by Yoon Ha Lee
Kaela started over, and her roomsister moved in perfect accompaniment. At the point where she had stopped earlier, exhilaration overtook her. The blades were in her hands, and Teris did not even have practice sticks. She did not have to worry about miscalculating and getting cut by a lunge, although Teris’s reflexes were good enough to prevent such an occurrence. Through the weight of metal, the momentum of their turns as their shadows performed a projection of their dance across the floor and upon the wall, Kaela imagined that she tasted migration toward a season of beauty and poise.
The pattern ended. Kaela returned to the room, to the blades, to Teris’s delighted smile.
“That was splendid,” said Teris. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier.”
“Think of what?”
Teris gestured toward the blades, although she seemed in no hurry to retrieve them. “Letting you wield them for the sword-dance. It’s different, you see, even if you use the heavy wooden knife-sticks. You know what I mean, now.”
Despite an unexpected reluctance to surrender the blades, Kaela did just that. She did not trust herself with them at the moment; she did not trust her voice or even her hands. She hoped that her eyes conveyed gratitude rather than giddy madness. And her hands no longer trembled. They must have stopped during the pattern, without her awareness.
Unfazed by Kaela’s momentary muteness, Teris resheathed the blades with an admirable nonchalance, and smiled again. Neither of them glanced toward the scroll with its absent manual.
After that, Kaela returned to studying for the week’s exam in judicial theory. She had neglected to do so earlier because she was puzzling over the problem of the shadow postulates, which she had brashly submitted as her research topic, and later because she had decided that, after months of dead-end possibilities, she would rather learn sword-dancing. She was paying for it now.
Tonight, she would rather have hidden in her room and studied. The Black College was hosting a trio of visiting scholars, however, and since the dinner talk was on mathematics, her specialty, she could not absent herself. Teris had disappeared after their practice session, heading for a festhall sword-dance with her lover, a college technician who shared her enthusiasm for the physical disciplines. Kaela envied them their revelry, even though she shied away from that bright, barbaric atmosphere.
Trapped at dinner, Kaela toyed with her chopsticks and reviewed canonical decisions while a senior magistrate introduced the scholars. When her seatmates started giving her irritated looks, she switched to teasing apart a tassel on her floor-cushion to keep herself awake.
Three scholars, the ever-present convention of rhetorical balance, in contrast to the undiluted pairing of the sword-dance, relic of earlier, more warlike traditions. The second scholar, at least, had an animated face and voice in contrast to the pedantry of the first. Even so, she felt her attention drifting. Maybe she should buy a new floor-cushion for her room, one with many silk tassels for the unraveling. On second thought, maybe not. Teris was sensitive to small nervous motions, but was too polite to protest. Kaela tried to return the courtesy by stilling herself. The sword-dancing did help reduce her jitteriness.
When the scholar went into a digression on mirror dynamics, Kaela sat straighter, the tassel forgotten. This intersected her research topic, after all.
“—what the mirror-war revealed,” said the scholar by way of conclusion, “is that the relationship between source and image is mediated by these dynamics. An invisible third presence, if you like, satisfying the rule of three for Vorief’s framework.”
Kaela shivered at the name. Anje Vorief’s studies in entelechy had resulted in near-instant communications and the ready production of silhouettes, which displaced scribes and the necessity of large-scale printing. They had also led to the continent’s only mirror-war, which started with the assassination of several public figures by paring away their reflections hour by hour until they wandered lost in iterations of shattered identity and died.
Nevertheless, now that safeguards existed against those abuses, Vorief’s treatise, When Shadows Walk into the World, was required reading at the Black College. Magistrates had a long history of primitive applications of entelechy theory, as the college’s procession of shades showed. All magistrate-aspirants were warned that the shades, which belonged to past magistrates, paid them especial scrutiny. The shades’ demands for inhuman honesty had driven careless aspirants into safer academic pursuits.
The third scholar had finished speaking. Kaela’s body begged for sleep. She stayed just long enough to show courtesy to the visitors before fleeing to her empty room. Tassels and their shadows, forming unbreakable knots on the walls, twined in her dreams.
“I’m hungry,” Kaela said after her roomsister prodded her awake.
Teris gave her an exasperated look. “I bet you didn’t remember to eat anything at dinner. I saved you a pastry from breakfast, but your tea’s no longer hot.”
“You’re too splendid for words, Teris.” Kaela didn’t mind lukewarm tea.
Teris sniffed, but the crook of her mouth suggested she was not unflattered. “How was the talk?”
“The parts of it I was awake for? There were some interesting things about how mathematical applications affect the propagation of legal norms, models for ethical calculus, that sort of thing.”
Teris had started stretching, palms to feet, and she straightened herself before saying, “Nothing controversial, then. I wish they would inflict these itinerant scholars on us less often. Let them ponder philosophy and leave applications to us.”
“I’m sure they think their work is important. At least we’re exposed to judicial research from all over the continent. Unless you think we should be sheltered from different paradigms until we have more experience?”
“See what happens when I give you a pastry? It’s restday and here you are starting a policy discussion without a third participant.”
Kaela changed the subject, despite her roomsister’s teasing tone. “How was the festhall?”
“Ever so refreshing after poring over documents.” She resumed her stretches, recounting the pleasure of her lover’s surety of form, the consuming dream of motion they shared.
Soon sorry she had asked, Kaela made noncommittal noises in response. She thought Teris spent too much time trying to impress the technician. Still, she enjoyed watching her roomsister’s lithe motions, although the topic of conversation had stifled her desire to join in the stretches.
Reluctantly, Kaela looked away and reviewed the last two days of notes, even if it was restday. She lost herself in her research problem. The shadow postulates, although they dated from an earlier era, extended the Vorief framework. Like those before her, Kaela suspected that the third of the three postulates, which dealt with incorporeal consequences, could be derived from the rest of the extended framework.
As a magistrate-aspirant, Kaela could have submitted a less abstruse, more practical research topic. The point was to prove herself capable of basic research methods, no more. Many scholars had lost years in the postulates’ intricacies only to peel away into related studies. Kaela was too stubborn to admit that this might happen to her.
Last week, her sponsor, the senior scholar Roz Roven, had reminded her that she needed to submit a draft of her thesis by the end of this term. “I know you’ve sworn yourself to this,” he said, “but you’re running short of time. You may have to settle for a less ambitious problem. You won’t be the first.” The words belied the regret in his gaze, that the student he had taken in on account of her early promise should fall short, as he had decades ago.
Kaela found the prospect of his disappointment unbearable, even if the third shadow postulate was one of the outstanding problems in entelechy theory. Stymied, she wondered what had prompted the magistrate Brien, several hundred years dead, to append the postulates to a mundane schedule roster. Records from that time, according to Teris, spoke of war between nations now united. Of Brien, they said little
concerning mathematics. In his time, he had befriended a traitor and the traitor’s innocent lover, herself a magistrate. Beyond that, Kaela had never been able to follow the intricacies of intrigue.
If more of Brien’s writings had survived, the shadow postulates might not have become such an enduring puzzle. Kaela shook her head. Too bad the magistrates’ shades communicated through cryptic gestures and never in words, or she—and generations of mathematicians before her—would have asked Brien’s faceless shade the everlasting why?
Although Teris invited her to a festhall dance after dinner, Kaela refused. “I might head out before dinner and eat there,” Teris said, disappointed but forgiving, as always. “Don’t worry about me, sister-mine.”
Kaela could no more stop worrying about her roomsister than she could stop fidgeting. Since she delighted in symmetry, she saved tea and riceballs from dinner just in case. They grew cold as she hunched over her notes.
When the equations started to blur, she conceded that this was doing her no good. In a fit of recklessness, she shrugged on a shabby wool coat, located her boots, and ventured out of the room. Shadows clung to her footsteps. She shivered.
Fear of shadows was a common student phobia. During curfew hour, wherever light lived, shades paced along the college’s walls and through its gardens. They were instantiations of past magistrates, a phenomenon from the Black College’s earliest days. New students received the curfew-bell schedule upon arrival so they knew when to be wary. Rumors abounded of students losing parts of their reflections, or speaking in voices of dust and smoke, or getting lost on paths they had walked a hundred times, ending up on rooftops or behind doors that, once exited, were never to be seen again. According to the college, the curfew hours were the outgrowth of a religious practice to honor the shades. Teris had opined, when they first met, that it was really to keep revelers from irritating the shades into starting a second mirror-war.
Kaela, startled out of being intimidated by her new roomsister’s confident bearing, asked, “Wouldn’t it make more sense to have an all-night curfew, then? And aren’t the shades only abroad during those particular hours?”
“Nothing ruins a judgment like the facts,” said Teris, and they both laughed. That was when Kaela decided she might be able to share a room with Teris without stammering every time Teris glanced her way.
In any case, none of the shades troubled Kaela as she threaded her way from campus to city. The quarter that surrounded the Black College had its share of street lights, hazing the stars’ distant shine. Kaela coughed behind her sleeve at the mingling of smoke, perfume, and cheap vintages with bouquets obscured beyond recognition. She skirted puddles and shied from laughing men and women who swept by her with disdainful looks at her clothing. Student, their glances judged her, and poor at that.Both were true enough, and she was not Teris to challenge them in her turn.
As Kaela was about to pass the first festhall, she realized she had forgotten which one Teris had said she would be at, or whether, indeed, she might not drift among several in the course of the night. This only firmed her determination. Kaela sought her roomsister at the more reputable festhalls that mushroomed around the college. Even then, the noise from the doorways appalled her.
She found no sign of Teris’s bright hair amid the crowds. Men propositioned Kaela, or offered dances or drinks, but she refused them with polite phrases, unmoved by smiles or inviting eyes. Her training in sword-dancing helped her elude those who became more insistent before they could grab her arm or swing her close.
After a while, Kaela gave up and retraced her route, unwilling to check rowdier possibilities. She credited Teris with better taste. Obsessive about detail, she checked the festhalls in reverse order as she went. In the Spinning Rose, she found Teris Tascha at last.
The beat of hand-drums warned her of the sword-dance within, and her hands clenched in the folds of her coat. The rhythms, whose syncopation she analyzed instinctively, drew her toward the open entrance, the hushed voices, the lanterns blossoming in bold colors. She did not belong here, despite the invitation, but Teris—Teris was another matter.
Kaela edged into the Spinning Rose, and saw Teris with that bright-spun hair caught up in combs and beaded ribbons, blades gleaming in her hands. Across from Teris was the technician, likewise lithe, his motions timed to hers. Kaela was unable to remember his name, but here names didn’t matter. Teris and her lover did not see the watcher by the doorway, shaking and flushed wordless. Their gazes were locked upon each other, but what they saw, Kaela realized, was not each other, only the dance’s precise symmetries, the parabolic flight of flung blades, the coordination of movement with the drums’ insistent voices.
Enraptured by Teris’s laughing eyes and quickened breath, those choreographed geometries, Kaela almost stepped farther into the festhall, ready to meet the eyes of an unpartnered dancer and offer herself to the dance. The spinning blades, which would once have tightened her throat with dread, now reflected light into patterns that tugged at her hands, her feet, the pulse in her veins.
Then Kaela remembered that she had no blades of her own, because purchasing a brace would have meant committing herself to this bright, barbarous dance. If she walked a little closer and caught Teris’s attention with the plea in her eyes, Teris would smile at the technician and draw away from him to loan Kaela her blades for a dance or two with the unthinking generosity she had always shown. Teris wouldn’t mind; would, in fact, be delighted to see her roomsister join the dance at last. Kaela could not, however, bring herself to interrupt the pair, so splendidly matched, for her own brash pleasure. She left the festhall, and no one marked her departure.
Shaken, Kaela did not think to check the hour before she ventured back on campus. The street lights stretched shadows into spindly mockeries. Although no one shared the path with her, other shadows moved purposefully, undistorted by exigencies of distance and angle. Since she was halfway to her dormitory, she hastened rather than turning back.
Between one step and the next, a magistrate’s shade brushed her shadow. For a terrible, unblinking moment, she understood the principle by which Vorief’s framework could be used to kill from a distance, understood it in a visceral manner that her first-term reading of the treatise had failed to convey. What was a shadow, after all, but a shape in the moving world reduced to a projection of possibilities?
The dead magistrate had made his choices, Kaela was given to understand, and those choices collapsed into the single sharp fact of his death, the face of unflinching truth. What would her shade reveal after her heartbeat stilled?
She saw her life flattened to an ink-blot, her own shadow beginning to peel into shapes she did not want to confront, and fled the rest of the way to her room. Her hands shook as she spread her sleeping mat, and in the darkness, she laced her fingers together to still them. Only shadows, she told herself over and over as she sought sleep. Only shadows.
Kaela did not mention the Spinning Rose to her roomsister that day or the next or the next after that, even during sword-dancing practice. She reread When Shadows Walk into the World. She performed flawlessly on her next exam, which concerned the comparative history of execution and exile, although after she handed it in, she could not recall any of the questions, much less her responses. And, Teris told her one morning, she began talking in her sleep.
“What have I been saying?” Kaela demanded.
“Mathematical things,” Teris said, and recited some of them back to her.
She relaxed, then wondered why she had been tense. “Oh, that. I’ve been trying to reformulate Brien’s notation. I swear there’s something going on with those definitions, if I could just see what he was doing. The entelechy framework didn’t exist while he lived, so that third postulate must have seemed necessary to him. Why is it so hard to figure out how to derive it?” She swallowed. “I haven’t been keeping you up, have I?” Kaela slept deeply, so Teris’s comings and goings rarely woke her, but the reverse was not true.
Kaela averted her gaze from her roomsister’s earnest eyes. “I’m nearing the deadline for that rough draft, and my notes, the structures I see, they don’t quite come together. As if there’s a gap, and I should know the shape of the bridge.”
“Even so.” Teris passed the brush from hand to hand with unthinking precision. “Tomorrow, instead of your paper, promise me you’ll do something that hasn’t the slightest relationship to research. Sit in the library and read torrid love poetry if that’s what it takes. It’ll help. You’ll see.”
“I want to buy my own blades,” Kaela blurted out.
Forever after, Kaela would remember that her roomsister’s expression, rather than being surprised or amused or smug, became thoughtful and not a little pleased. “Tomorrow, hells. We can go shopping after breakfast, if you like. Neither of us has class today until the afternoon, is that right?”
“Yes,” said Kaela, thinking that, with blades of her own, she need no longer fear shadows.
That evening, and the evenings afterward, Kaela and Teris, both wielding steel, practiced true sword-dances. Teris showed her new exercises to ease her out of her self-consciousness. It helped for a while. She would never equal her roomsister’s shining poise, but she approached it in her own slow way. Sometimes, laying alone in the darkness with the blades beneath her pillow, she even forgot her encounter with the magistrate’s shade.
Scant weeks remained before her draft was due. Kaela resumed murmuring in her sleep. Teris continued to invite her to festhall sword-dances, but Kaela’s fear of shadows held her fast. Finally, she retreated to the Black College’s library after dinner to avoid the invitation, telling herself she needed to concentrate. As she slipped between the shelves, she avoided looking at the shreds of her shadow along the interstices of wall and floor. Teris, she was sure, had never struggled with phobia in her life.