Kor was fond of his dramatic comments, but even for him the last one was egregious. We had no sooner settled the lord of Qenain in the tea house under Ajan's watchful eye than I cornered him in our bed-chamber. “What did you mean by it? That you didn't expect it? You can't be serious!”

He was seated on the edge of the bed, much as he had been the night before. Had my sensibilities been less outraged by his revelation I might have paid more attention to the fact that he was not taking off his shoes, as he had been then, nor beginning to undress... but rather just sitting there. Perhaps I might have been forgiven for not noticing such a small, crucial detail in those days before living side-by-side with Shame honed my powers of observation. It does not seem such a small detail in retrospect.

“Farren,” Kor began.

“They are aliens,” I said.

“They are alien people,” he said, horribly distorting our language just to put the notion into words.

“They are alien aliens,” I said, and the memory of the female’s anguish spurred me. It had to be true that they were entirely different from us, or what had we done? “They are not Ai-Naidar—“

“—on that we are agreed,” Kor said.

“—but they are not people!” I finished. When he did not speak, I said, “Kor. You are Kherishdar’s Shame.”

“…and I just separated a man from the loves of his life, possibly for the balance of it,” Kor said, voice as sharp as a slap.

I’ve lived with him for decades, aunera, and I still don’t know how he does that with his voice.

I stared at him in shock, finally seeing him… seeing the way he was sitting, the dejection, the exhaustion.

“Farren,” Kor said. “Please. If you will not try to understand, then leave me alone.”

I drew myself up, every limb aching. And then took myself out. But before I left, I stopped at the door and said, “I’m sorry.”

And then I found myself in the antechamber. The very empty antechamber. Ajan was across the hall standing guard in the lord’s room, and Haraa... was not here. No doubt she too was in the lord’s chamber, though what she thought she might accomplish there I could not guess. Nothing, I thought... save to offer him the balm of a familiar presence.

Couriers are swift, and have their own lanes on roads so that they might travel unimpeded. Even so, a message to the capital and back... we might be here several days. Several days in this unforgiving atmosphere under this too-bright sun and on this heavy soil; several days in this oppressive melancholy, with the lord drooping like one of his own flowers, parched, and all the rest of my companions distrait. Truly, Qenain’s maien had taken us all.

The thought would have made me angry a few days previously. On this evening, all I could do was look at the barren sitting room and feel acutely my loneliness, and the emptiness of the coming hours.

So I did the only thing I could, that I knew how to do.

You wonder, perhaps, that I could paint. In truth, it hurt. It hurt my wrists and the fine little bones in my fingertips, and the joints where they bent, holding the brush. It hurt my eyes, which blurred with wetness that I refused to notice, but which I knew the secret name of anyway. It hurt my heart, which did not want to speak through the ink.

But the hand, the eye, and the heart are yoked in an artist. When one is invoked, the others follow, unless something is desperately, fatally wrong. Since it was inevitable, I surrendered; I took up a brush, and with that committed to the examination of a distressed spirit. By the end of it, I had salted the paper with my tears, and the brush had worked the dilution into the art.

So many words I could have chosen. Grief. Regret. Oppression. Taint, again, now that I understood it better.

But I painted shul.

Change. Personal change. The kind of change that a paisathi creates, the breaking, shattering, world-upending sort, that can mean everything to a single person and yet not make any sense to anyone else. A small thing. An ending and beginning thing, inside the self. Shul. Shul. The sound of breaking pots. And I would like to say that I made a great thing of it, that I drew some beautiful masterwork. And indeed I planned it so... but what I ended up doing was... writing the word. My own handwriting, without ornament, without color. Black on cream parchment, spattered with water that fell in beads from my eyes as I bent close.

Shul. I put my head down on the table when I was done, and knew nothing more but the smell of the ink and the salt... and my own confusion at feeling so undone. So completely undone.

The next awareness I had was of Kor’s hand on my shoulder, and very swiftly after that, the ache of my body; I was kneeling on the ground before the low table where I’d been at work, a pose I had not felt while in my artist's fugue but that I now felt in every groaning joint. I lifted my head; he had sat on the divan behind me and was staring past me at the page.

“So,” he said. “You understand.”

“No,” I said. “No, I do not. And Kor… it frightens me.”

“It does me as well,” he said, and drew me into his arms. I tucked my head against his chest and felt his hand on my hair, and there we abided for some time.

When I spoke, it was for the regrettable sort of words which often break such silences. “If I don’t rise now, I don’t think I’ll be able to move for cramping.”

“Up, up,” he said. “I’ll put in a bath for you.”

“Let me come with you,” I said. “I don’t want to be alone.”

In the bath I watched him at work; the confidence of his movements remained unimpeded by the world-weight, but he was more deliberate than usual. He felt it too, I thought, if not as dearly as I did. The sight of his grace soothed my spirit all the same, just as it was pleasing when he helped me undress; it felt good to be taken care of. I went into the bath and there I reposed, eyes closed, until the steam loosened some of the muscles in my legs and arms and chest.

It was the latter release that freed me enough to speak. “Tell me. Why you knew they would not be animals.”

“It is in the books, if you look for it,” Kor said, sitting cross-legged at the edge of the bath.

“You cannot be serious,” I said, startled. But he was, so I said, “Where?”

“In the histories describing our first experiences with aunera,” Kor said. At my expression, he said, “I had cause to look, for one of my Corrections was interrupted by one. Afterwards, I did the research.” He smiles, lopsided. “You will find that is often my answer to many things.”

“I cannot fault a man for seeking the wisdom of books,” I said, thinking of my own long association with the librarian of the capital. Then, looking up at him again. “But what aren’t you saying, Kor?”

He sighed and smiled, and it was a very tired smile. “The lord’s male lover… he was the aunerai I saw that day. I suppose it makes sense, for the number of aunera who would be allowed ingress are few and one associated so closely with a nanaukedi lord would be a likely candidate. But it was… a surprise.”

“Did he recognize you, do you think?” I said, astonished.

“I don’t know,” Kor said. “How could I? Does he know enough of us to know that I am unusually colored?” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, Farren. What does matter is if you read the books you will learn we did not give the aunera their designations in order to diminish them to the status of animals. We did it to make clear that they stand outside the hierarchy of Kherishdar, that the hierarchy cannot apply to them.”

“But—" And then I stopped.

“You understand,” Kor said, no doubt watching my thoughts course over my face. “We cannot assign them a caste in order to speak politely of them in our language, because that would make them a place within our society. We cannot even remand them to the unspoken caste, because even a slave, historically, was an Ai-Naidari with a value within the system: a negative value, perhaps, but you would know as well as I do that the negative space creates a shape."

"Yes," I murmured, lost in the image, and the... well, the alienness of the discussion.

"The only way to exclude them, then," Kor finished, "is to speak of them as un-people.”