The lord burst out, “They wanted it so much. To be a part of what we are, to have a chance to be a part of something greater than themselves. I had to try. Isn’t what we have worth spreading to others?”
“That,” Shame said, “is not for you to decide, nanaukedi.”
The lord hung his head, his hands clenching his knees so tightly I could see the tendons strain on their backs, as if the caste-rank title had stung him with a reminder of his position, his responsibilities. “I am sorry,” he whispered. “What will you?”
“Nor is that for me to decide,” Shame said. “You have usurped the authority of the Emperor, and to Him you must make answer. I have sent a message; when I have His response, I will do His will.”
“What… does that… mean?” the male asked, looking from Shame to me. His command of the language was poorer than the female’s, but he was troubling himself to learn it. “Will he be—“ he searched for the word, and could not find it. It was the female who supplied it. “Corrected.”
“That is not for me to decide,” Shame said again. To the lord, “Until I receive a response, you will remain in my custody.”
A singing silence as both aliens and the lord stared at him. Then the male aunerai looked at the female and said something quickly in their own tongue, to which she replied only by shaking her head, shoulders slumped.
The lord rose slowly and said to them, “I must go.”
What followed changed us all. I spoke in the very beginning of my paisathi, of the inevitabilities that lead to change in one’s life, change that allows growth, and perhaps you thought that Shame and Ajan and Seraeda were the shape of that change and they were, they were. Certainly they were the shape that I would have expected, had you asked. But I wonder sometimes, about how the unexpected can break us open. So it was with the lord’s leave-taking of his pet aliens; it was a thing that should have been more properly relegated to perverse fantasy.
But he stood there, in grave dignity, concealing his loss, all the long lines of his robes utterly undisturbed so that he seemed almost a statue. And the female went to him first and rose on her toes, the cloak whispering around her heels. She closed her eyes as he folded the hood back from her brow with tender fingers… and then he gently kissed her naked skin, just below the hairline, and beneath her lashes gleamed a bead of water that did not fall.
The lord faced the male, then, and brought his hand to the edge of his jaw, barely touching, an intimacy that we would think nothing of between family or ajzelin. And yet, how hard the aunerai had to work to accept it! He flinched, but forced himself to hold still, and it was not revulsion if I read him rightly. He wanted the touch badly, so badly I could see his hands trembling at his sides, but he did not know how to accept it. And the lord was so careful of him.
And they… they were fully focused on him. Both of them, their gazes intent, the lines of their bodies straining toward him. He whispered something to them both in their tongue. The female lowered her face, and I saw only the wet streak on her cheek, glinting in the low light. The male’s face was a mask, but his eyes were of someone who knows that he is wounded but does not yet feel the pain.
The lord turned his back on them and walked out of the room. As we made to follow him, the female said, “Please…”
Shame and I paused to look at her.
“Please,” she said. “Make sure someone takes care of him.”
Shame said, “Kherishdar takes care of everyone,” and gently shut the door on her grief.
On the other side of the door, he and I met each other’s eyes and I said, low, “They are not animals…!”
“I didn’t expect that they would be,” he said, subdued, and followed the lord, leaving me to stare after him and then hurry in his wake.
Reck this: Once there was a country Merchant, an aridkedi potter who was the wonder of her community, for her wisdom and her deft touch with her art. So great was her talent that she promised to mend any of her pots, did they break, or else issue a new one in its stead.
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.
