And then the flicker at my side was Kor, so swift he blurred, joining the alien. His face was a mask.
There is a reason we proscribe guns, aunera. We die easily, far more easily than you do. The velocity of a weapon seems to have more of an effect on us than it does on aunera—you are built more densely than we are—and what we can survive with difficulty from a sword we cannot from a rifle. Ajan had leaped, knowing that if hit he would die to protect one of Kherishdar's lords, not just from an ignominious end, but from becoming the foundation of a diplomatic incident and a terrible scandal. A lord dying from implied aunerai violence after being found in their beds? Better the sacrifice of a young Guardian in a misunderstanding between a lord and an alien than that.
But we all knew that he would die.
All of us, apparently, except the aunera.
I became aware that the female was on the verge of shaking me when she stepped between me and the sight of Kor bent with his brow to the slack hand he cradled in his own. "Osulkedi!" she cried. "Listen to me! I require permission to treat your man!"
In the distance I heard a hair-raising wail. "What?"
"Let us help him!" she said, desperate. "Our medicine is better than yours! We can save him!"
I stared at her. "What? How... it's not possible."
"It is!" she almost shouted, her eyes tearing. "So give us permission! And one of you come with us, in case the surgeon needs a healthy example of what you're supposed to look like when he stitches him back together!"
"I... you..." The sheer improbability of what she suggested was finally overwhelmed by an insane hope. "KOR!" I shouted, and ran for him. "Kor, go with them!"
Kor looked up from Ajan's side. The hands folded around his lover's were trembling.
"They want to save him!" I said. "They might be able to. Go with them!"
"Farren?" Kor said, hoarse, and my heart seized as his voice broke on the last syllable.
"Go with them," I said again as one of the aunerai vehicles burst into view, bringing with it the piercing siren.
Kor stumbled after them, then, when the aliens loaded Ajan's still form into their vehicle. The female—Lenore—paced Ajan's body, talking almost as fast as she could form words and translating them just as quickly on Kor's behalf. Haraa watched them with wide eyes, then looked at me in mute appeal.
"Go," I said. "You have some facility with the tongue. Help them."
She fled for the vehicle, then, leaving me there with the lord and his aunerai lover... and a pool of spreading blood...
...and the two Guardians, one of whom had fallen against the Gate jamb, his rifle on the ground. The other was clasping the weapon with fists so tight they shook. I said to the lord, "There is work to be done," and led him to the Guardians, saying, "you have used the proscribed weapons on an Ai-Naidari but it was not intentional. The lord here is witness; he will go with you to your liege and explain the situation." I eyed Qenain and was relieved to see him revivifying. I finished, "It would be well for you to take the male aunerai with you in case any diplomatic issue arises during the deposition."
"It is well considered, osulkedi," the lord said. To the Guardians, he said, "Send for your relief, and when they arrive, we will depart."
Within half an hour, then, I had dispatched everyone to where they could do the most good... except for one person. You will have observed whom, aunera.
Yes. I had forgotten myself.
Reck this:
Once there was a pot... a potter... once there was a broken pot—
So I was not there for the pathos of the work to save Ajan's life; I am glad, in retrospect, for from what I heard later I may have lost years of my life to the terror of it. But it is true that aunerai medicine is better than ours, for as strange as it seems you have more time to effect repairs on your bodies if they are traumatically wounded than we do, and this interval you have spent hundreds of years and much art and science on widening.
Nor was I there for the other intervention, the political one, in which the lord of Qenain and the lady of the colony atani saved the lives of the Guardians who had shot Ajan, for ordinarily their lives would have been forfeit for the misuse of the weapons they had been granted... if in fact the lady had had the opportunity to punish them at all. They might have been unable to live with what they had done and made restitution in the most final way a tortured conscience can conceive. But between the lord and lady and the aunerai administrator, they were saved, though never again did they stand Gate duty with rifles at their backs: not because they were found untrustworthy, but because the sight of the weapons forevermore sickened them and they refused any duty that required their carriage.
But all this I did not know until many interminable hours later, for I had done my work so well that no one remembered that I was not there to be informed of how it went. Lacking any direction of my own, I repaired to the tea house and sat in it over a single bowl of tea that quickly grew tepid and then cold, for I sent the proprietor away to spare her the weariness of my long vigil. The afternoon wore on and the brutal evening fell, and still I heard no word, and I despaired. I could not even lance that despair with my art, for my trunk had been sent ahead of us, and taken with it all my materials. The need to draw was a physical pain in my fingers, in my heart.
The first I knew of any of what transpired was when Kor stumbled into the tea house, and to his knees at my side, and collapsed there, head in my lap, weeping.
"Oh, no, no," I whispered. "Don't tell me..."
"They saved him," he said into my lap, his great chest heaving. "They saved him, only just, but they did it. It was so close." And then he relapsed into his paroxysms, and I bent close over him, covering him.
Aunera, I had seen him in his sickness, and in his brittle withdrawal; had seen his uncertainty and his guilt. I had not yet seen him weep. And seeing it finished something in my heart, filled some hole in it with the fierce need to protect him, who in all Kherishdar needed the least protection, and yet was as vulnerable as the smallest child given the right provocation. I pressed my nose to his hair and rested one hand on his arm; the other I spread on his back. Had someone burst into the room then with ill intent, I would have died to shield him... as I would have before. But before, I would not have fought.
For a brief instant, I had a shattering insight into the hearts of Guardians. I said a prayer of thanks for Ajan's life and gathered my ajzelin closer. I held him thus until his back ceased to lurch beneath my palm, until his breathing slowed. Until at last he drew in a long breath and sighed it out against my thigh, pressing his eyes into it. I stroked his hair, soothing the last of the tremors away.
"So close, Farren," he said again, at last, voice ragged.
"Too close," I surmised.
He shook his head. "Ordinarily I would say no; he is a Guardian. I welcomed him into my arms knowing that risk. But this..." He sat back on his heels and looked up at me, his body composed but his eyes rimmed in red. "His leap was a death sentence. Even now, he looks so wan... but they sent me away. He needs time to recover from the surgery."
"Surgery," I whispered. "Surgery does not stop certain death."
"It does among the aunera," Kor said, and rested his head against my thigh, exhaustion dragging the yoke of his shoulders toward the earth.
I set my long hand on his head again, and this he accepted without response; by that I knew how depleted he was.
The lord returned next, pausing at the sight of us, for we had not moved for nearly an hour and some sense of that timelessness remained about us.
