Conservation of Shadows - By Yoon Ha Lee Page 0,15

mat, and in the darkness, she laced her fingers together to still them. Only shadows, she told herself over and over as she sought sleep. Only shadows.

Kaela did not mention the Spinning Rose to her roomsister that day or the next or the next after that, even during sword-dancing practice. She reread When Shadows Walk into the World. She performed flawlessly on her next exam, which concerned the comparative history of execution and exile, although after she handed it in, she could not recall any of the questions, much less her responses. And, Teris told her one morning, she began talking in her sleep.

“What have I been saying?” Kaela demanded.

“Mathematical things,” Teris said, and recited some of them back to her.

She relaxed, then wondered why she had been tense. “Oh, that. I’ve been trying to reformulate Brien’s notation. I swear there’s something going on with those definitions, if I could just see what he was doing. The entelechy framework didn’t exist while he lived, so that third postulate must have seemed necessary to him. Why is it so hard to figure out how to derive it?” She swallowed. “I haven’t been keeping you up, have I?” Kaela slept deeply, so Teris’s comings and goings rarely woke her, but the reverse was not true.

Teris, in the process of unpinning her hair to brush it out before breakfast, paused and shook her head. The tangles were almost copper in the lamplight. “No. I’m just worried about you. I can’t say I understand your research, but you’ve got to ease up on yourself.”

Kaela averted her gaze from her roomsister’s earnest eyes. “I’m nearing the deadline for that rough draft, and my notes, the structures I see, they don’t quite come together. As if there’s a gap, and I should know the shape of the bridge.”

“Even so.” Teris passed the brush from hand to hand with unthinking precision. “Tomorrow, instead of your paper, promise me you’ll do something that hasn’t the slightest relationship to research. Sit in the library and read torrid love poetry if that’s what it takes. It’ll help. You’ll see.”

“I want to buy my own blades,” Kaela blurted out.

Forever after, Kaela would remember that her roomsister’s expression, rather than being surprised or amused or smug, became thoughtful and not a little pleased. “Tomorrow, hells. We can go shopping after breakfast, if you like. Neither of us has class today until the afternoon, is that right?”

“Yes,” said Kaela, thinking that, with blades of her own, she need no longer fear shadows.

That evening, and the evenings afterward, Kaela and Teris, both wielding steel, practiced true sword-dances. Teris showed her new exercises to ease her out of her self-consciousness. It helped for a while. She would never equal her roomsister’s shining poise, but she approached it in her own slow way. Sometimes, laying alone in the darkness with the blades beneath her pillow, she even forgot her encounter with the magistrate’s shade.

Scant weeks remained before her draft was due. Kaela resumed murmuring in her sleep. Teris continued to invite her to festhall sword-dances, but Kaela’s fear of shadows held her fast. Finally, she retreated to the Black College’s library after dinner to avoid the invitation, telling herself she needed to concentrate. As she slipped between the shelves, she avoided looking at the shreds of her shadow along the interstices of wall and floor. Teris, she was sure, had never struggled with phobia in her life.

She stopped by the shelves that housed the Black College’s history and counted backwards by decades until she found the era during which magistrate Brien had held office. So few volumes to encompass the long dance of lives, all reprinted via silhouette. Originals that old were stored elsewhere, and here the usual must of aging paper was replaced by a cleaner smell.

Kaela knew that she would find little on Brien here; she had already looked. Her roomsister, better trained in historical methodology, would have told her if anything useful appeared elsewhere. Who had Brien’s friend the traitor been, and what had he betrayed? She should have paid more attention, even if it seemed like gossip too ancient to have any relevance, especially to mathematics.

“Brien,” she said into the rows of listening books, tasting the name. The ancient gossip had once been anything but ancient or irrelevant; had captured three people, at least, in its knots. She did not know what they had looked like or what their voices sounded like. She did not know the touches they exchanged or failed