His eyebrows shot up. “I never told you?” he said. His voice was steely. There was an edge of dark, dark humor in it: a mockery, a condemnation. “I owed you this? You had some right to know private things about me, my past, which had no bearing at all on your life? Things that disgust you, that make you shrink away from me? I can feel it, you know. I am a shaper, too. I have spent a lot of time feeling that. No, Ariah, I never told you, because you are truly Semadran, right to the heart, and you carry in you all that’s good and bad about our people. No, I never told you. And you never asked. And why would you? It has never been relevant.”

I had thought him a simple man in Rabatha. Brilliant and determined, but at heart a man who made easy sense to those around him. He never seemed to doubt his place in our community, even when others did. He never seemed to struggle with it. That he housed within him such contradictions was a shock. That I housed such contradictions within myself was a greater shock. I understood him in that moment because I had tried to do what he had done in the Empire so effortlessly. There is much about me, which is classically, irrefutably Semadran, and there is much that has never been Semadran. I had always thought there was only one viable path, but seeing him then, it became suddenly clear that there were thousands of ways to live, and all of them were valid. There were consequences for choosing one over another, to be sure, but consequences did not mean they were the wrong choice. This had never been relevant. He was right about that, and it chastened me. But I could not help but see that he had chosen a life, constructed a life, where it would never be relevant. And I could not help but wonder why he had chosen that.