To Believe in Mathematics

by C Z Edwards

  “I think you could break it by destroying your ingenia,” she said slowly. “But perhaps only you, and only because yours has no other expression. Your ability to interpret the world is not dependent upon your additional perceptions. It wouldn’t be like blinding yourself. I wouldn’t advise it, though. Mostly because the best method for destroying an ingenia stands a good chance of killing your liver, too.”

  “So, obvious next question,” I asked, eyeing her sidelong. “What happens to the other one when half of a soul bonded pair dies?”

  “Sometimes they survive,” she said simply.

  “If I do decide to burn this out, I’ll probably kill you,” I said.

  “I’m tough,” she said.

  “Also, you’ve been running the risk of killing me for six years,” I said. “Good to know.”

  “As if you haven’t,” she retorted. “I’m pretty sure you live in a treehouse, and you hunt boar, and you’ve been out on the bay in truly foul weather, my lad.”

  “That’s the safe side of the Foreti,” I said. “Life is risk.”

  Her wariness redoubled. “Do you still finish that verse?” she asked carefully.

  “No, the first part is correct, but death is the only refuge is at best incomplete and mostly horseshit intended to indoctrinate.” Then I heard her. “And how exactly do you know Lethian scripture?” It’s not public, and it’s not published.

  “My talents,” she said innocently. “No field work allowed after quickening. While I harbored Gwen, my family took an extended trip to Cimenarum. Dad gave lectures at the University, Mam studied the Manufactury forge and the hot springs, I observed the Lethians and wrote my second monograph.”

  I did the math. Eight years ago, she was writing her second. “How many?” I asked. It’s a point of pride with Archilians.

  She held up four fingers.

  “And how old are you?” I asked. She looked about our ages, no older than Quin and Fanik, and she couldn’t be more than a year younger than Rien, not with two children, four monographs, and years of fieldwork.

  “Twenty-six. Fifteenth of Prosilis.”

  For anyone but an Archilian, four monographs in a decade was a blazing speed. But they expect at least one every other year. “Oi, you’re so far behind,” I teased.

  “And you, my lad, may bite me.”

  So I did. Gently, first on the delicate, thin skin of her inner wrist, and when she stopped walking, on the back of her neck. She’d liked both in our dreams, and she still did. She arched her neck into me, and that’s how we learned I’m completely inept at seduction, because I didn’t move with her. Which earned me a bonk on the nose.

  “Never?” she asked, after she checked that I hadn’t broken anything, but while she still cupped my face.

  “I hadn’t developed a fancy for my schoolmates yet,” I said, shrugging. “My voice was still up and down. No chance once I was in the chapterhouse. I didn’t even see a woman or a girl for five years. The only permitted satisfaction is in marriage, trying for a child. Had I embraced or kissed a classmate, we would have both been condemned. A night visit earned a whipping.” There’s a reason I touch my friends, and it’s not why Bran thinks. It’s because I came out of the Chapterhouse starving for other people, and I still haven’t made it up.

  “Mother of Reason,” she breathed. “They do know night shatters aren’t voluntary?”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but you teach yourself to wake up and think of frozen mud when the first offense is lashes, the second is two tendays of water only, and the third violation is incubilation.”

  She dropped her hands. “I keep stumbling over the depths of Lethian cruelty.”

  I pulled my collar aside. “This isn’t because I simply disagreed.”

  Sunset is long and slow this far north, but I wanted her to see what we’d done at Hazel Spring, so I pulled her along. “No Gorthanian girl would show any interest in a pair of witchy Galantierans working the worst jobs. For all of Bran and Quin’s excellent qualities as best friends, I’m not carnally interested in either one. Besides, I needed a good three years just to sort through what the Lethians taught and did.”

  “Have you?” she asked.

  I nodded. “They have made themselves evil in the pursuit of righteousness. Fear of loss drives them. Not just death, but all of the losses that a person will experience over their lifetime. Especially as they raise children. Lethians can’t accept that each loss balances a gain, that we should delight in a child’s discovery and independence. They see it as disobedience and willfulness, and deny that there’s any virtue in self-direction or thoughtfulness.”

  “Yet you sound like you’ve got some sympathy,” she said.

  “Don’t confuse the ability to articulate a motive with sympathy,” I said, quoting Rien. “Someone in this army needs to be able to think like a Lethian if we’re going to defeat them.”

  We walked for a quarter millia30 in silence. We’d have years of these hard, direct, uncomfortable conversations, where we disagreed and still found a way to be tolerant of each other. We had to start doing it right now, because we had no other option. Our shared dreams have never admitted speech, and we seemed stuck together.

  “Does my sweat... make you hard... only in dreams?” she asked carefully.

  “No,” I said. I wouldn’t lie about that, though I was trying to ignore my prong. Because stuck together or no, linked by dreams or not, these details of our intellectual and emotional lives probably mattered more than if my parts matched well with hers. I lacked some specifics, but I was teachable.

  However. The ethics upon which I rebuilt myself were not as subject to alteration.

  We’ve only built the one exceptional bathing pool and bathry, but what we learned here and there, we applied to the other three major springs in our range. Hazel had the advantage of being worn out of old, flat sandstones, so it’s now three large, shallow dishes of water separated by low falls. It’s not a forceful spring, and it dried up during bad droughts, as we learned the second year we were here. It was cooler than our home spring, which was good at the end of summer, when you want the water just warm enough to help soak off the grime, but was asking to freeze something vital come Midwinter. Hazel wasn’t deep enough for swimming or floating, but it was flat and smooth and warm, and we long ago pruned the trees around it so they wouldn’t drop leaves into the clear water. It’s best like this, on a summer evening, when you lay flat in a little more than a half-foot of skin-temperature water, and look up, to watch the stars rise and the sky turn from gold to pink to violet to the blue-black of ink.

  Since we moved to the treehouse, we’ve used Hazel as the place we go when we need to get away from each other. Quin and Bran used to come out here together, because their friendship meant they’ve sometimes been lovers. Or used to be. I’ve spent more than a few nights alone at Hazel Spring when I knew Kya was safe. Mostly, the intensity of our shared dreams was entirely in my head — which was good for the people I live with — but it didn’t have to be. When I was alone, events turned more sensual.

  And right now? I wanted to get Kya out of her clothes and lay in the upper pool with her.

  I was not an innocent. I’d read more than my share of the kind of sagas that the wise bookseller keeps out of the hands of children. I knew how my prong works, and there were five of us. One of us grew up in a brothel, one of us is married in everything but signed documents. And I knew how Kya’s body worked, because... we’ve shared it. And she shared mine, I was nearly certain.

  But I’d also waited a lot of years. A few more hours wouldn’t hurt.

  And then we were there, with the sun in the golden hour above the horizon. I gave Kya my Foreti in its best aspect, its most magnificent light. We’d come up to the back of the spring, so when we stepped into the clearing, it spread below us, three glistening drops of clear sky stretching down a slope. B
ran was the one who bought an expensive pound of mixed pasture seeds to spread over the ground after we cleared the scrub and saplings. He was not wrong; the grasses bound up the dirt, which kept it out of the water, and it attracted the large grazers that kept us fed. Now, after a long season of growing lush on summer rain, Hazel Spring seemed enchanted, surrounded by blooming, almost feral blue flax, and clover, and meadowsweet, and angelica. Above us towered a stand of the Foreti’s few broadleaf trees, which prefer the spring’s warmth and water, and on the far side of the pools, Bran had shaped the natural hazels into a hedge.

  I didn’t feel rain on the wind, so we wouldn’t need to shelter in the cave where Quin and I first lived. Instead, I left Kya standing at the upper meadow, and retrieved from the cave the roll of bedding we keep up here, to give it time to warm in the setting sun, and to air out atop a thick layer of tall grass.

  We also kept a large, unglazed crock of water here. Someone’s usually near Hazel every other day or so, and it’s a good place to take a midday rest, get a cool drink from the crock in the summer, enjoy some shade, maybe soak your feet, or your whole self, down in the lowest pool. The crock was full, so cheers for us, we’d remembered to be responsible. I grabbed the soap box and the bucket to fill now, so I would not forget and could replenish the crock tomorrow before I left.

  “Are you trying to overwhelm me with natural beauty?” Kya asked when I returned to where I’d left her standing. “Every bit of this forest is lovelier than the one before.”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “It’s distracting you while I do my chores.” Again, someone had been responsible about leaving the next fire’s wood beside the fire pit. It took us long years to grow more attentive to each other, unlike when we were all young idiots. We used to argue so much over who forgot to do what.

  “Is that... ” she eyed the bedroll.

  “Comfortable for two,” I confirmed, “or extravagant for one. Your choice.”

  “Are you angry with me?” she asked.

  “How can you leave them?” I said, before I knew I was going to say it. “Is that what I need to expect? That I’ll be raising our children alone, because you’re running off to war?”

  “We don’t go to war,” she said. “We defend those who cannot defend themselves.”

  “A distinction that makes little difference to an inconsolable child. Is this what my soul’s gotten me into?”

  “If...” she hesitated. “If we live long enough to have children, then yes, probably. But probably not, because I have just defied direct orders. For the sake of someone who has invaded my mind without my direct consent — ”

  “That one’s mutual — ” I interrupted.

  “Not disputing that,” she fired back. “But this is how my seniors will see it. I have been compromised by a Lethian, and it has led to disobedience and dereliction from duty. There is every chance that this is all the time we will have, ever. From now until Rien allows me to go to Celestan. The Council knows I’m dangerous. They can’t risk any Wisdomian as a free agent.”

  “They’ll kill you?” I asked.

  “Probably not,” she said. “But they might confine me to quarters until I can be rendered... safe. Until they can burn out my ingeniae.”

  “You just said that would probably kill you — ” I said.

  “Yes.” She dropped her pack and stretched, then looked out over the pools. “But it’s the difference between an execution and a just punishment. I knew the natural consequences when I chose to come here. They’ll say I should have left as soon as I knew Laarens was in your hands, and returned only after I convinced my Council we should take an interest, in the form of my presence.”

  “Can’t you just... leave your order? There are about a hundred Archilian orders, right?” That’s one of their major tenets, that neither love nor wisdom flourish inside a clutching fist, and compelled obedience is slavery.

  “There are, and, no, not Wisdomians. That’s the vow I made.” She didn’t look at me, but got thoughtful for a long moment. “Pols said... Dastorian Patrona’s kid about you. Was he right?”

  I didn’t understand where that came from, nor what it meant, but it didn’t sound like a topic change. She sounded... like a priest, or a scholar, imparting a lesson. I, too, trained for that, though hers was more recent. So I went with it. “Yes.”

  “Are you Anneka dat Rindall’s son?”

  I froze. “That’s my mother’s birth name,” I said slowly. “Do you know her?”

  “Slightly,” she said. “She once told me the Lethians stole her husband and her son, and she’s lucky she managed to keep her daughters. There aren’t so many Lethians at all, and even fewer who escape them. You’ve got her nose. I last saw her about three years ago, at the Julianasport Navy Hospital. She’s a Healer’s Assistant, goes where the Minister of War assigns her, but she was fairly senior then. He’s dead, you know.”

  A weight just fell away, then. I hadn’t realized I’d been carrying it until it wasn’t there. I was probably as completely safe as is possible while building a civil war like an amateur theatrical. “And how do you know that?”

  “She told me. He’s been gone nine years, I think. About that, anyway. She thought you were dead, too.” She glanced over at me, and smiled faintly. “I actually have ridden courier more than anything else. Until the last two years, we’ve needed investigators and messengers more than spies, most of the time. I know your mother because she cared for a badly burnt, badly abused woman who was on a Spagnian warship we sank, and who spoke at least a little Galantieran. I hoped that woman was my sister, Justia. I now know she was probably a Comitae woman. But... your mother and I got very, very drunk together and grieved our lost families. You know your mother is far too talented to be a Healer’s Assistant.”

  I nodded. “Born poor.”

  “And in the back of beyond,” Kya said. “By the time anyone realized she should have specialized, she’d met your father. He didn’t want to take another eight years when he had that good job waiting back home at Dastorian. If you don’t mind me saying, I thought your father sounded like a controlling rat-bastard even before he lost his mind.”

  I shrugged. “I’m probably not the best judge. I don’t have any comparison, and I was eight when he began to change.”

  “I mention your mother because she’s got a lot of Valenas, and your father did almost kill her. Did you know?”

  “I suspected,” I said, then amended it to the whole truth. “I was certain he had and got away with it.”

  “No, other way ‘round. What I need you to understand is that any ingenia can be a weapon. It’s just a matter of knowing how to use it offensively, or finding yourself fighting for your life. He tried to strangle her, and she ... I think she blew out one of his heart’s arteries. I don’t think she allows herself to acknowledge what happened.” She looked into the distance. “We who can... often try not to think about it. So... I’m a battle Healer. If I were merely a Healer, I’d be right on the edge between Healer’s Assistant and full Healer. That means I’m far, far less powerful than your mother, but with far more training.” She turned and looked me in the eye. “And I’m a Wisdomian. That means that every time I learned a standard technique, I also learned the offensive variation. How to mend bone, how to erode it. How to calm asthma or cause it. Close veins, or open them. Thank all that is wise and good, very few of us want to cause harm. But in my order, they start teaching us to be deadly when we make our first profession. That’s why we can’t leave once we’ve passed our third profession. Justia was ten, and I was eight. We did everything together.”

  Rien’s been teaching me to be a lawyer, so she’s been teaching me to think in orderly priorities.Kya had been far too young to make that decision, and nobody ever should have held her to it, but that was for Rien and whatever government we built to address after this civil war. The most urgent priority right now was distance.
“You’re an Evocator, too. Do you and Rien — ” Spheres? Parallels? There was a term for it, but since I didn’t use it, I couldn’t recall it.

  “Yes, Rien and I share both chords and keys. She’s one of the easiest people for me to talk to. But we’re out of my range. I’ve only got a couple milliae.”

  We were still in my range then, my whistle range. Kya didn’t know those codes yet. And wouldn’t, until I told her. “Do Rien and Laarens know how dangerous you are?”

  “Those are two questions,” she said. “Rien’s an Archilian novica31, so yes, she knows what the Wisdomians are, and she knows I’m one. She was Ascendara32, so I’m nearly certain she would know what the Council used to tell the Monarch. She doesn’t yet know my specifics, because I was just about to tell her when you appeared. It will be the first thing I say when next she and I have a moment. Sorry.” She flushed slightly. “We have friends in common and we wasted time gossiping.”

  “What does Laarens know?” I asked.

  She sighed. “Far less than he should.” She crouched over her pack and undid the buckles, then started unpacking it. “The fact that I did not drown him nor stab him nor leave him for the street thieves should be proof of my best intentions towards Galantier.”

  I knew Rien loved Laarens. I also knew he could irritate her like almost no one else on earth. And clearly he exasperated people other than Rien. I let myself grin at that. “Fair assessment. You’ve seemed more than usually annoyed the past few tendays. Do you need laundry?”

  “Just a little, but I didn’t bring much, so yes. To my eye, the top pool is for lounging, the middle one for bathing, and the bottom for cleaning?”

  “Clever girl,” I said. “Indeed. Want help?”

  “If you don’t mind. I’m glad we’re not going to argue about laundry.”

  “Oi, we’ll have theology for that,” I said cheerfully. “Look, Kya, I’m not Lethian. I don’t think I believe in the Pantheon, and even if I did, I might not piss on a deity if they were on fire. You must believe, to be a priestess.”