The glass was in Naim's hand and then it was on the stone in pieces, and the tea ran between the pieces toward the woman's feet.
He had not decided to throw it. His arm had done it. He stood in the outer gallery of The Cave with his fingers still open in the shape of the glass and the heat of it still on his palm. The woman who had offered it to him stepped back with her hand over her mouth.
"I'm sorry," she said. "Was it too hot? I'm sorry."
He wanted to tell her that it hadn't been too hot. He had been offered tea in a glass every day for forty years, at a table, by a man who asked questions while it cooled. His mouth would not make the sentence. It made a sound instead, low in his chest, the sound a cornered dog makes, and her two children behind her went very still.
He crouched and began to pick up the pieces with his fingers. That he could do. Picking things up and putting them where he was told had been most of his work for forty years. The woman crouched with him after a moment and picked up pieces too, and they put them in her cooking pot lid between them, and neither said anything.
"My husband went to the camp," the woman said, to the floor. "He said there was water there. He took our son. He said he'd come back for us when he had a house." She set a piece of glass in the lid. "He told the boy his mother would follow in the next truck. He said it so the boy would get in."
Naim held a curved piece between two fingers. He knew that kind of sentence. It was the kind a man says because it works, and he had heard one at a table, and believed it, and then heard himself say a few.
The humans had been in the outer galleries for some weeks now. Soren the Marid had opened the door to them, the first time in the Cave's memory, and they had come with bedding and gas rings and plastic water drums, running from the road. They could see the Cave because they were inside it. They could see Naim because he let them, though he had not chosen the shape they saw. It was the thin grey man with the bad shoulder that Marcus's binding had worn him as. He had tried every day since the Cave took him in to remember the shape he'd had before. He could not find it.
The smaller child came round her mother's leg and held out a piece of flatbread to him, torn from the edge, the way you hold food out to a stray.
He took it. It was warm. He held it and did not eat it.
The hall of the unrecovered ran along the north side of the deep galleries, where the stone was coldest. The niches were cut at the height of a jinn's chest, row on row, most of them empty, the empty ones swept. It held the dead who never came home. Their bodies had stayed in the war or the weave or the hands of men. An old Jann sat at the far end with a broom across his knees, the keeper of the niches, and lifted his chin to Naim and went back to looking at nothing.
His son's was the eleventh from the end. Ithra the Sila had told him which one, the first week, when he could not yet keep words in order and she had said it to him three times.
The jewel sat on a square of dark cloth. It was green and small and cold, a thing you could close in a fist, and the lamp at the end of the hall put one point of light on it and no more.
Naim stood in front of the niche with the flatbread still in his hand.
He had thought about this moment through the weeks when he could think. He had imagined touching it, and feeling it warm in his palm, though a jewel doesn't warm. He had imagined saying the boy's name over it, the way the old fathers in his tribe said names over jewels, and feeling something answer. He lifted his hand toward it, and his hand stopped a finger's width short and would not go on.
It was the same hand that had thrown the glass. He understood that. The hand knew better than he did what it had done at Marcus's table. It had held the tea while his mouth told a smiling man what the boy liked to eat, and what he was afraid of, and what he dreamed.
He put the hand down.
"Kael," he said, to the niche. His voice came out cracked from disuse, and too loud in the hall.
Nothing answered, and nothing was supposed to.
He put the flatbread on the edge of the niche, beside the cloth. Then he took it back, because it would draw insects and the keeper would have to sweep it, and he stood there holding it again, and could not think what a father did with his hands.
The keeper had got up. He came down the row with his broom and stopped a polite distance off. He had washed Naim in the first week and asked him nothing then either. He held out his free hand, palm up, for the bread. Naim looked at the hand for a long moment and shook his head, and the old Jann nodded as if that were an answer too and went back to his place. Naim stood there until his legs told him to go.
He climbed to Soren's chambers slowly. The stairs were longer than they had been when he came here as a young Jann to work beside a young Marid, centuries ago, before either of them had a title. Halfway up he had to stop and stand with one hand on the wall. His fire did that now. It ran thin after climbing, the way a lamp runs thin when the oil is low. He supposed it was the forty years. Everyone said the forty years would take time to leave him.
Soren sat at his desk with a deputy's summary in front of him that he wasn't reading. He looked up when Naim came in, and the look stopped short of Naim's face the way it had every day since the confession.
They had spoken since then about bedding and food and the human children who wandered into the deep galleries. Soren had not said one word about the confession. Naim had not asked him to.
"I want one thing," Naim said. "Then I won't ask for anything else. I won't ask you for anything you can't give."
Soren waited. His shadow lay across the floor behind his chair, black at the centre like the bottom of a well.
"I want to see where he died. The room. The house of the woman."
Soren said nothing for a long time. Naim stood and let him. Silence was another thing forty years had taught him to do.
"The road is thick with devils," Soren said at last. "The human city there has gone half to the camp. Ithra says the woman's house was searched."
"I'm not asking for the road. I'm asking for the room."
"Why?"
"Because I gave him away at a table with a glass in my hand," Naim said. "I've seen that table every day for forty years. I've never seen the other end of it. I want to stand where he paid."
"You can't hold your own shape, Naim. You can't climb my stairs."
"Then I'll be slow."
Soren looked at him then, at his face, for the first time since the day Naim had told him all of it. It was a long look. Naim held it, and did not know what Soren was reading in him or whether he wanted it read.
"I never went," Soren said. "In all of it. I sent Ithra into that family. I read the pact in the weave. I named the man who burned him in front of the tribes. I never once stood in that room."
He set the summary face down on the desk and pushed back his chair. His shadow came up off the floor with him.
"Bring the bread," he said. "It's a long way, and you haven't eaten."