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.
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.
