Tahi-kvo’s face loomed up in his imagination, and with it, the sense of the school - its cold, bruising days and nights, the emptiness and the cruelty and the sense he had had, however briefly, of belonging. The anger rose in him again, as if it had only been banked all these years. Someone would have to go to the Dai-kvo, and Otah was ready to see the man again.
‘Bring it here then,’ he said. ‘To Liat’s cell. There are always ships leaving for Yalakeht this time of year. I’ll find a berth on one.’
‘You’re not going,’ Liat said. ‘You can’t. Your indenture . . .’
Otah opened the door and moved to one side. He walked Maati out to the passage with a pose that was both a thanks and a promise.
‘You’re sure of this?’ Maati asked.
Otah nodded, then turned away again. When they were alone, the cell fell back into twilight.
‘You can’t go,’ Liat said. ‘I need you to stay. I need someone . . . someone by my side. What happened to Maj, what happened to her baby . . . it was my fault. I let that happen.’
He moved to her, sitting on her desk, stroking her silk-smooth cheek with his knuckles. She leaned into him, taking his hand in both of hers and pressing it to her chest.
‘I have to. Not just for this. My past is up there. It’s the right thing.’
‘She hasn’t stopped crying. She sleeps and she wakes up crying. I went to see her when the utkhaiem released me. She was the first person I went to see. And when she looks at me, and I remember what she was like before . . . I thought she was callous. I thought she didn’t care. I didn’t see it.’
Otah slid down, kneeling on the floor, and put his arms around her.
‘The reason you’re going,’ Liat whispered. ‘It isn’t because of me, is it? It isn’t to get away from me?’
Otah sat, her head cradled against his shoulder. He could feel his mind working just below the level of thought - what he would need to do, the steps he would have to take. He stroked her hair, smooth as water.
‘Of course not, love,’ he said.
‘Because you’ll be a great man one day. I can tell. And I’m just an idiot girl who can’t keep monsters like Oshai from . . . Gods, ’Tani, I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it.’
She wept, the sobs shaking her as he cooed and rocked her gently. He rested his chin on her bent head, curling her into him. She smelled of musk and tears. He held her until the sobbing quieted, until his arms ached. Her head lay heavy against him and her breath was almost slow as sleep.
‘You’re exhausted, love,’ he said. ‘Come to bed. You need sleep.’
‘No,’ she said, rousing. ‘No, stay with me. You can’t go now.’
Gently, he lifted her and carried her to her cot. He sat beside her, her hand wrapping his like vine on brick.
‘Three weeks to Yalakeht,’ he said. ‘Then maybe two weeks upriver and a day or two on foot. Less than that coming back, since the river trip will be going with the water on the way down. I’ll be back before winter, love.’
In the light pressing in at the shutters and the door, he could see her eyes, bleary with grief and exhaustion, seeking his. Her face was unlined, relaxed, halfway asleep already.
‘You’re excited to go,’ she said. ‘You want to.’
And, of course, that was the truth. Otah pressed his palm to her lips, closing them. To her eyes. This wasn’t a conversation he was ready to have. Or perhaps only not with her.
He kissed her forehead and waited until she was asleep before he quietly opened her door and stepped out into the light.
11
A mat woke in the darkness, her breath fast, her heart pounding. In her dream, Ovi Niit had been kicking in her door, and even when she’d pulled herself up from sleep’s dark waters, it took some time for her to feel certain that the booming reports from the dream hadn’t been real. Slowly, the panic waned, and she lay back. Above her, the netting glowed like new copper in the light from the night candle and then slowly became brighter and paler as the cool blue light of dawn crept in through the opened windows. The shutters shifted in the sea-scented breeze.
Her desk was piled with papers. Ink bricks hollowed from use stacked one on another at the head of the stairs, waiting to be carried away. The affairs of the house had fallen into near chaos while she was away. She had spent long nights looking over lists and ledgers and telling herself that she cared for them all the way she once had. That House Wilsin and her work for it had not been poisoned.
Amat sighed, sat up, and pushed the netting aside. Her world since her resurrection had been much the same - nightmares until dawn, gray and empty work and messages and meetings until sunset. At one point, seeing the strain on her face at the end of the day, Marchat had offered to send her away for a week to Chaburi-tan once the season was over. The house could cover the expenses, he said. And she let herself imagine that time - away from Saraykeht and the seafront and her desk and the soft quarter - though the fantasy was washed by melancholy. It could never actually happen, but it would have been nice.
Instead, Amat Kyaan rose from her bed, pulled on clean robes, and walked out, leaning on her cane, to the corner stall where a girl from the low towns sold fresh berries wrapped in sweet frybread. It was good enough as a meal to see her through to midday. She ate it as she walked back to her apartments, trying to order her day in her mind, but finding it hard to concentrate on shifting meetings and duties back and forth. Simply leaving her mind blank and empty was so much easier.
Her time since the sad trade and her banishment had felt like being ill. She’d moved through her days without feeling them, unable to concentrate, uninterested in her work. Something had broken in her, and pretending it back to fixed wasn’t working. She’d half known it wouldn’t, and her mind had made plans for her almost without her knowing it.
The man waiting at her door was wearing robes of yellow and silver - the colors of House Tiyan. He was young - sixteen, perhaps seventeen summers. Liat’s age. An apprentice, then, but the apprentice of someone high in House Tiyan. There was only one errand that could mean. Amat shifted her schedule in her mind and popped the last of the berry-soaked frybread into her mouth. The young man, seeing her, fell into a pose of greeting appropriate for an honored elder. Amat responded.
‘Kyaan-cha,’ the boy said, ‘I come on behalf of Annan Tiyan . . .’
‘Of course you do,’ she said, opening her door. ‘Come inside. You have the listings?’
He hesitated behind her for only a moment. Amat went slowly up the stairs. Her hip was much better since she’d returned to her apartments with her stinging ointment and her own bed. She paused at her basin, washing the red stains from her food off her fingertips before she began handling papers. When she reached her desk, she turned and sat. The boy stood before her. He’d taken the paper from his sleeve - the one she’d sent to his master. She held out her hand, and he gave it to her.
The receipt was signed. Amat smiled and tucked the paper into her own sleeve. It would go with her papers later. The papers she was going to take with her, not the ones for House Wilsin. The box was on the desk under a pile of contracts. Amat shifted it out, into her lap. Dark wood banded by iron, and heavy with jewels and lengths of silver. She handed it to the boy.
‘My master . . .’ the boy began. ‘That is, Amat Kyaan-cha, I was wondering if . . .’
‘Annan wants to know why I’m having him hold the package,’ she said, ‘and he wanted you to find out without making it obvious you were asking.’
The boy blushed furiously. Amat took a pose that dismissed the issue.
‘It’s rude of him, but I’d have done the same in his place. You may tell him that I have always followed imperial form by caching such things with trusted friends. One of the people who had been doing me this favor is leaving the city, though, so it was time to find a new holder. And, of course, if he should ever care to, I would be pleased to return the favor. It’s got nothing to do with that poor island girl.’
I
t wasn’t true, of course, but it was convenient. This was the fourth such box she’d sent out to men and women in the city to whom she felt she might be able to appeal if circumstances turned against her again. The receipt was only as good as the honor of the people she stowed the boxes with. And there would be a certain amount of theft, she expected - one jewel replaced by another of less value. A few lengths of silver gone despite the locks. It wasn’t likely, though, that if she called for them, her boxes would be empty. And in an emergency, that would be very nearly all Amat cared about.
The boy took a pose of acknowledgment and retreated down the stairs. Amat understood what Saraykeht had taught her through Ovi Niit. She wouldn’t be caught without her wealth again. That it was a courtesy of the great families of the Empire before it collapsed gave her something like precedent. Annan wouldn’t believe that it was unrelated to Maj and the sad trade, but he would understand from her answer that she didn’t want him to gossip about it. That would suffice.
For the next hand and a half, she went through the contracts, making notations here and there - one copy for herself, one for the house. So late in the season, there were few changes to be made in the wording. But each contract carried with it two or three letters outlining the completion or modifications of terms and definitions, and these were the sort of things that would sink a trading house if they weren’t watched. She went through the motions, checking the translations of the letters in Galtic and the Khaiate, noting discrepancies, or places where a word might have more than one meaning. It was what she’d done for years, and she did it now mechanically and without joy.
When she reached the last one, she checked that the inks were dry, rolled the different documents in tubes tied with cloth ribbons, and packed them into a light satchel - there were too many to fit in her sleeves. She took her cane, then, and walked out into the city, heading north to the Wilsin compound. Away from the soft quarter.
The agents of the utkhaiem were present when she arrived at the wide courtyard of the house. Servants in fine silks lounged at the edge of the fountain, talking among themselves and looking out past the statue of the Galtic Tree to the street. She hesitated when she saw them, fear pricking at her for no reason she could say. She pushed it aside the way she pushed all her feelings aside these recent days, and strode past them toward Marchat Wilsin’s meeting room.
Epani Doru, Wilsin-cha’s rat-faced, obsequious master of house, sat before the wide wooden doors of the meeting room. When she came close, he rose, taking a pose of welcome just respectful enough to pretend he honored her position.
‘I’ve some issues I’d like Wilsin-cha to see,’ she said, taking an answering pose.
‘He’s meeting with men from the court,’ Epani said, his voice an apology.
Amat glanced at the closed doors and sighed. She took a pose that asked for a duration. Epani answered vaguely, but with a sense that she would be lucky to see her employer’s face before sundown.
‘It can wait, then,’ Amat said. ‘It’s about the sad trade? Is that what they’re picking at him for?’
‘I assume so, Amat-cha,’ Epani said. ‘I understand from the servants that the Khai wants the whole thing addressed and forgotten as quickly as possible. There have been requests to lower tariffs.’
Amat clucked and shook her head.
‘Sour trade, this whole issue,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry Wilsin-cha ever got involved in it.’
Epani took a pose of agreement and mourning, but Amat thought for a moment there was something in the man’s expression. He knew, perhaps. Epani Doru might have been someone who Marchat took into his confidence the way he hadn’t taken her. An accomplice to the act. Amat noted her suspicion, tucked it away like a paper into a sleeve, and took a pose of query.
‘Liat?’
‘In the workrooms, I think,’ Epani said. ‘The utkhaiem didn’t ask to speak with her.’
Amat didn’t reply. The workrooms of the compound were a bad place for someone of Liat’s rank to be. Preparing packets for the archives, copying documents, checking numbers - all the work done at the low slate tables was better suited for a new clerk, someone who had recently come to the house. Amat walked back to the stifling, still air and the smell of cheap lamp oil.
Liat sat at a table by herself, hunched over. Amat paused, considering the girl. The too-round face had misplaced its youth; Amat could see in that moment what Liat would be when her beauty failed her. A woman, then, and not a lovely one. A dreadful weight of sympathy descended on Amat Kyaan, and she stepped forward.
‘Amat-cha,’ Liat said when she looked up. She took a pose of apology. ‘I didn’t know you had need of me. I would have—’
‘I didn’t know it either,’ Amat said. ‘No fault of yours. Now, what are you working on?’
‘Shipments from the Westlands. I was just copying the records for the archive.’
Amat considered the pages. Liat’s handwriting was clean, legible. Amat remembered days in close heat looking over numbers much like these. She felt her smile tighten.
‘Wilsin-cha set you to this?’ Amat asked.
‘No. No one did. Only I ran out of work, and I wanted to be useful. I’m . . . I don’t like being idle these days. It just feels . . .’
‘Don’t carry it,’ Amat said, still pretending to look at the written numbers. ‘It isn’t yours.’
Liat took a questioning pose. Amat handed her back the pages.
‘It’s nothing you did wrong,’ Amat said.
‘You’re kind.’
‘No. Not really. There was nothing you could have done to prevent this, Liat. You were tricked. The girl was tricked. The poet and the Khai.’
‘Wilsin-cha was tricked,’ Liat said, adding to the list.
Or trapped, Amat thought, but said nothing. Liat rallied herself to smile and took a pose of gratitude.
‘It helps to hear someone say it,’ the girl said. ‘Itani does when he’s here, but I can’t always believe him. But with him going . . .’
‘Going?’
‘North,’ Liat said, startling as if she’d said more than she’d meant. ‘He’s going north to see his sister. And . . . and I already miss him.’
‘Of course you do. He’s your heartmate, after all,’ Amat said, teasing gently, but the weariness and dread in Liat’s gaze deepened. Amat took a deep breath and put a hand on Liat’s shoulder.
‘Come with me,’ Amat said. ‘I have some things I need of you. But someplace cooler, eh?’
Amat led her to a meeting room on the north side of the compound where the windows were in shade and laid the tasks before her. She’d meant to give Liat as little as she could, but seeing her now, she added three or four small things that she’d intended to let rest. Liat needed something now. Work was thin comfort, but it was what she had to offer. Liat listened closely, ferociously.
Amat reluctantly ended her list.
‘And before that, I need you to take me to the woman,’ she said.
Liat froze, then took a pose of acknowledgment.
‘I need to speak with her,’ Amat said, knowing as she said the words precisely how inadequate they were. For a moment, she was tempted to tell the full story, to lighten Liat’s burden by whatever measure the truth could manage. But she swallowed it. She put compassion aside for the moment. Along with fear and anger and sorrow.
Liat led her to a private room in the back, not far from Marchat Wilsin’s own. Amat knew the place. The delicate inlaid wood of the floor, the Galtic tapestries, the window lattices of carved bone. It was where House Wilsin kept its most honored guests. Amat didn’t believe it was where the girl had slept before the crime. That she was here now was a sign of Marchat’s pricked conscience.
Maj lay curled on the ledge before the window. Her pale fingers rested on the lattice; the strange dirty gold of her hair spilled down across her shoulders and halfway to the floor. She looked softer. Amat stood behind her and watched the rise and fall of her breath, slow but not so slow as sleep. br />
‘I could stay, if you like,’ Liat said. ‘She can . . . I think she is better when there are people around who she knows. Familiar faces.’
‘No,’ Amat said, and the island girl shifted at the sound of her voice. The pale eyes looked over her with nothing like real interest. ‘No, Liat-kya, I think I’ve put enough on you for today. I can manage from here.’
Liat took a pose of acceptance and left, closing the door behind her. Amat pulled a chair of woven cane near the island girl and lowered herself into it. Maj watched her. When Amat was settled, the chair creaking under even her slight weight, Maj spoke.
‘You hurt her feelings,’ she said in the sibilant words of Nippu. ‘You sent her away, didn’t you?’