She even believed the story until the girl running the stall asked if she’d want more tea. Amat almost wept at the small kindness. So perhaps she wasn’t quite so unscathed as she told herself.
She reached her apartments in the press of the morning. On a normal day, if she could recall those, she might have been setting forth just then. Or even a bit earlier. Off into her city, on the business of her house. She unlocked the door of her apartments, slipped in, and barred the door behind her. It was a risk, coming home without being sure of things with Marchat’s cruel business, but she needed money. And the stinging salve for her legs. And a fresh robe. And sleep. Gods, she needed sleep. But that would wait.
She gathered her things quickly and made for the door, struggling to get down the stairs. She had enough silver in her sleeve to buy a small house for a month. Surely it would be enough for a room and discretion for three or four days. If she could only …
No. No, of course she couldn’t. When she opened the door, three men blocked her. They had knives. The tallest moved in first, clamping a wide palm over her mouth and pushing her against the wall. The others slid in fast as shadows, and closed the door again. Amat closed her eyes. Her heart was racing, and she felt nauseated.
“If you scream, we’ll have to kill you,” the tall man said gently. It was so much worse for being said so carefully. Amat nodded, and he took his hand away. Their knives were still drawn.
“I want to speak with Wilsin-cha,” Amat said when she had collected herself enough to say anything.
“Good that we’ve sent for him, then,” one of the others said. “Why don’t you have a seat while we wait.”
Amat swallowed, hoping to ease the tightness in her throat. She took a pose that accepted the suggestion, turned and made her way again up the stairs to wait at her desk. Two of the men followed her. The third waited below. The sun had moved the width of two hands together when Marchat walked up the steps and into her rooms.
He looked older, she thought. Or perhaps not older, but worn. His hair hung limp on his brow. His robes fit him poorly, and a stain of egg yolk discolored the sleeve. He paced the length of the room twice, looking neither directly at her nor away. Amat, sitting at her desk, folded her hands on one knee and waited. Marchat stopped at the window, turned and gestured to the two thugs.
“Get out,” he said. “Wait downstairs.”
The two looked at one another, weighing, Amat saw, whether to obey him. These were not Marchat’s men, then. Not truly. They were the moon-faced Oshai’s perhaps. One shrugged, and the other turned back with a pose of acknowledgement before they both moved to the door and out. Amat listened to their footsteps fading.
Marchat looked out, down, she presumed, to the street. The heat of the day was thick. Sweat stained his armpits and damped his brow.
“You’re too early,” he said at last, still not looking directly at her.
“Am I?”
“By three days.”
Amat took a pose of apology more casual than she felt. Silence held them until at last Marchat looked at her directly. She couldn’t read his expression—perhaps anger, perhaps sorrow, perhaps exhaustion. Her employer, the voice of her house, sighed.
“Amat . . . Gods, things have been bad. Worse than I expected, and I didn’t think they’d be well.”
He walked to her, lowered himself onto the cushion that Liat usually occupied, and rested his head on his hands. Amat felt the urge to reach out, to touch him. She held the impulse in.
“It’s nearly over,” he continued. “I can convince Oshai and his men that it’s better to let you live. I can. But Amat. You have to help me.”
“How?”
“Tell me what you’re planning. What you’ve started or done or said that might stop the trade.”
Amat felt a slow smile pluck her lips, a low, warm burble of laughter bloom in her chest. Her shoulders shook and she took a pose of amazement. The absurdity of the question was like a wave lifting up a swimmer. Marchat looked confused.
“What I’ve done to stop it?” Amat asked. “Are you simple? I’ve run like my life depended on it, kept my head low and prayed that whatever you’d started, you could finish. Stop you? Gods, Marchat, I don’t know what you’re thinking.”
“You’ve done nothing?”
“I’ve been through hell. I’ve been beaten and threatened. Someone tried to light me on fire. I’ve seen more of the worst parts of the city than I’ve seen in years. I did quite a bit. I worked longer hours at harder tasks than you’ve even gotten from me.” The words were taking on a pace and rhythm of their own, flowing out of her faster and louder. Her face felt flushed. “And, in my spare moments, did I work out a plan to save the house’s honor and set the world to rights? Did I hire men to discover your precious client and warn the girl what you intend to do to her? No, you fat Galtic idiot, I did not. Had you been expecting me to?”
Amat found she was leaning forward, her chin jutting out. The anger made her feel better for the moment. More nearly in control. She recognized it was illusion, but she took comfort in it all the same. Marchat’s expression was sour.
“What about Itani, then?”
“Who?”
“Itani. Liat’s boy.”
Amat took a dismissive pose.
“What about him? I used him to discover where you were going, certainly, but you must know that by now. I didn’t speak with him then, and I certainly haven’t since.”
“Then why has he gone out with the poet’s student three nights of the last five?” Marchat demanded. His voice was hard as stone. He didn’t believe her.
“I don’t know, Marchat-cha. Why don’t you ask him?”
Marchat shook his head, impatient, stood and turned his back on her. The anger that had held Amat up collapsed, and she was suddenly desperate that he believe her, that he understand. That he be on her side. She felt like a portman’s flag, switching one way to another with the shifting wind. If she’d been able to sleep before they spoke, if she hadn’t had to flee Ovi Niit’s house, if the world were only just or fair or explicable, she would have been able to be herself—calm, solid, grounded. She swallowed her need, disgusted by it and pretended that she was only calming herself from her rage, not folding.
“Or,” she said, stopping him as he reached the head of the stairs, “if you want to be clever about it, ask Liat.”
“Liat?”
“She’s the one who told me where the two of you had gone. Itani told her, and she told me. If you’re worried that Itani’s corrupting the poets against you, ask Liat.”
“She’d suspect,” Marchat said, but his tone begged to be proved wrong. Amat closed her eyes. They felt so good, closed. The darkness was so comfortable. Gods, she needed to rest.
“No,” Amat said. “She wouldn’t. Approach her as if you were scolding her. Tell her it’s unseemly for those kinds of friendships to bloom in the middle of a working trade, and ask her why they couldn’t wait until it was concluded. At the worst, she’ll hide the truth from you, but then you’ll know she has something she’s hiding.”
Her employer and friend of years hesitated, his mind turning the strategy over, looking for flaws. A breath of air touched Amat’s face smelling of the sea. She could see it in Marchat’s eyes when he accepted her suggestion.
“You’ll have to stay here until it’s over,” he said. “I’ll have Oshai’s men bring you food and drink. I still need to make my case to Oshai and the client, but I will make it work. You’ll be fine.”
Amat took an accepting pose. “I’ll be pleased being here,” she said. Then, “Marchat? What is this all about?”
“Money,” he said. “Power. What else is there?”
And as he walked down the stairs, leaving her alone, it fit together like a peg slipping into its hole. It wasn’t about the child. It wasn’t about the girl. It was about the poet. And if it was about the poet, it was about the andat. If the poet Heshai lost control of his creation, if Seedless escaped, the c
otton trade in Saraykeht would lose its advantage over other ports in the islands and the Westlands and Galt. Even when a new andat came, it wasn’t likely that it would be able to fuel the cotton trade as Seedless or Petals-Falling had.
Amat went to her window. The street below was full—men, women, dogs, carts. The roofs of the city stretched out to the east, and down to the south the seafront was full. Trade. The girl Maj would be sacrificed to shift the balance of trade away from Saraykeht. It was the only thing that made sense.
“Oh, Marchat,” she breathed. “What have you done?”
THE TEAHOUSE WAS NEARLY EMPTY. TWO OR THREE YOUNG MEN INSIDE WERE still speaking in raised voices, their arguments inchoate and disjointed. Out in the front garden, an older man had fallen asleep beside the fountain, his long, slow breathing a counterpoint to the distant conversation. A lemon candle guttered and died, leaving only a long winding plume of smoke, gray against the night, and the scent of an extinguished wick. Otah felt the urge to light a fresh candle, but he didn’t act on it. On the bench beside him, Maati sighed.
“Does it ever get cold here, Otah-kvo?” Maati asked. “If we were with the Dai-kvo, we’d be shivering by now, even if it is midsummer. It’s midnight, and it’s almost hot as day.”
“It’s the sea. It holds the heat in. And we’re too far south. It’s colder as you go north.”
“North. Do you remember Machi?”
Visions took Otah. Stone walls thicker than a man’s height, stone towers reaching to a white sky, stone statues baked all day in the fires and then put in the children’s room to radiate their heat through the night.
He remembered being pulled through snow-choked streets on a sleigh, a sister whose name he no longer knew beside him, holding close for warmth. The scent of burning pine and hot stone and mulled wine.
“No,” he said. “Not really.”
“I don’t often look at the stars,” Maati said. “Isn’t that odd?”
“I suppose,” Otah allowed.
“I wonder whether Heshai does. He stays out half the time, you know. He wasn’t even there yesterday when I came in.”
“You mean this morning?”
Maati frowned.
“I suppose so. It wasn’t quite dawn when I got there. You should have seen Seedless stalking back and forth like a cat. He tried to get me to say where I’d been, but I wouldn’t talk. Not me. I wonder where Heshai-kvo goes all night.”
“The way Seedless wonders about you,” Otah said. “You should start drinking water. You’ll be worse for it if you don’t.”
Maati took a pose of acceptance, but didn’t rise or go in for water. The sleeping man snored. Otah closed his eyes for a moment, testing how it felt. It was like falling backwards. He was too tired. He’d never make it though his shift with Muhatia-cha.
“I don’t know how Heshai-kvo does it,” Maati said, clearly thinking similar thoughts. “He’s got a full day coming. I don’t think I’ll be able to do any more today than I did yesterday. I mean today. I don’t know what I mean. It’s easier to keep track when I sleep at night. What about you?”
“They can do without me,” Otah said. “Muhatia-cha knows my indenture’s almost over. He more than half expects me to ignore my duties. It isn’t uncommon for someone who isn’t renewing their contract.”
“And aren’t you?” Maati asked.
“I don’t know.”
Otah shifted his weight, turning to look at the young poet in the brown robes of his office. The moonlight made them seem black.
“I envy you,” Maati said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“You want to be directionless and unsure what you’ll be doing to earn food in a half-year’s time?”
“Yes,” Maati said. “Yes, I think I do. You’ve friends. You’ve a place. You’ve possibilities. And . . .”
“And?”
Even in the darkness, Otah could see Maati blush. He took a pose of apology as he spoke.
“You have Liat,” Maati said. “She’s beautiful.”
“She is lovely. But there are any number of women at court. And you’re the poet’s student. There must be girls who’d take you for a lover.”
“There are, I think. Maybe. I don’t know, but . . . I don’t understand them. I’ve never known any—not at the school, and then not with the Dai-kvo. They’re different.”
“Yes,” Otah said. “I suppose they are.”
Liat. He’d seen her a handful of nights since the audience before the Khai. Since his discovery by Maati. She was busy enough preparing the woman Maj for the sad trade that she hadn’t made an issue of his absence, but he had seen something growing in her questions and in her silence.
“Things aren’t going so well with Liat,” Otah said, surprised that he would admit it even as he spoke. Maati sat straight, pulling himself to some blurry attention. His look of concern was almost a parody of the emotion. He took a pose of query. Otah responded with one that begged ignorance, but let it fall away. “It isn’t her. I’ve been . . . I’ve been pulling away from her, I think.”
“Why?” Maati asked. His incredulity was clear.
Otah wondered how he’d been drawn into this conversation. Maati seemed to have a talent for it, bringing him to say things he’d hardly had the courage to think through fully. It was having someone at last who might understand him. Someone who knew him for what he was, and who had suffered some of the same flavors of loss.
“I’ve never told Liat. About who I am. Do you think . . . Maati, can you love someone and not trust them?”
“We’re born to odd lives, Otah-kvo,” Maati said, sounding suddenly older and more sorrowful. “If we waited for people we trusted, I think we might never love anyone.”
They were silent for a long moment, then Maati rose.
“I’m going to get some water from the keep, and then find some place to leave him a little of my own,” he said, breaking the somber mood. Otah smiled.
“Then we should go.”
Maati took a pose that was both regret and agreement, then walked off with a gait for the most part steady. Otah stood, stretching his back and his legs, pulling his blood into action. He tossed a single length of silver onto the bench where they’d sat. It would more than cover their drinks and the bread and cheese they’d eaten. When Maati returned, they struck out for the north, toward the palaces. The streets of the city were moonlit, pale blue light except where a lantern burned at the entrance to a compound or a firekeeper’s kiln added a ruddy touch. The calls of night birds, the chirping of crickets, the occasional voice of some other city dweller awake long after the day had ended accompanied them as they walked.
It was all as familiar as his own cot or the scent of the seafront, but the boy at his side also changed it. For almost a third of his life, Otah had been in Saraykeht. He knew the shapes of its streets. He knew which firekeepers could be trusted and which could be bought, which teahouses served equally to all its clientele and which saved the better goods for the higher classes. And he knew his place in it. He would no more have thought about it than about breathing. Except for Maati.
The boy made him look at everything again, as if he were seeing it for the first time. The city, the streets, Liat, himself. Especially himself. Now the thing that he had measured his greatest success—the fact that he knew the city deeply and it did not know him—was harder and emptier than it had once been. And odd that it hadn’t seemed so before.
And the memories curled and shifted deep in his mind; the unconnected impressions of a childhood he had thought forgotten, of a time before he’d been sent to the school. There was a face with dark hair and beard that might have been his father. A woman he remembered singing and bathing him when his body had been small enough for her to lift with one arm. He didn’t know whether she was his mother or a nurse or a sister. But there had been a fire in the grate, and the tub had been worked copper, and he had been young and amazed by it.
And over the days and nights, other half-formed
things had joined together in his mind. He remembered his mother handing him a cloth rabbit, sneaking it into his things so that his father wouldn’t see it. He remembered an older boy shouting—his brother, perhaps—that it wasn’t fair that Otah be sent away, and that he had felt guilty for causing so much anger. He remembered the name Oyin Frey, and an old man with a long white beard playing a drum and singing, but not who the man was or how he had known him.
He couldn’t say which of the memories were truth, which were dreams he’d constructed himself. He wondered, if he were to travel back there, far in the north, whether these ghost memories would let him retrace paths he hadn’t walked in years—know the ways from nursery to kitchen to the tunnels beneath Machi—or if they would lead him astray, false as bog-lights.
And the school—Tahi-kvo glowering at him, and the whirr of the lacquer rod. He had pushed those things away, pushed away the boy who had suffered those losses and humiliations, and now it was like being haunted. Haunted by who he might be and might have been.
“I think I’ve upset you, Otah-kvo,” Maati said quietly.
Otah turned, taking a questioning pose. Maati’s brow furrowed and he looked down.
“You haven’t spoken since we left the teahouse,” Maati said. “If I’ve given offense . . .”
Otah laughed, and the sound seemed to reassure Maati. On impulse, Otah put his arm around Maati’s shoulder as he might have around a dear friend or a brother.
“I’m sorry. I seem to be doing this to everyone around me these days. No, Maati-kya, I’m not upset. You just make me think about things, and I must be out of practice. I get lost in them. And gods, but I’m tired.”
“You could stay at the poet’s house if you don’t care to walk back to your quarters. There’s a perfectly good couch on the lower floor.”
“No,” Otah said. “If I don’t let Muhatia-cha scold me in the morning, he’ll get himself into a rage by midday.”
Maati took a pose of understanding that also spoke of regret, and put his own arm around Otah’s shoulder. They walked together, talking now the same mixture of seriousness and jokes that they’d made yet another evening of. Maati was getting better at navigating the streets, and even when the route he chose wasn’t the fastest, Otah let him lead. He wondered, as they approached the monument of the Emperor Atami where three wide streets met, what it would have been like to grow up with a brother.