Conservation of Shadows - By Yoon Ha Lee Page 0,16
to exchange.
The archivist on duty, bemused by Kaela’s interest, found no contemporary portraits of the three, but located a later woodprint of the execution, called Between Shadows. The first thing Kaela noticed was the utter absence of blades in the picture, although even today, full magistrates carried a ritual sword of office. “Who is who?” Kaela asked, captivated by the stark stiff lines and shadows, the contrasting fluidity of the falling leaves that framed the scene.
“Rahen the Traitor,” said the archivist, pointing to the man who stared defiantly from the center of the picture, hands bound behind him. “Magistrate Kischa.” A woman with a river-fall of dark hair around her averted face, to Rahen’s left. “Magistrate Brien.” A thin man with no expression except in his hands, with his fingers laced together. In those tense hands, Kaela, who had learned to read stances as a sword-dancer, saw a cry too broken for other expression.
And all around them, the falling leaves, each three-lobed. No, shreds of leaves. Even Kaela understood that symbolism, the implication of death and divided lives. She thanked the unknown artist for being straightforward.
The archivist said, “Shall I make you a silhouette of this?”
“Yes,” Kaela said. “Oh, yes.” Brien had a face now. She would settle for that.
She made it back to her room with a half hour to spare before curfew, clutching the woodcut-silhouette all the way. She laid it atop her escritoire and studied it more closely. For all she knew, the artist had invented the faces. But those tense, anguished hands had a truth in them beyond fact or fancy.
Next to the picture, she laid her silhouette of the shadow postulates in their earliest known formulation, although the archaic notation gave her headaches. Three postulates, braided around each other and into the entelechy framework. Three-lobed leaves. Three people, two lovers, one death.
The bell tolled curfew. Kaela was nowhere near ready to sleep. She stretched, then segued into the Wolf Approaches, miming the blade. Her shadow partnered her, a solitary shape against the wall. She stopped. No. Without Teris, it wasn’t the same.
“I am not afraid,” Kaela said to her shadow.
Kaela repeated the stretches to keep her muscles from knotting up. Idly, letting her mind drift free of her body, she negated the third shadow postulate, then followed the strands of logic in search of the inevitable contradiction. She knew the extended framework as intimately as her hands knew the unruly cascades of her hair. With practiced discipline, she began working through the consequences of a system identical save for that one negated postulate.
There was no contradiction.
Kaela sat before the escritoire. She laid her hands on her notes, intending to make sure she was remembering the postulates correctly, then snatched them back before they clenched and crumpled the sum of her work. Her gaze fell again on the woodcut-silhouette with its border of falling leaves.
No. She had not misremembered.
It was as though, having lived all her life in the belief that roomsisters or roombrothers must come in threes, she discovered they could live in pairs, as with herself and Teris, or quartets. The Black College organized itself around a rule of three, but why not a rule of two, or four?
A person cast one and only one shadow under most circumstances, but in the darkness, no shadows lived; in the light of several lanterns, shadows proliferated. Each scenario, for a given set of light sources, was equally valid. And so it was with the third shadow postulate.
Two shadows crossing and uncrossing while she watched, breathless, from the doorway of the Spinning Rose.
“Teris,” Kaela breathed, eyes widening. She was in love with Teris Tascha, despite the sister-taboo.
Falling leaves, three-lobed leaves. Brien must have loved his friend’s lover, the woman with the long, dark hair, although it had gone unwritten and Kaela, in the absence of textual evidence, would never be able to prove it.
Kaela began writing, scarcely conscious of her pen’s outpouring. She knew the shape of the entelechy framework and the alternate structures that would result from the variations on that third, mutable postulate, from its possible negations. She knew, too, that she could not articulate the key insight, the silent cry that Brien had left within the single language abstract enough to trust with his anguish at standing outside his friends’ romance.
Perhaps Brien had executed the traitor, friend and rival both, with a traitorously glad heart himself. Perhaps he had wished to discard himself in the traitor’s place, after seeing what the execution did to