Once they were all on and their belongings tied down, Eiah took a pose
that indicated their readiness. The second called out, his voice almost
a song. The riverfront clerk called back. Ropes were untied, the evil
chuffing from the wheel grew louder, and the deep, violent slap of wood
against water jerked them away from the bank and into the river. It
seemed as if a breeze had come up, though it was likely only the speed
of the boat. Eiah sat beside Maati, taking his wrists.
"We told them the child was the get of one of the utkhaiem on a
Westlands girl. Vanjit is the nurse."
Maati nodded. It was as good a lie as any. At the bow, Vanjit looked
back at the sound of her name. Her eyes were clear, but something in the
set of her face made him think she'd been crying. Eiah frowned, pinching
his fingertips until they went white, then waiting for the blood to pour
back into them.
"She asked about your tablets," he said. "You have been busy with them.
The binding?"
"I'm trying to cut deep enough that I can read it with my fingers," Eiah
said quietly. "It's a better exercise than I'd expected. I think I've
seen some ways to improve the grammar itself. It will mean another
draft, but ... How are you feeling?"
"What? Ah, fine. I feel fine."
"Tired?"
"Of course I'm tired. I'm old and I've been on the road too long and ..."
And I have loosed a mad poet on the world, he thought. All the cruelties
and tricks of the Dai-kvo, all the pain and loss that I suffered to be a
poet was justified. If it kept people like Vanjit from the power of the
andat, it was all justified. And I have ignored it.
As if reading the words in his eyes, Eiah glanced over her shoulder at
Vanjit. The sun was shining off the water, surrounding the dark, huddled
girl with a brilliant halo of gold and white. When Maati looked away,
the image had scarred his eyes. It lay over everything else he saw,
black where it had been light, and a pale shape the color of mourning
robes where Vanjit had been.
"I'm making your tea," Eiah said, her voice grim. "Stay here and rest."
"Eiah-kya? We ... we have to kill her," Maati said.
Eiah turned to him, her expression empty. He gestured to Vanjit's back.
His hand trembled.
"Before your binding," he said, "we should be sure that it's safe for
you. Or, that is, as safe as we can make it. You ... you understand."
Eiah sighed. When she spoke again, her voice was distant and reflective.
"I knew a physician in Lachi. She told me about being in a low town when
one of the men caught blood fever. He was a good person. Wellliked. This
was a long time ago, so he had children. He'd gone out hunting and come
back ill. She had them smother him and burn the body. His children
stayed in their house and screamed the whole time they did it. She
didn't sleep well for years afterward."
Her eyes were focused on nothing, her jaw forward as if she was facing
someone down. Man or god or fate.
"You're saying it's not her fault," Maati said softly, careful not to
speak Vanjit's name. "She was a little girl who had her family
slaughtered before her. She was a lost woman who wanted a child and
could never have one. What's wrong with her mind was done to her."
Eiah took a pose that disagreed.
"I'm saying no matter how little my physician friend slept, she saved
those children's lives," Eiah said. "There are some herbs. When we stop
for the night, I can gather them. I'll see it's done."
"No. No, I'll do the thing. If it's anyone, it should-"
"It will have to be quick," Eiah said. "She mustn't know it's coming.
You can't do that."
Maati took a pose that challenged her, and Eiah folded his hands gently
closed.
"Because you still want to save her," she said. Something about
weariness and determination made her look like her father.
Otah, who had killed a poet once too.
23
Otah rose in the mornings with stiff, aching joints and a pain in his
side that would not fade. The steamcarts allowed each of them the chance
to sleep for a hand or two in the late mornings or just after the midday
meal. Without the rest, Otah knew he wouldn't have been able to keep
pace with the others.
The courier found them on the road. His outer robe was the colors of
House Siyanti and mud-spattered to the waist. His mount cantered
alongside the carts now, cooling down from the morning's travel as its
rider waited for replies. The man's satchel held a dozen letters at
least, but only one had occasioned his speed. It was written on paper
the color of cream, sewn with black thread, and the imprint in the wax
belonged to Balasar Gice. Otah sat in his saddle, afraid to open it and
afraid not to.
The thread ripped easily and the pages unfolded. Otah skimmed the letter
from beginning to end, then began again, reading more slowly, letting
the full import of the words wash over him. He folded the letter and
slipped it into his sleeve, his heart heavy.
Danat drew closer, his hands in a pose that both called for inclusion
and offered sympathy. The boy might not know what had happened, but he'd
drawn the fact that it wasn't good.
"Chaburi-Tan," Otah said, beginning with the least of the day's losses.
"It's gone. Sacked. Burned. We don't know whether the mercenaries turned
sides or simply wouldn't protect it, but it comes to the same thing. The
pirates attacked the city, took what they could, and set the rest alight."
"And the fleet?"
Otah looked at the roadside. Sun had melted the snow as far as its light
could reach, but the shadows were still pale. Otah had known Sinja
Ajutani for more years than not. The dry humor, the casual disrespect of
all things pompous or self-certain, the knife-sharp and unsentimental
analysis of any issue. When Kiyan died, they had been the only two men
in the world who truly understood what had been lost.
Now, only Otah knew.
"What ships remain have been set to guard the seafront at Saraykeht," he
said when he could speak again. "The thought is that winter will protect
Yalakeht and Amnat-Tan. When the thaw comes in spring, we may have to
revisit the plan."
"Are you all right, Papa-kya?"
"I'll be fine," Otah said, then he raised his hand and called the
courier close. "Tell them I read it. Tell them I understood."
The courier made his obeisance, turned his mount, and rode away. Otah
let himself sit with his grief. The other letters for him could wait.
They had come from his Master of Tides, and from others he'd named to
watch the Empire crumble in his absence. Two had been for Ana Dasin, and
he assumed they were from her parents. The letters had made their way up
from Saraykeht and then along the low roads, tracking Otah and his party
for days. And each day had marked the ending of lives, in Galt
especially, but everywhere.
He had known that Sinja might die. He'd sent the fleet out knowing it
might happen, and Sinja had gone without any illusions of safety. If it
hadn't been this and now, it would have been something else at some
other time. Every man and woman died, in time.
And in truth, death wasn't the curse he'd set out to break. All his work
and sacrifice had been only so that they could balance the constant
withering of age with some measure of renewal. He thought of his own
children: Eiah, Danat, and even long-dead Nayiit. They had each of them
been wagers he'd placed against a cruel world. A child comes into the
world, and its father holds it close and thinks, If all goes as it
should, I will die first. This one, I can love and never mourn for. That
was all he wanted to leave for Danat and Eiah. The chance of knowing a
love that they would never be called to bury. It was the world as it was
intended to be.
He didn't notice Idaan riding close to him until she spoke. Her voice
was gruff, but he imagined he could hear some offer of comfort in it.
"It's past time to shift. Crawl up on that cart and rest awhile. You've
been riding that thing for five hands together."
"Have I?" Otah said. "I didn't notice."
"I know. It's why I came," she said. After a moment's pause, she added,
"Danat told us what happened."
Otah took a pose that acknowledged having heard her, but nothing more
than that. There wasn't anything more that could be meaningfully said.
Idaan respected it and let him turn his horse aside and shift to the
steamcart where Ana Dasin and Ashti Beg sat, their sightless eyes fixed
on nothing. Otah sat on the wide boards not far from them, but not so
near that their conversation would include him. Ana laughed at something
Ashti Beg had said. The older woman looked vaguely pleased. Otah lay
back, his closed eyes flooded with the red of sun and blood. He willed
himself to sleep, certain that it would elude him.
He woke when the cart jerked to a halt. He sat up, half-thoughts of
snapped axles and broken wheels forming and falling apart like mist in a
high wind. When he was awake enough to make sense of the world, he saw
that the sun had sunk almost to the treetops, and the cart was sitting
in the yard of a wayhouse. The memory of the morning's foul message
flooded back into him, but not so deeply as before. It would rise and
fall, he knew. He would be jarred by the loss of his friend again and
again and again, but less and less and less. It said something he didn't
want to know that mourning had become so familiar. He plucked his
traveling robes into their proper drape and lowered himself to the ground.
The one thing he truly didn't regret about the journey was that his
servants were all in Utani or Saraykeht. Walking into the low, warm main
room of the wayhouse without being surrounded by men and women wanting
to change his robes or powder his feet was a small pleasure. He tried to
savor it.
"Half a day east of here," a young man in a leather apron was saying,
but he was pointing north. "Must have been five or six days ago. Raised
ten kinds of trouble, then left in the middle of the night. So far as I
can see, no one's talked about anything else since."
"Did you see them?" Danat asked. His voice had an edge, but Otah
couldn't see his face to know if it was excitement or anger.
"Not myself, no," the young man said. "But it's the ones you asked
after. An old man with a physician, and nothing but women traveling with
him. There was even some talk he was trying to start a comfort house or
something of that kind, but that was before the baby."
"Baby?" The voice was Ana's.
"Yes. Little one, not more than eight months old from the size. So I'm
told. I didn't see him either, but they all saw him over at Chayiit's
place. Walked right out in the middle of the main room."
Otah slipped down at a bench by the fire grate. The fire was small but
warm. He hadn't realized how cold he'd gotten.
"Those are the people," Danat said.
"Five, six days then," the young man said with a pleased nod. He glanced
over at Otah, their eyes meeting briefly. The other man paled as Otah
took a pose of casual greeting and then turned his attention back to the
flames. The conversation behind him grew softer and ended. Danat came to
sit at his side. Through the open door, the yard fell into evening as
the armsmen finished unloading and leading away their horses.
"We've gotten closer," Danat said. "If they keep traveling as slowly as
they have up to now, we'll overtake them well before Utani."
Otah grunted. There was a deep thump from overhead and voices lifted in
annoyance. Danat's fingers laced his knee.
"I told Balasar that I would beg," Otah said. "I told him that I would
bend myself before this new poet and beg if it meant restoring him and
Galt."
"And now?"
"I don't believe I can. And more than that, having heard Ashti Beg talk
about this Vanjit, it's hard work thinking it would help."
"Maati, perhaps. He holds some sway with her."
"But what can I say that would move him?" Otah asked, his voice thick.
"We were friends once, and then enemies, and friends again, but I'm not
sure we know each other now. The more I look at it, the more I'm tempted
to set some sort of trap, capture the new poet, and give her over to
blind torturers until she makes the world what it should be."