“I wouldn’t—not deliberately, but Mahtra, you can’t call me Father. I’m Pavek, Just-Plain Pavek. Leave it at that.”
She blinked, and pulled her arms tight around her slender torso as if Pavek had struck her, which only made him feel worse. But he couldn’t have her calling him Father; that was a responsibility he couldn’t take.
“Mahtra—”
“I need someone to talk to and I don’t think I should talk to Lord Hamanu. I think he’d listen, but I don’t think I should. I think he’s made, too, or born so long ago he’s forgotten.”
“You can talk to me,” Pavek assured her quickly, determined to put an end to any thought of confiding in the Lion-King. “You can’t call me Father, but you can talk to me about anything.” He felt like a man walking open-eyed off a cliff.
Mahtra came closer. Her bird’s-egg eyes sparkled—actually sparkled—with excitement. “I can protect myself now!”
“Haven’t you always been able to do that?” he asked, hoping for a comprehensible answer. She’d talked about the protection her makers had given her before, but she’d never been able to explain it.
“Before, it just happened. I got stiff and blurry, and it happened. But today, by the water, when I got angry at Ruari, I didn’t want him to stop me, so I made myself afraid that he’d hurt me, and made it happen.”
Pavek recalled the moment easily. “You made it stop, too. Didn’t you?”
“Almost.”
That was not the answer he’d hoped for. “Almost?”
“Angry-afraid makes the protection happen. When Ruari pushed me down, I wasn’t angry-afraid anymore, I was sad-afraid, and sad-afraid makes the protection go away. I’m glad it went away without happening; I didn’t want to hurt Ruari, not truly. But I didn’t make it not-happen.”
Pavek looked up into her strange, trusting eyes. He scratched his itchy scalp, hoping to kindle inspiration and failing in that endeavor, too. “I don’t know, Mahtra, maybe you did learn how to control what your makers gave you: angry-fear makes it start; sad-fear makes it stop. If you could make yourself angry, you can make yourself sad.”
“Is that good—? Making myself feel differently, to control what the makers gave me?”
“It’s better than hurting Ruari—however you would’ve hurt him. It’s better than making a mistake.”
Mistake was an important word to her, and she reacted to it by nodding vigorously.
“If I made a mistake, then I’d be responsible for it, like you? I want to be like you, Pavek. I want to learn from you, even if you’re not Father.”
He turned away, not knowing what to say or do next. It was bad enough when Zvain or Ruari put their trust in him, but there always came a point in those conversations where he could poke them in the ribs and break the somber mood with a little roughhousing. A poke in the ribs wouldn’t be the same with Mahtra. With Mahtra, he could only say:
“Thank you. I’ll try to teach you well.”
And pray desperately for Initri to ring the supper bell.
Ruari came back during supper. Pavek didn’t ask where he’d been, but he had a turquoise and aqua house-lizard the size of his forearm clinging contentedly to his shoulder, its whiplike tail looped around his neck. In itself that was a good sign. The brightly beautiful lizards had innate mind-bending defenses: they could sense a distressed or aggressive mind at a considerable distance and make themselves scarce before trouble arrived. Even Ruari, who turned to animals for solace when he was upset, couldn’t have gotten close to the creature while he was angry.
Ruari unwound the lizard from his neck and offered it to Pavek. “My Moonracer cousins say that in the cities a house where one of these lizards lives is a house where friends can be found.”
Friendship—the greatest gift an elf could give, and a gift Ruari had never gotten from those Moonracer cousins of his. Or offered, and that’s what Ruari was offering. Pavek held out his hands with a heart-felt wish that the damn thing found him acceptable and didn’t take a chunk out of his finger. It probed him with a bright red tongue, then slowly climbed his arm.
“I’ll keep it in the garden,” he said once it had settled on his shoulder.
They ate quietly, quickly, grateful for the food rather than the cooking. The question of baths and laundry came up. House Escrissar had a hypocaust where both clothes and bodies could be soaked clean in hot water, but it required a cadre of slaves to