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The Domain of Estre was cold, grey, and loud with wind. Pemmer Erath rem ir Stok had, during his tenure in the Imperial College, studied the geography of Kerm Land with the loving intensity of the native, and concluded that the sister territories of Stok and Estre sat neatly enough in the wind-funnel down from Mount Teremander that the wind would likely never cease to howl there, come summer or winter. No surprise that Arek disliked their home with the equally intense hatred of the local: 'It's a damn racket, Therem, when you're not in the inner hearth - just in off the first walls and there is nothing but the wailing of something close to a gale going down the corridors.'
The door to Therem's room swung open, inviting a rush of cold air and framing Arek, freshly returned and in high colour.
'Maybe,' Therem said with some humour, 'you shouldn't try to escape outwards.'
Arek disliked, in addition to the noise of the westerly Moth-Tuwa winds, his lessons with the hearth's tutor. Not for lack of adroitness, but rather because of an excess of it: Arek thought so quickly on his feet that his wit went from being quicksilver to downright impatient. He had no patience for slow men in a slow country. Arek burned while Estre froze. 'You're the heir of Estre and you can barely sit still,' Therem berated. 'One day you'll -'
'Have to do this on a day to day basis,' Arek cut in, waving one hand in the air and stomping his feet to dislodge clumps of snow and ice. He'd been out, though where to Therem could only guess. His brother pulled off his hieb shirt as he pushed the door closed, and came to a full sprawl on Therem's bed. 'More reason to enjoy my freedom while I still have some. Everyone older than us seems determined to turn me into stone before I am even twenty.'
'You've given them enough reason to despair over the years,' Therem shrugged, setting his books down and coming to stand in front of Arek. 'Perhaps they're looking to do you a similar turn.'
Arek kicked at Therem, and then reached over to pull Therem down next to him. 'You are irritable today,' Arek said, his chest to Therem's back. 'Are you possibly tired of,' he glanced at Therem's desk, 'the study of glaciations on the Kerm Ice? Profoundly interesting choice of reading.'
'You've read it before,' Therem pointed out. 'There were notes in the margin in your hand.'
'The eldest child of the flesh has duties,' Arek grunted, waving it off. 'The second child of the flesh seems, on the other hand, to have excessive spare time.'
Therem, laying back, said nothing. His brother paused a moment, then touched his forehead - warm, too warm - and exhaled. Arek's grip on Therem's shoulders went tight. Arek murmured, 'Did you speak to our parent?'
'Yes,' Therem answered, closing his eyes so that Arek could not see some of the relief there. His body thrummed with unfamiliar pains; odd for Therem to think that they may become familiar soon. The line of his brother's body was natural and as habitually familiar as life itself, free and sexless and void of the things changing within him. 'It should be less than a fortnight now, he said.'
'That is,' Arek said slowly, 'close enough to my own cycle of kemmer. If you would like, I -'
'I would,' Therem said, before Arek could finish. They were silent for a little while. Then Therem asked, 'What is it like?'
'Liberating,' Arek replied immediately.
'I'd think that it'd be restrictive,' Therem said, ponderously. 'To be slave to the body's demands, unable to control what you feel.'
'It is a freedom of its own sort. We are all slave to something, Therem,' Arek told him, idly picking up his brother's hand to lay his own against it, palm to palm. His words were quiet. 'But in kemmer you breathe and you live and you love as your intuitions tell you to, with nothing to hold you back.'
Therem looked at his hand and his brother's, the way they fit. He said nothing, so Arek said, 'You'll understand soon,' and a fortnight later Arek was right.
Arek was right in ways Therem could never understand him being right in, his brother always having been a knot of contradictions - of duty and obligation and passion and youth and respect and family, a constant presence Therem thought he knew everything about one moment and nothing about the next. When Esvans completed the ceremony for his younger son and sent him, with the severity of a lord and the pride of a parent, towards the kemmerhouse, Arek was there inside waiting. Therem thought he would be unrecognisable, everything being as it was clouded in some sort of haze that burned like oil and fire underneath his skin. But Arek was there and as he had always been, just as warm and just as alive as he ever was, and their hands still matched.
Arek brought him in to kemmer, made Therem's body morph and slide and burst forth into an ecstasy that living in Estre had never produced in Therem before. And then, when Therem worked off his first, drowsy touches and woke into sensation, Arek laughed and pushed him towards the others in the kemmerhouse. Therem went, and explored and loved and rose and fell and tumbled; at the end it was too confusing, too disorderly, too little for something too intense, and he gravitated back to his brother, who'd come to rest in the small, private alcove closed off for inner hearth members.
'Hello, Therem,' Arek greeted him, lazy eyes and knowing smile.
Therem chuckled and reached out again. They kissed, and that burned in a way that other touches had not. Arek's mouth was the same as it was in somer. Therem chuckled again.
'What is it?' Arek asked him.
'It is quiet in here,' Therem replied, stretching out. 'No howling of the wind. No thoughts of the ice.'
---
Estraven said, 'I will vow peace with you.'
So they made that vow, and then spoke no more, and the hurt man slept. In the morning Stokven was gone, but a party of people from Ebos village came to the hut and carried Estraven home to Estre. There none dared longer oppose the old lord's will, the rightness of which was written plain in three men's blood on the lake-ice; and at Sorve's death Therem became Lord of Estre. Within the year he ended the old feud, giving up half the disputed lands to the Domain of Stok. For this, and for the murder of his hearth-brothers, he was called Estraven the Traitor. Yet his name, Therem, is still given to children of that Domain.
---
The year that Arek turned twenty, in the month of Ockre, he failed to glide into the practiced motions of somer and kemmer. He and his brother stayed, alone, in Arek's room, where Therem lay one hand on the breadth of his brother's stomach and narrowed his eyes as if thinking. Arek, for his part, was silent. Esvans Harth was away, due in Erhenrang on petition to the kyoremmy. They had time to think. They had time, some little time left.
The elder fisted his fingers together, and then forced them to relax again. Pulling a shirt over his bare back - for they were unaccustomed to dressing heavily in the privacy of the hearth - Arek said, 'What do you think to do?', although he himself sounded as though there was no question at all. The set of his shoulders was stubborn, defiant, knowing. He went and sat at his desk, over which some of the issues of the hearth were sitting; Arek was obliged, as the eldest son, to manage the Domain's social disputes and minor quarrels while their parent was away.
Therem said, eventually, 'We are all slave to something.'
Arek slammed his hand against the desk and swept everything on it aside; the signet ring that he used to seal important documents flying and hitting the far wall, where it fell with a damning, sharp noise. 'Therem,' he said, angry, 'I do not care for the cole controlling kemmer. You know this. You've known this.'
'And I, Arek?' Therem shot back, angry himself, though only because he was desperate. 'I would have you respected, not hunted down like a criminal for being too stubborn to realise that some rules we have to abide by instead of break.'
Arek's laugh was bitter and barked out; harsh, hysterical. 'The prodigious Therem Harth, unable to think of a plan to make this work?'
'I could,' Therem bit out. 'And what good would it do us? Lord of a Domain as you will be, and I due to go to the Fastness at Rotherer.' Because Therem could see - that was his gift, an intuition that Arek sorely lacked. And everywhere Therem looked there were dead ends and danger, no path safe, their journey forward like a blind pull across the Ice and equally as doomed. 'Arek, every story in history, every record speaks out against this,' Therem said urgently, voice low. 'How do we succeed where others have failed?'
'I think,' Arek said, looking Therem squarely in the eye, 'to name the child Sorve.'
Therem stopped. 'Arek. You defy everything.'
Arek reached out to touch Therem's hand. 'And you think I do not know that?'
Therem laughed, the odd noise that men make when they do not know whether to do that, or to cry. Arek smiled at him, which made Therem twist his own lips and ask, 'Did you bind up my heart in order to kill me, Estraven?'
'No,' Arek said, as old as ritual. 'We are brothers of the flesh. I would vow kemmering with you.'
'And I with you,' said the other, said Therem.
---
Therem went, when the state of Arek's getting had become obvious and the eyes of the clan hearth wary, to the Fastness at Rotherer, and tried for a while to think of another way. He kept his vow while he practiced at privation; the old ones taught him the art of abstinence, and pain was as good a deterrent as any in the world.
Esvans Harth wrote to him, in a way that told of how well he knew his sons, with words that resembled both warning and entreaty. When you return, Esvans said in his letters, you will be of age enough to help your brother in the dealings of the Domain.
A plea, if nothing else, to recognise the duties that Arek performed but did not love.
Arek wrote as well. The wind, at the very least, prepares me for the howling that Sorve will make, come the next six months. I am sorry you will not be here. And other letters, each with a devotion and perfect assurance of his return that Therem sometimes could not read them, and sometimes could not stop re-reading them. He placed one letter from Esvans with one from Arek each, paired them up so that he could remember that he was bound to more than just one person, that he was the sum of more than just one part.
When a year had passed, Therem went back down towards Estre, keeping full well in his thoughts the intention not to fall back into the old habit of love and the old vice of kemmer. The time spent engaged with Handdara logic had taught him one thing: to praise the Creation unfinished - the grounds of ignorance, if untread upon, leave opportunity for both denial and affirmation. Therem thought to himself that he would break no vow to Arek, and break no bonds with Esvans, if only he kept to his own path and did nothing.
Therem was ten minutes in his old room when Sorve Harth was placed into his arms. He did not move for the rest of the day, and not through the evening until nightfall, when Sorve burbled to sleep and drooled over his arm and made Arek laugh a laugh that Therem had not heard in so long. Arek put Sorve to bed in the room that they had once shared as children. Therem could not say no when Arek asked him to stay, that night, with him.
Then, in somer as in kemmer, they lay side by side, Arek smiling against the back of Therem's neck, and Therem barely able to breathe for the weight in his chest.
---
They lay together once more before Therem left.
Therem left because he had to, because he could not say no to Arek any more than he could say yes; Arek would not, could not listen to reason, and Therem never wanted him to, never needed him to. He kissed Sorve on the forehead the night he snuck out like a thief in the darkness, stopping only to knock on Esvans' door, and to bow his head to the hardened knowing in his parent's eyes.
'Where will you go?' Esvans asked him, placid and unmovable as the stone walls around him and equally as worn.
'To Erhenrang,' Therem answered. 'To make the most out of myself.'
'It is an empty life, playing shifgrethor with politicians,' Esvans said.
'I keep my own shadow behind me,' Therem replied. 'I've come to know it well, these last years.'
And he left.
---
Arek wrote. Estraven replied. Sorve grew. Esvans aged.
Light, Arek wrote at last, is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.
They do not bury suicides for the shame they bring, and so Estraven never buried Arek, and no one buried Therem, until he heard Arek's voice again on the Gobrin Ice, pulling side by side with Genly Ai, a man as alien as he was.
---
There was a coldness in the Domain of Estre, there east and south in Kerm Land.
Genly walked there at the end of summer, going slowly and on foot with not much more on his back than his shirt and the whistling back-beat of the wind. Autumn crawled with him, pace by pace, biting at his feet every time Genly stopped to rest at some hearth, some small town. The people welcomed him now; ushered in the Alien that had played a game of shifgrethor so thunderous that they would not let Genly stop hearing the ring of it in his ears. They made him tell his story as recompense. It was a long journey from Erhenrang, counting by the number of times he'd sat by the fire and talked about Drumner and Dremegole, the Ice, the whiteness, and then the blank space at the end of the story.
'What happened on the border?' they inevitably asked Genly, when the silence inevitably fell.
'They shot Harth rem ir Estraven,' Genly told them. 'They shot him, and he died.'
Alien though he was, there was enough in his voice that they would let him go after that; they'd bring him beer and tug the children away and let him stay staring into the flames and embers until the heat wormed its way past his defences and back into his body. Genly, in return, never stayed the customary three days. There was was only so much hospitality that anyone could extend to the inconsolable - they knew as well as Genly did that he would not find whatever it was that he was looking for there in their homes. They let him go, and shut the door quietly against his shadow.
Genly kept Estre in his sights. He kept the black line of the thore-forest border over through Stok at the edge of his vision, bent his head, and kept going. His footsteps in the snow were solitary. When he could, he avoided the electric cars, treading instead on the by-paths, synchronising his heartbeat to the crunch of upturned slush. At the end of each day's trek, Genly checked the temperature on his small themostat. He was waiting for winter.
Though he was on leave of absence, Genly kept his voice recorder with him. When the days started to grow colder still, and when the edges of the east started to converge, he restarted his journal, more to hear his own voice than anything else: Opposthe Thern. Snowing neserem. The night before he reached the hearth Genly played them all back, listening intently to the modulations in his voice, observing tonality and timbre and wondering, in all foolishness, if that was what Estraven had heard, and if that was what Arek Harth had sounded like.
There was a coldness in the Domain of Estre when Genly finally knocked on the stone door and met Sorve Harth, heir of Estre, the son of sons.
Genly knew it had been an idle and stupid hope to come looking for some part of his friend there in Estre. Therem was dead. Saying his name made Genly ache.
But when Sorve asked, 'Will you tell us how he died?', Genly looked into the face of a boy provincial enough to not fear strangeness, and saw --
'Yes,' Genly said in reply to Sorve's request, when they let him adjourn to the inner hearth, to sit by one more fire. He sat, and Sorve sat beside him like a ghost and a memory and with all the promise of potential. 'I'll tell you about the other kinds of men, the other lives.'