POV: painter
Summary
Painter — wearing Yumi's body again on her world — steps into the cool spring outside the village they are currently inhabiting, his back turned to her ghost form, hers turned to him. The attendants take his clothing and leave him to soak. They bathe in silence. He is still trying to understand the way she will be confiding and human one moment and impassably formal the next — almost a person, and then the yoki-hijo again, the moment they cross back to her world. He floats on his back and watches the strange blue sky and the plants drifting a hundred feet overhead, as if he has somehow sunk far below the real surface of the world.
Yumi tells him from somewhere nearby that Liyun did not come this morning, which means she is still deciding what to say. They failed utterly yesterday. He asks whether Yumi's worry is for Liyun, not for him; she answers, in her stern register, that the yoki-hijo is nothing. When Liyun arrives — which she will — he is to kneel and bow in ritual apology. Her world, her rules. He grunts and climbs out before the attendants are ready, calling them in. Yumi hurries out half-dressed alongside him, more distracting than he can manage to pretend.
Liyun does walk up the path a short time later. *Bow*, Yumi hisses, and he sinks to his knees with hands on the ground and forehead to his knuckles. To his surprise Liyun kneels and bows in answer, just as ashamed. *What is happening, Honored One?* Yumi feeds him the words: he cannot explain it, it is as if another soul has taken residence in her and stripped her ability to stack; she fears she must take time to relearn what she has lost. Liyun receives it in silence, then rises and says she will go to the leaders of the town and beg the use of their place of ritual for practice. The townspeople, she adds, will be only more shamed by this — they already believe their own unworthiness is the cause. Perhaps the shame will yet move the spirits to forgive. She leaves to prepare the ground. After the attendants finish dressing him, Yumi reprimands Painter for getting out of the bath ahead of them, and forbids him from speaking aloud while they are watching.
The place of ritual turns out to be a fenced-off slab of overheated stone strewn with quarry-leavings, set just outside the cluster of fewer than a hundred homes that make up the town. Liyun has fortunately driven off most gawkers; for an audience Painter has only the attendants and a few of the town's elders, the men in bearded antique fashion but in colours brighter than the black-and- white photographs would have suggested. He cannot kneel on the stone even with kneepads; the heat creeps up under the skirt and cooks him. Yumi grudgingly allows him to squat instead, and to request gloves, which Liyun fetches from the town.
Yumi sets the first lesson: the apprentice does not yet stack. He must learn to evaluate a stone — to weigh it in the hand, to feel for its centre of gravity, to know which faces and dimples could catch on another stone for stability. She walks circles around him, lecturing on illusions of impossible overhang you can engineer if you know where the mass is. Centre of gravity and precise work, Painter repeats — *I thought you called this an art?* Art, she says, is all about precision. He counters that art is about feeling, about letting emotion escape so it can be shared, about tearing a hole in your chest and exposing your soul. She calls it pretty meaningless words. Poetry is a luxury, and they have no claim on luxuries. He drops the rock. The whole world, he tells her, is stupid: she does not need a hero, she needs an accountant.
She stares at him until he picks it up again. *Fine. How do I stack it?* He doesn't, she says. Not yet. He drops that stone, picks up another, and weighs that one too. Today they will only weigh stones. Tomorrow, probably as well. They may spend a week on it; she spent months. He almost says she must be joking — and stops, because of course she isn't, and would not understand the word.