202 - Go for what you truly want

Dear Chevenga:

I can’t sleep. My mind won’t stop, like a boy’s. No doubt you are snoozing serene and undisturbed in that peaceful no-blades-allowed place. I will write, as I once used to to the person who I thought didn’t exist. You are the one I want to tell this first, but I can’t speak to you, so I will write to get out the words.

It’s about your shadow-mother. Poor lad, the one person who didn’t get to be at the party in his honour. After they shipped you flat on your back down to the ila asa kraiya, we decided you’d prefer we went ahead and partied anyway. Besides, Skorsas would be beyond wounded if we didn’t, after all that preparation. Perish the thought.

Your shadow-mother came up to me. This was in the main hall, all done up with evergreen branches and white ribbons for asa kraiya. And tiny little candles everywhere. It must have taken them beads to light them all… and you never got to see. “Esora-e,” she said, sort of formally, “I just wanted to say, that was a beautiful thing you did.”

Of course like the clumsy fool I am, I stammered out a thank-you and said “Not as beautiful as you… sorry. Sorry, I’m drunk.” In the lamplight she looked younger again, soft-eyed and long-lashed and with that perfect nose.

“I don’t know that he could have done it without you doing that,” she said, civilly ignoring my slip of the tongue. Telling you to let go the sword in you, she meant.

“I believe he would have,” I said. “But if I could make it easier for him.”

“I guess we’ll never know... but it doesn’t matter. You did it, and it very obviously helped.”

“Ha!” I said. “I bet he’ll be an astonishing an asakraiyaseye as he was a warrior!”

Was a warrior. Can you believe, I still can’t believe I’m saying that, sometimes?

“I guess. I know nothing about asa kraiya, but Karani seems to think something like that.”

“She’d know.” In a way, I wanted to be anywhere but here, shadow-son. It was suddenly worse than asking for a first date.

“Anyway... I just wanted to say that,” she said. “You’ve been doing a lot of wonderful things lately.”

“Thank you. I... ummm… ah…” I said in my silver-tongued way.

“I’m glad you’re reconciled with Niku.”

I told her how that all went, as I’ve already written to you, how your wife beat me to apologizing after all, and told me she was worried I still wanted her dead, and I’d set her straight, and so forth. And said the truth, “She didn’t deserve me treating her like that.”

“No, she didn’t,” Denaina said. “Nor did Chevenga.”

“He didn’t. He didn’t deserve any of it.”

“You wanted to hand her a drubbing, didn’t you?”

We’ve never talked about it before, Chevenga. She just walked out without a word, didn’t even sign consideration, as you know, and everything after that was just the formal words. She has never asked before why I did my part of it.

“I did,” I admitted. It was surprisingly easy to tell her.

“To show him she was not so good?”

“I wanted to prove my stupid prejudice,” I said.

“Having no idea she’d given him the thing no one else would. The thing that was everything to him. None of us but Karani had any idea.”

“Talk about trying to move the mountain by spitting on it,” I said. I suddenly felt too sober, but didn’t want to pour myself more in front of her. “And she’s good, in a lot of ways.”

“Better than you thought, eh?”

“Not just with weapons. All-Spirit, I couldn’t credit she was in the Mezem, same as him…”

“I’ve never understood why not,” she said. “He’d hardly make that up.”

“I didn’t want to credit it,” I said. She was saying things she’d never have said to me before, and I was saying things I’d never have said to her. “I was being stubborn and pig-headed as usual.”

“If she hadn’t been in the Mezem we’d never have got the wing,” she said. I signed chalk. “So in the end you opened your arms to each other?”

“She hugs solidly,” I said.

“That doesn’t surprise me. I’ve seen her seize Chevenga.”

“That’s different! He’s her husband!” Now I was laughing. Laughing with your shadow-mother, Chevenga. Can you believe it?

“She’s still trying to persuade me to learn to fly,” I said. “I’m thinking I might take her up on it. My dad’s thinking of it, and I can’t let the old goat put me to shame. You don’t have to hold the bar tight, she and Chevenga both tell me.”

“So they tell me, too. I’ve gone double a few times. It really is amazing… there’s nothing like it.”

“I’ve doubled to Arko,” I said. “When it got bumpy I threw up right from the insides of my toes.”

Now she laughed. It threw me back twenty-five years, just like that, Chevenga. You know how you can get that, very clearly and vividly, with wine? Well… twenty-five years back, you wouldn’t know. She and me and Karani and Tennunga, sitting under the plain trees at Kyara’s in Terera, drinking wine and feeding tidbits to the stray cats. Tennunga is a brand-new semanakraseye. We’ve been married for maybe a year. We all still have two thumbs. Life is perfect, and we can’t imagine how the future can be anything but just as wonderful.

“I might look the idiot but I’m willing to try,” I said. Well, there’s a bit of the future that was more wonderful than we could have imagined. “Everyone would have to get out from under me.” She laughed again. I’d keep making jokes, I decided, just to hear it. “I hear the couriers just piss in the wind... making sure they’re over uninhabited places. Unless there’s a war, and then they piss on the enemy.” We laughed together.

“You are still nicer than me,” I said.

“You’ll have to keep working on it,” she said.

“I will,” I said. “I need to write to ma, soon. Even if she would never show it... she’s lonely. I wish she’d take up Chevenga’s invitation to visit, even if it is hard.”

I certainly have not told Denaina what we learned from my mother that night, nor has my dad. And I’m sure you haven’t. She doesn’t know. If she were still my wife I would have told her in a heartbeat, as we told Karani.

“I hope so, for her sake.”

“Maybe just as well she never spoke to us,” I said, though I’d never said such a thing ever. “She would have been a kyashin horrible mother-in-law.”

“You didn’t move so far away for no reason.” So many times, she’s said that. Probably never within your hearing, lad. “But something somewhere in between would have been nice. Like... answering our letters.”

“At least she never threw any of them out.”

“So that Chevenga now knows all the sordid details of his parents’ courtship and marriage,” she said. “Just watch, they’ll end up in his memoirs.”

“It’s as if I was a big secret in her life,” I spat.

“As if everyone in Chavinel didn’t know she had a son.”

“Or the semanakrasaeye as a shadow-grandson. How could I dream of going back? I’d rather be here.” Beyond the thick of the crowd around the drink-table, lad, two of your whelps were climbing up the wall after a wing-cat, as if to make my point. “With a shadow-son who is alive and happy, and whose children actually like me.”

“Definitely better,” she said.

“Have you tried those little pink sea-curls?” I asked her. “Niku told me about them and Dad likes them, with that golden sauce.”

“Oh yes, they’re delicious,” she said. “Very delicate... not overly salty or sea-weedy like so many other things from the sea.”

I imagined myself feeding her one, slipping it between her glistening lips with gentle fingers. I made myself stop imagining. “I could stuff myself like a pig on those.”

“Anything you stuff yourself like a pig on is something,” she said.

“My stomach is easier now.”

“Yes, I know. And it’s good.”

“Surya and I were talking about my mother, and he said that’s one thing that people who fight dogs do to their fighting-dogs: starve them to make them mean.”

“It seems like everything is good these days,” she said. I can’t blame her for not wanting to talk about fighting-dogs.

“Yes, life is good. And for you too.”

“Yes... good enough.”

“Denaina... if I’m overstepping... smack me, all right?”

She looked surprisingly unwary. “I’ll just put it down to the wine. You are always overstepping anyway.” But she said it smiling.

“Surya once said to me: whatever you want for life to be better than good enough... you can have.”

“You really believe that?” She said it without raising her brows, though. Well, without raising them all that much. “It doesn’t sound like you, I have to admit.”

“I do, because… finally…! I gave up what I was afraid of, and all of a sudden, what I was fighting to get was just given me.” She looked at me, puzzled. “A living Chevenga... a happy family... being at peace with myself... I eat better... I’m a good war teacher... and that’s just the start.”

“Ah,” she said. “I see what you mean.”

“It gets better, in ways I never dreamed... my life isn’t perfect, but it’s improved out of all recognition. Denaina—I’m sorry to overstep to give you unasked-for advice—but whatever it is that makes you say it need only be ‘good enough’ Don’t settle for so little. Go for what you truly want.”

†

It didn’t wake me entirely, and was dream-like in and of itself. They were blades within, not steel, though their bearers had those too: blow-guns like Mahid, garrote-wires, slings with lead bullets. You’ll be able to see the sword in others once yours is gone… Surya hadn’t told me I’d weapon-sense it too; perhaps he hadn’t known. I’d never sensed one before, I guessed, because no one else on the ila asa kraiya had one.

I have been where you are. There is hope, there is freedom; trust me. That auric steel was deep, hard, well-rooted, in all three of them, the one on point the most; even from this distance I could feel that. Still half in the other world, I slipped out of myself easily, though I had not been practicing since I’d got here, flung off the earth enough as it was. I went through the door and to them.

Who were they? It was assassin’s tools they had inside—a thick-bladed stabbing-knife, a pin-dagger, a short dark-bladed sword, wreathed and embedded for years in bones and lungs and hearts, slowly growing. I saw it all when I was close enough, like flames within the lampshades of the brilliant blue of their inner auras. Now and then they whispered faintly to each other in Enchian, using the soft-lipped whisper assassins use so as not to be given away by their sibilants, which can carry so far through still air.

You’ve come to the right place, for what you need. Through our common humanity, we have chiravesa too; I found their feelings, and even some of their thoughts and knowledge, as they crept wordlessly into the corridor with the sleeping-rooms, and the point-man drew out of a pouch a fist-sized kraumak that shone the colour of a dim candle-flame.

Nervousness was overlain by long experience in ignoring it. Just another contract, just another contract, just another contract, the shield-side rear man was telling himself, in Arkan. The point-man was harder, nerves made stony by decades of cold sweats; this is my life was emblazoned on his whole aura. The third man’s killing intent was frosted with hate, red and coruscating, for the intended victim. Their skill and grace in moving silently, they drew on unthinkingly to reassure themselves, as anyone with any skill does; likewise their knowing where they were going, from what seemed like good instructions.

“One of these.” Pausing beside a door, the point-man held his kraumak up to the sign, and I hovered a handspan above his shoulder to read it with him. By the accent in which he spoke Enchian, he was Brahvnikian. “Remember, we’re looking for that fake name he’s taken on, not his real one. Shi… mi… sae… No.” The Arkan, on his left, gave a sudden shudder. “Shen… is this place haunted?” The point-man ignored that entirely and went to the next door. “Ma…ro—No.” He’d learned his classic Yeoli letters, I heard in the echo of memory around his thoughts, just to do this. “Vi… ra… ni-e. Here. Ready tools… take your time.” They unclipped blades, unsheathed blow-guns, reached delicately with their fingers for kill-venom-filled darts.

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