Blade Kin by David Farland

invisible waves of joy radiating, tangible as a lover’s cry issuing from his mouth. She knew that humans claimed not to feel kwea, but that seemed hard to understand.
    Humans claim there is no kwea only because they feel none, she thought. They are all like blind men who teach that there is no light only because they cannot see it.
    “Yes, you radiate love for me,” Fava said.
    “Yet I haven’t always loved you,” Tull said. “I loved Wisteria.”
    “Even then, your spirit radiated passion for me,” Fava countered. “Always. Even if you only felt hechazho, cattle love, for me, you always enjoyed my presence.”
    Tull shrugged as if at his wit’s end. “Who rules Bashevgo?”
    “Adjonai, Him We All Fear.” It was a question any child could answer.
    “And can you feel his kwea? Can you feel him reaching out to snatch you?”
    “The redwoods hide us,” Fava said uncertainly. She did not like thinking about Adjonai. It made perspiration rise on her forehead.
    “But the redwoods can’t always hide you, can they? The slavers find us sometimes and take us to Craal.”
    Fava trembled. She could feel the dark god beyond the mountains, searching for her, stretching his long hands across wilderness like a cloud. She choked back a sob.
    Tull stepped close and held her. “Adjonai is not really here,” Tull said. “He’s an illusion, created by your fear. He’s not real. I’ve been to Craal. The sun shines just as brightly on Denai and Bashevgo as it does here. People laugh and fall in love there. But their fear is strong. They fear the Blade Kin and the Slave Lords. They are so frightened that their feet would not carry them if they tried to run away. There is no Adjonai. He is only the sum of your fears.
    “Yet,” Tull said, “you don’t fear the Blade Kin enough. That is not your fault; it is the fault of kwea. You don’t believe they will come in force, only because they have never done it before. They are a knife that has never cut you deeply. They’ve never attacked a town this large. Yet the humans here fear such an attack.”
    Outside, the gulls wheeled over the ocean and cried. The sound came through the windows distantly, almost like the startled cries of children, and Fava could feel the blood pounding in her veins. “You are saying the humans are smarter than us. I don’t think they are smarter. They just have clever little hands. They are just lucky that their ancestors lived among the stars. Now they rot down here on the ground, just like we do.”
    “No,” Tull said. “I think that our ancestors on Earth could never have gone to the stars. We Pwi, because of kwea, because our thoughts are so strongly tied to our emotions, we always live in the past. We surround ourselves with the people we love, with the things we enjoy, and we live off the accumulated kwea. As long as we had our huts and our families and our favorite meat on the fire, we would have been overwhelmed by pleasant kwea, and we would have been content.”
    Fava looked at him, and everything he said seemed so obvious. Who could want more than that? It should be enough for anyone.
    “We cannot think like the humans do,” Tull said. “We don’t look to the same source for happiness. The humans, because they are seldom aware of kwea, they live only in the future. They look ahead and plan to be happy somewhere in the future, at some distant time, when they have accumulated all the wealth and power they think they will need. For them, a family and a hut and good food on the table is not always enough.”
    Tull squeezed her hand, and Fava looked down. Tull had huge hands, big paws like a Pwi, with robust joints on fat fingers and a thumb that was not tilted like a human’s.
    “If they can never be happy, then we should pity them,” Fava said. She suddenly realized what he was saying. “You mean to say, you are Pwi, but your heart is human? You find it hard to be happy today because you live for tomorrow?” She saw it was