If Seth noticed that the pots were less than pristine or the knives were becoming somewhat dull, she went looking for Karis, often bearing something from Garland’s oven—something simple, like a small loaf, trailing the toasty, rich scent of fresh-baked bread. She almost always found Karis in her bedroom in a big chair by the window, watching the rain fall, cuddling the always-cheerful Gabian, with the dogs asleep nearby. She might not eat, but she never wanted Seth to leave. So Seth learned that the G’deon of Shaftal was no less haunted than her wife, though by a different set of ghosts.
The Truthken intercepted Seth one day and took her to one of Travesty’s cold little windowless rooms that had no possible use except as places to collect things that any sane person would give away. This particular room was crammed with horrible furniture, and Seth found herself backed up against the snout of an ugly carved pig that poked out of a headboard someone had understandably not wanted to sleep under. Perhaps the Travesty’s crazed builder had taken pleasure in giving his houseguests nightmares.
“That’s supposed to be the Black Pig of the Walkaround,” said Norina. She shut the door and the light was gone, all but a faint, watery crack at the bottom of the door. In darkness, Seth discovered, she felt able to shift forward so the pig’s carved tusk wasn’t jabbing her in the shoulder blade.
“I have this effect on people,” said Norina, just a voice in darkness now. “It seems to help if they can’t see me.”
“Have I done something wrong, Madam Truthken?”
“Not at all, Madam Councilor, though I understand why you might think so. My public acts all involve identifying errors and falsehood, and people assume that’s all I do.”
“You teach young air bloods to do the same.”
“It must be done. But I also make people sane; I protect them from themselves. I even managed to keep Karis alive for fifteen years, with only one near failure, until people finally came who could do a better job of that than I could.”
“The suicide scars on her wrists,” Seth said.
“I was scarcely more than a child myself at the time, and Karis has a will that—well, I wasn’t adequate to the task, and Mabin wouldn’t permit me to seek help. That’s all past now, fortunately.”
“But everyone is worried about her. I am.”
“She has her dark days, but self-loathing is no longer her greatest weakness. Madam Councilor—”
“Call me Seth.”
“No, not yet. Madam Councilor, there are plenty of things you could fix in this house, but you’re the sort of earth blood who would have become a healer if not for the chaos of our time. It’s broken people you are most drawn to. And though you have neither a proper education nor any particular power, you’ve become quite skilled at using the reality under your hands to influence the reality beyond your reach. Another earth blood with your propensities might drive herself to distraction by the enormousness and inconclusiveness of such projects, but you appear to have a strategy for determining and delimiting your commitments. Whatever you’re doing is quite effective. Is it a rubric of some sort?”
“Rubric? That’s red clay, isn’t it?”
“Red ink is made with that red clay, and in the Law of Shaftal the headings and subheadings are printed in red. By scanning these rubrics, the appropriate section can quickly be found. But a rubric might work in the other direction also, to screen the mess of the everyday to determine what is irrelevant and what is significant. An air blood must engage in such sorting all the time.”
“I would call it judgment, or a sense of proportion.”
“Yes, of course you would call it that.”
Seth realized that the Truthken’s neutral tone was even worse than hostility. Its blankness must be one source of her unpleasant effect on people. All people have had their shameful failures, and Norina’s absence of warmth could inspire a bout of self-recrimination in anyone. For a Truthken to distinguish genuine guiltiness in a room full of desperately self-conscious people must require a screen of great sophistication. A rubric.
“I suppose I do have one,” Seth said, “Though I never thought about it. Some things are fixable and some are not; some things are important and some are not. It’s not difficult to sort it out.”
“Don’t examine whatever you’re doing; it works well in its natural form but might stop working if you try to do it deliberately.”
“Why point it out to me, then?”
“You need to be told that your careful friendship with Karis is appreciated.”
“You approve of it, you mean.”
“There is nothing fragile about her. She can only be harmed by certain kinds of people, and she identifies them as well as I do. So you are correct that it is not my business to approve of her friendships.”
There were words beneath words, unspoken meanings that echoed in the meanings that were spoken. Seth knew this, but to converse with a person who could address both levels of meaning at once was unsettling.
Norina spoke again, a voice in darkness, a voice as blank and flat as a whitewashed wall, “It is appreciated. When Zanja died last time, Karis removed herself. This time she remains with us.”
“I lost a wife and two babies all at the same time. I fell out of that family and could never join another one.”
“It is apparent to me that you can learn from pain, so I’m not surprised by this history. Of course, the situation with Karis is different, but not that different. Karis has married herself to a crosser of boundaries, a hinge of history, and from the first moment of that affair I thought it was the worst possible match.
“In all of Shaftal, children are precious, but the children in Lalali are thought of as vermin, and if they survive they grow up to be slaves. There Karis was monstrously betrayed, from her first breath. By the time we found her she was damaged, distorted, stunted, subverted, addicted—and that is what Harald filled with the power of Shaftal. No one thought Karis could ever be worthy of that power. I never thought so—the Fall of the House of Lilterwess ended my training, and I hadn’t yet been taught how to compensate for the great weakness of all air bloods, that we easily become only able to see flaws. But Zanja—she sees possibility, and when it can’t be seen, she feels it, and when she can’t feel it, she can act in blind ignorance, for any movement at all in any direction can become a way to enlightenment for her.”
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me,” Seth said. “And it’s the same problem I’m having everywhere I go and in everything I do. I’d conclude that I’m incapable of being a councilor except that everyone on my committee is as confused and overwhelmed as I am.”
“I’ll say it in one sentence, then: Zanja is Karis’s trailbreaker—and without her, Karis can’t trust the unfolding moments of her extraordinary life—but Zanja cannot be what she is without abandoning Karis, and Karis cannot hold onto her except by letting her go.”
“So what?” said Seth, for she was beginning to feel very crabby. She didn’t like being trapped in this dark clutter of a room, and the Truthken’s arrogance in confining her here and lecturing her like this was more than aggravating. “Karis has an awareness of the world that makes my own seem childish. How could she understand so much, and have so little faith?”
Seth then felt the full power of a Truthken’s silence. That, too, gave an absence of information in which a person’s anxieties might begin running wildly about, squeaking with terror, like mice who suddenly become convinced that a cat is in the room.
“What did you hear,” Seth asked her, “in what I just said?”
“That there is nothing feigned about you.”
“Of course not. I’m as dull and honest as any earth blood.”
“So you don’t realize how much you’re influenced by air. You have an unusual elemental balance, with almost as much air as earth, informed by
fire—that would make you highly adaptable, able to see all sides of things, while the fire saves you from indecisiveness.”
“Air?” said Seth, having hardly even heard the rest of it.
“Yes.”
The silence again, and Seth said, “Well, I guess I’m doomed to learn all kinds of things about myself that I’d rather not know. What else did you hear?”
“In Basdown you have been protected from the worst that people can do to each other. I suppose it’s a result of that unshakeable Basdowner decency. You are aware that you’ve been protected, yet you don’t realize the extent to which it limits you.”
“I had to ask,” Seth muttered. The pig’s snout banged on her back, and she was tempted to give the headboard a good kick.
Silence can work in two ways, she realized after a while. Norina, by holding this conversation in darkness, had deprived herself of information she might have gained by merely watching Seth’s face. So Seth said, “I’m trying to figure out how anyone could come to know what they lack.”
“We stumble across it, of course, and some of us recognize it and some do not. It’s a problem of perception; a problem of how one sees, and how able one is to accurately see what is there.”
“You learned all this about me from—what was it, two sentences?”
“One sentence followed by one question, actually. Yes, Seth, I did. And in our conversation since then I have learned how quickly you change. Observe.”
Norina opened the door. Now Seth could see her again, the scar that slashed across her inexpressive face; the hair that was shorn even closer than Clement’s, so close that her scalp looked very much like the chin of a man who has gone two days without shaving; the eyes, the coldest and sharpest thing about that extraordinarily cold and sharp woman.
A moment passed. Seth realized the pig wasn’t poking her in the back. Norina, able to see her face now, said, “I am not so frightening as you thought.”
She walked away, leaving Seth feeling quite dazed.
Later that same day, Karis clasped Seth’s hand, and it was like being licked by a tongue of lightning. Seth yanked her hand away.
Karis said, “I’m sorry—I wasn’t thinking. I intrude on people in my family all the time without asking permission first.”
“And that’s why they’re all so healthy, I suppose.”
“That’s why Emil grew some new teeth, and Norina got pregnant—just the one time, though.”
They were in the bedroom, and when Karis retreated there she had always lost her sense of humor. Seth laughed, though she was laughing alone. “I’m not offended, Karis—I was just startled. I wouldn’t mind a new tooth or two.”
Seth offered her hand and Karis clasped it again, but it was just a handclasp. Karis said, “I feared there was something wrong with you. But no, you’ve just been talking with Norina.”
Later, Seth peeled turnips with Tam, a member of the Peace Committee who was an apple farmer from the north, near Kisha. At first he had been living with a distant cousin who was a clerk in a business that Tam didn’t understand well enough to describe. But he had moved to Travesty when he realized that the backache that had nagged him for years disappeared entirely when he was in that building. He had moved into one of the chilly rooms in Seth’s wing, which no doubt would be sweltering by summer. He had an easy way about him and was a good neighbor. They frequently wandered into each other’s rooms, asking each other for definitions of words or help with understanding a particularly unreadable sentence.
That morning’s meeting of the Peace Committee had aggravated him as much as it had aggravated her. He said, “Emil writes us those notes, which I’m sure he intends to be helpful, and we try to answer him, but no matter what question he asks we keep saying the same thing: We must change the Sainnites into Shaftali. As if saying it would make it happen somehow.”
“I constantly feel like I don’t know enough,” Seth said.
“But how much more can we possibly know? My eyes hurt from those mountains of books we’re reading. My ears hurt from all that talking people are aiming in our direction. Yet the more I learn, the stupider I feel.”
“It’s odd,” said Seth, “that we have a good four hundred years of knowledge between the ten of us, and yet that doesn’t seem to be enough.”
He glanced sideways at her, and it occurred to her that turnip-peeling might be quite clarifying. Maybe the entire committee should start meeting in the kitchen. “All this knowledge,” Seth said, “maybe it’s just a lot of clutter. When I was learning what to do when a calf is coming out backwards—”
“I’m getting tired of your cow stories.”
Tam could peel a turnip without hardly looking at his hands, and the peel came spiraling off in a uniform piece, which was all the more remarkable considering how difficult turnips were.
“Like peeling a turnip without knowing what a turnip is, without having ever seen one, without having seen anyone else try to peel one. You could tell someone how to do it—you could waste a whole year on it, probably. But that person still wouldn’t be able to peel a turnip.”
Tam said, “It’s closer to five hundred than four hundred years, I should think. You’re a bit younger than most of us.” The peel spiraled away and then he glanced at his hands and said, “If I even think about it, I can’t do it.”
“You’ve peeled a few thousand turnips, I expect.”
“And we’ve seen plenty of Sainnites, all of us have.”
Seth thought for a while about how they all thought they knew what a Sainnite was. Then she considered how all this might be a failure to perceive. She had thought Clement was a farmer in soldier’s clothing; she had been surprised by Damon’s friendliness and good humor; she had been affronted by the blood spilled in the hallway, as though the assassination attempt had been a failure of etiquette. People had seen their families butchered by a friendly and good-humored soldier just like Damon, who was acting on the orders of an intelligent, lonely, contradictory commander just like Clement. That was the sort of thing Seth thought it was important to understand.
“We have to know all sides,” Seth said, “but especially the inside.”
“What?” said Tam, who thanks to Seth appeared to have lost the knack of turnip-peeling.
“We’re trying to put it inside of us, but we need to put ourselves inside of it.”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” Seth said. “I don’t know what I just said. But still, we should consider that we might be doing this thing the wrong way.”
Two days later, she went back to Watfield Garrison. This time she had a letter from Emil, written to Commander Ellid, which Gilly had to translate. Ellid didn’t speak Shaftalese at all.
Seth feared she wouldn’t be able to learn their language, either. But neither would most Shaftali, so that was a problem they needed to find a way around.
Ellid said something in a tone that certainly sounded doubtful, if not disbelieving. She had an extraordinarily neat office, unlike Clement’s. Gilly said, “The commander finds it difficult to understand why you wish to do this.”
“It’s because I don’t know the right things, in the right way. I thought this might help. If it does, all the Peace Committee members might do something like this—in different garrisons, of course.”
Gilly translated, Ellid responded, and Seth could tell that she was even more skeptical now. “There are practical problems,” Gilly said.
“I’m sure there are, but I’m a practical person.”
“But a soldier’s life—!” Gilly paused, as Ellid was speaking again. Before he could translate, though, Seth said, “For just one day and one night, then.”
He seemed surprised. Seth said, “I’ll come back to Commander Ellid, of course, and ask her to allow me another day—I guess you should te
ll her that’s what I intend to do. But after one day, she’ll know I’m not going to die of whatever she thinks I’ll die of, and she’ll let me stay another day. And if I’m still alive then . . .”
Gilly gave her a cool look, and it occurred to her that he might actually be angry with her—angry for Clement’s sake. How long had he worked with Clement, his hand in her glove? How had a Shaftali man become a general’s secretary, and what was it like for him, to be in-between? Was Clement his family, and was he hers?
Seth had a great deal to learn, that was certain. But she could feel herself sorting things out, by that method Norina had urged her not to pay any attention to, because it worked without thinking, like turnip-peeling did. Right now, she thought, I just need to go into a solder’s barracks, and put my satchel onto an empty bed—or whatever they sleep on—and look around to see who’s next to me, and tell her my name. That’s all I need to do.
She ended up in Prista’s company, which of ten possible companies was the best she could have hoped for, though she didn’t even realize it until various soldiers began yelling for Damon. The young, good-natured soldier eventually appeared in the barracks mud room, though he didn’t step into the sleeping part proper, due to some kind of rule, Seth supposed, about men going into the women’s barracks, which she assumed would also apply the other way around.
“Councilor?” he said, clearly astonished to see her there.
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