Seasons of War (85 page)

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Authors: Daniel Abraham

BOOK: Seasons of War
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A fire burned in the grate, protecting the air from even the slightest chill and tainting it with tendrils of pine smoke. The summer cities had always been overly vigilant of cold. Thin blood. Everything south of Udun was plagued by thinness of the blood. Otah came from the winter cities, and he threw open the shutters, letting in what cold there was. He didn’t notice that Danat was there until the boy spoke.
‘Father.’
Otah turned. Danat stood in the doorway that led to the inner chambers. He wore the same robe that he had before, but the cloth sagged like an unmade bed. Danat’s eyes were rimmed with red.
‘Danat-kya,’ Otah said. ‘What’s happened?’
‘I’ve done as you said. Shija and I went to the rose pavilion. Just the two of us. I . . . spoke with her. I broke things off.’
‘Ah,’ Otah said. He walked back from the open windows and sat on a couch before the fire. Danat came forward, his eyes glittering with unfallen tears.
‘This is my fault, Papa-kya. In a different world, I might have . . . I have been careless with her. I’ve
hurt
her.’
Was I ever as young as this? Otah thought, and immediately pressed it away. Even if the question was fair, it was unkind. He held out his hand, and his son - his tall, thick-shouldered son - sat beside him, curled into Otah’s shoulder the way he had as a boy. Danat sobbed once.
‘I only . . . I know you and Issandra-cha were relying on me and . . .’
Otah hushed the boy.
‘You’ve taken a willing girl to bed,’ Otah said. ‘You aren’t who she hoped you might be, and so she’s disappointed. Yes?’
Danat nodded.
‘There are worse things.’ Otah saw again the darkness of Idaan’s eyes. He was sending the woman behind those eyes after his Eiah, his little girl. The ghost of nausea touched him and he stroked Danat’s hair. ‘People have done worse.’
14
M
aati frowned at the papers before him. A small fire crackled in the brazier on his desk, and he was more than half-tempted to drop the pages onto the flames. Eiah, sitting across from him, looked no more pleased.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘We’re moving backward.’
‘What’s happened?’ Eiah asked, though she knew as well as he did.
The few weeks that had passed since Vanjit’s successful binding had only grown more difficult. To start, the other students excepting Eiah were more distracted. The mewling and cries of the andat disrupted any conversation. Its awkward crawling seemed capable of entrancing them for a full morning. Perhaps he had known too much of the andat, but he held the growing impression that it was perfectly aware of the effect its toothless smile could have. And that it was especially cultivating the admiration of Ashti Beg.
Added to that, Vanjit herself had come almost disconnected from the rest. She would sit for whole days, the andat in her lap or at her breast, staring at water or empty air. Maati had some sympathy for that. She had shown him the most compelling of the wonders her new powers had uncovered, and he had been as delighted as she was. But her little raptures meant that she wasn’t engaged in the work at hand: Eiah, and the binding of Wounded.
‘There is something we can do,’ Eiah said. ‘If we set the classes in the mornings, just after the first meal, we won’t have had a full day behind us. We could come at it fresh each time.’
Maati nodded more to show he’d heard her than from any real agreement. His fingertips traced the lines of the binding again, tapping the page each time some little infelicity struck him. He had seen bindings falter this way before. In those first years when Maati had been a new poet, the Dai-kvo had spoken of the dangers of muddying thoughts by too much work. One sure way to fail was to build something sufficient and then not stop. With every small improvement, the larger structure became less tenable, until eventually the thing collapsed under the weight of too much history.
He wondered if they had gone too far, corrected one too many things which were not truly problems so much as differences of taste.
Eiah took a pose that challenged him. He looked at her directly for perhaps the first time since she’d come to his study.
‘You think I’m wrong,’ she said. ‘You can say it. I’ve heard worse.’
It took Maati the space of several heartbeats to recall what her proposal had been.
‘I think it can’t hurt. But I also think it isn’t our essential problem. We were all quite capable of designing Clarity-of-Sight with meetings in the evening. This’ - he rattled the papers in his hand - ‘is something different. Half-measures won’t suffice.’
‘What then?’ she said.
He put the papers down.
‘We stop,’ he said. ‘For a few days, we don’t touch it at all. Instead we can send someone to a low town for meat and candles, or clear the gardens. Anything.’
‘Do we have time for that?’ Eiah asked. ‘Anything could have happened. My brother may be married. His wife may be carrying a child. All of Galt may be loading their daughters in ships, and the men of the cities may be scuttling off to Kirinton and Acton and Marsh. We are out here where there’s no one to talk to, no couriers on the roads, and I know it feels that time has stopped. It hasn’t. We’ve been weeks at this. Months. We can’t spend time we don’t have.’
‘You’d recommend what, then? Move faster than we can move? Think more clearly than we can think? It isn’t as if we can sit down with a serious expression and demand that the work be better than it is. Have you never seen a man ill with something that needed quiet and time? This is no different.’
‘I’ve also watched ill men die,’ Eiah said. ‘Time passes, and once you’ve waited too long for something, there’s no getting it back.’
Her mouth bent in a deep frown. There were dark circles under her eyes. She bit her lower lip and shook her head as if conducting some conversation within her mind and disagreeing with herself. The coal burning in the brazier settled and gave off a dozen small sparks as bright as fireflies. One landed on the paper, already cold and gray. Ash.
‘You’re reconsidering,’ Maati said.
‘No. I’m not. We can’t tell my father,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’
‘We could send to others, then,’ Maati said. ‘There are high families in every city that would rise up against Otah’s every plan if they knew the andat were back in the world. You’ve lived your whole life in the courts. Two or three people whose discretion you trust would be all it took. A rumor spoken in the right ears. We needn’t even say where we are or what’s been bound.’
Eiah combed her fingers through her hair. Every breath that she didn’t answer, Maati felt his hopes rise. She would, if he only gave her a little more time and silence to convince herself. She would announce their success, and everyone in the cities of the Khaiem would know that Maati Vaupathai had remained true to them. He had never given up, never turned away.
‘It would mean going to a city,’ Eiah said. ‘I can’t send half-a-dozen ciphered letters under my own seal out from a low town without every courier in the south finding out where we are.’
‘Then Pathai,’ Maati said, his hands opening. ‘We need to step back from the binding. The letters will win us time to make things right.’
Eiah turned, looking out the window. In the courtyard, the maple trees were losing their leaves. A storm, a strong wind, and the branches would be bare. A sparrow, brown and gray, hopped from one twig to another. Maati could see the fine markings on its wings, the blackness of its eyes. It had been years since sparrows had been more than dull smears. He glanced at Eiah, surprised to see the tears on her cheek.
His hand touched her shoulder. She didn’t look back, but he felt her lean into him a degree.
‘I don’t know,’ she said as if to the sparrow, the trees, the thousand fallen leaves. ‘I don’t know why it should matter. It’s no secret what he’s done or what I think of it. I don’t have any doubts that what we’re doing is the right choice.’
‘And yet,’ Maati said.
‘And yet,’ she agreed. ‘My father will be disappointed in me. I would have thought I was old enough that his opinion wouldn’t matter.’
He searched for a response - something gentle and kind and that would strengthen her resolve. Before he found the words, he felt her tense. He took back his hand, adopting a querying pose.
‘I thought I heard something,’ she said. ‘Someone was yelling.’
A long, high shriek rang in the air. It was a woman’s voice, but he couldn’t guess whose. Eiah leaped from her stool and vanished into the dark hallways before Maati recovered himself. He followed, his heart pounding, his breath short. The shrieking didn’t stop, and as he came nearer the kitchen, he heard other sounds - clattering, banging, high voices urging calm or making demands that he couldn’t decipher, the andat’s infantile wail. And then Eiah’s commanding voice, with the single word
stop
.
He rounded the last corner, his fist pressed to his chest, his heart hammering. The cooking areas were raw chaos come to earth. An earthenware jar of wheat flour had been overturned and cracked. The thin stone block Irit used for chopping plants lay in shards on the floor. Ashti Beg stood in the middle of the room, a knife in her hand, her chin held high like a statue of abstract vengeance. In the corner, Vanjit held the still-mewling andat close to her breast. Large Kae, Small Kae, and Irit were all cowering against the walls, their eyes wide and mouths hanging open. Eiah’s expression was calm and commanding at the same time, like a mother calling back her children from a cliff edge.
‘It’s done, Ashti-cha,’ Eiah said, walking slowly toward the woman. ‘I’ll have the knife.’
‘Not until I find that bitch and put it in her heart,’ Ashti Beg spat, turning toward Eiah’s voice. Maati saw for the first time that the woman’s eyes were as gray as storm clouds.
‘I’ll have the knife,’ Eiah said again. ‘Or I will beat you down and take it. You know you’re more likely to hurt the others than Vanjit.’
The andat whimpered and Ashti Beg whirled toward it. Eiah stepped forward smoothly, took Ashti Beg’s elbow and wrist in her hands, and twisted. Ashti Beg yelped, the blade clattering to the floor.
‘What . . .’ Maati gasped. ‘What is happening?’
Four voices answered at once, words tripping over each other. Only Eiah and Vanjit remained silent, the two poets considering each other silently in the center of the storm. Maati raised his hands in a pose that commanded silence, and all of them stopped except Ashti Beg.
‘. . . power over us. It isn’t right, it isn’t fair, and I will not simper and smile and lick her ass because she happened to be the one to go first!’
‘Enough!’ Maati said. ‘Enough, all of you. Gods.
Gods
. Vanjit. Come with me.’
The girl looked over as if noticing him for the first time. The rage in her expression faltered. Her hands were shaking. Eiah stepped forward, keeping herself between Ashti Beg and her prey as Vanjit walked across the room.
‘Eiah, see to Ashti-cha,’ Maati said, taking Vanjit’s wrist. ‘The rest of you, clean this mess. I’d rather not eat food prepared in a child’s playpen.’
He turned away, pulling Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight after him. The andat was silent now. Maati crossed the hallway and started down a flight of stone stairs that led to the sleeping rooms for the younger cohorts. The voices of the others rose behind them and faded. He wasn’t certain where he was taking her until he reached the branching hall that led to the slate-paved rooms where the teachers had once disciplined boys with the cutting slash of a lacquered rod. He stopped in the hallway instead, putting the reflexive impulse to violence aside. Vanjit bowed her head.
‘I would like an explanation of that,’ he said, his voice shaking with anger.
‘It was Ashti Beg,’ Vanjit said. ‘She can’t contain her jealousy any longer, Maati-kvo. I have tried to give her the time and consideration, but she won’t understand. I am a poet now. I have an andat to care for. I can’t be expected to work and toil like a servant.’
The andat twisted in her grasp, looking up at Maati with tears in its black eyes. The tiny, toothless mouth gaped in what would have been distress if it had been a baby.
‘Tell me,’ Maati said. ‘Tell me what happened.’
‘Ashti Beg said that I had to clean the pots from breakfast. Irit offered to, but Ashti wouldn’t even let her finish her sentences. I explained that I couldn’t. I was very calm. I am patient with her, Maati-kvo. I’m always very patient.’
‘What happened?’ Maati insisted.
‘She tried to take him,’ Vanjit said. Her voice had changed. The pleading tone was gone. Her words could have been shaved from ice. ‘She said that she could look after him as well as anyone, and that I was more than welcome to have him back once the kitchen had been cleaned.’
Maati closed his eyes.
‘She put her
hands
on him,’ Vanjit said. In her voice, it sounded like a violation. Perhaps it was.
‘And what did you do,’ Maati asked, though he knew the answer.
‘What you told me,’ Vanjit said. ‘What you said about Wounded.’

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