131 - What is the cursed magic?

When you’re on truth-drug, everything everyone around you says seems bigger than the world, and inside you, touching you to the bones. When Linasika said “Got you!” it felt like a sword-thrust straight to the heart, except it was all through me. I was still feeling it days later; I’d be lying half-awake in the dead of night and with no warning, “Got you!” would lance through me again.

Darosera, bless her, tried to help me in her turn by asking me why I had decided as I had, until it suddenly occurred to her that my words might aid the prosecution, if it got to court. You give very simple answers under truth-drug, so it’s hard to explain thoughts or reasons convincingly. I’d do better in the chair of testimony. Or even in the memoir; the most important of my internal deliberations were recounted there.

The reading I had had Jinai do when I was nineteen was finally going to see the light of day. Who’d have thought that would come out of me hiring a healer to save my life?

Darosera asked me such things as whether I had been wrestled over the question and been troubled in my conscience, which of course I had, and whether I had entirely devoted to the semanakraseyesin, at least while I’d either been holding the office or being trained for it. But then, feeling it best to leave off on that, she went on to other things. Because no one else on the Committee was comfortable doing it, they stopped questioning me while I was still in the truth-state, and Krero rode me up to the Independent to recover.

Linasika wasted no time. I think the spawn-presses were spitting out the story before the drug had entirely worn off. He’d had me say it declaratively, of course, so it could be quoted. “I violated the Statute semanakraseyeni” was across every first page starting the next day.

As soon as I was off the drug enough to be up, I started putting the papers of the memoir together, to lend to the Committee. Two members who clearly neither particularly favoured or disfavoured me—Chanae Salhanil and Miniya Shae-Sima—were given the task of reading it, and over the next few days the three of us and three Assembly scribes undertook the work of transcribing the parts they deemed relevant to their mandate into classic Yeoli script for entering into the record. It was quite a lot.

Surya had meant to speak with Niku and me on matters of our marriage, such as it was, the same day I’d been truth-drugged, but had wisely put it off when I’d come back up to the Independent full of truth-drug and lax as a rag on Krero’s horse. Two days later we went to his healing room; she couldn’t wait longer. For all those several times she’d made it seem she was leaving me, my signature on the certificate was haunting her.

What was haunting me? When I asked myself, it was the words she’d flung at me just before she’d left, and the uncertainty she’d made me live with. Yes, she had reason for fear and anger, while I still upheld the stream-test; but adversity shows what a person is capable of, and we’d be fools to think our life would have no more adversity. As Surya had pointed out, no trouble to bear for another year; too much for another fifty. I did not have an instinctive image of fifty years in the future in my mind as I’d had another ten, say, at the age of twenty, but I could think of it abstractly.

I have no reason for my heart to be in my throat, I thought, as we sat down. She was obviously nervous, too, and Surya was calm as pond-water, as always. Why is it? “Well,” he said, “what exactly do you want?”

We glanced at each other, as if ask, ‘What are you going to say?’ I’ll joke when I have nerves, as often as not. “To be happy every moment of our lives from now on,” I said; at the same time she was saying, “To solve this… I guess we do…?”

Surya didn’t seem to see my irony, but answered as if he thought happiness every moment was possible. “What do each of you see standing in the way of that?”

What a harridan she can be. I kept that behind my teeth, and let her answer first, knowing she would; she is never one to hesitate. “I am afraid all the time, and when I’m afraid, I fight,” she said. I remembered Skorsas saying, “She is always fighting.” Why I ever disagreed with him, I had no idea. Of course Surya asked her, afraid of what, and then tears welled up in her eyes. “That he will not need me any more. That he’ll wake up one morning, look at me and wonder what he’s tied himself to. It’s beginning to happen…” Her eyes fixed on me, full of naked terror. I did not know what to say, or even what look to give back, when there was so much merciless truth in that.

And yet, I worried about the same; just as I had told her, I was not the same person as I had been before, and would change more still. These talks are the place for full honesty, so I said it. “It’s as you said, Niku: I have a Committee.”

“Look, I’m sorry I slashed you with that one,” she said. “I shouldn’t have. It was cruel of me.” If anyone had taught me that it was possible for someone to apologize for something and yet remain capable of it, it was her.

“It was cruel, but there was truth to it... as with all the cruellest things, I guess.” The person who used truth most cruelly, Riji Kli-fas, somehow came to mind. “And when I come out of this, I may turn out to be someone you can’t stand.”

“I don’t think so.”

“How would you know, when I don’t even know?”

Surya neatly brought us back to order, like a Servant of Assembly presiding over a committee. “So both of you worry that you will turn out not to be to the other’s taste.”

“Peas in a pod,” I said.

“I’m not made of chocolate!” Niku said, her eyes still red. “I’m... not as good as I could be...”

“Neither am I,” I answered. “I’m about to get brought up on charges, probably.”

“No,” said Niku. “Even Yeolis wouldn’t be that unjust.”

“What a sorry pair of miserable excuses for human beings,” Surya said, without even the trace of a smile. Of course neither of us could help but burst out laughing.

“But is there no truth in my claim at least?” I said, when I could get my face straight again. “She wants a love who is sane—everyone does—and that’s, you know, up in the air.”

Surya shrugged. “Let’s ask her. Niku, do you want a love who is more sane than—”

“No, I want him!” It was almost her battlefield-voice; she threw her hands over her mouth and said, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be that loud.” Yet it split me in two; part of me couldn’t believe it.

“And for your part, your fear—”

“I want a love who I’m not scared is going to get bored or annoyed with me…”

“Bored?” I felt my brows rise high. “Niku Wahunai, you’ve got to be kidding. You’re the least boring person I know!”

“But harder to deal with than most…”

“So you won’t get bored,” said Surya, “but might you get too annoyed with her?

Enough to leave?”

“I wouldn’t do that based just on annoyance,” I said. “There are better ways of solving it.”

“Each of you have told me,” Surya said. “Now tell each other.”

He’d had us sit facing each other in two of his cushioned chairs. For a moment we stared at each other, at a loss. “What’s keeping you, tell each other! Don’t worry that it might come across as false, because you’ve been commanded; it’s real.”

How can something so simple be so hard? Had we bruised each other so badly? And yet hearing was far harder than telling.

When he ordered her to look at me, and listen to me with her whole being, I told her the truth, that I would never leave her over anything trivial, and that I had only signed consideration because I’d thought she was leaving me, and I didn’t blame her when it was to save the twins. She wept, as did I; but when Surya asked if she believed me, she wrapped her arms around herself as if she were cold, though the room had been warmed well enough, before we’d closed the door, by the stone-stove in the greatroom, and kept asking for water, which he kept pouring for her from a jug on the table-wing of his chair. “Now I’ve renounced it, that should all be solved,” I said.

“The fact that that point of contention is gone will reveal whether there is anything deeper,” he said.

“Oh, joy,” I said. Now I know why my heart was in my throat. “Surya, do you think there is? Or is that just a naive question?”

“Best you see for yourselves.” How many times had he said that to me?

“Of course. And everything’s going as it should.” Niku snorted through her tears.

“So,” he asked her, “do you believe him?”

It was a hard thing to put into words for her. “It’s as if… I... hear him with part of me... and part of me... says ‘Sure. Just wait.’” He asked her how the thoughts usually went, that led to her anger, and she said, “ ‘You don’t want me? I’ll fight you. I’m good enough.’ And I need to move, to go… to make sure I’m not trapped and going to die all alone... I have to go somewhere bigger than an island.”

Where did that come from? By her face, she knew no more than I did. I saw Surya read her aura, and see it clear as day, but of course he did not tell. You have to go somewhere bigger than an island, I thought; is that why you left Niah-lur-ana? “And if Chevenga could put the baby in the steam and watch him die, he could do that to me or anyone—”

I couldn’t help but gasp, “What!?” but Surya cut me off, saying now was not the time for anger, though I’d only thought I was shocked.

“So I knew that if his people truly didn’t want me as his wife he’d comply,” she went on. “So it’s me against Yeola-e in a way.” I fought to make the fast breaths deep and slow. “Sorry, sorry, love, it’s stupid, I know…”

“Don’t reproach yourself,” Surya ordered. “These things are as they are and everything is going as it should. Chevenga, tell me: does what Niku just told you explain some things?” I could barely breathe, let alone speak, for the strength of the yes.

It is always this way with Surya; you think he has taken you to the ultimate, and then he goes further. “Your turn now,” he said, grinning.

Why is it I can’t stand to hear her say she loves me? the sensible part of me thought, as I argued with her, saying she could not know me now, as I turned from the two black-brown spear-heads of her eyes, brimming with love, as I got up and paced, since it was as close as I could get to running out of the room? What is the cursed magic that happens in this room? Surya knew all, of course, gazing at my aura. “I wanted you when you were a ring-fighter, I wanted you when you were on Haiu Menshir, I wanted you when you were in Arko, I wanted you when you weren’t semanakraseye anymore, I want you as you are now,” she said. “I’ll want you tomorrow and for the next hundred years. I won’t cease wanting you for a fahkad thousand years, if I look at my feelings!”

Why was I trembling? Why was I sweating, a stream running down between my shoulder-blades, making my shirt stick? I glanced at Surya, thinking, Now he’s going to ask if I believe her. I had no idea what would come out of my mouth. “What do you think?” she snapped, angry now. “That I’ll just wake up and say, ‘Thank the Gods I only had to put up with him for nine years?’ Ten is too much?’” The room spun end over end; pain stabbed all along the scar through me that Idiesas’ sword had left, searing. She stood panting, fists clenched. “I don’t want you to leave me! I don’t want you to die! I love you!”

A pair of firm hands was on my arm and shoulder, steering me into the chair. “Deep breath,” Surya said. “Make the white line.” When the room had stopped spinning, he said, “What’s in your heart? Tell us.”

I couldn’t get anything out but disjointed words, until I managed something true, “Surya, whatever it is is so unbearable I can’t even put it into words... it’s wrong… somehow…”

“Deep breath, Virani-e. What’s wrong?” He laid his hands on me again, as if I would need holding to the world, and myself. “That you should be loved even if you live long?”

--