She looked stricken. “‘Let’s try again,’ I think? How do you expect me to remember—”
“‘Not again,’” Kip said. “You said, ‘Not again.’ Can you explain that to me?”
She couldn’t cover the guilty look that flitted over her face for the barest fraction of a second. “No,” she said, “I’m sure that wasn’t it, I was frustrated, and I said, ‘Dammit, let’s go again.’”
“Tisis,” Kip said gently.
There was a long silence. Then, not moving her eyes from the floor, she said hollowly, “There was a boy. Almost two years ago now. I wasn’t even that interested in him, but I was furious with Eirene. My sister was sleeping with every willing woman in three satrapies, and she wanted me to be the perfect virgin. She said since she was never going to marry, I had to carry the family honor. It wasn’t a religious thing. Eirene doesn’t believe in anything but honor and money. But I had to act virtuously so I could be sold like a pillow slave to the highest bidder. I love my sister, and she’s apologized to me a few times when she’s been drunk, but the apologies never changed the deal. She insisted I had to do this one thing—like it’s simple for me. She has to do all the hard stuff in every other aspect of her life, she said, so it’s only fair she gets to relax in her private life.
“Anyway, I was with this boy, and we were pushing the boundaries one night, sort of daring each other to go further, but I kept thinking about how furious Eirene would be, and we tried, and… when he couldn’t get in, he didn’t take it as gracefully as you did, Kip. He, he said I wasn’t a real woman. That I was a freak. And I said some pretty terrible things, too. I said if he ever spoke of it that I would tell everyone how he didn’t even last long enough to get inside me. We never spoke again, and every time I would see him, my stomach would knot up all over again. I thought maybe because I was older now, it would just work with you, but I was afraid, too. I expected you to reject me if it happened… and then it did. I sort of still do. Expect your rejection, I mean.”
Kip sighed. He had two thoughts at once, and one was terribly selfish. “Tell me about this ceiling. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“The… ceiling?” She was incredulous.
“Please.”
“What? You need some distance from all this girlish emotion?”
He took a deep breath and blew out the spark of her rudeness before it could reach the tinder pile of his resentment. He was not a good man, but he could pretend for a little while longer. “Please, it’s soothing. I think we could use some of that.”
“Fine,” she said in her not-fine-est tone.
God, what a bitch, a hard, unforgiving part of him said. I am trying to give us a chance—
But another part of him said, God, how she’s hurting. And that voice, slower and softer, utterly silenced the first. Peace, Kip, peace.
The muscles in her cheeks clenched, but she silently surveyed the undulating, burnished wood that formed the ceiling. “I can’t remember the name of the woodwright, but there are treasured examples of his work all over Blood Forest. Few are so large, though. It’s called Túsaíonn Domhan, it means ‘A World Begins.’ It’s supposed to represent a pond where a single rock has been thrown. These are the waves expanding from the center. At different times of the year and different times of day, two people can lie down head to head right below the center and see different colors and even visions, some claim. Apparently, getting all these beams to match in color and curvature is considered impossible now, and it’s endured like this for three hundred years.”
“What about the gold… stars? The knotholes?”
“Oh, that’s an old tradition. In woodworking like this, knots in the lumber are a tremendous challenge. You can’t get beams this size without them, of course. They’re a problem when you’re felling the trees because the saws bind in the knot, and then when the lumber is cut, the knot becomes a weakness in the structure. In every way, the knot is a flaw, an embarrassment that must be worked around, glued or minimized or covered over as well as possible.
“But there was another school of thought. Instead of ignoring the flaw, they highlighted it instead. It’s called golden joinery or golden repair. Look, maybe this is all just artists’ bullshit, right, but they say it’s not a celebration of flaws but an acceptance of them, addressed insofar as the structure needs it. Here, Phaestos—that was the woodwright’s name, just came to me—here in addition to the gold dust that would be mixed with the joinery glue to hold the knots together and make the starburst patterns, he also employed some master drafter-artisans.”
Her face had relaxed as she told Kip of her people, as he had hoped it would. She was intensely proud of them.
“But I’m boring you,” she said.
“Not at all. Why masters? Slap some solid yellow in knotholes. Problem solved, right?”
“Structurally, yes, but these were women who’d been asked to work with Phaestos himself. Well, we don’t know their names. It’s assumed they were women because they were yellow superchromats. They were great artists, too. A true artist is one for whom there is no ‘good enough.’ They drafted perfect solid yellow for the structural integrity, but then they filled channels so small we can’t see them or perhaps natural air pockets in the wood with a yellow luxin ever so slightly off spectrum so that on moonlit nights, some of the yellow would release into visible light. They say it was like seeing the moonlight shimmer on the undulating waves.
“The downside, of course, is that when you have luxin decaying, no matter how slowly that is, it eventually disappears. They say the shimmering luxin lasted more than a hundred years. Some say there is a lesson there about the longevity of what is made by magic and what is made by hand, and what endures—Phaestos’s work remains while theirs is gone. Personally, I think a century is pretty good.”
“No one could fix it?” Kip asked.
“It’s not like sending gleams to refill the lanterns at the Chromeria, Kip. They tried. They failed. There are some things that pass from the earth and are simply lost.”
“Huh.”
They sat together for a time, looking at the salving curves and basking in the soporific natural wood tones.