7 - There is steel in you

“Have you talked to anyone else about it? Family, friends?”

“No one. I couldn’t bring myself.”

“You need others as well as me. Your family, your spouses, your friends, do they know about your foreknowledge?”

“My mother, my wife and one of my lovers do.”

“What would they feel and think, if they knew what you now do, about it?”

Death-obligation. Lay down the sword. I tried to imagine Niku hearing these things, then Kallijas, and I was in a worse maelstrom than before. “Take a deep breath and let me rephrase that,” Surya said. “How would they feel if they knew that there was a way for you to survive?”

“They’d... well, they’d be ecstatic.”

“So tell them. I can see something of them in your aura, they are all very brave and strong people—have to be, to be with you, eh?—and they’d close ranks hard with you if they knew. They are warriors, yes?”

“My mother’s asa kraiya, but she cut her hair and took up the sword again against Arko when she found out what they did to me.”

“Would you trust them with your life, on the field?” I signed chalk. “Then why not with this? The sooner you tell them, the sooner they can start helping you. Eventually they’re going to demand to know what’s going on anyway.” That was true enough. “You’ve relinquished your will to me, and I am going to give you orders today. This is one of them—tell your wife and the one lover who knows. Tonight. And your mother, she’s in Yeola-e?” I signed chalk, noticing I was doing it firmly like a good soldier to his commanding officer. “Write her. Tonight.”

“A-e kras.” Like many a warrior given an assignment, I didn’t know how I would do it.

“So,” he said. “Are you convinced of the truth in what I said last time?”

“I... well, I know I dare not argue with you on it.”

“That’s a start. Are you convinced you must go asa kraiya?”

Asa kraiya: beyond the sword. Lay it down, give up warriorhood. Asakraiyaseyel are fairly secretive about it; my mother had never told me what it was like, and nor had I asked. My letter to her started to write itself.

“Well, if it’s that or die, yes. Yeola-e will lose me as a warrior either way. Given the choice, I imagine they would take the way that left me alive.”

“Of course they would. But this isn’t for them, it is for you. Can you see yourself doing it?”

“No. I can barely believe I’m even saying these words to you.”

“You are very, very tightly tied to the steel in you,” he said. “You think of that idea, the steel in you, as a metaphorical construct. And it is true, there is no material steel inside your body. But there is steel in you, the sword in you—an energy-form, a thing made of the same stuff that makes up your aura—”

“So you can see it?”

“Plain and clear.”

“Really? Where is it in me, exactly?”

“I could make you feel it, except that you’re not ready for that.”

“How do you know I’m not? Why don’t you give it a try?”

He smiled, and just when I thought he might commend me for my courage, said, “You are thinking, ‘How scary could that be?’ It isn’t courage prompting you this time, kraiyaseye—it’s denial. You tell me, how scary can it be to lie on a healer’s table?”

I sipped my tea, and signed chalk without a word.

“Don’t worry, you’ll feel it soon enough. You are very much a person of touch, who perceives reality through his bodily sensations, and I will speak to you that way, all through.”

There, to me, is the mark of a great healer. Alchaen did it all the time too. He will tell you something hugely significant about yourself which you have never thought of, and no one else has ever told you, but which you immediately recognize as such obvious truth you are astonished you did not know it. Of course I am a person of touch, who perceives reality through my bodily sensations; I have been all my life, with everything from the butterfly-kisses of lovers’ eye-lashes on my cheek to steel rammed through my body.

“As I was saying, you are very much tied to the sword in you, much more so than most. So going asa kraiya for you will require a lot of preparation.”

“Not more preparation than I have time for, with however much time you gave me last session, I hope?”

“I gave you nothing; you claimed that time. All I did was show you how. The thing is, you don’t need to actually do it, to perform the asa kraiya ceremony, to save yourself in effect—just to definitely decide, to form the intent solidly enough. Though don’t start thinking that just by deciding here” —he touched his temple— “that it’s done, that you can change it just like that. You have had experiences in the past, perhaps, where you decided something in your mind, but when it came time, things went exactly the opposite?”

I felt a little sick as I signed chalk, thinking of the sack of Arko.

“Don’t flog yourself,” he said, patting my shoulder. “The stroke of the past is in the past, it makes no difference now. However important it is that you do right, don’t hold yourself to too high a standard for a human being to attain.”

I took another deep breath. Alchaen had said that so many times.

“So. We will prepare you for asa kraiya, kraiyaseye.”

“You’ve done it before, for others?”

“No. Not for anyone else. Most people who go asa kraiya don’t need a healer. For one thing, they’re usually not on quite so tight a schedule. They can afford to wait ten years until they’re ready. You’re... unusual.”

No argument there. “Then how...” I wasn’t sure how to ask this, without risking offending him.

“How do I know how to do it? Go ahead, ask me such questions, they are fair. I did it for myself.”

“You are asa kraiya?” That explained his strong hands, his ease in lifting me, his short hair. It was hard to imagine Surya in armour, those magical fingers holding a sword or a spear.

“Yes. ’50 — the second-last battle against Arko, Porfirias.” It was even harder to imagine that he’d fought under my command.

He was being kind to the Arkans, calling it a battle. They’d been twenty thousand to my hundred thousand, put in our way just to slow us down, allowing more time for the final force to be gathered in Finpollendias, the plain just above the City, as its last defense. All twenty thousand must have known they were just the rocks placed in front of the carriage, their lives being thrown away.

“I’ll tell you the story,” said Surya. “Put your feet up, take a break.





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6 - Oh kyash, talk-healing

In the next two days, the bliss faded. Everything Surya had said, my mind recoiled from, in shock, in horror, and in other emotions I could not name. The second night I woke soaked with sweat.

They poked at the edges of my thinking, death-obligation, lay down the sword, I don’t deserve to live, and my mind shrank away from them like a caterpillar from a firebrand. Then when I least expected it, some part of my body would whisper, I want to live. It was the oddest thing, to be completely disoriented in perfectly familiar places, as if I had taken a head-blow without noticing it happening. My thoughts would be going along their everyday course, then everything would suddenly be spinning; else rising out of sleep, I would feel as if I’d been flung sideways, the room going end over end.

I was desperate; it was a problem I had to solve, but could not even begin to make sense of, as if I must win a battle but could not even count my army or see what equipment we had or name any officers, all these things slipping out of my mind even as I thought them, making it impossible to bring everything together, like in a bad dream. It was like the time on Haiu Menshir after Kurkas had tortured me to insanity, when I could not form up my thoughts; but this time it was not some external disturbance making it impossible, like a din forbidding speech, but the nature of the thoughts themselves, each seizing me too violently with shock to allow me to think of all of them at once, so that I could not consolidate them.

I told no one. I couldn’t bear to, didn’t know what to say; my mind shying away from it all would hardly allow my tongue to speak it, and let another hear it. “I can’t talk about it, please stop asking,” I begged Niku and Skorsas and Kallijas, which astonished them, being so unlike me.

I floated through my work, the gilded office, the meetings, the national calculations and considerations all seeming distant and strange. People noticed that I seemed as if I had partaken of the herb-pipe; those who did not fear me mentioned it. I know now they talked about it with each other.

I cancelled on someone, something I never do unless I’m deadly ill, to go to Surya the second time. Of course, according to him, I was.

I turned to walk up his flag-stoned path, and froze in fear. I could not move forward, as if I was standing against a wall.

I have sneaked alone into a war-camp to kill the most well-guarded person there, at the age of fifteen. I led more charges than I’ve kept count of, running or riding straight towards the naked blades of hundreds of enemies all ignoring everyone else to fight-stare me, wanting my blood most. I won fifty duels in the Mezem, and strode without hesitation to where I would duel Riji, and Kallijas Itrean, both at least my equals. My courage is the subject of songs, murals, statues. But now I couldn’t walk up to the door of a healer’s office. I stood like an idiot in an Arkan street, unable to make myself step forward, swearing I’d die before I stepped backward, thinking “I will do this if I have to stand here until the second Fire does come,” the only mercy that I was wearing a hooded cloak so that none of the glancing passersby could know it was me.

Then Surya opened his door, and said “Nye'yingi, come in,” and my body mindlessly obeyed as it would a war-commander.

“Kras’,” I said as I passed him. He smiled, and I braced myself for his order to strip and lie on the table, my mouth gone bone-dry and my legs jelly. Instead he took me into a parlor with two plush chairs, had me sit down and offered me ezethra, of all things, as if I were a visiting friend.

“No touch-healing today,” he said, reading my mind to answer my question. I thought my heart would fall out of my chest, with relief. “Just talk-healing today. Tell me: how do you feel?” Oh kyash, I thought: talk-healing.

“You can’t see it in my aura?” I asked him.

“I can; but I want to know how well you know your own feelings.”

And how honest I’ll be, I thought. “All right. Shocked to my bones. Very relieved not to be on your table. So scared I feel like shitting my kilt right here.”

“And one other.”

“One other?”

“Emotion. You feel another emotion. Tell me, because I need to know, are you hiding it just from me, or yourself as well? Be honest with me, it’s very important: do you know you feel another emotion and just don’t want to tell me, or do you not know you’re feeling it?”

I felt, and followed, the urge to breathe deeply, as I thought about how to answer this. “I must be hiding it from myself,” I said finally, “for I told you all the ones I could think of.”

“All right, good.” He did not say which of the two possibilities carried the better prognosis; I hoped the “good” meant it was the one I was taking. I wondered if he could tell if a person was lying from their aura. I certainly wasn’t going to try. “The other emotion you are feeling is shame, shame for your fear.”

Of course, I thought, smacking myself inwardly, remembering how glad I’d been of the hooded cloak on his walk. “Which you needn’t feel. With what you’re facing, courageous as you are, you’d be inhuman not to be afraid.”

“Ah.” I pursed my lips. “That’s so reassuring.”

He laughed again. It was good to see; he had a warm laugh, and it made him human. Face-to-face, I noticed other things about him I hadn’t before; he had green-grey eyes, his hair was short enough to be counted a warrior-cut, he had a mole over one eyebrow, he wore a plain white linen tunic and nothing on his feet. His hands I was almost afraid to look at, but of course I could not help it while he spoke. Their way of moving was gentle, like their touch, but they were muscular, making me wonder if he did hard massage as well. He was so plain outwardly, for what he carried within him, it was startling; those hands, that had done what they had done to me, looked like anyone’s.

“Well, we’ll return to shame. Have you thought about the last session?”

“As little as I could possibly manage.”

The laugh came with a snort, this time, catching him by surprise. “My clients should always be so truthful. Well... sooner or later you will have to start.”

“Seriously... I did think about it, I tried to, but I could get nowhere. It’s... it’s still entirely overwhelming, Surya.” I suddenly wanted to cleave to him, like a bit of rock in a heaving ocean. In all this, he was the only certainty.





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5 - I can't do that

“What!?” That wrenched me out of the place he had sent me like a splash of cold water. I noticed my hands had suddenly taken a death-grip on the edges of the table. “Lay down the sword? I can’t do that.”

“Oh? You just swore you’d do anything. Second Fire come.”

My thoughts chased themselves in circles. “Lay down the sword. Are you sure I have to? And why?”

“When you first understood what being a warrior meant, did you want to be one?”

I tend to forget intermittently, the memory burned away by the fire of all that has happened since. “No,” I whispered.

“Because of that, bearing it is killing you. It kills everyone, but some faster than others. I am as sure as I can see it in your aura, which is as clear to me as your face, or clearer. Breathe, kraiyaseye. Lay down the sword you never wanted to take up in the first place, or die, those are your choices, it’s simple as that. You think, you were taught, that your own inclination, your choice, was not important, could be overridden without cost. But it can’t; do you think that choice is sacred to all Yeolis except yourself? The cost is your life. How old are you?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“For someone whose death waits at thirty, twenty-eight is old age. There is another part of you that is just plain tired, that just wants to stop, and get away from all this shit, and death is the only honourable way. It’s all right, let the tears come, they are ones you can’t allow anywhere but here. Let them come.”

Though my body stayed lying down, my mind lost it then, and my tongue ran clean away. He did not answer any of what I said, just knelt with his hands lying gently on me while I cried and thrashed and railed at him that he was mad, that I wasn’t afraid of my death, never had been, and wouldn’t try to squirm out of it now like a coward; that it was too late to put down the cursed sword, I was a warrior to my bones whatever I had wanted as a child; that I was going to take all my blades and get out of here before he dragged me into his madness so he’d better stand aside, and so on. He let me go on; I think, on retrospect, he’d expected it. After a while he laid a finger on my lips and said, “Stop,” and I did.

“You say all this,” he said, “but it’s not what you want. Always it’s the mind that’s full of shit… your body and your spirit know the truth. Else you would throw me off, you would go. Instead you’re lying here still. Deny it?” I just let my tears run silent.

“I know,” he said. “It is very, very hard. I wouldn’t go so fast, if there were more time. You can bear it, even though it seems you can’t; you can.” He took hold of my manhood again, and the streak of feeling through me sent me down deeper. “Before you,” he said, “lies the possibility of a journey. If you take it, I will lead you; you will follow, or not, by choice. If you follow all the way, you will live. If you choose to follow, you have to relinquish your will, like a warrior to a commander. Will you do that?”

As I lifted my hand to take my crystal again, to swear the relinquishment, fear filled me; my tears and my sweat seemed to turn from hot to icy cold. I tried to master myself. His hands did not waver. Inside me was a silent shrieking, even as I felt the beginnings of ecstasy. “Feel the life in you,” he said. “More than anything, life wants to continue forever, so we feel it there most keenly, and so I am touching that part. Now follow the life in you, do what it wants.”

It took everything in me, to mouth the words. I relinquish my will to you, Surya Chaelaecha, in matters of my life and death. It felt like leaping off a cliff. Second Fire come if I am forsworn. “Good. It’s all right.” There was a sinking and a release all through me; I felt the table seem to press harder against my back and limbs, and realized my body was relaxing. My mind stilled, like falling into a trance, and from then on his every word or motion or idea seemed as great as the world, and touched me bone-deep, with a kind of joy in sensitivity so keen it was almost pain. I fell deeper, beyond words spoken or unspoken, beyond concepts; there was no reality for me but Surya, his hands, his voice, my own breaths in and out like life and death, dark and light, interchanging while my body danced, climbing, to his hand.

“Tell me,” he said. “What do you want?” I didn’t know. “Speak from everything you feel. What do you want, more than anything?”

“To… to live,” I whispered, though neither the voice nor the words seemed like mine.

“Say it declaratively,” he said. “And out loud. What do you want?”

“I want to live.” It was barely more than a whisper.

“Again,” he said. “Keep saying it. Draw the intent out of the pleasure. Feel the life in you, and express its will.”

“I want to live.” It was a struggle; I felt my eyes clench shut, my cheeks tense like rock. My core was on fire with ecstasy. “I want to live.”

“When you hit the peak,” he whispered, “make your cry those words. Say it with freedom, fly on the wings of it.”

I felt the beginnings of the long joy-scream within, unstoppable with any degree of will. “I... want... to... live. I want to live. I want to live. I want to live. I want to live I want to live I want to live I want to live I want to live I WANT TO LIVE I WANT TO LIVE I WANT TO LIVE I WANT TO LIVE...”

It went on; it would not stop; even when I was long past coming, convulsing, agony and ecstasy wracking me at once, I could not stop. I screamed it over and over like a child having a tantrum except there was as much joy in it as anger; I leapt off the table and was all over the room, dancing the desire and the pain of being denied it for all my life, which he told me I was feeling in full for the first time; there was the freedom, the wings as he had said, and I flew, I flew on it as he had commanded, flew and screamed and wanted and demanded, with tears raining, and his encouragements all the way, the life-wish that I had forbidden myself for twenty-one years, until I was empty of everything but a vast white bliss all through my insides, that I had never felt before.

†

Surya helped me wash and showed me to another room, with a couch. “Sleep,” he said. “No one else is here, you are safe, and I’ll get you back to where you should be when you should be, don’t worry.” I didn’t think I would, but I was gone the moment I closed my eyes.

I slept two beads solid. When I woke, he wouldn’t let me even attempt to walk, but hired a chair to carry me back to the Marble Palace, telling me to come back in two days. The bliss still filled me. I got a notion of swords near; my invisible back-up, seeing me in this state, had quickly decided to make themselves visible. When I got to the Palace, they put me straight into bed. For all I told Kaninjer I had not been drugged, he insisted on checking me from head to foot. I cancelled all my appointments for the evening, fell asleep again, woke just long enough to eat a little and reassure my loves that for all I might be flattened, I felt better than I could describe, then slept solid again, right until dawn.

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4 - Give yourself to life

Somehow, this made me want to breathe deep and hard. “The first thing to do—you are doing it already, good. Breathe. Keep it flowing, like water. When did you last drink?” He went away and came back with a large cup of water and made me drain it dry, though I had not thought I was thirsty. He touched the top of my head and the spot between my legs again. “See that river of light between my fingers. Feel it. As well you must open yourself.”

“More than I already have? You have my great secret, and how long have I been here—half a tenth?”

“It’s all right,” he said again, and with one hand took hold of my penis. It was impersonal—he was a healer—but his touch had power in its tenderness, as if to say to me, ‘I am here, and there is no turning away from that.’ I stared at him for a moment but he was not looking at my eyes, and his expression had not changed. Despite all my fear, my body granted him its trust. I fell into myself, my mind blanking but for the thought of the river of light.

“What I am doing is speaking with your body, because when it comes to life and death, your body is wiser than your mind. How many times have you tried to kill yourself, and your body refused?” He didn’t sound as if he didn’t know that it had been several. “So I am going to make your body tell your mind.”

I swore Second Fire come, I thought. What have I done? But I heard myself say, “I should trust you, you mean, as I’d trust a surgeon.”

“Yes, exactly. That is physically; this is emotionally and spiritually. You must give up your power of choice in matters of your life and death, because such decisions you aren’t competent to make. Your habit of thinking and choosing is going to kill you in two months. If you could change that by yourself, you would have already; you can’t, so you need to give it to someone who is competent, who knows, who understands and who isn’t afraid of you, and I think I am the only one.”

I just lay and breathed, trying to keep the room from spinning with the depth of my breaths; I could do nothing else.

“Keep the path of light strong in your inward eye, and keep breathing, else what I’m going to tell you will knock you unconscious, no joke. Tell the truth: you don’t much believe me, do you, that it is not foreknowledge, but a feeling that you don’t deserve to live?”

“I... well, I’ve thought it was foreknowledge for twenty-one years.”

“Fair enough.” He let go with the one hand to touch two points on my chest with his fingers. I felt another strangeness on top of everything else. “So tell me you do, then. Say, ‘I deserve to live.’”

I opened my mouth, and my tongue locked just as on Haiu Menshir the first time. “I... I...” I struggled for a time, and managed no better than wordless panting. “I... kyash, what’s wrong with me?”

“Breathe. Nothing. But I am touching your aura in such a way that you can say nothing but the truth of your belief. Question: what is the one thing that can counter foreknowledge?”

“Other foreknowledge.”

“Have you ever worked with an augur?”

“Yes... Jinai.”

“Jinai Oru! The greatest augur. You worked with him on decisions you had to make, for others. Have you ever asked him to look for your own death, so you could see how to prevent it?”

Like yesterday, I remembered Jinai saying, when I had asked him whether he ever looked for his own death: “No—I might see it.” I remembered how that had seemed to make us brothers. By not answering Surya, I answered him.

“Why not?”

“I... I always considered it inevitable.”

“Why? As you say, foreknowledge can be countered by foreknowledge, and that is something you know. What stopped you?”

I felt myself fall into myself again, trembling now. I could think of no explanation, except his.

He laid his hand on my brow. “I see... you as a child on the mountain, with... an older man. Shadow-father. I think you have forgotten this, we’ll have to come back to it. It was your duty to be a great warrior, you’d be a traitor if you weren’t, all these things he taught you and so you took the sword deep into yourself. You are such a warrior, and you did not want to be one at all—the core of you still does not. Because you did not want to give out death, you did not want to render other sons fatherless. Your shadow-father told you it was your duty, that you would be a traitor if you quit war-training. So you stayed, and took the sword very deeply into yourself, as you do all your obligations. But there had to be a price to pay. A great price, for something that was so against your conscience, and yet which you do so much and so well. You already had an idea what sort of price. As I said, your family stream-tests. All Yeola-e used to, and all Yeola-e carries the trauma, still, deep in our souls. We may not live if we are not strong... breathe.

“Your shadow-father... a hard relationship, with him. When your father was killed, he leaned more on you than he let you lean on him, though he was the adult and you were the child. And... he let you know you were not to outdo your father. At the same time you were supposed to be the greatest warrior, which was outdoing your father. You had to outdo him and not outdo him, both at once. You found a way, the path unconceived. ‘No one deserved more than he,’ did your shadow-father not say that? That gave you the clue: more life. You could be the greater warrior so long as you didn’t live longer than he. How old was he when he died?”

“Twenty-eight,” I whispered. The world spun end over end; the only steady things were the river of light, and his hands, touching me to depths deeper than I understood. Breathe. Keep the river of light steady.

“Your shadow-father feared you, too. Even when you were a child. Many people fear you still, they fear your capability and your power, regardless of your intent; they see it as inequality and we are a very egalitarian people. None more than you, so you would give your life to assuage their fear. And it is fair exchange, you feel, for what you have been given. The best die young, is that not the saying? Breathe... you see what I mean, you are near to passing out.”

When I could, I said, “I feel like I’m dying.” Each idea he spoke seemed to sink me deeper, as if towards some kind of complete collapse, or defeat, or surrender.

“That’s all right,” Surya said. “It will feel like dying, for all it’s denying death. You’ll get a lot of that, throughout. For you to live, something in you, something substantial, must die, and that death you will feel as the death it is. As I said, it will be difficult; I would not lie to you. There’s no way around it. But you have done very difficult things before, met great challenges, and on the other side lies rebirth. You deserve to live. To get old, to work for another twenty or thirty or forty years, to see your children grow and thrive and marry and have children of their own. You think a thousand things about yourself that are wrong; one of them is that you know how to give yourself to life, and to take it in, when in truth you don’t. I will teach you, I am teaching you.

“You have given yourself to death—give yourself to life. The sword is killing you. That is one thing you will have to do: lay it down, go asa kraiya.”

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3 - The commitment

37 Bright Street is in the middle section of the fessas quarter. I went cloaked and hooded and with invisible back-up, though at the entrance to the street I signed them to let me go on alone. It was a rowhouse with the usual glass windows and front porch, though roofed with cedar shakes new enough to still be brown, instead of the more common tile; rebuilt after the sack, I guessed. Probably he lived upstairs. His sign was as modest as his card, hand-sized and ungilded, giving his name and profession in Arkan, Yeoli and Enchian.

I did not notice the square flagstones of his walk, though I have a vivid memory of them from later; as I followed them I was trying to settle in my mind what exactly I should say. As it was, I didn’t get a chance even to knock; the door was flung open, and a stocky man in his mid-thirties or so, with red-brown hair tight-curling enough that it was a soft cloud around his head, seized my wrist.

“Come in, come in, you are Megidan’s patient, come in right away!” He laid one hand on my chest and one on my back at the same level, firmly as if to stop bleeding from a wound. A shock went through me, painless, indescribable, making me gasp just as I was about to ask him if he was Surya Chaelaecha. It was as if his touch did not stop at my skin, but reached inside me; as if he had gently seized my innards, if that were possible. “Through here. I am Surya Chaelaecha.” Without even letting me hang my weapons by the door, he pulled me into his healing room, which smelled faintly of incense, and had walls and ceiling lined entirely and unevenly, with what I realized were sea-sponges. “Take off everything and lie on the table.”

“What? Just like that? What are you doing?” He seemed not to want to take his hands off me even to let me strip.

“You... you have two months. Two more months with what you’re carrying, and you’ll be dead, unless you stop carrying it. You have no time, hurry, lie down.”

Stunned, I obeyed. At least a Yeoli healer is not troubled if you happen to have a shortsword and two daggers under your cloak in addition to your longsword. I took off my wristlets but not the Imperial Seals, wondering if he’d ask me to, but he didn’t seem to notice them. His table was actually as low to the ground as a bed, lightly cotton-padded and covered with blue and purple pattern-dyed flannel sheets so it felt solid and soft under me at once. Once I was naked and on it he laid his hands on the centre of my body, on my chest and on my abdomen, with that penetrating touch, and I prickled and tingled all over.

“Breathe. Don’t hold it. Deep, long, slow.” No shock or horror at seeing all my scars, like most people; he seemed not to be looking at me at all, but around and into and through me. The ceiling, with which I would become familiar in time, was white-plastered with rosettes in the classic Arkan style; a cotton cloth painted with a many-coloured Brahvniki-style mandala was hung by its four corners beneath the sun-slit that every Arkan house has in its sacred room, softening and warming the brilliant light.

“Shininao,” he said. “Death-spirit. You’ve lived with him all your life, except the first day of it… the sword in you has been growing since… seven. Your father was stabbed to death, one blow, there.” He slid a finger under my back and pressed it into the precise spot, drawing another gasp out of me. “Don’t stop breathing, keep it flowing strong, like in training. What I am going to tell you is going to shock you to the core, so you need your air. You saw yourself the same as him. Same age, the age you are now. The death you’ve always expected and always kept secret, is closing in on you.”

My breath froze in me. “How...”

“Breathe. How do I know this? It is all in your aura, the life-energy, the immaterial bodies that surround and permeate the physical one. I can see it; that’s my gift. Your aura is full of death. Full of life, very strong—but cut through everywhere with death. We must figure out how to give you more time than two moons, that’s the immediate thing. So many fights, so many wounds... you’ve been tortured. No, don’t close your eyes, that puts you in the past, stay here in the present. It’s all right.”

“I...” I clawed for calm. “I can’t hide anything from you, can I?”

“No, but if you need healing, why would you want to? Don’t worry, I swore the same secrecy oath as a Haian, nothing goes beyond these walls. Second Fire come if I am forsworn.” He gently opened my legs, touched the spot between my testicles and my anus, and at the same time touched the very apex of my head. It was as if a line joined his two fingers, running up through the very centre of my body. “Imagine that course made of light. Keep that in your mind, your will. You have a very strong will. The part of it that’s turned against you is set to kill you, and it is so strong it will succeed. That’s why Megidan sent you. Your family stream-tests, harshly, the old-fashioned way. There is the first lesson, in I-don’t-deserve-to-live, I must earn the right.”

“First lesson in what?”

“They laid you in an ice-cold stream as a baby, because if you were not strong enough, you should not live. Here is the thing you have to understand: you think it is plain clairvoyance, this death you go towards, but it’s not. It is obligation. It does not await you; you are drawing it to you, and you have ever since you were a child, because you felt you ought to, because you felt that was right. And within two moons you will succeed, unless you change course.”

I could not speak, my mind stunned to blankness, like the eyes’ blindness after a close lightning-flash.

“Most people with such a thing have just one or two reasons for it; with you there are so many, it is in everything about you. It will be very difficult for you; you’ve thought this way for twenty-some years, most of your growing up, all your adulthood, you’ve worked so hard all that time to accustom yourself to it, you’ve built the nature of your life around it, and that is not easy to change. You’ve got quite the opinion of yourself, as well, you feel you know everything, control everything—I’m not saying it’s not justified—but still, it’s one more obstacle.

“You have so little time... I will have to do some drastic things, and if they are too much for you, or not enough, we will both know we did all we could, and you will return to All-Spirit and another life. You’ve locked yourself so much into this you can’t even imagine living past thirty, your heart doesn’t even ache for it any more. You do want to, don’t you?”

I managed to gasp out, “If it were possible, I’d want to... of course I would. Who wouldn’t?” I had not held the thought in my mind for fifteen years at least. In the back of my head a voice whispered, this is all madness.

“It is possible. Didn’t Megidan say it was to save your life? In the part of your mind you know, you don’t believe me; deeper inside you know I am telling the truth. Tell me, what would you do to live past thirty?”

“If it were possible? I... what would I... mamaiyana, I would do anything.”

“Anything?”

“I… I would not commit a crime.”

“No crime-committing is necessary. Otherwise, anything?”

“Y…yes.”

“Good. Because what you are going to have to do is so hard. It’s going to take everything you’ve got. You’ll have doubts later; I think I should make you swear. Swear you’ll do anything I ask.”

“Anything you ask?”

“Anything I ask would fall within the definition of anything, would it not?”

Why the wariness in me, as if I were worried about being rooked? Would I not do anything? I asked myself, more deeply and seriously, ignoring the voice whispering “madness,” and thought of my grandchildren.

I took my crystal and my father’s wisdom tooth in my sword-hand, laid my shield-hand over the semanakraseyeni signet, and said “To live past thirty I would do anything you ask, Surya Chaelaecha – Second Fire come if I am forsworn.”

“Excellent.” He slapped his hands together, and rubbed them long, as if in relishing preparation.

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