59 - Change unimaginable

Surya had said I must come to him as soon as I could after Sharaina’s trial; if he could have done it yelling across the air between two double-wings, I sensed, he would have. Then after we’d landed, except that the writers and Rafas had accosted me first. I begged off for tiredness. “Tomorrow morning, as soon as you’re awake, then,” he said. “I’m going to assign Skorsas to send for me.”

I woke at cock-light as usual and went to Surya’s healing room. I realized, as I was going, that underneath the layer of black dismay over what Sharaina had done and the worry about what Rafas might unearth, I felt light; when I asked myself what was in it, I was suddenly walking on air. It’s as he said; I saved myself. Utterly unwittingly, when I put off the Kiss of the Lake; with more awareness hearing her name in the dream.

I’ve saved myself.

I wasn’t alone in thinking this, I realized; Niku, Skorsas and Kallijas had said something last night about having to celebrate. My mind was suddenly drawn back to Vae Arahi, also, where people had congratulated me in the street for outrunning Shininao. They didn’t just mean Sharaina’s plan.

“That was the death I should have died… no. I won’t say it that way. Would have died,” I said, when Surya asked me my thoughts. “I’ve dodged it… I must be done, except for the ceremony. Does it take long to set up? All-Spirit, this has not been easy.”

When Surya put his hands on my back and my chest at once, it always felt like they were joined through me, and wrapping around something within. “Say ‘I deserve to live.’”

“I deserve to… I de… kyash.” I’d almost got it out fast enough, before my tongue locked. Almost. “Kyashin kevyalin marugh miniren, I said it in court! Under oath! I argued furiously that I deserve to live—you saw me!”

“It is a death you would have died,” he said. “How is it impossible that there could be others? Think of the battlefield; you have to save yourself more than once. When you walk with ‘I deserve to die’ in your heart of hearts, you find deaths.”

I said nothing, no words being sufficient. I felt sick. How could I not be done, after this? How cursed long would this take? How much more did I have to endure? I buried my face in my crossed arms, and he put his arm across my shoulders. He must see in my aura that I really need sympathy and encouragement, rather than my heart’s merely screaming for it, I thought.

“Strength, Chevenga. I know it’s hard, to not be finished, after this. It was a great step. You’re getting there. Everything’s going as it should. Right now you don’t feel stronger, but you are. In fact… lie on the table, you don’t need to strip. Face down.”

I started with the deep breaths as I did. “Make the white line, too,” he said. “Very strong, very solid; get yourself into a deep calm.” He waited patiently for my fear of what he was going to do to ease.

“Second visit, I spoke of the sword in you,” he said in the quiet voice he used when I was half in trance. “You asked where in you it was, and I said I could make you feel it, but you weren’t yet ready. You are now. All I am going to do is touch it, and only one touch, on the hilt. Don’t close your eyes, stay in the present.”

Now that I knew what to fear, he waited again for it to steady down, one hand lying gently on my head. In true fear, there is infinite comfort in such a hand. I accepted it. He laid three fingers of his other hand delicately on the nape of my neck.

I had come to know, even when I wasn’t looking, when he put himself into a trance, which he could do instantly and without effort. It was as if the very air around us was stilled. Then, I would swear, one of his fingers slid into the nape of my neck, pressing into the vertebra as if it could pass effortlessly through solids.

I’m feeling it aurically somehow— The thought cut off; I could not think, or move, even to breathe. From head to toe I was stone, but silvery; the essence of what was deepest in me, my very core, seemed a soul-deep hard straight line down through me. Then his finger was gone, and I was clenching the table’s corners, gasping for breath, dripping sweat. The room spun end over end. His hand on my shoulder was my only refuge.

“What you need to understand,” he said, “is that the only thing that disorients you is habit that doesn’t want to be changed.” At the same time I tried to make the spinning stop with deep breaths, I tried to grasp this. “I touched it… just for a moment. Remember at the start I said you could not have borne it; was that true?” I let go with one hand to sign chalk; I was absolutely certain, though I wasn’t sure how I knew at all.

He waited for me to calm myself again, with just that one hand on my shoulder. When I was mostly there he said, “What I’ll do is keep doing this, keep making you feel it, and feel more of it, and feel it shift, as you go, as you get closer to letting it go. It’s to prepare. On the day you go asa kraiya, it will be out of you.”

I couldn’t even begin to imagine that; but then, when I thought, much of how my life had gone since I’d started with him, I wouldn’t have imagined beforehand.

Outside, all Arko did what they could not have imagined a few years before: voted.

†

Krero arrived that night, about the same time the voting-houses in the City Itself were closing. (The law is that anyone in line at the time of closing can still vote, since they did arrive on time, so the houses will stay open until then; tonight there were so many people, the poll clerks stretched even that, some not closing until midnight. I can’t say how much joy filled my heart.)

He came to me in my office. Without a word, he handed me what I thought at first was a piece of glass, bloodstained. Then I saw his crystal; the end with the point was broken off. When I looked at him in horror, his eyes filled with tears. “My semanakraseye,” he said. “The bond is broken.”

I thrust it back at him, my own eyes filling. “You committed no crime, Krero; none but Sharaina did!” But he would not take it, saying, “If such a thing has become possible, we are all at fault.”

I couldn’t talk him out of wearing it like that, not even with the blood washed off, everywhere, so everyone saw. When they asked why, he explained. People began coming to me, sometimes silently putting their own broken-off piece into my hand, sometimes embracing me weeping, sometimes saying things.

I began receiving bits of crystal in letters, from all over Yeola-e. I have never counted them, but I know there are thousands. Some are bloodstained, some not. Krero’s became that way by accident, when he cut his finger doing it; others did it on purpose. There was nothing I could do to stop it.

I still keep them all in a large glass jar in a cupboard in the Hearthstone Independent’s sacred room—what else can I do, throw them out? I don’t often look at them, since it invariably brings tears to my eyes. At the time there was more shame; it seemed too terrible a thing, just for my sake, even though I knew it was as much if not more for the greater principle. As well, I felt in some way I had caused it.

Linasika and all others Sharaina quoted who were still alive were chased down unmercifully by writers. They all had to say emphatically they’d never meant their words to be taken in such a way, and condemn her thoroughly, and all got spat on a fair amount anyway. While few of them have much of my sympathy, this was unjust, and I went out of my way to say so more than once. That did little to abate it.

This was all the terrible national paroxysm that I had hoped could be averted by Sharaina not having spoken to anyone yet. You asked about my changing Yeola-e, I thought. Now I am praying that you have not changed it more than I.




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