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.
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:
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:
