“Walls can’t think!”

“That doesn’t stop them from caring.”

Gaotona shook his head, muttering about superstition. “How long?”

“To create this soulstamp? I’ve been etching it here and there for the last month or so. It was the last thing I wanted to do for the room.”

“The artist was JinDo,” he said. “Perhaps, because you are from the same people, it… But no! That’s thinking like your superstition.” Gaotona shook his head, trying to figure out why that painting would have taken, though it had always been obvious to Shai that this one would work.

“The JinDo and my people are not the same, by the way,” Shai said testily. “We may have been related long ago, but we are completely different from them now.” Grands. Just because people had similar features, Grands assumed they were practically identical.

Gaotona looked across her chamber and its fine furniture that had been carved and polished. Its marble floor with silver inlay, the crackling hearth and small chandelier. A fine rug—it had once been a bed quilt with holes in it—covered the floor. The stained-glass window sparkled on the right wall, lighting the beautiful mural.

The only thing that retained its original form was the door, thick but unremarkable. She couldn’t Forge that, not with that Bloodseal set into it.

“You realize that you now have the finest chamber in the palace,” Gaotona said.

“I doubt that,” Shai said with a sniff. “Surely the emperor’s are the nicest.”

“The largest, yes. Not the nicest.” He knelt beside the painting, looking at her seals at the bottom. “You included detailed explanations of how this was painted.”

“To create a realistic Forgery,” Shai said, “you must have the technical skill you are imitating, at least to an extent.”

“So you could have painted this wall yourself.”

“I don’t have the paints.”

“But you could have. You could have demanded paints. I’d have given them to you. Instead, you created a Forgery.”

“It’s what I am,” Shai said, growing annoyed at him again.

“It’s what you choose to be. If a wall can desire to be a mural, Wan ShaiLu, then you could desire to become a great painter.”

She slapped her stamp down on the table, then took a few deep breaths.

“You have a temper,” Gaotona said. “Like him. Actually, I know exactly how that feels now, because you have given it to me on several occasions. I wonder if this… thing you do could be a tool for helping to bring awareness to people. Inscribe your emotions onto a stamp, then let others feel what it is to be you…”

“Sounds great,” Shai said. “If only Forging souls weren’t a horrible offense to nature.”

“If only.”

“If you can read those stamps, you’ve grown very good indeed,” Shai said, pointedly changing the topic. “Almost I think you’ve been cheating.”

“Actually…”

Shai perked up, banishing her anger, now that it had passed the initial flare-up. What was this?

Gaotona sheepishly reached into the deep pocket of his robe and withdrew a wooden box. The one where she kept her treasures, the five Essence Marks. Those revisions of her soul could change her, in times of need, into someone she could have been.