To Believe in Mathematics

by C Z Edwards

  She opened deep and took every bit of me she could. Her shatter came with shape of my name in her mouth. That’s what it took. I was gone, deep in her.

  Yes, it was better this way.

  And would keep getting better.

  Somewhere around the time the moon was reaching the opposite trees, and the eastern sky was just starting to lighten from almost black to violet, Kya flooded her fourth shattering all over me. My jewels and my thighs ached, and no effort or time was ever better spent. We had pulled the blanket up, and had spent more than an hour cuddled together, watching the great swath of the universe above, stroking each other and tutoring our specific muscles to our individual needs. She preferred small circles to up and down or side to side; I needed slow strokes and a soft grasp. But she hadn’t answered my question.

  “Kya,” I started.

  “Yes, I will marry you,” she said. “Will you marry me? We’re both supposed to ask and consent.”

  “Yes,” I said simply. “Festivis Twenty-seventh to Imbris Twenty-seventh?”

  “Works for me,” she agreed.

  We were sticky and warm under the blankets, our faces slightly chilled in the predawn cool. Part of me wanted to fall asleep, but I suspected if we did, we might not wake until late, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know yet how our dreams had shifted. I knew they would, and I didn’t want to be disappointed and hurt if it turned out our last night in our dreams was behind us. This union was joy. I didn’t want grief to complicate it.

  So I petted her, and thought about the intellectual work of being our worst bookworm and only apprentice lawyer. I hadn’t been doing much work with the Tiwendar papers over the last few days, mostly because we were simply too busy. We needed every moment of sun to dry fish and meat and salt and berries and mushrooms and herbs. But I’d been reading that same set of documents for more than half a year. I could use another mind as flexible and convoluted as my own.

  “Three,” she said, and didn’t sound sleepy, either. “I want to try for three with you. I warn you, I’m not an especially good cow. I made a little more with Peri, but not as much as Vinca would have liked. So... nursing bottles. You’ll have to feed the babies, too.”

  I nodded and pulled her closer. Three was my ideal, too. “No complaints here. But it’s your decision, and I’d rather you change your mind than hold yourself to promise you don’t want. Gwen likes fire and rocks and your mother. What does Peri like?”

  “Jackstones, climbing trees, and drawing. Right now.”

  “Do I treat Darav like your brother or your lover?”

  “Like an absolute pain in my arse,” she said with a small laugh. “Brother is the closest, but donation partners are always complicated, unless they’re like my parents.”

  “Why didn’t they marry before you were born?”

  “No responsible priest will marry young people,” she said. “Twenty should be the very youngest, and personally, I prefer twenty-five for the first marriage, unless there are significant mitigating circumstances.”

  I knew I’d seen a couple of marriages at Archilavast that looked like both parties were too young to get drunk in a tavern, but I wasn’t not necessarily the best judge of age. “Then your parents aren’t elderly now, I assume.”

  “No, Mam’s forty-five, and Dad will be fifty in the spring.” She rolled over and fitted her back into my chest. This was the best position, by far, all the skin touching. “Fair warnings about my family. Mam is firm in her opinions, and she’s considered radical even amongst Archilians. She’s part of the reason we evacuated the Sancta Sophia. Mam and her faction think we should be occupying Prava House as a demand for justice. Which would just get everyone killed, but the only way she would listen to us Wisdomians was closing the city. My father is utterly irrational on the subject of sweets. He thinks they’re poison, and since he studies mushrooms, especially medicinal ones, he’s probably not entirely wrong. So never start either of them on their pet subjects, unless you’re prepared to listen for at least three hours.”

  “Good to know. Are they happy?” I asked. I cupped one of her breasts, delighting in the shape of her softness compared to the taut, contained power of everything else.

  “Rather disgustingly so, yes,” she said.

  “Are they soul bound, too?”

  She shook her head. “Not by any test I can devise. And they’re both minor Ingeniae, so it’s not being prosaic. They’re just... content. Even when they’re devastated. They just... keep going, hand in hand.”

  “Good, dove,” I said. I would need that model. The only happy marriage I’d seen was Fanik and Lin, and they got maybe nine tendays a year together, never more than four or five days at a stretch. That we’d been able to spare them both for almost two tendays at Midsummer had taken a near-miracle of scheduling and Rien’s insistence. Lin managed the second largest landgreve in Galantier, and her brother was a murderous devil, more monster than man. We’d all be happiest if he got himself killed in Farenze. We could hope, anyway. His absence was the only reason Lin and Fanik could take the time away; Lin knew her people and the langreve were safe from him, so they could go be a family for a little while. “Where were you at sea this spring?”

  “I was at Breitleit,” she said slowly, “and if I tell you I need to talk to Rien first, can you wait for why?”

  I nodded. To be expected when you’re friends with a monarch. I’d find out eventually. “Are Quin and Rien soul-bound?”

  She took a long time answering. “I think so, yes, but I lacked time for a deep inventory of their experiences. They share the common markers I’ve learned to associate with a bond. But we’re the rarities, being separated for a long time. Most people who are bonded just... meet, stay together, live long lives, and die.”

  “They’re in love with each other,” I said. “And Rien’s... she can’t admit it. I know why, Praziae aren’t supposed to fall in love. She was trained like a retriever dog. To refuse what she wants most in the world.”

  “Yes,” she said softly. “They did a lot of damage to her, Cedri. It’s why Cel and Darav and I are so protective. And Avah. Before. Do you know what happened to Avah?”

  I nodded. “Do you?”

  She shook her head. “We only have the building. It burnt. There were two skeletons. One was undoubtedly Avah. Cel knew her bones. The other... I don’t know who. Yet.”

  “There was an assassin,” I said. If I could spare Rien having to tell that story again, I would. When she told us, it almost broke her. “They were working for us and for Lin Silvalt. Others, too. Rien had got a package in the post before the Wet, but she got busy, forgot to open it. That last day was during that big ice storm last fall, so Avah went to the tooth-mender, because nobody in Celestan was busy, except the lawyers. Rien re-found the package. It was her diadem, and her father’s Ascendar sword. Her sash and a note. She thought someone was framing her for something then, now thinks maybe a Prognosticator who got very unlucky or lucky, depending on perspective. Rien doesn’t know. She went out for a walk and a think and food. Whoever the assassin was, he got into their office while they were both gone. Avah came back first. The assassin surprised her and killed her almost before she knew what happened. Rien said Avah couldn’t have struggled more than a little when he cut her throat. He closed their office doors, he raped Avah’s body, then started going through their files and spread fuel oil everywhere. When Rien came back, she went through the back door, realized something was wrong, and used the sword. She disemboweled him, but not before he slashed her face, stabbed her arm, and dislocated her jaw. She spent... a few hours not entirely in her right mind. Then Rien set fire to the building. I think she may have... taken revenge on his corpse.”

  “Oh, Holy Mother,” she breathed, and then we cried, together. It was difficult to grieve for Rien, and for Avah, because it distressed Rien to see us hurting. Rien has always believed she’s respon
sible for us, after all.

  I barely knew Avah, only met her once. I liked her. She was smart and kind, and she was half of Rien’s mind. I saw Avah in everything Rien did as an Advocate, from how she approached a case to notes in her Lex. Rien tried to keep herself entirely in this world, but they were more than just legal partners. Friends, at least as close as Fanik and me. Sisters in everything but blood.

  When we first met, the spring before the assassin came after them, Rien grieved for her father, and she was angry at being deposed, but she was fierce. Determined. When Bran brought her through the ice storm not quite half a year later, Rien was defeated. Dying inside. Five tendays later, she came as close to murder and suicide as someone can get without anyone actually dying. She almost took Quin with her.

  “She’s... fragile,” I said. “Not delicate. She’s... physically better than she was. She can be stubborn. She sometimes gets this look —”

  “Yes, the Royal Prerogative,” Kya said. “I’ve seen it once, and heard about it. Implacable, that.”

  I nodded. “But... she’s fragile. Like an unmortared arch. She’ll stand as long as the pressure’s on her, but... you’re right to be protective, and that’s the worst part. Protecting her makes her worse. Like... she feels like she’s being smothered. All of the anxiety just bubbles up. Complex grief, the Lethians would call it, but more.”

  “I’ve had to protect people who don’t like to be protected,” she said. “Like Laarens. That’s my job. Yours is to be her apprentice until you become her partner.”

  “Oi, no. She’s never letting anyone that close again.”

  “She wouldn’t have apprenticed you if she wasn’t sure,” Kya said. “That’s letting you into her mind, Ced. Almost nobody goes there. Trust Darav on that.”

  We cuddled through dawn and sunrise, a pair of bodies learning contentment. I thought I must be done, but when Kya pulled me on top of her and wrapped her legs around me, all I wanted was to be joined again. For as long as we could manage. As often as we could manage. For the first time, I understand why Bran and Quin spent so much of that summer slipping away. Not just starved for any touching, starved for specific ones. I didn’t know I was hungry until she made me realize I was famished.

  I wanted my spectacles, so I could see all of the expressions on her face, the delicate flushes of her lips and cheeks and throat and nipples. I loved when she grasped my hair, guiding and controlling me, and the gasps and cries we made together. I loved the peak of her shatter, her grip around me, the way she pulled mine from me. Our scents together, mineral and animal, sweet and salt, a multitude of musk. And laying together quietly in the afterwards. The only good part about slipping out of her body was knowing that I’d be allowed back in.

  “We’ve made a mess,” she murmured into my neck. “And I can’t be naked in sunlight much longer. I hate sunburns and I can’t Heal myself.”

  Indeed, the felted wool sleeping pad was damp on the surface. That was the advantage of wool felt, and why we used them. There’s a reason every baby’s cot is wool felt, and the cushions in most public houses, and the beds in most dormitories. People get sick, and people also have a lot of intimacies. The surface would dry in the sun before we needed to brush it off and roll it up for storage, and tight felting meant the interior was not wet.

  Only the reality that Kya would burn, and burn badly, got us into and out of the bathing pool, dressed, and eating. We were both tired, and I was not looking forward to climbing into the treehouse. Nor to figuring out who I could wheedle or bribe into giving up a single room to share a room with Fanik. If I couldn’t manage it this afternoon, well... I’d take her to see Salt Spring overnight. We shouldn’t monopolize Hazel Spring. Others needed the place to get away, too.

  But being dressed and clean didn’t stop us. If I didn’t want her further away than the end of my arm, she touched just as much, and more. While doing my chores, repacking our laundry, and waiting for the sleeping pad to dry in the sun, we got distracted into raw, sloppy kissing and groping. At least half a dozen times. And it was possible to tumble each other standing and almost fully dressed. Eventually, I expected that specific exercise would become more trouble than it was worth, but not then.

  If we continued getting this distracted, all of the discipline I ever learned, or ever re-purposed, and worked so hard to use in the service of right action... well, I didn’t think I’d lose it, but I might not be the person I wanted to be.

  Maybe it was a form of superlative control to willfully deny desire, but it’s absolutely required of working, parenting adults.

  Besides, if we kept that up, we were going to rub raw spots. The rosewater and almond oil were up in the medicaments cabinet in the old treehouse. We desperately needed distraction while we finished cleaning up.

  “I read the word Comitae back in the spring. You said it yesterday. Explain, dove.”

  “What did you see?” she countered.

  “The word in a broadsheet, referred to a group settling at Corlarin. It looks Porsirian, maybe similar in sense to battle company or command, but it’s not. Haven’t seen it since.”

  “They’re refugees. From Spagna,” she said. She sounded a little apprehensive, and also intensely curious, and excited. “And they’re on our side. Laarens recruited them. They’ve got... they make our Ingeniae look practically useless. Of course, they think I’m demonic, but...” She shrugged. “It’s not Porsirian, though there must be a common root language much further back. It’s much closer to the commitment or the committed ones than battalion.”

  “Why do they think you’re demonic?” I asked. “Not that I’ll object if you are, but if we need to take care at moondark, I think you should tell me now.”

  That got a tired laugh from her. The bedding was now indeed dry, and the evidence of enthusiasm could be beaten from the grey-brown upper felt. The rule we’ve worked out over years is to brush off anything on the surface, flip and roll, so the next person gets the relatively cleaner side. I’d make sure we volunteered for the autumnal cleaning out here, when we wash everything that stays out here. We’d do that before Teander’s festival, when it would still be reasonable to sleep on a bed of pasture grass for a couple nights while the bedding dried in the sun.

  “Have you read The Galeniad?” she asked.

  I nodded. It’s only the founding history of the country, the story of how Galene, then the relatively young wife of an elderly lord, came to oppose the Emperor. Of how she considered Imperial edicts the floor of her behavior, and had a duty of care for everyone in her husband’s domain. Of how she was mother then to nine daughters and five sons, born over twenty years, and when her aged husband died, her sons — grown men, with wives and children — sided with her, that she should remain Lady of the Daruvai. And how that battle with the Emperor became a test of wills until Galene was sent into exile. How, when informed of the exile, almost all of the Daruvai began planning their own exile from the Porsirian Empire. Not everyone could leave with Galene in the first expedition, but fourteen hundred people took everything they had and set off for unoccupied land, beyond the reach of the Imperium. They became us.

  “In the early chapters,” she said, “there’s a side story. The Gift of Ten Thousand Slaves?”

  I nodded. “The Lord Jadran held most of the northwestern arc of Imperial territory. He had been a great general in his youth, under the second Imperium. In his old age, he sided with neither the old lords of the second Imperium, nor the new faction that became the third Imperium in the war for the succession. The Emperor of the Third Imperium sent ten thousand slaves captured in battle to Lord Jadran as a bribe. Which didn’t work, since the northwestern territories had no use for slavery.”

  She gave the sleeping pad one more good thwack before flipping it over. I laid the now aired, sun-warmed quilt and blankets over the top, and we rolled it all together. Kya sat on the bundle while I tied it closed, and k
ept talking. “And in the chapter right before, The Flight of the Dissenters?” I nodded. “What isn’t in The Galeniad is how those two stories are intertwined. The Dissenters became my Archilians. The other Archilians in the world think we’re at best heretics and apostates. The Comitae’s ancestors were the ten thousand slaves, and the old Archilians are the ones who incited and made the war against them.”

  “Why?” I asked. “What was that war about?” She climbed off and I carried the bundle back up to the cave. The crock of water was full, the fire pit was cold, the soap was dry and in its place, the pots and dishes we used were clean and put away. I had six bottles of cool water in my pack, Kya also had six, plus all of her clean clothing. We were done here, and everyone else should be well into their daily work, so I could show her everything in the treehouse clearing when we got back. She pinned on her hat, we both put on our dark glass spectacles against the rising glare of the day. I offered my hand, she took it. We set off back to our base.

  “That’s what I don’t entirely know,” she said. “There are words in the old histories that just... don’t translate anymore. It had something to do with an invention or a technology that the old Archilians both wanted and wanted destroyed. Something they didn’t trust at all. Perhaps Ingeniae. The Porsirians of both the Empire and the Republic were deeply suspicious of most Ingeniae. Most of the world still is, to be fair. The old Archilians considered it such a threat that it warranted the destruction of not just Corcula — the desert oasis city of the million Comitae, far from everyone else — but of the people themselves. The ten thousand sent to Lord Jadran were supposed to be separated, not allowed to use their language. The boys were supposed to be gelded, the girls placed in Daruvai households as servants. The old Archilians wanted the Comitae entirely destroyed, Ced. They were willing to kill the Archilian Dissenters, too, if they stood in the way. Even back then, in a world far more violent than ours, Archilians didn’t kill other Archilians. The schism that birthed our Archilians and my order... well, it’s like your scars. Not simply because we disagreed.”