89 - One who joins what is parted

Tyirya pronounced himself too old for a wing, and so I gave the command to exchange moyawal for horses. Legally I couldn’t actually command anything, but it was old habit for me, and for them. Then Krero said to me, “Wait—that’s one of your strictures, no riding. No reins, then; your horse will be tied to mine.”

I stood dumbfounded for a moment, until I could take in a breath. “In front of the shadow-grandfather I just met?”

“Cheng, all Yeola-e knows what a kyash-pile of a mess your head is, now. You think a harbour-town businessman like him doesn’t follow the news? I just don’t want to catch it from your healer if you… try something, and from all Yeola-e if you succeed.”

“You think I’m going to try something in front of him? All-Spirit…” I grabbed my crystal. “Yes, it’s true, I have absolutely no regard for my life, but can’t you imagine how much I am dying to see Tyirya and Esora-e meet? Sorry, bad wording—yearning. Second Fire come if I lie, I will not try anything until they do, and by then I’ll be off the horse and you won’t be responsible.” He stood gnawing his lip and staring fire at me for a while, and I thought, I’ll kiss his boots if I have to, before he finally assented.

Riding gave Tyirya and me time to talk. He had burned a candle for me when that custom had spread to Selina, though he had not broken his crystal after Sharaina’s trial. “I cannot know how it is to be you, Chevenga,” he told me, “so I do not judge you, and didn’t even before I knew we were kin. We all have our curses.”

Mostly we talked about Esora-e. I left out the ways he had hurt me, just talked about his greatness as a warrior, his dedication, his teaching, his steadfastness; and that now, learning my curse, he’d said he’d give even his own life to save me. Tyirya gathered, nonetheless, that Esora-e had his hardnesses; I think it was mostly from Denaina having left him, mid-war. “Krasila drove him like a dog, didn’t she? And that’s why he ran away in the end? She would.” I told him the little I knew. “So he ran far away, as I did. I thought it cowardly of myself. At least he was running to something, not just away.” I told him I didn’t consider him cowardly. By the time we were in Vae Arahi, I felt as if we’d known each other all my life.

We came in late morning. My parents had posted a lookout at the edge of Terera, so that by the time we were riding past the falls, family a good hundred-strong were gathered to greet us at the slope’s crest. I saw one of them lifted onto shoulders: Esora-e. Tyirya gasped, “That’s him, isn’t it?”, and his eyes filled with tears.

I thought there might be doubts and awkwardness, when we dismounted and they stood facing each other. Tyiyra thought so too, he’d confessed to me the night before. Instead, neither of them said anything, just seized each other, and clung a long, long time. They saw each other’s eyes, and some things go deeper than words or doubts. Even that night when we were all drunk, it seemed my shadow-father and his father had to stare at each other for a certain amount of time, as well as talk, to accept the reality of each other. Every now and then they’d stop talking and just gaze, by unspoken agreement.

†

“A healer is one who makes whole,” said Surya, when I went to his room for journey debriefing and auric examination. “Hence holistic, hale, health—they all mean whole—and House of Integrity. One who joins what is parted, who reunites the separated.”

“It was wrong,” I said, “so I wanted to set it right.”

“As is that which keeps us from being whole. You see why you are a healer? You have a natural feel for the rightness and wrongness of these things.”

“Oh come on—who wouldn’t, with something like this?” I couldn’t bring myself to fling a cushion at him, though, not today, with my head and heart so full of the reunion. Blood-father and son had gone out together on the mountain to yell and break rocks, about Krasila. Tonight we would all get happily drunk.

“It was the healing urge in you that sent you to Chavinel,” he said. “Not only for your family’s sake, but your own. The son regaining his father, the father finding the son he didn’t know he had, and the suspicions slain, will not only heal them, but you. Healing works up and down generations, did you know that? The places in your aura that are edged with pain with Esora-e’s, which are edged in pain with his parents’, are less so now.”

I didn’t entirely follow this, but I couldn’t argue with it.

He caught me up on what had happened while I was away. The Committee had had him in again to talk about how I’d been raised; they’d had a session discussing the torture file; then Tamenat had arrived and they’d questioned him on the nature of suicidal inclinations in general, and how what he knew applied to me; then they’d questioned him and Surya together. Tamenat, incidentally, had come to study this subject because his own sister had killed herself in her teens, something extremely rare among Haians, and his anguished desire to know why had become a greater curiosity as to why people do it at all.

Next it would be Tamenat, Surya and I, all three. I couldn’t wait. “That’s scheduled for today, actually, if you were home in time,” he said. “They’ll convene this afternoon, if you aren’t too tired from traveling, so they told me.”

I took a deep breath. “Well, I’ve had a rest from that, I guess. I can do it.” I heartened myself by thinking for a moment of Kuraila’s face with the look of attention full of compassion it usually had, and her voice, speaking some reassurance.

“Oh, em, by the way,” Surya said, “one of the members of the Committee has recused herself from it. Kuraila Shae-Linao… for personal reasons.” His face had an odd look for such news, as if he were hiding something. In fact he’d been different in some way from the start, today; I couldn’t put my finger on it.

“Kuraila’s off the Committee?” So much for that heartening. “Oh, that’s not good; I don’t know how they’ll do without her.” She was the mainstay, the true leader even though she was not presiding, so that other members would often cede their questioning time to her. The degree to which I had come to trust the entire Committee had more to do with her than anyone else; I felt that keenly, now.

I said all this to Surya, and saw the odd look grow with each bit of praise for her I spoke. I finally saw he was stifling a besotted smile. “Yes,” he said. “She’s wonderful.”

I’ve been matchmaker for many people I know, especially after the war and the occupation, when so many were widowed. Since Surya had been, I’d had vague notions of finding someone in Vae Arahi for him, but the fire of the work he did on me had burned any such thoughts out of my mind. Now, it seemed, they were unnecessary. That’s what was different about him: his eyes were brighter, his step was lighter, his smile came more frequently and had that lovestruck look—all unmistakable signs.

“Personal reasons,” I said, “such as falling in love with a key witness?” Kuraila had been war-widowed too, I remembered. He grinned unrestrainedly then, helplessly. It made him look so much like a boy I wanted to burst out laughing.

I felt the usual surge of warmth in the heart that I get when two people I know find each other, but also a spike of jealousy that surprised me. Please don’t see my aura now, I thought; naturally, he did. “Don’t worry, Chevenga,” he said. “You won’t lose me until you want to.”

“Well, you have to tell me all the details,” I said. “I haven’t had a soak yet, come join me. Remember: only truth, clear and complete to the best of your understanding.” Soon we were settled in the hot tub, the water soothing my horse-muscles, which were perpetually out of practice now that I flew everywhere.

“I was struck the moment I first saw her,” he said, “It was that feeling as if you’ve known the person forever, as if you could think her very thoughts with her—”

“Without even looking at her aura?”

“Yes, without even looking at her aura. But it was so much the wrong place… in the Committee chamber as I sat down to testify. And I had no idea whether she was married, and how married, if she was, or whether she would be in the slightest bit interested in me if she wasn’t. It was like being sixteen again. So I clamped down on it.”

“But you had a way to find out in an eye-blink whether she was interested.”

He fixed me with a stern look through the steam. “Fourth Chevenga, there are some times when auric seers do not look.”

“Seems almost a crime not to use what everyone else in the world would give their right arm for, in that situation,” I said. “I know, I know, ethics.”

“I told myself, in three moons, the investigation will be finished, and then, if I haven’t found out she’s thoroughly married, I’ll… run into her somehow. Nothing else would be proper. Then… she was the first to question me. She was so intelligent, so articulate… so beautiful… I just kept getting deeper and deeper, with everything about her I noticed. Meanwhile she was coming to know me very well—they wanted my whole background as a healer on the record—while I was learning not a thing about her.”

“Though you could have learned everything, at a glance… I applaud your self-restraint.”

“Afterwards, I told myself, she’s a Servant of Assembly, a crafter of laws for the nation. They’re all intelligent, they’re all articulate, they all have the charm that comes naturally with those things. I tried not to think about her. You can probably guess how well I succeeded.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, remembering trying not to think about Niku in the Mezem.

“Next time they called me in, you remember, it was together with you, to do your suicide history. And… I’m not even sure I should tell you this”—he flashed an aura-seeing glance—“but it was not how she questioned me that really threw me over the cliff. It was how she questioned you.”

“She did everything imaginable to make it easier,” I said. “That’s all I remember, in the blur.”

“Exactly. When she questioned me it was all professional civility. When she questioned you, I saw her tenderness, her compassion… that’s who she is, one of those people who treats the whole world cherishingly, but one who is in pain most of all. How could I not love her?”

So I had been the matchmaker after all, in a way.

“When it was done, and we were standing up to go… our eyes caught. I didn’t mean it, but I guess I couldn’t help it. We looked at each other, and I felt the cursed heat on my cheeks that mean they were flushing enough for her to see. But then—I saw the same on hers. My heart leapt so much I thought it would burst out the top of my head. We both turned away fast and went our opposite ways out of the room.”

“Two days later, when you’d gone to Chavinel, and they had me in again to talk about how you were raised, she ceded her time to one of the others, when it was usually them ceding theirs to her. Afterwards when I’d come back up here… there was a tap on my door. I thought I’d fall over; it was her.

“ ‘You and I are doing the work of the nation,’ she said. ‘Nothing must obstruct that.’

“I said, ‘I know.’ And that was all we said… we were looking at each other, and we could barely draw breath, let alone speak, and what happened next… well, I’ll just say, no words were needed.”

“I get the idea,” I said, trying my best not to imagine it too vividly in case he glanced again at my aura and saw me doing so.

“Afterwards, she said, ‘I’ll have to recuse myself from the Committee. I have no choice. Maybe I can still help them some other way…’

“We’ve been inseparable ever since, when work allows. She’s been my, and your, guest here most often… she has two teenaged children living with her in Terera. Their father was killed in the war. She was never in more than a two, with him. We are stupid for each other.

“What it will lead to, who knows… I keep hoping she’ll pop the question, but then I think, ‘Surya, you mad fool, it’s only been a half-moon!’ But always there’s that feeling that it’s been forever… as if I knew her a much longer time ago than this life. It’s exactly the same for her—right from the moment she saw me, she had that feeling. And such beautiful madness, such sweet foolishness...” He stared off dreamily into nowhere, so long that I couldn’t resist sending a gentle gout of water into his face.

“So,” he said, a little awkwardly, when he’d shaken it off, “Em… there is a favour I would ask of you, if I could...”

“Yes, she and her kids may move in with you, of course! You think maybe it’s time you got Anchera, Jana and the little ones up here, too?”

“Chevenga… you are generous beyond generous. I thought when I was done with you I’d go back to Tinga-e, but now I don’t know. Kuraila can’t leave Vae Arahi, she’s a Servant of Assembly. All-Spirit… I knew the moment I learned your name that my life would become more political. I had no idea how much.”

I shrugged. “But we politicians are just as good in bed as anyone else… well, I guess I don’t need to tell you that now.” It was my turn to get the face-full of water.

The next day, Kuraila moved in, with her son Marel, who was sixteen, and her daughter Kaila, who was fourteen. Anchera, Janinara-e, their toddler Klo-e and Surya’s son Emaera, who was ten, and daughter Kamina, who was eight, came about two moons later, Surya and Kuraila being betrothed by then; they’d find a place of their own in Terera or Vae Arahi once Surya was finished with me. We had to have a few walls knocked out to make one set of rooms for them all.

I imagine two healers talk about healing a fair amount, as well as what thorns in the codpiece certain of their clients are. I’d often run into them cuddling and giggling in the hot tub or the pool, so much new lovers it was a delight to see. The way they moved with each other truly did look as if they’d known each other a long time.

The only painful point for me was Kuraila telling me, when I asked almost idly where her husband had been killed, Chinisinal. The way the war had gone, when I talk to a bereaved Yeoli, I could almost count on it not having happened under my command. But not always. At Chinisinal we’d fought two battles that added up to victory with major losses, because I’d been dull-minded with overwork. I gave Kuraila my apology, as I would to everyone who lost someone they loved to my errors, if I could meet them all.

Sometime around then, I asked Surya, “Did you fall in love with her… or with her aura?”

He laughed, and I would realize later that it was at the silliness of my question. “And the difference between her and her aura would be?”

“Well… at first you don’t see people’s auras, you say, it’s only when you’re working,” I said. “So, say you’re struck by a woman. She is beautiful, when she speaks you find her mind entrancing too, and you just want to be in her presence as much as you can… and then she lets you see her aura for the first time, and you find something there that is horrifying, or disgusting, and that you want nothing to do with. Hasn’t that ever happened?”

He pursed his lips for a moment, and then said, “For most people, love erases the imperfections of the beloved, so it is a mirage they love, not the true person. Because I see auras, I’ve had to learn to love the true person, imperfections and all, rather than the mirage.”

Everyone in the world should have his gift.

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