She hung her head again. "I won't trouble you," she murmured. "If I can just have the blanket from the massage table."
Kor met my eyes over her bowed head, and with them asked a question.
Do you have a word for this, aunera? The wordless communication between those who are close? We call it banaj. The verb form is baneje, to speak without speaking; that is a word only used to describe that silent communication when it is exchanged and understood between two people. It is a good sign, a relationship that has trustworthy banaj. I knew implicitly what Kor was asking, and what he was permitting by making the question, so I said to Haraa, "You should sleep in the room, with us."
She glanced up at me, startled. "Osulkedi?"
"Farren," I reminded her. "You should not be alone."
"I..." She began, then stopped. "All right. Yes, please. I'd like that. And thank you."
"Go prepare," I said, and she went, too dispirited to argue. Once she had vanished into the bathing chamber, I glanced at Kor. "You don't mind?"
"No," he said, beginning to put my materials away.
"Even though she called you impotent?" I said.
He chuckled. "Don't worry, I don't hold her words against her." More seriously. "To do so would be to hold her pain against her. And she is suffering, Farren." He looked toward the closed door. "More keenly than anyone else in this."
"Even the lord?" I murmured.
"The lord of Qenain remains the lord of Qenain," Shame said. "It is his fathrikedi whom his actions have condemned to being rakadhas. His heart is broken, but he has shattered her spirit."
Put that way, the whole of it raised the fur up my arms. I rubbed them under my thick sleeves as I joined my gaze to his and wondered at the woman behind the door.
"Come," Kor said, touching my wrist to bring me back from the reverie. "Let's prepare for bed."
"I don't like that Ajan is alone," I said. "When will he sleep, if no one can relieve him?"
"The same way he did in the Merchant hall when we first met," Kor said. "When he tires, and lying across the door with his sword naked under a palm. That is the way, with Guardians... and we will not deprive him of that when everything else is so out-of-place."
I thought of Ajan's gift to the lord of Qenain and my feelings about the nuance of it and found it appropriate that Kor had just made the same sort of gift to his lover. Truly they were well-matched. It made me smile, and I had need of one then. "Very well," I said, and repaired to the bedchamber. Given the day, I was ready.
Being ajzelin was new enough that Kor and I did not yet have a routine, and truth be told, aunera, even years later we would still lack one, for the demands of our work often took us from one another at awkward and unexpected times. The closest we have come is an ability to fall into a comfortable position together no matter what has transpired; many a night has seen me only barely wake when Kor has joined me long past the hour, and yet I know how to make room for him and the weight of his arm is familiar.
In these days, when we were first learning one another, we were more involved in the minutia of making such sleeping arrangements work (yes, that has a word too: lavash, how one sleeps with another person, or several other people in the case of families, in order to be comfortable both emotionally and physically; when Haraa spoke earlier of the lord not sharing a bed with his wife because of their divergent comfort-needs, that was lavash). Haraa entered before Kor, and it took some time for the two of us to settle before I realized... that she was on the floor.
On the floor. It could not be suffered. The poor woman had already been discarded once; the thought of exiling her to the floor like a Guardian standing his watch in a room with his wards, but not truly in the room... it was not fair. And yet, if she was truly rakadhas, to ask her onto the bed as one might reasonably do when one is addressing a fathrikedi, would be... awkward.
For a long time—too long, really—I stared at the wall in the dark, feeling the weight of Kor's arm over my waist and the warmth of his breath on my neck. By the speed of it, I knew he was not sleeping yet. By the speed of my ribcage rising alongside his arm, he knew I wasn't yet either.
"Haraa?" I said finally. "It is a family-style bed. It is long enough for you to sleep near us in comfort."
Utter silence. Kor's was the considering, waiting silence I later learned to associate with the constant observation of others that allowed him to execute his ishas with such consummate grace. Haraa's... I could not interpret at all.
Mine, I am sorry to say, was mostly fear. That I had done the wrong thing, or said the wrong thing, and made things worse.
"You wouldn't mind?" she said, at last.
"I would mind more to have you remain on the floor, isolate," I said.
"Your ajzelin is silent," she said. "Is this well with him? He has barely spoken to me this evening."
"He has barely spoken," Kor said, quiet, "because he knows that anything he says will be taken poorly."
Another quiet. I tried not to grow queasy with anxiety, and wondered at the strength of my reaction.
"We did not start off well, we two," Haraa said at last, and from the sound of her voice she had sat up. "When you arrived at Qenain, I did not want you to like me too well or speak to me too long for fear that you would learn my lord's transgression, and my own."
"Your fear was a sensible one," he said. "But your reticence revealed you all the same."
She sighed. "I worried about that possibility, too."
"And yet you came to me anyway, to tell me of Qenain's acts," I said, puzzled. "Why?"
"It was too late," she said. "I worried more about his fate by then than I did about my own." A pause. Then, to Kor, "I am guessing you feel some supernatural compassion for my situation which makes it possible for you to forgive my rudeness, and that my unease at accepting that forgiveness is what's coming between us right now."
Kor's latent amusement, always awaiting an opportunity to surface, was quite obvious in his voice by then. Even so, one had the uncomfortable feeling that he was also being completely serious when he replied, "Would you feel better if I whipped you?"
Worse, she considered it before replying. "Once, maybe."
There was no laughter then; that would have been a relief. Nor was there any charge to the silence that followed; that would have been a warning. What actually happened was for one moment, everything was just as it had been, with Kor's arm warm over me, the sheets settled, everyone in the same place, and in the next Shame was across the room and I heard the hiss of his belt leaving the chair and the sudden, shocking snap of it breaking the air. Haraa cried out, more in shock than pain, and then it was over and Kor was once again in bed, sliding into the depression he'd made at my back.
I was stiff in surprise and no little horror until Haraa said, voice husky, "A woman could get attached to the hand of Kherishdar's Shame."
Kor snorted, his lips curving into a smile I could feel on my neck. "But not this one. Come, Haraa. Be quit of your guilt and climb onto this bed before my ajzelin fetches you up himself."
