Chapter Six

An Elegant Argument

By the time Diana arrived home later that afternoon, she felt as if she were being inexpertly skinned by a novice hunter.

Every step pulled at a different piece of her back and she wouldn't have been surprised to find the tender flesh coming apart in patches and strips. She breathed shallowly through her teeth and kept her shoulders so ridged they nearly trembled, balancing on the back of her heels to keep from pulling on her stitches. Surely it didn't hurt as bad now as when she'd been actually whipped, but in the space of two days she seemed to have forgotten that pain, and there was only the eternal now, passing one excruciating step at a time. She wanted nothing more than to crawl up to her bedroom, lie down on her belly, and never move again.

But her father had other plans.

Within the slightly ridiculous colonnade on the front of their house was a small sitting area, facing the south with several wide hearths for fires. It was a good place to sit with guests when the weather was fine, especially since between them Diana and Domitian had filled every other space in the house with books and scrolls. Domitian was sitting straight-backed and severe on one of the benches, dressed in his gold cloak for the Benedictions. His eyes were darkly shadowed and Diana remembered again that he was growing old, nearer now to seventy than sixty. She remembered it like finding an unwelcome visitor on the doorstep, or a swarm of silverfish in an old book, a thought that she cast swiftly away, repulsed.

"Father," she said, surprised to see him there. He marked his place in his book with a finger and looked up.

"Diana," he said. "I did not expect you to be out of your bed today."

"I went to see Lelia," she said.

"How is she?"

"She lost her eye." Diana's voice thickened, and she looked at the ceiling, working to clear the tightness in her throat away. "Last night."

"We train with iron," Father said, when she had mastered herself. It was no more comforting now than it was when Helion said it, and there was a grim quality to Father's voice that she didn't like at all. "Come and sit. Since you are better, there are things we need to discuss."

It was not in her to complain about pain, but at the moment she felt that better was a wild exaggeration. And he should see it, she thought, bewildered, but sat down in the chair facing him. It was tall enough that she didn't need to bend to sit, and had no back that might accidentally press against her.

"Discuss what?" she asked, with foreboding.

"What we will do next." Something in his bearing reminded her that he wasn't just her father, but an Elder of the Fifth Degree. There were only two dozen others that could call themselves his equal in all the Solari; perhaps a dozen could call themselves his superior. "Do you feel your punishment was just?"

"My punishment—" Her eyes flicked to his. This was not the way she had wanted to talk to him about it. She had planned to apologize, to confess what she had said and done and thought and beg pardon, but he caught her wrong-footed. She stuttered. "Y-yes. I was wrong. I wanted to apol—"

"Your apology is not due to me," he interrupted. "I heard you apologize for your blasphemy, and I know you meant it. But that isn't the whole of it. You and I know it isn't."

"No," she said, low. Her stomach knotted.

"You are moon-witted." He said it matter-of-factly, the same way he would have stated that she was a girl, or had gray eyes. "You have been for as long as I have known you. The moon calls you no less today than it did when you were four years old. And you have been spared the consequences of it, though at every turn you have questioned and distorted and perverted the doctrine of the Solari. Yet the Temple spared you. I…I have spared you, all these years. Is it not so?"

She looked at the tile floor, muddy and splashed from the rain.

"Yes," she whispered.

"So I ask you again. Do you feel your punishment was just?"

The tears that pain alone couldn't wring from her welled, and fell, clear drops only a little more colorless than her eyes.

"No, father."

"I have tried everything I know to help you. I sent you to the Temple, that they might succeed where I failed." He was building an argument, as expertly as the Master of Rhetoric: a solid wall of logic unassailable, stone by stone. "We have all failed. I do not say you are the only one at fault. But you are growing worse, not better."

"I tried, Father!" She burst out miserably. "I tried to understand like you said, but—"

He lifted a hand to silence her, and it was as good as a slap.

"You never tried to understand," he said, and his sharp blue eyes met hers, keen and cutting as a sword. "You twisted everything you heard, Diana. You sought always to negate it, to unmake it. Every time Skalos Abeon spoke, you heeded the voice in you that said it wasn't true, or it wasn't all true, or that this other thing might also be true. The man is a fool and a bully, but he was correct in his doctrine. Every piece of the evidence you were given, you distorted, and then complained that you could not fit the pieces together. Is it not so?"

She could not speak. She nodded, her breath shuddering.

"So we will try something else. Your Skaloi cannot stop to correct you when you do this. They have others to teach. I will again be your teacher. I will correct you."

A few hours ago this would have filled her with joy, but Father was so strange, so fierce and harsh and distant at the same time, that she felt only dread, as if her insides had been flash-frozen in a blizzard.

"Father," she said desperately, "I'm sorry. I am. For all of it. I will try, I really will—"

"Words are wind," he said, suddenly weary. "We will begin tomorrow. You will not be returning to the Temple to study. You will only go to fulfill your duties as an acolyte."

She wasn't at all sorry about that, though it would mean she spent more time polishing mirrors; students were excused from some duties to give time for their studies. But what he said next made her feel it would have been a small price to pay if Skalos Abeon had been appointed to personally oversee the mirror polishing.

"You also will not return to the agoge."

She gaped at him.

"This is more important, and I do not want anything to distract you. I have sent for a tutor to continue your training with the spear. You will not fall behind."

"But my friends," she said, her voice cracking.

"You will still see them, sometimes. I am not doing this to be cruel to you. And Helion has my permission to continue calling. He is a good boy. You chose well."

Helion chose poorly, she thought, covering her face with her hands and breathing slow and deep to keep from sobbing aloud. The agoge was the only good thing in her life. To think of them training without her, to watch Parthas and Ereon walk by her window every morning and know she wouldn't follow them…

"When will I see them?"

"You will see Helion tonight, after the Benediction." Father looked toward the Temple Heights at the bottom of the hill, where the great mirrors were already being moved into position. His face was remote. "The others…we will see."

"Father," she began, without any idea of what she was going to say. "I will try. But please, they're my friends, I will fight beside them one day. I will—"

"Endanger them all with your madness." Father shook his head. "As you did Helion, when you were twelve. Oh, my daughter, can't you see how dangerous this is? Can't you understand that I'm trying to spare you from worse?"

His voice quavered and that was the stroke that undid her, worse than anything else he might have said.

"I will!" She sobbed, and threw herself into his arms as she had done when she was a child, heedless of the pain of her patchwork skin. "Father, I will try, I promise, I—"

But he caught her elbows and held her away, his face working painfully.

"Show me," he said, his hands squeezing her elbows. "This is first. It must be first. Do you agree?"

She nodded, her tears blinding her.

"We will leave for the Benedictions soon." He let her go and lurched to his feet, his staff clattering on the tiles. "Go wash your face."

Helion was acting oddly.

If she hadn't spent all her tears in the conversation with Father, it would have frightened her more; as it was, she just noted it with a weary sort of resignation. They were sitting together in the cedar grove, Helion fresh-scrubbed after the day's practice, his golden skin glowing in the last of the daylight, his bronze hair curled over his forehead.

"I thought you were," he said frankly when she told him she was moon-addled. It was the equivalent of confessing she was a drunkard or a whore, but he took it in stride. "When your father told me you were being whipped for blasphemy, I put it all together."

"All what together?" she asked, surprised.

His blue eyes were darting around the grove, narrowing as he searched the cedars. He was putting a good face on it, she thought, but he wanted to be away. Of course he did. The Solari had no tolerance for the foolish fancies of moon-witted madwomen.

"You, going to the Temple," he said absently. "And being so determined to stay there, even though they were treating you badly. And that thing you said, about needing to understand why the sun is the way it is. And you watch the moon a lot. I don't think anyone else has ever noticed, at least not that they've said, but I—well, I've had occasion to watch you." He flashed a quick smile at her and stood. He was a lanky boy, all long legs and big feet.

"Doesn't it bother you?" Diana would normally stand to follow him, and look at whatever it was he was looking at, but her whole body was a thumping ache and she found that if she sat absolutely still without moving at all, it was just tolerable. It even hurt to breathe, but she reckoned there was no way out of doing that.

Helion straightened, looking slightly flustered.

"Yes." His blue eyes were always so direct; it was something she loved about him, that he made no pretenses, that he had no fear of telling her precisely what he was thinking. "It's terrible. I hate it. But your father said he was going to help you. I'll help you, if I can."

And with that, he went back to scrutinizing the cedar roots.

"Are you looking for something?" she asked, with an edge to her voice. She was tired, she hurt, she'd had to nerve herself up to say the words I'm moon-addled through the entire Benedictions, and he wasn't at all shocked or upset. She had expected him to be angry. She had expected him to leave her. How could he not? She was nothing now. She was no one's hero, no one's exemplar. No one would point at Diana, blasphemer of the Temple, publically flogged for her crime, and say, there is the champion of the agoge. If they pointed at her at all, it would be with scorn, or worse, with pity.

They would pity Helion for being with her. They would think him trapped by promises of betrothal he had never made. They would shake their heads and say it was a shame, that so promising a boy was stuck with her, the moon-mad dog of the Temple Heights.

"It must have gotten away," Helion said finally, sounding dismayed.

"What got away?" she demanded. She had worked herself into an agony of anger and humiliation and tears were standing out like hot pinpricks in her eyes. She just wanted to go home.

But Helion startled the life out of her with a sudden whoop, darting into the shadows at the far end of the cedar grove and flinging himself flat as if he were tackling a fleeing enemy on the practice field. She leaped to her feet, her back yanking taut with a surge of hot agony like a whip snapping.

"Helion, what—"

"I got it!" He shouted triumphantly, bounding back to his feet and clutching whatever it was to his chest. It was so dark that she could only see his tunic clearly, the white now streaked with grass stains and cedar needles. For all his other charms, Helion's one significant failing was that he never could keep tidy. She knew his mother still gave him a final looking-over before he left the house, but half the time he still managed to rip, stain, and wrinkle whatever he was wearing between his own house and Diana's.

She had the impression of a squirming bundle in his arms and saw his grin, wide and bright as the noonday sun, before he shoved whatever it was into her hands.

"What—where in Valoran did you find a poro?!" The wiggling beast turned around and swiped half her face with its tongue, and she couldn't help it, she started laughing. "Helion!"

He was laughing too, delighted with the success of his joke. "I've had it for almost a month now, I got it off a trader. He almost gave it away; he had six and they were tearing the rest of his merchandise apart." He rubbed the poro's head roughly. "It's yours."

Everything in her melted at once.

"For me?" she breathed, and lifted it up to look at the ridiculous little creature's face. It was panting and warm under its white fur, almost hot despite the cold night. It had little legs with cloven hooves like a mountain goat, and the goat's horns, but the short-bodied poro was as magical as the creatures of Ionia or the Shadow Isles. Its dark eyes gleamed and she snuggled her cheek against its head. Its fur was softer than sheepskin.

"Yes," Helion said, softer, watching her pet and cuddle the creature. The Rakkor bred strong, fierce women, and Diana was stronger than most, but it meant she rarely got to indulge herself over something so silly and girlish. "Do you like it?"

"I love it." She stood on tiptoe to kiss him firmly on the lips. "I love it! What's it's name?"

"My mother called it 'that idiotic little white thing.'" Helion bent and pulled the shreds of a canvas bag from under the bench, examining it. The scraps of canvas were soggy with slobber and ripped by little teeth marks; clearly the poro had chewed its way free.

"Well, I don't like that." She sat down on the bench again, carefully, holding the poro in her lap. "I have to think about it. He needs a good name. Is it a he?"

Helion shrugged, sitting next to her, his arm looped loosely around her waist, careful not to hurt her. "Who knows? How do you check a poro for that?"

"He looks like a he," she said decisively. The poro sat contentedly on her lap as she stroked his fuzzy body, rubbed her fingers over the ridges of his short, curving horns. It somehow made it easier to tell Helion the next thing she needed to say. "Father says I won't be coming back to the agoge, Helion."

His head jerked up and he pulled his hand away from the poro, where he had been tickling his chin. "Why?"

"I have to focus on my studies."

"You still need to train for the Rite," Helion said, his eyes narrowing. He rarely got angry, but he was getting angry now. "All your studies won't do you much good if you're slaughtered on the solstice."

"Father sent for a tutor so I won't fall behind." She picked up the poro and inhaled the scent of his fur, cool and somehow sharply green, like he had fallen out of a snowy pine tree. She felt a sort of bitter vindication that Helion was angry, that she had been right that he would be.

"It's not right," Helion said stubbornly, with an angry jerk of his chin, and it fell to her to explain Father's reasoning, laying out the argument as squarely as he had. It took time, and the moon was two hours over the horizon by the time they were done talking. It was only a day past full and still swelled enormous, dominating the night sky. To Diana, the phases of the moon were like watching a familiar face look away from her, and then turn back again, like the glowing silhouette of Helion's profile, the beloved bones of his cheek and jaw and forehead.

The moon made it hard to concentrate on what she was saying. Arguments always tended to tangle on her tongue when she tried to say them aloud, but the moon made it worse. She trailed off more than once into silence, her eyes flicking irresistibly to the sky, her face lit white and shining as it reflected the moonlight.

And that, more than any of Father's clever arguments, convinced Helion.

"Look at me," he said, when she trailed off into silence again, and he took in her eyes, the pupils shrunk to pin-pricks, the silver-blue of her irises glowing. He didn't like it. It made him uncomfortable, it was as shameful as watching a drunk stumbling his way home, and he stood and moved away from her a few paces.

"Maybe your father is right." He said aloud.

"He usually is," she said, embarrassed. She knew why he had gotten up.

He blew out a breath, the way he did before they were about to tackle some impossible exercise in the agoge. "It's bad, isn't it? I guess I didn't really think about what it meant before."

"I've been moon-witted since I was four," she said softly, feeling that traitorous lump re-form in her throat. "Father has tried everything he knows. He sent me to be an acolyte to try to cure me. We have tried for ten years, Helion. So…so if you…" she swallowed hard and forced it out. "I'll understand if you don't want to be together anymore."

He was quiet, and he didn't look at her. He was thinking about it, she thought, and nuzzled the poro again. She should give him back, too, even if Helion's mother wouldn't like it; she shouldn't take gifts from Helion if he wasn't going to be her betrothed anymore. But unless Helion demanded it, she wouldn't.

"No," he said finally. "No. I love you. And you love me."

The way he said it, it was a question, and she set her poro down on the bench and went to him swiftly.

"I do love you," she said, and didn't even flinch when he held her hard, her face pressed against his chest. "I do, oh, so much! But I'm…I'm dangerous to you, and I will try, but what if…"

"We do not plan to fail," he said severely, in such a good imitation of Skalos Grakos that she giggled in spite of everything. "Your father will help you, and I'll help you, and I know if you tell them Kallista and Lelia will help you. You should tell them, Diana, really."

"Maybe I will," she said, and closed her eyes to breathe the clean scent of him. "I will try. I swear it."

And for a little while, she didn't notice the moon, didn't notice anything at all but Helion. He was getting much better at kissing.

"Your poro got away," Helion whispered, his lips moving against hers, and her fingers curled in his. Sure enough, the bench was empty, and she could hear a cheerful sort of panting from the other end of the grove.

"Then we'd better go find him," she whispered back.

She paid for her adventuring the next morning.

The first time she tried to get up, her body flatly refused. It was the strangest experience, the first solid evidence she had that there was a real dividing line between her body and her spirit, the conscious thing that called itself Diana. Diana said get up, but the flesh refused absolutely.

Father called her again, and Wilhelm (she had decided the poro, being a creature of the Freljord, ought to have a proper Avarosan name) licked her nose in an encouraging way as she tried again, groaning aloud at the sheet of agony that was her back. She might have even pulled a stitch or two, she thought, holding herself in a rigid half-crouch. She was afraid to lie back down and afraid to straighten up.

"Father, can I stay in bed today?" she called raggedly, without much hope.

"You have work at the Temple," was the remorseless reply, and she made her mincing, painful way to her chest for a fresh tunic, sourly noting the bloodstains on the back of the old one. Lifting her arms to pull it off, and then pull on the new tunic, was a whole new fresh hell.

She scooped up Wilhelm on the way out, feeding him a poro snack from the pouch on her desk. Helion had warned her that her poro, being something between a goat and a dog, would eat anything—anything, he had stressed, waving the ragged remains of the canvas bag—and was liable keep eating until someone stopped him.

She had learned on her own that he was a shameless little beggar, and that his large, limpid dark eyes were hard to resist.

But poros were also famously loyal, and Wilhelm proved it on the stairs, hopping them one at a time to keep pace with her as she made her way down the steps to the kitchen. Father was already at the table eating a bit of bread and olive oil.

"Father, look," she said, holding her hands out for Wilhelm, who bounded into them with the spring-loaded bounce of a mountain goat. "Look what Helion gave me!"

"A poro," Domitian leaned forward to examine the little creature, but stayed out of licking range. "How did the boy come by a poro?"

"He got it from a trader at the pass." She sat down carefully, putting Wilhelm on the bench beside her. "I named him Wilhelm. I can keep him, can't I?"

"He will be your responsibility," Father said sternly. "I won't have him in my study or among my books, chewing them up."

"No, father," she said, and started to reach for the jam, but then thought the better of it. Stretching her arms in any way made her shoulders shriek. She didn't know how she was going to do her chores at the Temple.

As it turned out, it was through sheer bloody-minded determination. The other acolytes ignored her; for a time she would be in disgrace, for all that Skalos Joras had proclaimed her forgiven by the Temple. As long as it was silent disgrace, she could endure it. Elder Phaeton, a lean and ascetic man who was as exacting as his precise equations proscribing the position and angle of his mirrors, might have taken pity on her when he assigned her the largest mirrors. They could be cleaned with long sweeps of her arms rather than the endless small circling motion required by the round and concave mirrors.

They moved the mirrors into place for the Salutation ceremony, and then moved them back to the storeroom, giving them another polish as if they hadn't just been cleaned to perfection an hour before. Elder Phaeton only let them go when every mirror was accounted for, lined up in its place, and tested with a bit of white cloth to make sure not a speck of dust lingered on any of the surfaces.

Then, she went home, to begin her studies with her father.

There was none of the chatter that had marked her early learning, the easy back-and-forth as they went through her simple books and scrolls. He had taught her her letters in the dirt, she remembered, scratching them into the sides of the mountain paths they had walked when she was a little girl, or into the snow, or into the ashes of their hearth once. Domitian had found opportunities for learning in the flight of birds, the puffs of cloud that sometimes rolled up their sides of the mountain, even in the sudden shift of the wind.

"Sit," he said when she came into his study, closing the door on a whimpering Wilhelm. Domitian made a fuss over ensuring she had water, that she wasn't hungry, that she had been to the toilet, that her chair was as comfortable as could be expected. There would be no interruptions. She folded her hands in her lap, watching him with some trepidation.

"The faces of the sun," he said.

"The bleeding sun, which is the winter sun from the south. The sleeping sun, that is to the west, the fall. The northern—"

But Father had already held up his hand.

"One at a time. You said the bleeding sun, which is the winter sun. Why do we call it the bleeding sun?"

"Because in the winter, our part of the continent is tilted away from the sun, so its light is less direct," she said, demonstrating the tilt of Runeterra's axis and their position on the planet with her hands. "We get redder, darker sunsets when the sun is at this angle."

"That is the science of it," her father agreed. "What does it mean?"

"The sun is far from us. It is winter, so the days are short and the nights are long and dark. It is then that the struggle for life is the greatest," she said, quoting exactly from the Solari Cycles. "The sun bleeds as it fights its way back to us."

"And it is then that the danger is greatest," her father said somberly. "It is then that we fear the light may be extinguished forever."

She nodded, but this was the first point at which she questioned this teaching. The Solari believed that it was their ceremonies, their worship, that summoned the sun every morning, and drew it back from its long winter sleep. The Rite of Kor on the winter solstice was not needless bloodshed. It was the Solari weapon against the long dark, the Rakkor warriors killed in the Rite a living embodiment of the bleeding labor pains of the sun's re-birth. But to Diana, the sun was like the moon. Its phases were longer, but its return was sure.

"We agreed," her father reminded her, watching her face carefully, "that the instant you differed with the doctrine, we would stop and discuss it."

"Yes, father," she said, with some wariness. Even with her father, who she trusted implicitly, she expected to get the same impatience and irritation her Skaloi had shown her.

"Then explain your logic. Omit nothing." He picked up his quill and waited expectantly.

His instructions to explain her logic and omit nothing were to become two phrases she dreaded above all others.

He wrote down every word as she spoke it in the quick, flowing script of a scholar, then read it back to her to ensure he hadn't missed anything. Then he asked if there was anything she wanted to expand upon or rephrase.

"There will be no misunderstandings between us," he said, in a tone that was more like grim prophecy than aspiration. There was much to add and edit, because the scratching of his quill as she spoke made her obscurely self-conscious. She kept breaking off to circle back to earlier points or jumping forward, but though it was nearly midday by the time she was done explaining herself, she felt in the end that he had guided her to making a better argument than she would have constructed on her own.

And she understood more than ever why Domitian was an Elder of the Fifth Degree. Until then she had never had an opportunity to truly appreciate his intellect, which was prodigious. He questioned her without leading her, prodding her to take her own steps toward her own conclusions. He required that she provide evidence of her assertions and examine the sum of her arguments for inconsistencies and contradiction. Her argument, when they broke for the noon meal, was the best she had ever made.

After lunch, Domitian methodically demolished it.

He cited sources. He showed her the equations which proved the lunar wobble she had observed was nothing less than the wavering of Runeterra itself on its axis, like a child's top that might spin forever or flip onto its side. He taught her the equations that predicted the probability of such a thing. He explained the magic at the heart of Runeterra that was as elusive as a fog, but still had the internal logical consistency of a crystal in its structure, each facet leading inexorably to the next.

In short, he refuted her from every angle, and from angles that she had not dreamed existed. He drew from her every possible objection, every possible counterargument. He refuted himself, countered his own refutation, in a dialogue of such theological perfection that she could only sit in awe as he drew it to its close. It was like watching two champion duelists maneuvering, only this was the product of a single mind. Much of it was simply beyond her comprehension, but she had learned enough in her time as acolyte to appreciate not just the depth of his knowledge, but the elegance with which he assimilated it into his arguments.

Then he let her take Wilhelm for a turn about the cedar grove to stretch her limbs.

"The sleeping sun," her father said when she came back, his quill at the ready. "Explain your logic. Omit nothing."

By the end of the day, her brain felt like a sponge soaked to overflowing and then wrung out to dry and hung up in the sun. She collapsed into bed, barely able to speak for the sheer volume of information she had absorbed. Beside her, Wilhelm curled up on her pillow with a sleepy grumble, his warm little body radiating heat like a brazier. If there was a moon that night, if it shone through her window like a silver beacon, she was too exhausted to notice it.

The next day, she woke up and did it all again.

.

.

.

Author's Note: Thanks very much for your reviews and notes! I haven't read enough other LoL fanfiction to know if poro-giving is cliched, so I'm sorry if it is, but I couldn't resist.