Wolf's-own: Koan by Carole Cummings Page A

eyes, the slow, sorrowful shake of the head. He doesn't love you. Why do you go on lying to yourself, Jacin-rei? Why do you go on letting them lie to you?
    Jacin tightened his jaw and shut his eyes again. “Because I can't care enough not to."
    And he didn't want to know, damn it. Why couldn't Beishin see that, if he thought he saw so much? And why couldn't he just shut the fuck up about it?
    You can't care enough about anything. It's why all of your trying amounts to nothing more than a lake of blood on the dirty cobbles of an alley behind a whorehouse.
    Which was true, except that it wasn't really, and it made sense, except that it didn't, but Jacin was more or less used to that.
    You need your beishin to show you what you want, little Ghost. Only I can love the unlovable. Your Temshiel pretends at it, all the while hiding from you what you are, keeping perfection from your grasp, because it suits his god, because he wishes to keep for himself what—
    "Why do you listen to them, Jacin?"
    Jacin didn't jump. He was used to Caidi showing up abruptly. He even guiltily hoped for it sometimes. Caidi always chased Beishin away when she came.
    "They're not real, you know."
    Her voice was quiet, kind. Jacin kept waiting for it to turn accusing, but it hadn't yet.
    "Neither are you,” he told her.
    "How d'you know I'm not?"
    Jacin flicked ash into the saucer, thought about trying a few more smoke rings, but what was the point? He lifted the bowl in an ironic toast to Caidi, sitting primly on the windowsill, just staring at him, sunlight sparking through the panes and glinting off her hair. Jacin looked away and took a drink. Sometimes he liked to sit and stare at her for hours, and sometimes he didn't want to look at all.
    "Because if you were real,” he answered evenly, “you'd know how you died. And you wouldn't be here."
    "I know how I died."
    Jacin sighed and emptied the bowl, waiting until the burn at the back of his throat ebbed into pleasant warmth and the fire in his gullet tamped to a steady tingle. “You'd know why."
    "I know that too."
    "Yeah?” Jacin couldn't think of anything else he wanted to say, so he didn't say anything. He could tell her everything—how it all evolved, how he'd failed her so spectacularly, how his need and his sick, impotent maybe-love-maybe-hate had made him too slow and uncertain. How she'd died because he hadn't been able to make himself believe how thoroughly he'd been betrayed until he'd watched her silent descent from the sky. But then she might go away, or start agreeing with Beishin, and Jacin didn't think he could take that.
    He set the empty bowl on the mattress beside him and stared at his fingers, running his thumb over the tips. They were losing their calluses, going soft, and somehow, it terrified him, except he didn't know why, so he stopped looking. He set his hand to his torso instead, settled his fingers over the scar from Malick's sword, and gave it a light swipe through his shirt. An almost complete absence of sensation. Scars he knew. Scars were old friends. Stripes of desensitized remembrance that blanked out feeling.
    It had taken weeks for this one to heal properly. Malick had been frustrated, cursing more than once through his teeth about magical healing and Tatsu's perceived failure to use it with the precision and motivation necessary. Jacin hadn't said anything. Malick wouldn't have wanted to hear it. Malick would have looked at him the same way Joori did, and Jacin could barely stand it from Joori. So Jacin had just kept his mouth shut and eventually stopped picking and poking at the scabs, seeking that bright pinpoint of pain whenever he needed to know if he was real or not. Anyway, Malick always seemed to show up seconds after the blood started to ooze, like he could smell it or something, so it never did Jacin much good.
    Sometimes, he thought about asking Malick for his knives back—partly to see if Malick would hand them over; partly because Jacin needed