She opened it; Belton stood there, with a guarded expression, still fully dressed although he should have been in his nightclothes by now.
"Come to say good-bye privately?" she asked, giving him an easy excuse for his presence, so that he could broach the real reason he had sought her out when he felt a little more comfortable. "Please, come in and share my hearth."
The boy blinked in the fire- and lantern-light, and came hesitantly inside. Tarma waved him to a chair, and took her own seat again. "Tea?" she invited, holding up a pot. He shook his head, and she put it back on the table beside her chair. "I'm glad all three of you boys will be coming back after the holidays," she said, relaxing into the embrace of her chair. "You are all intelligent and quick, and I think you'll be happy here. I'm happy to have you as students. More than that, well, I like you boys for yourselves." She smiled at him. "Even when you're all acting like brats, I still like you."
Belton didn't relax. He stared at his hands, clenched rightly on one knee, then at the fire, then back at his hands, all without saying anything. Tarma waited with infinite patience; she had a fair idea that he was about to tell her the secret she'd sensed in him.
In the meantime, she filled the silence with onesided conversation, about her own training, about things Belton could expect to learn when he returned, about how she had felt at his age when confronted by some of the things she had been expected to learn. Finally, he looked as if he was ready to say something, and she paused to give him a chance.
"Is revenge wrong?" he finally blurted, looking up urgently into her eyes. "Not for something petty, not a stupid argument or something. Serious revenge, grown-up revenge."
Interesting question. "Are you asking the teacher or the Shin'a'in?" she replied.
"Both. Either." He shook his head, clearly confused. "I don't know what I want to hear-"
"Well, the teacher would say -- 'yes, of course, revenge is wrong, doing something terrible to revenge yourself is creating a second wrong on top of the one that was done to you.' But the Shin'a'in has a different way of looking at things than the teacher who has to live in civilization." She smiled slowly. "The Shin'a'in would say that it depends on what you expect you're going to get out of the vengeance -- and it depends on what the vengeance is going to do to you."
"What I'm going to get out of it? Don't you mean, what I'm going to accomplish?" Belton looked puzzled at her wording, and she wasn't surprised. She was about to introduce him to some complicated thinking, but she thought he could grasp it.
"No, that's not what I mean. The Shin'a'in are not at all against vengeance, or against blood-feuds. In fact, I'm here now because of an oath of vengeance." She nodded at his look of surprise. "For us, the key difference is that in order to swear an oath of vengeance, or take on a blood-feud, you have to swear yourself to the Warrior-Goddess, and that means giving up everything. Family, Clan, love, marriage -- all of it."
"Why?" Belton wanted to know.
"In part, to make sure that revenge is the act of last resort-that it is kept for very specific purposes." She wound a strand of hair around one finger. "We don't allow people to declare blood-feuds just because they can't get along with another person in their Clan, and we don't let Clan declare blood-feud with Clan. Very far back in the past, our people separated into two groups, one of whom became the Shin'a'in, because of a difference of opinion. That separation came out all right, but it isn't something we want to happen again." How much to tell him? I can't give him the whole history of the Clans in one night! But the boy did look intent on her words, so she continued. "That's why someone who needs revenge that badly gives up everything, and becomes an instrument of the Shin'a'in as a whole. The Shin'a'in take revenge very seriously, and only someone who is acting for the People of the Plains rather than himself is permitted to take it. We believe that if you aren't serious enough about revenge to be willing to give up everything in order to have it, then you aren't going after revenge for the right reasons."
Belton chewed on his lower lip for a long time before answering her. "What are the right reasons?"
"I can't give you all of them, but I can tell you mine -- and as to how I know they were right, well, the Goddess accepted my oath, so they must have been." She took a sip of her warm tea and let the taste of honey and flowers linger on her tongue for a moment. He continued to watch her face intently. "Bandits had slaughtered my entire Clan. I wanted to wipe them off the face of the earth -- but not because killing them would bring any of my people back. Yes, I wanted to kill them because they had killed everyone I cared about. But I also knew that if they got away with the murders, others would try to emulate them -- and the People could not have that happen."
"What if you'd gotten killed yourself?" Belton asked.
"If I had failed, there would have been other Shin'a'in who would have come after me who would have succeeded where I failed. I just had the right to try to do the job first." She nodded as his eyes widened. "I also knew that they had probably murdered plenty of other people in the past, and would do so again in the future -- and there is one sure thing you can say about destroying a murderer, and that's that he won't be around to kill again."
Belton pondered her words silently; she waited for him to say something, but he remained silent.
"However--" she held up a cautionary finger "--revenge for an insult, for a purely personal wrong -- that's no reason for revenge. And I'll tell you why; you don't teach a piece of scum a lesson by serving out to him what he served out to you, all you do is give him a reason to heap your plate with more of the same. Slime doesn't learn lessons; it just stays slime." She took a long, deep breath. "Don't fool yourself, don't try to tell yourself you intend to teach your enemy a lesson. You won't. Revenge on slime is not education, it's got to be eradication -- or at the very least it has to accomplish the task of making absolutely sure that the slime can't ever commit that particular act again."
The boy blinked at her, as if he couldn't quite believe that she had said that. "But what about -- what if someone arranged -- hired someone else to do his dirty work for him?"
"When someone is low enough scum to buy a bully-boy to hurt or kill someone you care about, just who do you intend to get your revenge on?" she asked bluntly. "The bully-boy? Granted, that piece of garbage won't be taking on any more jobs, at least for a while, but the perpetrator won't care, he'll just hire someone new."
Belton chewed his lip a little more. "No, no -- it would have to be the one who did the hiring."
"So, you want to take on the scum himself?" She saw a fire leap into Belton's eyes and again raised a cautionary finger. "Think it through. Can you prove that he bought the bully? Obviously you can't, or you or your family would have brought him up before the King's Justice on charges."
The boy's face tightened up. "You're right," he said harshly. "We can't prove anything."
"I'm going to be saying this a great deal, Belton -- think this through, every aspect of it. What if he really didn't do anything? What if you're wrong?"
"But-" Belton began.
She shushed him. "Humor me. What if you're wrong? You try to hurt an innocent man. Well, maybe not innocent, but certainly one who isn't guilty of that particular crime. I don't know what your religion says about that, but I know that the King's Justice will certainly catch up with you, and their punishment here on earth is bad enough."