Conservation of Shadows - By Yoon Ha Lee Page 0,11
trefoil emblem, and then her face went ashen.
It is not true that the dead cannot be folded. Square becomes kite becomes swan; history becomes rumor becomes song. Even the act of remembrance creases the truth.
But the same can be said of the living.
THE SHADOW POSTULATES
Kaela Navus was reading a beginners’ sword-dancing manual when a hand descended upon her own, blotting out the diagram. She looked up, mouth opening in protest, only to have the scroll plucked from her grip and rolled shut. The black lines faded into ricepaper-white. “Teris!” Kaela said.
Her roomsister, Teris Tascha, set the scroll down on the escritoire out of Kaela’s reach. “You won’t learn the pattern for the Swallow Flies Home from a diagram,” she said. “It has to live in your muscles.”
Kaela felt the heat in her face and averted her gaze, but did not argue the point. Of this year’s magistrate-aspirants at the Black College, she was the least comfortable with the required physical disciplines. She would rather have been working on her thesis if it hadn’t been for the difficulty her research topic was giving her. The college did not specifically ask magistrate-aspirants to learn sword-dancing, but since Teris had agreed to teach her, she had chosen it instead of any number of more staid alternatives, like archery or dance.
“Come on,” said Teris. She nudged Kaela into standing up. Teris was the taller of the two, with great dark eyes and bright hair that she kept pinned up so it wouldn’t get in her way. She was Kaela’s only roomsister, although the Black College preferred to group its magistrate-aspirants in threes. One had dropped out during the first term. Teris compensated for the absence by venturing into the city most evenings, while Kaela was relieved, and spent her free hours in the garden or library.
Teris said, “Let’s go through the Swallow Flies Home—only this time I’ll mime, and you’ll use my blades.” She unsheathed one of the two blades at her hip and held it out. “The balance will be close to your practice-sticks, Kaela. Go ahead.”
Although Teris was right, Kaela flinched from the weight of steel, the shining edge separated from her grip only by the slender, flower-embossed circle of metal. She accepted the second blade with better grace, wondering how she could apologize for her awkwardness.
“Just hold them for a few minutes until you get used to them,” Teris said. And, after the tension in Kaela’s arms and shoulders began to ease, “Ready?”
Kaela felt far from ready. She had put off purchasing her own brace of blades, despite having saved enough to do so, for this very reason. Nevertheless, she could not bring herself to turn away from her roomsister’s encouraging smile. “Ready.”
The first time through, sweating and trembling, she halted in the middle of the gliding steps through which she and her partner would exchange positions. Only the nakedness of her embarrassment kept her from blurting out, “I’m sorry,” or “I can’t,” or some excuse. She had danced this pattern before, not clumsily, but not expertly either. She had done this before. Just not with blades.
Kaela started over, and her roomsister moved in perfect accompaniment. At the point where she had stopped earlier, exhilaration overtook her. The blades were in her hands, and Teris did not even have practice sticks. She did not have to worry about miscalculating and getting cut by a lunge, although Teris’s reflexes were good enough to prevent such an occurrence. Through the weight of metal, the momentum of their turns as their shadows performed a projection of their dance across the floor and upon the wall, Kaela imagined that she tasted migration toward a season of beauty and poise.
The pattern ended. Kaela returned to the room, to the blades, to Teris’s delighted smile.
“That was splendid,” said Teris. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier.”
“Think of what?”
Teris gestured toward the blades, although she seemed in no hurry to retrieve them. “Letting you wield them for the sword-dance. It’s different, you see, even if you use the heavy wooden knife-sticks. You know what I mean, now.”
Despite an unexpected reluctance to surrender the blades, Kaela did just that. She did not trust herself with them at the moment; she did not trust her voice or even her hands. She hoped that her eyes conveyed gratitude rather than giddy madness. And her hands no longer trembled. They must have stopped during the pattern, without her awareness.
Unfazed by Kaela’s momentary muteness, Teris resheathed the blades with an