“I do not. I tell you your weaknesses.You learn quickly. That leads to rash behavior, and rashness is not of the Lethani. Vashet is not alone in thinking there is something troubling about your spirit.”
Shehyn gave me a long look. For over a minute she stared at me. Then she gave an eloquent shrug and glanced at Vashet, favoring the younger woman with a ghost of a smile. “Still,” Whimsical musing. “if I have ever met someone without a single shadow on their heart, it was surely a child too young for speaking.” She pushed herself out of her chair and brushed off her shirt with both hands. “Come. Let us go and have a name for you.”
Shehyn led the three of us up the side of a steep, rocky hill.
None of us had spoken since we had left the school. I didn’t know what was about to happen, but it didn’t seem proper to ask. It would have seemed irreverent, like a groom blurting out, “What comes next?” halfway through his own wedding.
We came to a grassy ledge with a leaning tree clutching tight to the bare face of a cliff. Beside the tree was a thick wooden door, one of the hidden Adem homes.
Shehyn knocked and opened the door herself. Inside it wasn’t cavelike at all. The stone walls were finished, and the floor was smooth wood. It was much larger than I’d expected, too, with a high ceiling and six doors leading deeper into the stone of the cliff.
A woman sat at a low table, copying something from one book into another. Her hair was white, her face wrinkled as an old apple. It occurred to me then that this was the first person I’d seen reading or writing in all my time in Haert.
The old woman nodded a greeting at Shehyn, then turned to Vashet and her eyes crinkled around the edges. Gladness. “Vashet,” she said. “I did not know you were returned.”
“We are come for a name, Magwyn,” Shehyn said. Polite formal entreaty.
“A name?” Magwyn asked, puzzled. She looked from Shehyn to Vashet, then her eyes moved to where I stood behind them. To my bright red hair and my bandaged hand. “Ah,” she said, growing suddenly somber.
Magwyn closed her books and came to her feet. Her back was bent, and she took small, shuffling steps. She motioned me forward and walked a slow circle around me, looking me carefully up and down. She avoided looking at my face, but took hold of my unbandaged hand, turning it over to look at the palm and the fingertips.
“I would hear you say something,” she said, still looking intently at my hand.
“As you will, honored shaper of names,” I said.
Magwyn looked up at Shehyn. “Does he mock me?”
“I think not.”
Magwyn made another circle of me, running her hands over my shoulders, my arms, the back of my neck. She moved her fingers through my hair, then stopped in front of me and looked me fully in the eye.
Her eyes were like Elodin’s. Not in any of the details. Elodin’s eyes were green, sharp, and mocking. Magwyn’s were the familiar Adem grey, slightly watery and red around the edges. No, the similarity was in how she looked at me. Elodin was the only other person I had met who could look at you like that, as if you were a book he was idly thumbing through.
When Magwyn met my eyes for the first time, I felt like all the air had been sucked out of me. For the barest of moments I thought she might be startled by what she saw, but that was probably just my anxiety. I had come to the edge of disaster too often lately, and despite how well my recent test had gone, part of me was still waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“Maedre,” she said, her eyes still fixed on mine. She looked down and made her way back to her book.
“Maedre?”Vashet said, a hint of dismay in her voice. She might have said more, but Shehyn reached out and cuffed her sharply on the side of the head.
It was exactly the same motion Vashet had used to chastise me a thousand times in the last month. I couldn’t help myself. I laughed.
Vashet and Shehyn glared at me. Actually glared.
Magwyn turned to look at me. She didn’t seem upset. “Do you laugh at the name I have given you?”
“Never, Magwyn,” I said trying my best to gesture respect with my bandaged hand. “Names are important things.”
She continued to eye me. “And what would a barbarian know of names?”
“Some,” I said, fumbling with my bandaged hand again. I couldn’t add fine shades of meaning to my words without it. “Far away, I have made a study of such things. I know more than many, but still only just a little.”
Magwyn looked at me for a long time. “Then you will know you should not speak of your new name to anyone,” she said. “It is a private thing, and dangerous to share.”
I nodded.
Magwyn looked satisfied at this, and settled back onto her chair, opening a book. “Vashet, my little rabbit, you should come and visit me soon.” Gentle chiding fondness.
“I will, grandmother,” Vashet said.
“Thank you, Magwyn,” Shehyn said. Deferential gratitude.
The old woman nodded a distracted dismissal, and Shehyn led us from the cave.
Later that evening, I walked back to Vashet’s house. She was sitting on the bench out front, watching the sky as the sun began to set.
She tapped the bench beside her, and I took a seat. “How does it feel to no longer be a barbarian?” she asked.
“Mostly the same,” I said. “Slightly drunker.”
After dinner Penthe had pulled me away to her house, where there was a party of sorts. Call it a gathering, rather, as there was no music or dancing. Still, I was flattered that Penthe had gone to the effort of finding five other Adem who were willing to celebrate my admittance to the school.
I was pleased to learn the Adem impassivity dissolved quite easily after a few drinks, and we were all grinning like barbarians in no time. It relaxed me, especially as much of my own clumsiness with the language could now be blamed on my bandaged hand.
“Earlier today,” I said carefully, “Shehyn said she knew a story about the Rhinta.”
Vashet turned to look at me, her face expressionless. Hesitant.
“I have searched all over the world for such a thing,” I said.“There are few things I would value more.” Utter sincerity.“And I worry that I did a poor job of letting Shehyn know this.” Questioning. Intense entreaty.
Vashet looked at me for a moment, as if waiting for me to continue. Then she gestured reluctance. “I will mention it to her,” she said. Reassurance. Finished.
I nodded and let the subject drop.
Vashet and I sat for a while in companionable silence as the sun slowly sank into the horizon. She drew a deep breath and sighed expansively. I realized that, with the exception of waiting for me to catch my breath or recover from a fall, we had never done anything like this before. Up until this point, every moment we had spent together had been focused on my training.
“Tonight,” I said at last. “Penthe told me she thought I had a fine anger, and that she’d like to share it with me.”
Vashet chuckled. “That didn’t take very long.” She gave me a knowing look. “What happened?”
I blushed a bit. “Ah. She . . . reminded me the Adem do not consider physical contact particularly intimate.”
Vashet’s smile grew practically lecherous. “Grabbed hold of you, did she?”
“Almost,” I said. “I move more quickly than I did a month ago.”
“I doubt you move quickly enough to keep away from Penthe,” Vashet said. “All she is looking for is sexplay.There is no harm in it.”
“That is why I was asking you,” I said slowly. “To see if there was any harm in it.”
Vashet she raised an eyebrow, at the same time gesturing vague puzzlement.
“Penthe is quite lovely,” I said carefully. “However, you and I have . . .” I looked for an appropriate term. “Been intimate.”
Realization washed over Vashet’s face and she laughed again. “What you mean is that we have been sexual. The intimacy between a teacher and student is greater by far than that.”
>
“Ah,” I said, relaxing.“I’d suspected something of the sort. But it is nice to know for certain.”
Vashet shook her head. “I had forgotten what it is like with you barbarians,” she said, her voice heavy with fond indulgence. “It has been so many years since I had to explain such things to my poet king.”
“So you would not be offended if I were to . . .” I made an inarticulate gesture with my bandaged hand.
“You are young and energetic,” she said. “It is a healthy thing for you to do. Why would I be offended? Do I suddenly own your sex, that I should be worried about you giving it away?”
Vashet stopped as if something had just occurred to her. She turned to look at me. “Are you offended that I have been having sex with others all this while?” She watched my face intently. “I see you are startled by it.”
“I am startled,” I admitted. Then I did a mental inventory and was surprised to discover I wasn’t sure how I felt. “I feel I ought to be offended,” I said at last. “But I don’t think I am.”
Vashet nodded approvingly. “That is a good sign. It shows you are becoming civilized. The other feeling is what you were brought up to think. It is like an old shirt that no longer fits you. And now, when you look at it closely, you can see it was ugly to begin with.”
I hesitated for a moment.“Out of curiosity,” I said, “how many others have you been with since we have been together?”
Vashet seemed surprised by the question. She pursed her mouth and looked up at the sky for a long moment before shrugging. “How many people have I spoken with since then? How many have I sparred with? How many times have I eaten, or practiced my Ketan? Who counts such things?”
“And most Adem think this way?” I asked, glad to finally have the chance to ask these questions. “That sex is not an intimate thing?”
“Of course it is intimate,” Vashet said. “Anything that brings two people close together is intimate. A conversation, a kiss, a whisper. Even fighting is intimate. But we are not strange about our sex. We do not feel shame about it. We do not feel it important to keep someone else’s sex all to ourselves, like a miser hoarding gold.” She shook her head. “More than any other, this strangeness in your thinking sets you barbarians apart.”
“But what of romance then?” I asked, slightly indignant. “What of love?”
Vashet laughed again then, loud and long and vastly amused. Half of Haert must have heard it, and it echoed back to us from the distant hills.
“You barbarians,” she said, wiping moisture from her eyes. “I had forgotten how backward you are. My poet king was the same way. It took him a long, miserable time before he realized the truth of things: There is a great deal of difference between a penis and a heart.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIVE
Caesura
THE NEXT DAY I woke somewhat blearily. I hadn’t drunk that much, but my body was no longer used to such things, and so I felt each drink three times that morning. I straggled to the baths, dunked myself in the hottest pool I could stand, then scrubbed the vaguely gritty feeling away as best I could.
I was heading back to the dining hall when Vashet and Shehyn found me in the hallway.Vashet gestured for me to follow, and I fell in step behind them. I hardly felt up for training or a formal conversation, but refusing didn’t seem like a realistic option.
We wound our way through several hallways, eventually emerging near the center of the school. Passing through a courtyard we approached a small, square building that Shehyn unlocked with a small iron key: the first locked door I had seen in all of Haert.
The three of us moved into a small windowless entryway. Vashet closed the outside door and the room grew black as pitch, cutting off the sound of the persistent wind. Then Shehyn opened the inner door. Warm light from a half-dozen candles greeted us. At first it seemed odd they had been left to burn in an empty room....
Then I saw what hung on the walls. Swords gleamed in the candlelight, dozens of them covering the walls. They were all of them naked, their scabbards hanging underneath them.
There were no ritual trappings of the sort you might find in a Tehlin church. No tapestries or paintings. Just the swords themselves. Still, it was obvious that this was an important place. There was a tension in the air of the sort you might feel in the Archives or an old graveyard.
Shehyn turned to Vashet. “Choose.”
Vashet looked startled by this, almost stricken. She started to make a gesture, but Shehyn held up a hand before she could protest.
“He is your student,” Shehyn said. Refusal.“You have brought him into the school. It is your choice.”
Vashet looked from Shehyn, to me, to the dozens of gleaming swords. They were all slender and deadly, each subtly different from the others. Some were curved, some longer or thicker than others. Some showed signs of much use, while some few resembled Vashet’s, with worn hilts and unmarked blades of grey burnished metal.
Slowly,Vashet moved to the right-hand wall. She picked up a sword, hefted it, and put it back. Then she lifted a different one, gripped it, and held it out to me.
I took hold of it. It was light and thin as a whisper.
“Maiden Combs Her Hair,” Vashet said.
I obeyed, feeling somewhat self-conscious, as Shehyn was watching. But before I made it halfway through the sweeping movement, Vashet was already shaking her head. She took the sword back from me and returned it to the wall.
After another minute she handed me a second sword. It had worn etching running down the blade, like a crawling ivy. At Vashet’s request, I made Heron Falling. I swept high and lunged low, sword flickering. Vashet raised an eyebrow to me, questioning.
I shook my head. “The point is too heavy for me.”
Vashet didn’t seem particularly surprised and returned that sword to the wall as well.
So things continued. Vashet hefted swords and rejected most without a word. She set three more in my hands, asked for various pieces of the Ketan, then returned them to the wall without asking my opinion.
Vashet moved more slowly as she made her way along the second wall. She handed me a sword slightly curved like Penthe’s, and my breath caught when I saw the blade was the same flawless, burnished grey as Vashet’s. I took it carefully, but the grip wasn’t right for my fingers. When I handed it back, I saw relief written plainly on her face.
As she progressed along the wall, occasionally Vashet would steal a glance at Shehyn. At those moments, she looked very little like my confident, swaggering teacher and very much like a young woman desperately hoping for a word of advice. Shehyn remained impassive.
Eventually Vashet came to the third wall, moving slower and slower. She handled almost every sword now, taking a long time before setting them back in their places.
Then, slowly, she laid her hand on another sword with a blade of burnished grey. She lifted it off the wall, gripped it, and seemed to age ten years.
Vashet avoided looking at Shehyn, and handed me the sword. The guard of this one extended out slightly, curving to give a hint of protection to the hand. It was nothing like a full hand guard. Anything that bulky would render half the Ketan useless. But it looked as if it would give my fingers an extra bit of shelter, and that was appealing to me.
The warm grip settled into my palm as smoothly as the neck of my lute.
Before she could ask, I made Maiden Combs Her Hair. It felt like stretching after a long stiff sleep. I eased into Twelve Stones, and for the smallest of moments I felt graceful as Penthe looked when she fought. I made Heron Falling and it was sweet and simple as a kiss.
Vashet held out her hand to take it back from me. I didn’t want to give it up, but I did. I knew this was the worst possible time and place for me to make a scene.
Holding the sword, Vashet turned to Shehyn. “This is the one for him,” she said. And for the first time since I’d known my teacher, it was as if all the laughing had been pressed out of her. Her voice was thin and dry.
/> Shehyn nodded. “I agree.You have done well to find it.”
Vashet’s relief was palpable, though her face still looked somewhat stricken. “It will perhaps offset his name,” she said. She held the sword out to Shehyn.
Shehyn gestured: Refusal. “No. Your student. Your choice. Your responsibility.”
Vashet took the scabbard from the wall and sheathed the sword. Then she turned and held it out to me. “This is named Saicere.”
“Caesura?” I asked, startled by the name. Wasn’t that what Sim had called the break in the line of Eld Vintic verse? Was I being given a poet’s sword?
“Saicere,” she said softly, as if it were the name of God. She stepped back, and I felt the weight of it settle back into my hands.
Sensing something was expected of me, I drew it from its sheath. The faint ring of leather and metal seemed a whisper of its name: Saicere. It felt light in my hand. The blade was flawless. I slid it back into its sheath and the sound was different. It sounded like the breaking of a line. It said: Caesura.
Shehyn opened the inner door, and we left as we came. Silently and with respect.
The rest of the day was quite the opposite of exciting. With a dogged and humorless persistence, Vashet taught me how to care for my sword. How to clean and oil my sword. How to dismantle and reassemble my sword. How to strap the scabbard to my shoulder or hip. How the slightly enlarged guard would alter a few of the grips and motions of the Ketan.
The sword was not mine. The sword belonged to the school. To Ademre. I would return it when I was no longer able to fight.
While I normally have little tolerance for hearing the same thing over and over again, I let Vashet ramble. The least I could do was let her repeat herself a bit when she was plainly anxious and trying to settle her mind.
Around the fifteenth repetition, I asked what I should do if the sword broke. Not the hilt or the guard, but the blade itself. Should I still bring it back?
Vashet gave me a look of dismay so raw it verged on horror. She didn’t answer, and I made a point of not asking any more questions for the rest of the morning.