Conservation of Shadows by Yoon Ha Lee Read Free Book Online Page B

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 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