“You are the calligrapher for this book!” I say, startled.
Kor pauses with my pen in his hand, and that bland expression is a form of teasing. “Shall I get Farren instead?”
“No, it’s fine, I just… didn’t expect it…!”
“I do write, you know.”
“Of course you do, you’re just…” What to say? “You’re a very busy man.”
He resumes work. “I could leave it to Tsevet—”
I don’t shudder, but it’s a near thing. I don’t want to think of what Tsevet would do with the task of illustrating the Conversations. “Definitely not.” I eye him. “You are having amusement at my expense, Kherishdar’s Shame.”
“Only a little, Kherishdar’s Scribe.” He resumes copying words. “I prefer pens to brushes. And I do write, you know. And enjoy the act of writing.”
“I know. You wouldn’t have found it so easy to undertake the rewriting of the Book of Corrections if you hadn’t.” I sit across from him and watch the pen move down the page. “This latest book is so easy to write, to also be so devastating. It would already be done if I hadn’t injured myself.”
His mmm is noncommittal.
“My injury has nothing to do with the book. I know it looks like overwork, but it’s not.”
He doesn’t lift his head, but he glances at me, just a flicker of the coronal eyes.
“I wish I was moving faster.”
I’m expecting to be chastised. Maybe I’m asking for it. He touches the nibs of two of the pens to bleed the colors together. “Qirini, go eat the ice cream.”
I suppress my sigh, because when one is old enough, Correction is as often subtle as it is direct. “Do Ai-Naidar have ice cream?”
“A confection of chilled cream, sweetened and flavored? What do you suppose?”
Put that way…
Matova – noun – ice cream; literally ‘sweet snow’.
