213 - It’s very simple, what we want

In the hubbub, I learned later, Kaninjer signaled both the adakri and Darosera from the door, holding up one hand with all fingers extended. Darosera proposed a resolution that they allow me five days before I started again, and it went chalk unanimously. I was not hiding as well as I meant to that I was injured, I suspect.

Most of the rest of that evening I remember as a happy blur. When I requested painkiller, it was poured for me copiously. Linasika congratulated me, a little wanly, though he also leaned in a little close and whispered, “I bet you’re glad now I talked you out of resigning,” making wine burst out of my nose with horror or mirth, I’m not sure which.

I was swept up onto shoulders before I could change into the semanakraseyeni shirt, so I did it aloft. They carried me once around Vae Arahi, but then down to Terera too, and through every street. There wasn’t much Kaninjer could do about it, or I for that matter, but at least my weight was off the leg and my back out of reach of those who’d pound it. I’d wanted to introduce Krasila to every one of her kin, even the cousins twenty times removed, but had to leave that to my parents.

Between Kaninjer holding me to my promise I wouldn’t go too late, and Niku, who was genuinely tired, wanting me with her, they got me back into the sleigh at a decent hour. “Hot-tub, I treat you, then bed,” he ordered crisply. With everyone else having their hands full, I went down to the water-room alone,promising my wife I would not be long.

Everyone had been too busy to light the lights, it seemed, so I took a lamp from a sconce in the corridor. The sky was still clear, and the just-waning moon shone on the snowy slope, suffusing everything with a silvery blueness through the windows; that would probably have been enough to see my way anyway. I stripped and went in silently to savour the quiet, the peaceful trickle of the waterfall the only sound. Then from the hot-tub I heard a soft female sobbing, the voice one I didn’t recognize. I padded closer, dousing the light, and saw the grey-white spear. The sobbing cut off abruptly.

“It’s me, shadow-grandma,” I said. “Let me guess—not sadness, but the emotion that’s hard to name, of the hugeness of everything.”

“I know it’s you, Cheve—Virani-e. Congratulations, semanakraseye. ”

“Or maybe you aren’t even sure what it is. The hot-tub relaxes—nothing like it for old achy wounds—and loosens internal knots… it can catch you off-guard.” I climbed in and sat across from her, leaned my head back and closed my eyes, and felt the heat deliciously erase the pain in my back and calf. I wouldn’t be long for the waking world, I felt right away. It had been a long day.

“I had no idea you liked babies so much,” I said.

“Of course I do,” she said. “They haven’t had time to turn rotten yet.” I let out my breath in a long sigh. I was too tired to come up with a good-enough answer to that.

“When I asked you tonight how you got hurt, shadow-grandson, you said, ‘kriffiyah accident,’ knowing full well that would tell me absolutely nothing,” she said. “Now you’re not coated with drooling drunken adorers, would you care to tell me what exactly a kriffiyah is, and how can you have an accident with one?”

“It’s a device for snatching up a person from the ground onto a double-wing, and you can have an accident with one through inexperience. But it’s not fair, shadow-grandma, that we should talk about what afflicts me and not what afflicts you.”

She pulled herself straight, fast enough that I heard it, and felt the ripples the movement threw off lap on my own skin. “Fourth Chevenga… I’m too old to change as much as you all want.”

“How do you know how much we all want you to change?”

“I’m not a fool, boy. You showed me what you wanted when the lot of you descended on me at my school.”

“Oh did we? And that was? You say you know, so I’m testing you.”

“My son, quite rightly, called me a layer-forged bitch this evening.” I’d seen no sign of a quarrel, so perhaps he’d said it jokingly. I hoped so. “He knows me well. A layer-forged blade cannot be melted and recast. It just breaks.”

Now I straightened, and looked her in the eyes. “Shadow-grandmother, it’s very simple, what we want,” I said. “You.”

She got up, waded to the steps and began climbing out. Unlike the front of her torso and limbs, which were seamed with old white scars, the back of all of her was wrinkled only, as unscarred as a Haian’s, the mark of a warrior who has never fled the field. “Good night, shadow-grandson. I’m tired.”

“For Esora-e and me, as kin. Tyiria, as a friend. That’s all.”

“Congratulations, semanakraseye, and good night.”

“You don’t believe me? Must I swear on my crystal to my own kinswoman?”

She stood for a moment, a towel wrapped around her, her face unreadable in the darkness. Finally she said, very quietly, “I believe you. Virani-e.”

“Thank you. Sleep well, shadow-grandma. I love you.”

“I… too.”

Krasila turned and strode away spear-straight, and I suddenly knew, as if I could see it in her aura though I was not seeing it, why she was fleeing me. It was not what I’d said, or that I had tried to touch her aura, since I had not. It was that my presence alone made the spear in her shift, ever so slightly.

Some day, I thought. In this life, or the next.

The faint whiteness of her body and the towel fading into darkness as she went suddenly blurred in my sight; just as I’d told her, the hot-tub can catch you off-guard. I let my own tears fall freely, full of the emotion that is hard to name, of the hugeness of everything.

vinya (the end)