‘I did,’ Amat said. ‘I came to speak with you. Not her.’
‘I’ve told everything I know. I’ve told it to a hundred people. I won’t do it again.’
‘I haven’t come to ask you anything. I’ve come to tell.’
A slow, mocking smile touched the wide, pale lips. The fair eyebrows rose.
‘Have you come to tell me how to save my child?’
‘No.’
Maj shrugged, asking with motion what else could be worth hearing.
‘Wilsin-cha is going to arrange your travel back to Nippu,’ Amat said. ‘I think it will happen within the week.’
Maj nodded. Her eyes softened, and Amat knew she was seeing herself at home, imagining the things that had happened somehow undone. It seemed almost cruel to go on.
‘I don’t want you to go,’ Amat said. ‘I want you to stay here. In Saraykeht.’
The pale eyes narrowed, and Maj lifted herself on one elbow, shifting to face Amat directly. Amat could see the distrust in her face and felt she understood it.
‘What happened to you goes deeper than it appears,’ Amat said. ‘It was an attack on my city and its trade, and not only by the andat and Oshai. It won’t be easy to show this for what it was, and if you leave . . . if you leave, I don’t think I can.’
‘What can’t you do?’
‘Prove to the Khai that there were more people involved than he knows of now.’
‘Are you being paid to do this?’
‘No.’
‘Then why?’
Amat drew in a breath, steadied herself, and met the girl’s eyes.
‘Because it’s the right thing,’ Amat said. It was the first time she’d said the words aloud, and something in her released with them. Since the day she’d left Ovi Niit, she had been two women - the overseer of House Wilsin and also the woman who knew that she would have to have this conversation. Have this conversation and then follow it with all the actions it implied. She laced her fingers around one knee and smiled, a little sadly, at the relief she felt in being only one woman again. ‘What happened was wrong. They struck at my city. Mine. And my house was part of it. Because of that, I was part of it. Doing this will gain me nothing, Maj. I will lose a great deal that I hold dear. And I will do it with you or without you.’
‘It won’t bring me back my child.’
‘No.’
‘Will it avenge him?’
‘Yes. If I succeed.’
‘What would he do, your Khai? If you won.’
‘I don’t know,’ Amat said. ‘Whatever he deems right. He might fine House Wilsin. Or he might burn it. He might exile Wilsin-cha.’
‘Or kill him?’
‘Or kill him. He might turn Seedless against House Wilsin, or the Galtic Council. Or all of Galt. I don’t know. But that’s not for me to choose. All I can do is ask for his justice, and trust that the Khai will follow the right road afterward.’
Maj turned back to the window, away from Amat. The pale fingers touched the latticework, traced the lines of it as if they were the curves of a beloved face. Amat swallowed to loosen the knot in her throat. Outside, a songbird called twice, then paused, and sang again.
‘I should go,’ Amat said.
Maj didn’t turn. Amat rose, the chair creaking and groaning. She took her cane.
‘When I call for you, will you come?’
The silence was thick. Amat’s impulse was to speak again, to make her case. To beg if she needed to, but her training from years of negotiations was to wait. The silence demanded an answer more eloquently than words could. When Maj spoke, her voice was hard.
‘I’ll come.’
Saraykeht receded. The wide mouth of the seafront thinned; wharves wide enough to hold ten men standing abreast narrowed to twigs. Otah sat at the back rail of the ship, aware of the swell and drop of the water, the rich scent of the spray, but concentrating upon the city falling away behind him. He could take it all in at once: the palaces of the Khai on the top of the northern slope grayed by distance; the tall, white warehouses with their heavy red and gray tiles near the seafront; the calm, respectable morning face of the soft quarter. Coast fishermen resting atop poles outside the city, lines cast into the surf. They passed east. The rivermouth, wide and muddy, and the cane fields. And then over the course of half a hand, the wind pressing the wide, low ship’s sails took them around a bend in the land, and Saraykeht was gone. Otah rested his chin on the oily wood of the railing.
They were all back there - Liat and Maati and Kirath and Tuui and Epani who everyone called the cicada behind his back. The streets he’d carted bales of cotton and cloth and barrels of dye through and the teahouses he’d sung and drunk in. The garden where he’d first kissed Liat and been surprised and pleased to find her kissing him back. The firekeeper, least of the utkhaiem, who’d taken copper lengths to let him and his cohort roast pigeons over his kiln. He remembered when he’d first come to it, how foreign and frightening it had been. It seemed a lifetime ago.
And before him was a deeper past. He had never been to the village of the Dai-kvo, never seen the libraries or heard the songs that were only ever sung there. It was what he might have been, what he had refused. It was what his father had hoped he would be, perhaps. How he might have returned to Machi one day and seen which of his memories were true. He hadn’t known, that day marching away from the school, that the price he’d chosen was so dear.
‘I hate this part,’ an unfamiliar voice said.
Otah looked up. The man standing beside him wore robes of deep green. A beard shot with white belied an unlined, youthful face, and the bright, black eyes seemed amused but not unfriendly.
‘What do you mean?’ Otah asked.
‘The first three or four days on shipboard,’ the man said. ‘Before your stomach gets the rhythm of it. I have these drops of sugared tar that are supposed to help, but they never seem to. It doesn’t seem to bother you, though, eh?’
‘Not particularly,’ Otah said, adopting one of his charming smiles.
‘You’re lucky. My name’s Orai Vaukheter,’ the man said. ‘Courier of House Siyanti bound at present from Chaburi-tan to Machi - longest damn trip in the cities, and timed to put me on muleback in the north just in time for the first snows. And you? I don’t think I’ve met you, and I’d have guessed I knew everyone.’
‘Itani Noyga,’ Otah said, the lie still coming naturally to his lips. ‘Going to Yalakeht to visit my sister.’
‘Ah. But from Saraykeht?’
Otah took a pose of acknowledgment.
‘Rumor has it’s difficult times there. Probably a good time to get out.’
‘Oh, I’ll be going back. It’s just to see the new baby, and then I’ll be going back to finish my indenture.’
‘And the girl?’
‘What girl?’
‘The one you were thinking about just now, before I interrupted you.’
Otah laughed and took a pose of query.
‘And how are you sure I was thinking about a girl?’
The man leaned against the railing and looked out. His smile was quick enough, but his complexion was a little green.
‘There’s a certain kind of melancholy a man gets the first time he chooses a ship over a woman. It fades with time. It never passes, but it fades.’
‘Very poetic,’ Otah said, and changed the subject. ‘You’re going to Machi?’
‘Yes. The winter cities. Funny, too. I’m looking forward to it now, because it’s all stone and doesn’t bob around like a cork in a bath. When I get there, I’ll wish I were back here where my piss won’t freeze before it hits the ground. Have you been to the north?’
‘No,’ Otah said. ‘I’ve spent most of my life in Saraykeht. What’s it like there?’
‘Cold,’ the man said. ‘Blasted cold. But it’s lovely in a stern way. The mines are how they make their trade. The mines and the metalworkers. And the stonemasons who built the place - gods, there’s not another city like Machi in
the world. The towers . . . you’ve heard about the towers?’
‘Heard them mentioned,’ Otah said.
‘I was at the top of one once. One of the great ones. It was high as a mountain. You could see for hundreds of miles. I looked down, and I’ll swear it, the birds were flying below me and I felt like a few more bricks and I’d have been able to touch clouds.’
The water lapped at the boards of the ship below them, the seagulls cried, but Otah didn’t hear them. For a moment, he was atop a tower. To his left, dawn was breaking, rose and gold and pale blue of robin’s egg. To his right, the land was still dark. And before him, snow covered mountains - dark stone showing the bones of the land. He smelled something - a perfume or a musk that made him think of women. He couldn’t say if the vision was dream or memory or something of both, but a powerful sorrow flowed through him that lingered after the images had gone.
‘It sounds beautiful,’ he said.
‘I climbed back down as fast as I could,’ the man said, and shuddered despite the heat of the day. ‘That high up, even stone sways.’
‘I’d like to go there one day.’
‘You’d fit in. You’ve a northern face.’
‘So they tell me,’ Otah said, smiling again though he felt somber. ‘I’m not sure, though. I’ve spent quite a few years in the south. I may belong there now.’
‘It’s hard,’ his companion said, taking a pose of agreement. ‘I think it’s why I keep travelling even though I’m not really suited to it. Whenever I’m in one place, I remember another. So I’ll be in Udun and thinking about a black crab stew they serve in Chaburi-Tan. Or in Saraykeht, thinking of the way the rain falls in Utani. If I could take them all - all the best parts of all the cities - and bring them to a single place, I think that would be paradise. But I can’t, so I’m doomed. When the time comes I’m too old to do this, I’ll have to settle for one place and I truly believe the thought of never seeing the others again will break me.’
For a moment, they were silent. Then the courier’s distant expression changed, and he turned to look at Otah carefully.
‘You’re an interesting one, Itani Noyga. I thought I’d come make light with a young man on what looks like his first journey, and I find myself thinking about my final one. Do you always carry that cloud with you?’
Otah grinned and took a pose of light apology, but hands and smile both wilted under the cool gaze. The canvas chuffed and a man in the back of the low, barge-built ship shouted.
‘Yes,’ he surprised himself by saying. ‘But very few people seem to notice it.’
‘So the island girl’s left,’ Amat said. ‘What does it matter? You were about to send her away.’
Marchat Wilsin fidgeted, sending little waves across the bath to rebound against the tiles. Amat sipped her tea and feigned disinterest.
‘We were sending her home. It was arranged. Why would she go?’ he asked, as much to the water or himself as to her. Amat put her bowl of tea down in the floating tray and took a pose of query that was by its context a sarcasm.
‘Let me see, Wilsin-cha. A young girl who has been deceived, used, humiliated. A girl who believed the stories she’d been told about perfect love and a powerful lover and was taken instead to a slaughterhouse for her own blood. Now why wouldn’t she want to go back to the people she’d left? I’m sure they wouldn’t think her a credulous idiot. No more than the Khai and the utkhaiem do now. There are jokes about her, you know. At the seafront. Laborers and teahouse servants make them up to tell each other. Did you want to hear some?’
‘No,’ Marchat said and slapped the water. ‘No, I don’t. I don’t want it to happen, and if it’s going to, I don’t want to know about it.’
‘Shame, Marchat. She left from shame.’
‘I don’t see why she should feel ashamed,’ he said, a defensiveness in his voice. A defense of himself and, heartbreakingly, of Maj. ‘She didn’t do anything wrong.’
Amat released her pose and let her hands slip back under the water. Wilsin-cha’s lips worked silently, as if he were in conversation with himself and halfway moved to speaking. Amat waited.
The night before, she had taken Maj out to one of the low towns - a fishing village west of the city. A safe house outside the city would do, Amat thought, until a more suitable arrangement could be made. A week, she hoped, but perhaps more. In the last days, her plans had begun to fall away from House Wilsin’s. It wouldn’t be long before she and her employer, her old friend, parted company. It was worse, sitting there with him in the bathhouse he’d used for years, because he didn’t know. House Wilsin had taken her from a life on a knife-edge, and he - Marchat-cha - had chosen her from among the clerks and functionaries. He had promoted her through the ranks. And now they sat as they had for years, but it was nearing the last time.
Despite herself, Amat leaned forward and put her palm on his shoulder. He looked up and forced a smile.
‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘At least it’s over.’
It was something he’d said often in the last days, repeating it as if saying the words again would make them true. So perhaps some part of him did know that it was far from finished. He took her hand and, to her surprise, kissed it. His whiskers scratched her water-softened skin. Gently and despite him, she pulled away. He was blushing. Gods, the poor man was blushing. It made her want to weep, want to leave, want to shout at him until her echoing fury cracked the tiles. After all you’ve done, how dare you make me feel sympathy for you?
‘Wilsin-cha,’ she said. ‘The shipping schedule.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course. The schedule.’
Together, they went through the trivial issues of the day. A small fire in one of the weaver’s warehouses meant that they would be three thousand feet of thread short for the ship to Bakta. It was significant enough to warrant holding the ship, but they didn’t dare keep it too long - the season was turning. And then there was the issue of a persistent mildew in one of House Wilsin’s warehouses that had spoiled two bolts of silk, and had to be addressed before they dared to use the space again.
Amat laid out the options, made her suggestions, answered Wilsincha’s questions, and accepted his decisions. In the main part of the bathhouse, a man broke out in song, his voice joined - a little off-key - by two more. The warm breeze coming through the cedar trellis at the windows moved the surface of the water. Painful as it was, Amat felt herself grabbing at the details - the pinkness of Marchat’s pale skin, the thin crack in the side of the lacquer tray, the just-bitter taste of overbrewed tea. Like a squirrel, she thought, gathering nuts for the winter.
‘Amat,’ he said, when they were through and she started to rise. The hardness in his voice caught her, and she lowered herself back into the water. ‘There’s something . . . You and I, we’ve worked together for more years than I like to remember. You’ve always been . . . always been very professional. But I’ve felt that along with that, we’ve been friends. I know that I have held you in the highest regard. Gods, that sounds wrong. Highest regard? Gods. I’m doing this badly.’
He raised his hands from the water, fingertips wrinkled as raisins, and motioned vaguely. His face was tight and flushed. Amat frowned, confused, and then the realization washed over her like nausea. He was about to declare his love.
She put her head down, pressing a palm to her forehead. She couldn’t look up. Laughter that had as much to do with horror as mirth shook her gently. Of all the things she’d faced, of all the evils she’d steeled herself to walk through, this one had taken her blind. Marchat Wilsin thought he loved her. It was why he’d stood up to Oshai to save her. It was why she was alive. It was ridiculous.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have . . . Forget that. I didn’t . . . I sound like a half-wit schoolboy. Here’s the thing, Amat. I didn’t mean to be involved with this. These last days, I’ve been feeling a certain distance from you. And I’m afraid that you and I might have . . . lost something between us. Something that . .
.’
It had to stop. She had to stop it.
‘Wilsin-cha,’ she said, and forced herself into a formal pose of respect appropriate to a superior in business. ‘I think perhaps it is too soon. The . . . the wounds are too fresh. Perhaps we might postpone this conversation.’
He took a pose of agreement that seemed to carry a relief almost as deep as her own. She shifted to a pose of leave-taking, which he returned. She didn’t meet his gaze as she left. In the dressing room, she pulled on her robes, washed her face, and leaned against the great granite basin, her hands clenched white on its rim, until her mind had stilled. With a long, deep, slow breath, she composed herself, then took up her cane and walked out into the streets, as if the world were not a broken place, and her path through it was not twisted.