Serial, Kherishdar's Exception, Episode 11: Not His Daughter

       I looked up at the perfect blue plate of the sky, so far overhead. The spires of Kherishdar’s temple district touched it, gold flashes of fire in the sun. The breeze skirled past, bringing with it the perfume of incense, and it tugged me into motion, down the thoroughfares toward the gate. I had last entered the capital on the back of a beast, nude and leaning against the Calligrapher’s back to stay astride. How different I must look today leaving it, silver robes fanned over the saddle, confidently astride, alone. I looked what I was, the osulkedi Haraa, on Thirukedi’s errand. And… this part felt good. I liked riding. Both Kor and Ajan had said I would, and they were right. Being carried by a beast is unpleasant. Controlling one….
      Farren doesn’t like riding, so he never bothered to tell you our name for the beasts: jev, and if you decline it, it refers to the animal, and if you conjugate it, it refers to the act of traveling by beastback. But the more pertinent word, aunera, is sumil. Freedom.
      It took me half a day to navigate the morning traffic to the external city gate. Since most of the capital’s travelers were pedestrians, there were strict laws governing the speed of beasts and where you could ride. Once I gained the Ashumel, though, the highway leading to the world-gate, I was free to use the courier lane, a separate road parallel to the highway reserved to those traveling at speed.
      I know now that few aunera ride animals save for pleasure, so perhaps you don’t know that riding is physical exertion. For someone of Farren’s sedentary habits, just being in the saddle is enough exercise. But I was fathrikedi, and you have learned that we are trained to an athleticism that would find riding at a sedate walk less than nothing. Riding a racing jevi—that is joy. The burn of muscle tension along the thighs, into the abdomen. The pleasure of holding yourself in perfect balance above the moving neck. There you find that moment of mindlessness where all your powers are engaged, physical and mental. I loved it, and the moment it was safe to do so I jammed my heels into my mount’s sides and we lunged for the horizon. The wind pulling my hair back and beading water from my eyes... yes. This was needful. Even if I could not outrun my racing thoughts. They kept me company, neck and neck with my steed, and one by one they peeled off, were left behind, until only one remained, and that one stayed. Stayed effortlessly. Stayed and left me unable to look away from it.
      Some number of you will have seen it already. That I was in love with Farren. I knew it was ridiculous. For a fathrikedi to love a single person was already in poor taste, and I had tripped headlong into that vulgarity with my former master, the lord of Qenain. To stumble from that gaffe, stunned by my own broken heart, into an entirely new and equally hopeless love with a man who considered me a daughter?
      It was farcical. I would have hated myself for it except that loving him felt good, even when it hurt to know he didn’t reciprocate my passion. And I thought… maybe… if he lived with me long enough to realize I wasn’t his daughter…
      I bared my teeth and urged the jevi on. You say ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder,’ aunera. We say ‘absence draws one’s needs into relief.’ Maybe my being away would make it clear to Farren that he needed to live again, to stop languishing in the arms of his departed wife. Or maybe he would realize how little he missed me.
      He would have loved the way the sunlight seemed poured on the road in bright creamy shafts. He would have told me to pay attention to how the shadows looked like lilac gossamer now, and how as the hours passed they would contract into deep purple pools beneath my beast’s galloping feet. He would have made me notice those things, and I would have found it absurd that beauty could exist outside Ai-Naidari bodies. People are beautiful. It would take an artist to see that the world was too.
      I rode, alternating between a jog and a run, all day. Twice couriers passed me, heading to the capital, the wind of their passing ruffling the strands of hair that had fallen from my chignon. Alongside, the travelers on the Ashumel proper were blurs I was free to ignore. I made far better time than the sorrowful cavalcade had when Farren had led us back home, and that put me, thankfully, at an entirely different inn than the one we’d used on that journey. No memories to trail my body like fog as I passed through the common room; none to fret me when I stretched out on the bed to sleep.
      I looked one more time at Lenore’s letter, not to re-read it, but to study the translation. She’d pulled the Ai-Naidari words apart as we might have to teach the finer points of grammar to children, and labeled those pieces with what I guessed to be aunerai equivalents. I stared at the explosion of the phrase ‘I wish I could be,’ petting the single letter that seemed to mean ‘I’. The elemental loneliness of it struck me as ominous and strange. One letter to isolate every person inside her own head, absent of context. I thought I must be misinterpreting it.
      Little did I know.
      It had been a long day. I slept without dreams.