"Penokedi?" I asked, edging closer to him. I nodded toward the Ai-Naidar in the parlor. “What is this?”
Ajan glanced at them, eyes flicking forward again. "They want to talk to him."
"Talk to him," I repeated.
Now the Guardian glanced at me and said, more slowly, "They have invoked their right to talk to him."
I stared at the people in the parlor, ears flattening. "All of them?"
"You missed the first four," the Guardian said. "There's another one in there now."
"Can they do that?" I asked, appalled, even though I knew the answer... and Ajan knew that I should know. He met my eyes just briefly enough to avoid insouciance.
"Does this happen every time you stop at a household?"
"There have been rare occasions where it has not," the Guardian said.
I grimaced. It would have been incorrect for the Noble to stop her household from descending on a visiting osulkedi; the purpose of our traveling so was to make ourselves available, even if in a limited capacity, while we were on errantry. For me that meant painting or sketching, an act I could do with company if I felt the need for other Ai-Naidar, or alone if I requested solitude.
But I had read Shame's journals, and I had some notion of what it meant for someone to need his services. Looking at the number of people in the parlor, I couldn't imagine him seeing to them all before sunrise, even if he heard only their confessions. If they needed something more involved…
"Surely they must let him sleep!" I exclaimed.
Said the Guardian, "There is only one Shame in Kherishdar."
They did not. I knew it by the tautness of the Guardian's face when I left the room in the morning and found him still standing at Shame’s door. Concern for his ward, I thought, not the exhaustion he surely must feel at having been on his feet all night. But he was young enough to weather it well... better than I could have. My own sleepless nights, caring for my daughter in her infancy, had long since fled... I did not think myself capable of such vigils anymore, though I would be proven wrong in that.
"The coach is waiting," Ajan told me, his voice tight. "The Noble is much grieved that we are leaving before breaking our fast with the family."
"I imagine so," I said, pitying her. She had to know that her own had prevented her guest from sleeping, and she constrained from chastising them for not considering his well-being. It would have been wrong for her to command her own to forgo his services; it was wrong for her to ill-use a guest. Her distress must have been extreme, and we were compounding it by not accepting the meal she was offering by way of what must have felt a very meager apology.
It was for me to go down the stairs, then, and enter that carriage. But I could not force myself to go: some nameless curiosity held me affixed to the spot outside my room. When Shame’s door opened for a slim female wrapped in the silks of an upper-ranked household Servant, I marked the look on her face as she went by: wide-eyed, pupils dilated, ears flushed… a smile on her face like a secret and an ease in her shoulders like relief. She looked whole and alive and relaxed even as she hurried back to her duties.
What would it be like, some part of me whispered before I could silence it. To be attended to by Shame. What would he say to me to make such an expression appear on my face? I stilled a shudder, wrapping my over-robe more closely around myself. I should certainly go down now to the carriage… but I had to see the osulkedi. As I waited I avoided Ajan’s eyes: I skirted impropriety close enough, indulging this curiosity, without knowing he bore witness to it.
The door opened again. Shame closed it behind himself, the movements abrupt and precise. If the night had drained him, there was no sign of it in his body.
I was standing at the door to my room; perhaps he expected the parlor to be empty save for his Guardian. I caught, in the moment as he turned from the door, a glimpse of his unguarded face, one stripped by hours of his work to its essential character.
And ancestors save me, aunera. My heart stumbled beneath my breastbone and all my breath stopped up with it.
Completing his turn, he greeted Ajan and then espied me. From his glance he did not know that I’d seen into him—initially. But within a heartbeat of seeing my face, he knew. I waited, not knowing what to expect. Some brusque comment, perhaps. A chastisement? To be ignored—
—I did not expect his eyes to soften, nor the wry twist of his mouth. He put his hand behind my back without touching it and propelled me toward the stairs by suggestion alone; I could not resist him, nor did I want him to touch me, not knowing what those hands had done in all the long hours before.
“Come, Calligrapher,” he said. “We have our duties.”
“Will you at least ride in the carriage and rest?” I asked, and was immediately appalled at my own forwardness.
He chuckled. “The day I cannot stand a night in the service of my duty, osulkedi, is the day I am no longer fit for it.”
“So I thought when I was young,” I said. “But my fingers no longer permit me to work through the night no matter my zeal, nor my prophecies a decade past.”
His laugh was quiet. “Then permit me the arrogance of youth while I may claim it.”
I continued talking—insisting. “I still wish you would rest. Your body may need no sleep, osulkedi, but your spirit is another matter.”
He glanced at me with his odd coronal eyes. “Perhaps so.”
But that was the end of the matter. I went down the stairs and he followed me, hands folded behind his back. We took our sadly abbreviated farewells of House Elikim’s majors… and Shame returned to his mount with Ajan at his heel, and I once again boarded the carriage alone. All the way there I had pondered my appalling liberties with a man I barely knew. To speak so to a virtual stranger! He had, with superior courtesy, allowed it, but I should not have been so insistent. Even you have a word for it, your scribe tells me: “badgering.” This much, then, we have in common.
And yet, thinking on his face as he left the room, I could not find it in myself to regret the words, and sitting in the carriage, I wished he had listened to me, and found even an hour’s peace therein.
And now, aunera, let us speak a moment about our cities, for I would have you understand the distances we travel. All Ai-Naidari cities are built to allow for atan, which is to say the areas of responsibility. Each House above the Wall of Birth is responsible for the management of a certain number of Ai-Naidar and the area they live in; in cities of sufficient size, one may have multiple Houses undertaking this work. Thus the atan, literally "rays," like those which come off the sun, for that the wedge-shaped areas radiate out from the center of a city.
Each of these wedges is overseen by Nobles who answer to the Regal at the source of the atani. The closer to the Regal, the more Ai-Naidar a Noble is tasked with managing, and thus the higher the caste-rank. The further from the center, the fewer the people and establishments, and the lower the caste-rank.
These wedges extend all the way into the countryside, to encompass farms and mines and other such industries and any Ai-Naidar who work them... unless, of course, those industries become large enough to need personal oversight, at which point a Noble House is sent there to extend the atani. Should these places eventually become cities, then the pattern begins anew, with a Noble or Regal in the center and the atan partitioned according to the number of people who need management.
The Throneworld capital, of course, remains the largest Ai-Naidari city, and at its center is Thirukedi, from whom springs all of the powers of those above the Wall of Birth. His fiefdom encompasses the empire entire; its atani is complete.
The capital is not a small city.
From the Bleak, which is a day's journey outside the capital, we had traveled into the city...not to stay in it, but as a least-time route to our destination. Though House Qenain maintains a presence in the capital in order to manage its affairs, its principal estate is not in the capital at all, but at the Gate. They make their business in botany, in the breeding, cultivation and examination of the properties of plants from all the worlds of the empire, and so they find it most practical to remain near the transport.
