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for words, Teris.” Kaela didn’t mind lukewarm tea.
    Teris sniffed, but the crook of her mouth suggested she was not unflattered. “How was the talk?”
    “The parts of it I was awake for? There were some interesting things about how mathematical applications affect the propagation of legal norms, models for ethical calculus, that sort of thing.”
    Teris had started stretching, palms to feet, and she straightened herself before saying, “Nothing controversial, then. I wish they would inflict these itinerant scholars on us less often. Let them ponder philosophy and leave applications to us.”
    “I’m sure they think their work is important. At least we’re exposed to judicial research from all over the continent. Unless you think we should be sheltered from different paradigms until we have more experience?”
    “See what happens when I give you a pastry? It’s restday and here you are starting a policy discussion without a third participant.”
    Kaela changed the subject, despite her roomsister’s teasing tone. “How was the festhall?”
    “Ever so refreshing after poring over documents.” She resumed her stretches, recounting the pleasure of her lover’s surety of form, the consuming dream of motion they shared.
    Soon sorry she had asked, Kaela made noncommittal noises in response. She thought Teris spent too much time trying to impress the technician. Still, she enjoyed watching her roomsister’s lithe motions, although the topic of conversation had stifled her desire to join in the stretches.
    Reluctantly, Kaela looked away and reviewed the last two days of notes, even if it was restday. She lost herself in her research problem. The shadow postulates, although they dated from an earlier era, extended the Vorief framework. Like those before her, Kaela suspected that the third of the three postulates, which dealt with incorporeal consequences, could be derived from the rest of the extended framework.
    As a magistrate-aspirant, Kaela could have submitted a less abstruse, more practical research topic. The point was to prove herself capable of basic research methods, no more. Many scholars had lost years in the postulates’ intricacies only to peel away into related studies. Kaela was too stubborn to admit that this might happen to her.
    Last week, her sponsor, the senior scholar Roz Roven, had reminded her that she needed to submit a draft of her thesis by the end of this term. “I know you’ve sworn yourself to this,” he said, “but you’re running short of time. You may have to settle for a less ambitious problem. You won’t be the first.” The words belied the regret in his gaze, that the student he had taken in on account of her early promise should fall short, as he had decades ago.
    Kaela found the prospect of his disappointment unbearable, even if the third shadow postulate was one of the outstanding problems in entelechy theory. Stymied, she wondered what had prompted the magistrate Brien, several hundred years dead, to append the postulates to a mundane schedule roster. Records from that time, according to Teris, spoke of war between nations now united. Of Brien, they said little concerning mathematics. In his time, he had befriended a traitor and the traitor’s innocent lover, herself a magistrate. Beyond that, Kaela had never been able to follow the intricacies of intrigue.
    If more of Brien’s writings had survived, the shadow postulates might not have become such an enduring puzzle. Kaela shook her head. Too bad the magistrates’ shades communicated through cryptic gestures and never in words, or she—and generations of mathematicians before her—would have asked Brien’s faceless shade the everlasting why?
    Although Teris invited her to a festhall dance after dinner, Kaela refused. “I might head out before dinner and eat there,” Teris said, disappointed but forgiving, as always. “Don’t worry about me, sister-mine.”
    Kaela could no more stop worrying about her roomsister