"Do you truly feel as if you haven't been living since the lord's love?" I asked at last.
She looked at me over the rim of her bowl, tapered fingers tracing the cut edge of a pale yellow melon. And then she looked down with a faint frown. "I don't know," she admitted. "I begin to wonder if... I have just... fallen in love. If in fact..." She stopped, lost in thought, then met my eyes. "If perhaps I have experienced, briefly, what you told me you felt for your wife."
"The one, rare, perfect love," I said, remembering our conversation.
"Yes," she said, eyes lowered. "There is some guidance among fathriked about what to do in such a situation, but... it is rare. The personalities drawn to the caste are not usually the kind to form strong attachments."
"What is the guidance then?" I asked, fascinated. The things I was learning about the castes on this errand!
"That such affairs rarely end well," she admitted with a sigh. "We love, osulkedi, but we are rarely loved in return in the same way. And we are passed from hand to hand... even if we do have such a singular love, we are not always lucky enough to remain with the object of our passion."
"And you fear it is so, with the lord," I said, quiet. "You love him, and he feels for you, but not as you do. Not any longer."
She sighed again, glum, and set the melon aside. "How humbling it is, Calligrapher... to know how much you need someone, and see how little they need you."
"Humbling... and terrifying, I would think," I said.
She smiled at me, tired. "How lucky you are to not know."
I set my bowl down. "Haraa."
"Pardon?" she said.
"Your name," I said. "Haraa."
She flushed at the ears and inclined her head. "If it pleases you, osulkedi."
"It does," I said. "And I hope it pleases the fathrikedi."
She lowered her eyes. "You do me honor."
"I speak what I see," I said. And that is what I called her forever after: "Courage."
That is how I came to pass the first dareleni without Kor: asleep on a divan with a fathrikedi for company. If the two lovers made any noises that should have darkened my sensitive ears, I did not hear them, and so exhausted was I that I did not even dream. There I would have stayed the night, in fact, had Shame not come for me at some hour, ancestors alone knew how late. I could not see him in the darkness, but I knew his fingertips when they trailed my cheek, and his breath when he kissed my brow, drawing me blearily from slumber.
"Come, ajzelin," he murmured. "You need a real bed."
"Ajan—" I mumbled.
"Has a duty to stand tonight, as usual," Kor said, sliding an arm under mine and pulling me from the divan.
"Haraa," I said, giving him a moment's pause until she answered, her voice gentle.
"I am fine, osulkedi. Go rest."
As we crossed the threshold into the bedroom, Kor murmured, "You named her Courage?"
"To love is an act of bravery," I answered, eyes closed, and so I did not see his smile, but somehow I knew that he had.
And with that, I fell into a proper bed, one long enough to stretch my limbs, and Kor wrapped his dense, heavy arm around my torso and pulled me into him amid sheets that smelled of joyful exertion, and of family, and I knew then that I would never go back to living alone. The studio, the temple, our separate work, our possible lovers... all of it could be arranged, somehow. And would be.
Thirukedi was wise.
We passed the night in peaceable slumber. Kor did not kick, for which he was saved the necessity of plying me with twelve apologies, massage, tea and citrus trifles. And I woke happy... but very, very sore. Sufficiently so that attempting to move my arm from off the mattress set off a string of bright, deep aches through the muscle, and the rest of me promised similar cruelties. The colony did not agree with me. I have since learned we have a word for that—morananil, something like "world travel sickness"—but it is not something I was familiar with then.
"Just this day longer," Kor said, noting the flinch I had hoped he would miss. He caught my hand and rubbed the threads of thin muscle leading to the wrist. "I'll send the message this morning to the capital, to Thirukedi, telling Him what we know and that we need aid, and we will be quit of this."
"I so pray," I answered, twisting my hand until I could thread my fingers in his. "But I will also let you make the arrangements for breakfast and bathe first."
"I'll pull your bath when I'm done," he promised, and kissed our joined hands.
I did not rise until he came for me; further, I allowed him to help me out of bed. I have made jokes previously about being old and decrepit, aunera... but those had been intended as humor. At home I rarely noticed that I was no longer as limber or strong as I had been a decade ago because the world is kind and my work is rarely arduous. But on the colony I felt each of my years, twice the weight they should be, and sleeping only seemed to have made the situation worse.
"It's because you were lying in a single place for too long," Kor said. "It will pass after you've been up a while. Enough for you to move again, anyway."
I murmured, "These alien worlds..."
"And yet, they are ours," Shame said firmly. "Shall I help you to the bath?"
"No," I said, "I think I'm fine now."
I know it seems as if I am dwelling on my aches and pains, aunera, like the worst of visitors whose conversation fixates solely on the pole star of his own miseries. But the issue is relevant—gods hear me but I wish it was not!—and so I feel constrained to explain it to you. We were all feeling the difference in the worlds, even if I was the only one to be quite so deeply affected. None of us were accustomed to the colony.
So, I apologize, I do.
I bathed carefully, then, letting the hot water serve as balm for my aches. Whatever salts Kor had poured into them seemed to help, for by the end of my soak I was feeling more myself. I was expecting to dress myself so I was surprised not to be left to it... or at least, I was until I saw who it was that awaited me. Ajan was standing at the bath's edge with a towel and my clothes over one shoulder.
