Kherishdars exception, p.42
Kherishdar's Exception, page 42
part #1 of The Books of Kherishdar Series
“You see,” Farren said, “It really is the only answer.”
“You grow too much like your beloved,” I observed, affectionate.
Farren smiled faintly. “Maybe a little.”
“And you should cease to worry him,” I added. “If I brought you a page, would you paint here?”
“The light…”
“I’ll fetch a lamp.”
“It’s not the same,” Farren said.
I glanced at Shan. “At very least you should show your son the strokes.” A pause. I had him then. “It may interest him. To see you work.”
The boy glanced up, and I hid my triumph beneath a serene mask.
“All right,” Farren said. “Though I have no idea what materials are left in the house.”
That, at least, was a problem that had been solved weeks ago, when the lady of Utraenith had arranged for the delivery of a set of paints and papers as a promise against the restoration of all the osulkedi calligrapher’s supplies. I sent the same adorable child who’d summoned me to the family room to bring them and had the intense satisfaction of peeking into the room later to find Farren bent over the table drawing, with Shan in his lap watching every movement of the brush with rapt attention.
I was having my tea outside in our sadly deficient garden when Kor arrived and went to a knee before me, black robes fanned around him.
“What would be sufficient thanks?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe if I ask you one day for another life-altering book? Another life-altering child?”
He laughed and took my tea cup from me, setting it on the bench alongside my hip so he could pull me into his arms and squeeze until I gasped. His strength was always unexpected, and always affecting. I cuddled into it, enjoying the temple-incense smell at his neck, and the warmth of his muscled shoulder now that he was no longer tense with unease.
“Or maybe that hug will do.” I smiled and pulled myself back onto the bench. “He would have come around. When the new studio started going up, if not before.”
“Yes,” Kor said, still on a knee in front of me. “But the longer that wound remained open, the better the chance of it festering. Now we can be certain of his healing.”
“A good thing,” I murmured. And, a little more impishly. “I am at Qevellen’s service always. As you see.”
“I do,” he said, and tipped my face down to steal my breath with the kiss he granted me. Then he left me to my tea and the whirlwind emotions of the day. I had not told him about Farren’s offer because, I suspected, he knew. Probably he’d known before Farren had made the decision; I’d noticed him watching me in those first weeks after the disaster. Useless to tell him, then, unless I wanted to make a joke of it, and I found… that I didn’t.
Because I was honored.
Astonished.
To go from a family-rent fathrikedi, uninterested in deeper ties, floating above them with a detached sense of superiority… to the lovelorn, rakadhas girl, bitter and rebellious and angry… all the way to a mother who would one day manage a family? Who could have predicted that course? When the Exception had mocked my boots so many years ago, had she guessed that they might lead me here? That I would use them to walk through the gate, then strip them and leave them by the door as I entered my home to sing to my children as I tucked them into bed?
So many things I had been convinced I would never want, and that slowly, I learned to desire… and find fulfillment in. How little that fathrikedi girl had known. Or was it unfairly aunerai of me to think of it as a progression? The Haraa who’d been Qenain’s sole fathrikedi had been proud and happy. Perhaps she might have remained so, had the universe not changed.
But I was here now… on the very bench where Kor had advised me to flee did I want to avoid marriage! And sitting here, in the garden denuded by ash and weather, with my tea growing tepid and my robes fluttering in the breeze, I realized I would be nowhere else.
And so my life prepared me for my last, and greatest test: by granting me my heart’s desire, before it offered me the opportunity to give it up forever.
As I’ve mentioned, our books are handmade, and thus unique. Popular ones are copied for public lending or commissioned for private libraries, and the artisans in question use what I think Farren has told you in the past is an iskadi, a ‘book soul,’ which contains not just the text but its common or suggested illustrations and letter treatments. But iskad are a relatively new invention; older texts, written before such master copies became common, might have more than one version, with subsequent arguments about which is the genuine article.
The most common copy of Ereseya’s Nine Spokes lists the knees as one of those spokes, and evokes with it the joy of falling to them for the beloved. But, being both curious and stubborn, I unearthed one of the few older editions, and in those, she lists not the knees, but the feet.
For the Beloved, one will endure any journey, walk until the feet are stripped to blood and wounding. No distance is too great. No exile too far. No task beyond one’s powers. One moves until the flesh fails, and then one keeps moving, and Love is the breath that keeps the soul from guttering.
And more on this theme. It struck me then, reading it, that the rest of the book was so intimate and encouraging, expounding on the bliss of sharing everything from bread to breath, and that the modern copy feels more of one piece that way… and that makes me trust that the older version might be the truer one. Ereseya knew, profoundly, what one paid for love. Any book of hers that does not speak of sacrifices near to death is, I believe, edited by some hand daunted by the uncompromising clarion of her call to love.
I was attempting to clear a space for a temporary work desk for Farren in our family room when Ajan found me, and his eyes were wild and wrong. “Haraa, he needs you.”
I straightened, alarmed, and followed.
Kor was standing at the window in his study, whole and apparently unbroken, and yet Ajan had told the truth. Something was terribly wrong. I couldn’t have said how I knew, only that I felt as if I was seeing the room through a skewed mirror. Fighting vertigo, I hurried to his side and touched his arm.
He looked at my hand as if the sight of it was as alien as the world, hung around him with him so out of focus. Then, carefully, he rested bleached fingers over mine. His hand was cold.
“We found the Exception,” he said.
Just that.
“Oh no,” I whispered.
Had I… I must have assumed that she was fine. That she’d continued on her merry way, flitting through the empire, unaware of, or not caring, that we suffered. Or maybe some part of me had believed she’d returned and seen Thirukedi while I was away from center, because we’d spent so many years missing one another despite our mutual attendance on Him. I had assumed she continued to exist, because… how could I not? She was a part of Kherishdar, as immutable as Thirukedi or Shame.
But she was mortal. And now… she was gone.
I knew better than to intrude further. With questions anyway. I stood for a while at his side, looking with him at a world that no longer included the rude and unfettered woman who’d taunted an empire and loved a god as a man. Who would mock my boots now? And how could I feel resentment that she should die before she could admit that I was no longer worthy of her tests? The girl she’d inspired to violence had become part of Kherishdar at last, no longer subject to distress at intimations otherwise.
Mostly, I looked toward center, and wondered if Thirukedi was suffering. They would have told Him. They would have told Him first.
I don’t know how I knew when it was time to leave. Certainly the aura around Kor didn’t fade—it wouldn’t for some time, I judged, and forcing it to would have been unfair. They’d ‘found’ her. Amid the wreckage no doubt. It had been weeks. The bodies they were unearthing now were horrible, even with winter’s chill to slow their decay. She’d been entombed in rock, and revealed. Had she been wearing one of her loose robes? Had it fluttered in the wind when they’d exposed her corpse? Had there been fear on her face at the last, or had she met her end laughing, daring it to complete her?
Was she perfect now?
Could she ever be?
Outside the room, I rejoined Ajan in the small family room. He rested his head on my shoulder and I looped my arm around his narrow back. “Were you there?”
“Yes.”
I waited to see if he wanted to volunteer details. He didn’t, so I let it lie. If he needed to expunge the experience, he would tell me later, or someone else. Pushing him wouldn’t help. Instead, I said, “What happens now?”
He squinted, turning his face toward mine without lifting it.
“I… I don’t know how it works,” I said. “The Exception. Kherishdar always has to have one, but… where do they come from?”
“Shame finds them,” Ajan said. “If they don’t show up themselves. Shame always finds them, has found them since the beginning, or so he tells me. Usually, he knows them before they know themselves. That’s one of the reasons this hurts so much.” The quiver in my arms… could Ajan feel it? Surely not, or he wouldn’t still be talking. “He found the last one, you know.”
“Did he?” I swallowed. “How does one know? Children often misbehave, chafe at restrictions.”
“She wasn’t a child,” Ajan said. “They rarely are. At most, maidens. Maidens are the most typical. But they have to be old enough that… well, exactly what you said. He has to be able to tell that they’re not transgressing out of ignorance.” He sighed. “He explained it once. That it was a spirit. Something that drove them to question.”
My heart tripped.
“Which makes sense,” Ajan said. “But he also said they had to be able to love, even when love was impossible.” A tired chuckle. “I’ll never understand that. Love makes all things possible. Itself particularly. But you know how he is, when he’s Shame. He says things that you feel are true but don’t necessarily understand. A life experience thing, maybe.”
“When we’re ancient and gold and wise,” I said, “maybe we’ll know what he means by it.”
“Which gives one to wonder how he knows these things so young.” Ajan sighed again. “Well. We are young, and I’m glad. And another Exception will turn up. There’s always one.”
“Yes,” I said, though I was nauseated now from the force of my palpitations.
I knew, now. I knew why Kor stood as if the world had receded and left him raw and isolate. He was afraid.
I suppose some other person might have deliberated on their course. Thought through the implications, weighed the outcome versus the costs, to themselves and others. Spent days dithering. Perhaps made a wiser choice because of it.
In some ways I remained the impetuous girl who’d thrown herself wholeheartedly into her infatuation for her lord: it was not in me to be indecisive. But I no longer committed myself quickly because I was rash and bold… but because I knew if I hesitated, I would never go. My children… Aishal, who had my curls and the strong bones of her father’s face. She was growing into such an incisive beauty. Unlike me, she was more disciplined about what she revealed, so the fact that she revealed everything to me was unspeakably precious. Kefthen, with Kor’s intense stare and self-possessed gestures, and Ajan’s lean build and quickness. What a man he would become. The next Shame… I didn’t doubt it.
Farren, aging with every year—what art would he make with the wisdom he was accruing? How would he transform the pain of living through Kherishdar’s great tragedy into beauty? They would ask him to create the calligraphy for the restored walls; it was inevitable. What other calligrapher had been mantled with the osulkedi’s stole? And what would he learn from Shan, whose parents had never come? To be a father this late… what a journey. I thought he might be with us longer than he planned.
Ajan… who had danced with me…
Qevellen, which had not only embraced me, but which would have been mine.
And Kor. Whom I would know still, but only as Shame. The man who’d fathered my daughter, who’d teased me and laughed with me, who’d invited me to share the family bed… him, I would lose.
I would lose everything.
If I looked too long at that, it would be too hard to go. So I didn’t. I stopped at the door to the garden, watching my children examine a shrub for signs of spring’s first buds. Too early yet for that, but it didn’t stop them from hoping. I glutted myself on the sight of their small and perfect hands, their faces bent toward one another. I consoled myself with the evidence that they would be there for one another, long after the rest of us had died. That was how it was supposed to work. We had big families, and lived with multiple generations, so the pain of losing any single person would be mitigated by numbers. You would call that harsh, aunera; I know, because Emma has. ‘No one is replaceable,’ she’d said. She was right.
I went upstairs and tidied, the movements rote. When my room was pristine, I plucked from it the one thing that didn’t belong and went downstairs.
Kor had left his study. I set The Hagiography on his shabati, and closed the door behind me.
I walked to center.
I took my time. I would have liked to report that my thoughts were busy, or even profound, but if I had thoughts, I didn’t note them. I was involved with the magnitude of my loss. Not just the personal one, jagged and new, that I had suffered on leaving Qevellen, but everyone’s. The capital’s grief over their dead, and the missing. Our sorrow at the material destruction, when those walls and buildings had been filled with history, with the evidence of our lives and loves. Thirukedi’s loss, and not just of the Exception… but every loss He’d endured since He’d become imperishable. People. Context. Children. He had sacrificed everything, and if that sacrifice had been wrested from Him, he had made of that accident a willing offering to every Ai-Naidari who came after.
He was our God…but He was my master, and I loved Him. Compared to what He had given, what I was coming to lay before Him was as nothing.
But I was cold, making that walk. The wind stung my cheeks and I didn’t find it refreshing. I was not vivified by the act of being abroad, alone, as an osulkedi might but a fathrikedi could not. The parks, leafless and raked, struck me as tristful rather than as some promise of rebirth. Ribbons of ash still wound the limbs of the trees, dark as the markings traced on us by our lords.
My shoes didn’t hurt the way they had when I’d donned my first pair. After today, I would put many, many more roads beneath them than I had discovered I cared to see.
What would the aunera say? That they would miss me. Perhaps they would be satisfied, because I was throwing off the yoke of conformity. Liberty, Ruben would tell me, is worth dying for. But I had never felt less free, contemplating lawlessness.
Maybe I was thinking, after all. But my thoughts had the breathless quality of a runner’s, broken and quick. I was walking to center and it was tearing my soul to ribbons. My feet were incidental. Ereseya was wrong—I could say that to her now, and imagined doing so. I come in your name, I thought. But I am not your equal. None of us have been, since you.
What would she say? Did she have to say anything? She had leapt into the abyss, trusting a god to catch her… and He had, until she’d slipped through His fingers and shattered into glorious pieces.
All those looks I’d seen in Kor’s eyes. The infrequent ones I hadn’t understood but that had filled me with dismay. The ones that had made it hard to sleep, because it had been almost as if… he’d been saying goodbye. Because he had been. Because he’d known.
A spirit that questions, and a heart that can love, impossibly.
Shame can be wrong. He hadn’t been, this time.
I walked to center, hoping I would never arrive, hoping that it would end and deliver me to my decision. Then the new Haraa would arise from the ashes of this sacrifice, the Haraa who couldn’t imagine being content with the life of Haraa-the-osulkedi. Thirukedi had said it Himself: the past is done. We are who we are in the moment. And the moment is the only place we can be happy.
I walked to center, and my journey ended, and my world held its breath.
I was admitted, as I had been so many times in the past. Was that not its own form of confirmation? Who else had had the temerity to insist on so many conversations with God? Who else had He welcomed with such indulgence? I had blundered my way into intimacy with Him, longing for it. Had read poetry about Him until my blood flamed with it. Had asked Him His name… knew His secrets… loved Him with every love in my heart, which included loves that I’d thought myself aware of when I’d been infatuated with Jaran and Farren, and now knew to have been pale substitutes for the real thing, which I’d discovered long after, a leisurely and gentle discovery. Like the rising of the sun: from moment to moment, one does not see it shift, but then it is overhead and… this, too, I would give up, for Him.
He was on His divan in one of the rooms I was familiar with, the long one suitable for walking. The Servant led me to it and left me, and in that silence… I did not kneel.
How my knees trembled. But I remained on my feet, on the feet that would endure any journey for the Beloved. On the feet that moved now, and delivered me to Him. To His lap, which I slipped onto. I rested my hands on His chest and met His eyes, and I was not bold, aunera. I was calm, and there was poetry in my heart, like the tolling of a bell.
“In all Kherishdar,” I began, quiet, “there is one man who has given up every choice.”
Thirukedi met my eyes with His willow-green ones.
“And in all Kherishdar,” I said, “there is a woman who has them all.”
He waited, His hands resting on my hips, steadying me.
“You have lost your Exception,” I said. “Will you accept your new one, masuredi?”
“I will,” Thirukedi said, gently, “…when she arrives.”
For a moment I didn’t understand the words. Didn’t even hear them properly. Then I gasped in, a great shudder that shook my entire body. When He cupped my face, I felt my fall as if I had been pushed off a cliff, and as abrupt, His arms as He caught me. Ereseya had spoken of it as flight, and she was right, she was right. The vastness of the reprieve was unspeakable. I could never repay it. I choked on my sob and forced it back so I could say, shivering, “I would have done it for you. Thirukedi… for you… anything… I swear, let me give you something—”
