Such knives are used for rituals, blades short and narrow as tongues. But I was less interested in the fact that our new home had a knife for an emblem than I was in my ajzelin's voice. I looked over my shoulder and found him staring past me at the house, and there was... a shining in his eyes. Merriment, partially. But a glitter also that made his coronal eyes gleam like the stars they were named for.
"Kor?" I said, softly.
He laughed then and put his hand on the device. "Tset... was Tsevet's love-name."
My ears flipped back. "You mean to say..."
"That Thirukedi has deeded us the First Servant's house," Kor agreed, and I could barely meet his eyes for the emotion in his voice. "Yes."
I looked from my ajzelin back to the house and studied it anew. It would make a beautiful residence, but it was a peculiarity in that it was a residence, standing apart from any temple; there were few private residences of this size in the temple district, and the larger ones were invariably attached to one of the temples.
"The First Servant didn't live in your shrine?" I said at last.
"No," Kor said, wiping his eyes. "No, he had the shrine built so that the priests who followed him would be more easily accepted. To break in some part the association between himself and the concept of Shame as priest."
"Sensible," I said. Looking up at the gracious estate, I added, "He had fine taste."
"By all accounts," Kor said. "He was quite the aesthete."
I glanced at him. "You never came by to look...?"
He shook his head. "I knew he had dwelt in the temple district, but not where. And even had I known, it would have seemed... inappropriate to come. If one's predecessors wish to take secrets with them out of this world, it is well to leave them there."
I offered him the key. It swung between us, licked by the afternoon sunlight.
"Too much of Shame's past has been shrouded in secrets," I said. "Secrets... and grief. Let us make some changes, shinje."
He met my eyes, then caught the key, holding it and my hand for a long moment. Then he used it on the gate, and together we entered the house bequeathed us by the Emperor. Its interior made good on the promises of its facade: it was a broad and airy floor-plan, with many of the ground floor rooms opening onto the gardens. Upstairs we found more intimate spaces, easy to close off, but they shared the first floor's tendency toward large rooms. I tried to imagine it as it must have looked in the time of the First Servant, sumptuous with wall hangings and rugs and pillows; all those things were probably long gone by now. We would have quite the task furnishing the rooms again, but perhaps Kor's temple Guardians would be willing to help with the task. I was still considering this while looking out of one of the third floor windows when I heard Kor's call. I went to him... and stopped.
One room had been left sealed. Kor remained at its threshold of its freshly unlocked door, looking inside. When I joined him, I understood his reticence: the original furniture had been left here... in what had to be the First Servant's bedchamber. The frame of the bed was still sound, an elegant low case of pale, almost white wood. It was not a small bed, by any measure. There was a table with a bowl of blue glass, for washing... and on the wall facing the bed, a mural.
Oh, aunera. Such a mural. Before Kor I knew nothing of Tsevet, Shame's first priest... but everything I needed to know was painted on that wall. For it was a succession of portraits, blurred as if in a dream, all painted with an urgency and a tenderness that rendered them unforgettable: these spirits from the past, captured with a lover's touch. And yet, for all the emotion so clearly communicated in each face, none of their features were clear... except their eyes. I dared to touch one, wondering at the beauty and the sorrow and the very realness of her gaze, set against the strange uncertainty of her body. "Kor?" I asked, soft.
"He was blind," Kor answered, voice rough. At the look I cast him over my shoulder, he cleared his throat and said, "Not fully. And not accidentally. He requested it in the merethek. That his eyes be scored."
I did not ask why. I didn't have to. I knew why I would do such a thing, were I a priest: to see more clearly, and to be less distracted by the surface of things, as I was. His reasons might not have been mine, but I could sense them all the same, with the same logic that informed dreams and made sense of poetry.
I rested my palm beside the woman's face. "We should sleep here."
"Farren?" Kor said, stunned.
"And in that bed," I said, nodding. "If you are willing."
"I wouldn't think that you would be," he said. He joined me at the wall. "You wouldn't be uncomfortable, being stared at?"
"But we're not being stared at," I said. "We are the ones doing the staring. They are looking back."
Together we surveyed the vastness of the First Servant's love, so personal. I knew without being told that he had died young: broken by the passion I saw in the paint, by the sheer number of those he had drowned himself in. Here was the history that had prompted Thirukedi to send me to Shame's side; what was begun in such ardor could not help but repeat, throughout the generations, echoing like the shattering of a great temple bell.
He had loved knives. Looking at his art, I understood a little of why.
Kor rested his hand alongside mine, dark fingers spread in the space between two faces. "I'm not sure I will be able to," he said. "But I'll consider it."
In the end, aunera, we did sleep in that bed... but not all the time. It became a place sacred to intimacies more hallowed than sleep, to confidences shared and times of witness and seclusion. I have never regretted any moment I spent there with or without company; for I went there often alone to contemplate those faces from the past, who were loved so deeply that their eyes were each captured in a moment of profound communion.
We investigated the house from topmost floor to cellar and then convened again on the ground floor in a room that opened onto a garden with a small pond. It would need floor cushions, I thought, and a low table, and then it would be perfect for use during the darelen, particularly on warm summer nights when the stars shimmered in the dark bowl of the sky. Chimes, too, I decided, looking past the trees at the steeples of the temple district. Maybe several; they could be tuned to whisper harmonies together.
"What now?" Kor asked, rather more subdued than I expected.
"Now," I said, "you will go to your shrine and put forth your proposition to the potential members of Qevellen... and I will arrange for my belongings to be sent here, and begin shopping for furniture." I glanced outside. "The pond needs restocking also. And we will need food. Then there is the matter of Servants...."
Kor laughed. "Very well, Head of Household! Go you to your tasks, and I to mine."
I laughed. "Yes. Off with you now, su'Qevellen."
"I did not ask to be heir to Qevellen!" Kor said.
"You did not ask," I said, "but until Qevellen has more members, you are stuck with the task. Ancestors preserve you."
Kor's eyes lost their focus for a moment. "Ah, yes. And who the ancestors of Qevellen might be, that I wonder." But then he was out the gate and I was left with this promising canvas. I had not often had cause to exercise my talents on the interior of a house, but I looked forward to it.
As you might expect, Kor came home that evening trailed by an entourage. I had spent a quite profitable afternoon myself and was ready for his arrival, standing by the open gate with a hand resting on one of its delicate arabesques. One beast I saw and seven males, and in the lead walked Kor with the reins of the mount in his hand. At his side, astride the mount, was Ajan... and ancestors hear me, aunera, I am a man of images, owned by beauty and mastered by my eyes, and even for me the sight of Ajan was something out of a fair and incredible dream, the sort from which you wake weeping for the loss of it. The youth, gaunt but unbent, backlit by the light of a fading red sun, burning as if from within and with everything stripped from him but will and the slowly welling vigor of a life freed from arrest... and at his knee, his beloved, his triumph a quiet fire in his face....
My eyes were wet, but I did not begrudge it.
Behind them came four youths with the lean, hard bodies of warriors, laughing and singing. I would come to know and love them all in the years that followed: gentle Varon with his musician's ear; boisterous Shem who could lift a spirit by merely entering a room; Runi, quick of wit and capable of such astonishing extemporaneous versifying; and Jash, who kept his council until he didn't, and then silenced us all with wisdom beyond his experience. But that night I saw them only as joyful potentials, and the newest members of a new family, and wondered what they would bring to Qevellen.
