Amat strode into the low house, the two men stepping back to let her pass. The round-faced man closed the door, deepening the gloom. As Amat’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, details began to swim out of it. The wide, low main room, too bare to mark the house as a place where people actually lived. The moss growing at edge where wall met ceiling.
“I’ve come to see the client,” Amat said. “Wilsin-cha wants to be sure she’s well. If she miscarries during the negotiations, we’ll all look fools.”
“The client? Yes. Yes, of course,” the round-faced man said, and something in his voice told Amat she’d stepped wrong. Still, he took a pose of obeisance and motioned her to the rear of the place. Down a short hallway, a door opened to a wooden porch. The light was thick and green, filtered through a canopy of trees. Insects droned and birds called, chattering to one another. And leaning against a half-rotten railing was a young woman. She was hardly older than Liat, her skin the milky pale of an islander. Golden hair trailed down her back, and her belly bulged over a pair of rough canvas laborer’s pants. Half, perhaps three-quarters of the way through her term. Hearing them, she turned and smiled. Her eyes were blue as the sky, her lips thick. Eastern islands, Amat thought. Uman, or possibly Nippu.
“Forgive me, Kyaan-cha,” the moon-faced man said. “My duties require me elsewhere. Miyama will be here to help you, should you require it.”
Amat took a pose of thanks appropriate for a superior releasing an underling. The man replied with the correct form, but a strange half-mocking cant to his wrists. He had thick hands, Amat noted, and strong shoulders. She turned away, waiting until the man’s footsteps faded behind her. He would go, she guessed, to Saraykeht, to Wilsin. She hadn’t managed to avoid suspicion, but by the time Marchat knew she’d discovered this place, it would be too late to shut her out of it. It would have to do.
“My name is Amat Kyaan,” she said. “I’m here to inquire after your health. Marchat is a good man, but perhaps not so wise in women’s matters.”
The girl cocked her head, like listening to an unfamiliar song. Amat felt her smile fade a degree.
“You do know the Khaiate tongues?”
The girl giggled and said something. She spoke too quickly to follow precisely, but the words had the liquid feel of an east island language. Amat cleared her throat, and tried again, slowly in Nippu.
“My name is Amat Kyaan,” she said.
“I’m Maj,” the girl said, matching Amat’s slow diction and exaggerating as if she were speaking to a child.
“You’ve come a long way to be here. I trust the travel went well?”
“It was hard at first,” the girl said. “But the last three days, I’ve been able to keep food down.”
The girl’s hand strayed to her belly. Tiny, dark stretchmarks already marbled her skin. She was thin. If she went to term, she’d look like an egg on sticks. But, of course, she wouldn’t go to term. Amat watched the pale fingers as they unconsciously caressed the rise and swell where the baby grew in darkness, and a sense of profound dislocation stole into her. This wasn’t a noblewoman whose virginity wanted plausibility. This wasn’t a child of wealth too fragile for blood teas. This didn’t fit any of the hundred scenarios that had plagued Amat through the night.
She leaned against the wooden railing, taking some of the weight off her aching hip, put her cane aside, and crossed her hands.
“Marchat has told me so little of you,” she said, struggling to find the vocabulary she needed. “How did you come to Saraykeht?”
The girl grinned and spun her tale. She spoke too quickly sometimes, and Amat had to make her repeat herself.
It seemed the father of her get had been a member of the utkhaiem—one of the great families of Saraykeht, near to the Khai himself. He’d been travelling in Nippu in disguise. He’d never revealed his true identity to her when he knew her, but though the affair had been brief, he had lost his heart to her. When he heard she was with child, he’d sent Oshai—the moon-faced man—to bring her here, to him. As soon as the politics of court allowed, he would return to her, marry her.
As improbability mounted on improbability, Amat nodded, encouraged, drew her out. And with each lie the girl repeated, sure of its truth, nausea grew in Amat. The girl was a fool. Beautiful, lovely, pleasant, and a fool. It was a story from the worst sort of wishing epic, but the girl, Maj, believed it.
She was being used, though for what, Amat couldn’t imagine. And worse, she loved her child.
NOTHING WAS SAID TO MAATI. HIS BELONGINGS SIMPLY VANISHED FROM THE room in which he had been living, and a servant girl led him down from the palace proper to a house nestled artfully in a stand of trees—the poet’s house. An artificial pond divided it from the grounds. A wooden bridge spanned the water, arching sharply, like a cat’s back. Koi—white and gold and scarlet—flowed and shifted beneath the water’s skin as Maati passed over them.
Within, the house was as lavish as the palace, but on a more nearly human scale. The stairway that led up to the sleeping quarters was a rich, dark wood and inlaid with ivory and mother of pearl, but no more than two people could have walked abreast up its length. The great rooms at the front, with their hinged walls that could open onto the night air or close like a shutter, were cluttered with books and scrolls and diagrams sketched on cheap paper. An ink brick had stained the arm of a great silk-embroidered chair. The place smelled of tallow candles and old laundry.
For the first time since he had left the Dai-kvo, Maati felt himself in a space the character of which he could understand. He waited for his teacher, prepared for whatever punishment awaited him. Darkness came late, and he lit the night candle as the sun set. The silence of the poet’s house was his only companion as he slept.
In the morning, servants delivered a meal of sweet fruits, apple-bread still warm from the palace kitchens, and a pot of smoky, black tea. Maati ate alone, a feeling of dread stealing over him. Putting him here alone to wait might, he supposed, be another trick, another misdirection. Perhaps no one would ever come.
He turned his attention to the disorder that filled the house. After leaving the bowls, cups and knives from his own meal out on the grass for the servants to retrieve, he gathered up so many abandoned dishes from about the house that the pile of them made it seem he had eaten twice. Scrolls opened so long that dust covered the script, he cleaned, furled, and returned to the cloth sleeves that he could find. Several he suspected were mismatched—a deep blue cloth denoting legal considerations holding a scroll of philosophy. He took some consolation that the scrolls on the shelves seemed equally haphazard.
By the afternoon, twinges of resentment had begun to join the suspicion that he was once again being duped. Even as he swept the floors that had clearly gone neglected for weeks, he began almost to hope that this further abandonment was another plot by the andat. If it were only that Heshai-kvo had this little use for him, perhaps the Dai-kvo shouldn’t have let him come. Maati wondered if a poet had the option of refusing an apprentice. Perhaps this neglect was Heshai-kvo’s way of avoiding duties he otherwise couldn’t.
It had been only a few weeks before that he had taken leave of the Dai-kvo, heading south along the river to Yalakeht and there by ship to the summer cities. It was his first time training under an acting poet, seeing one of the andat first hand, and eventually studying to one day take on the burden of the andat Seedless himself. I am a slave, my dear. The slave you hope to own.
Maati pushed the dust out the door, shoving with his broom as much as sweeping. When the full heat of the day came on, Maati opened all the swinging walls, transforming the house into a kind of pavilion. A soft breeze ruffled the pages of books and the tassels of scrolls. Maati rested. A distant hunger troubled him, and he wondered how to signal from here for a palace servant to bring him something to eat. If Heshai-kvo were here, he could ask.
His teacher arrived at last, at first a small figure, no larger than Maati’s thumb, trundling out from the palace. Then as he came nearer, Maati ma
de out the wide face, the slanted, weak shoulders, the awkward belly. As he crossed the wooden bridge, the high color in the poet’s face—cheeks red as cherries and sheened in an unhealthy sweat—came clear. Maati rose and adopted a pose of welcome appropriate for a student to his master.
Heshai’s rolling galt slowed as he came near. The wide mouth gaped as Heshai-kvo took in the space that had been his unkempt house. For the first time, Maati wondered if perhaps he had made a mistake in cleaning it. He felt a blush rising in his cheeks and shifted to a pose of apology.
Heshai-kvo raised a hand before he could speak.
“No. No, it’s . . . gods, boy. I don’t think the place has looked like this since I came here. Did you . . . there was a brown book, leather-bound, on that table over there. Where did it end up?”
“I don’t know, Heshai-kvo,” Maati said. “I will find it immediately.”
“Don’t. No. It will rise to the surface eventually, I’m sure. Here. Come. Sit.”
The poet moved awkwardly, like a man gout-plagued, but his joints, so far as Maati could make them out within the brown robes, were unswollen. Maati tried not to notice the stains of spilled food and drink on the poet’s sleeves and down the front of his robes. As he lowered himself painfully into a chair of black lacquer and white woven cane, the poet spoke.
“We’ve gotten off to a bad start, haven’t we?”
Maati took a pose of contrition, but the poet waved it away.
“I’m looking forward to teaching you. I thought I should say so. But there’s little enough that I can do with you just now. Not until the harvests are all done. And that may not be for weeks. I’ll get to you when I have time. There’s quite a bit I’ll have to show you. The Dai-kvo can give you a good start, but holding one of the andat is much more than anything he’ll have told you. And Seedless . . . well, I haven’t done you any favors with Seedless, I’m afraid.”
“I’m grateful that you were willing to accept me, Heshai-kvo.”
“Yes. Yes, well. That’s all to the good, then. Isn’t it. In the meantime, you should make use of your freedom. You understand? It can be a lovely city. Take . . . take your time with it, eh? Live a little before we lock you back down into all this being a poet nonsense, eh?”
Maati took a pose appropriate to a student accepting instruction, though he could see in Heshai’s bloodshot eyes that this was not quite the reply the poet had hoped for. An awkward silence stretched between them, broken when Heshai forced a smile, stood, and clapped Maati on the shoulder.
“Excellent,” the poet said with such gusto that it was obvious he didn’t mean it. “I’ve got to switch these robes out for fresh. Busy, you know, busy. No time to rest.”
No time to rest. And yet it was the afternoon, and the poet, his teacher, was still in yesterday’s clothes. No time to rest, nor to meet him when he arrived, nor to come to the house anytime in the night for fear of speaking to a new apprentice. Maati watched Heshai’s wide form retreat up the stairs, heard the footsteps tramping above him as the poet rushed through his ablutions. His head felt like it had been stuffed with wool as he tried to catalog all the things he might have done that would have pushed his teacher away.
“Stings, doesn’t it? Not being wanted,” a soft voice murmured behind him. Maati spun. Seedless stood on the opened porch in a robe of perfect black shot with an indigo so deep it was hard to see where it blended with the deeper darkness. The dark, mocking eyes considered him. Maati took no pose, spoke no words. Seedless nodded all the same, as if he had replied. “We can talk later, you and I.”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
“All the better. I’ll talk. You can listen.”
The poet Heshai clomped down the stairs, a fresh robe, brown silk over cream, in place. The stubble had been erased from his jowls. Poet and andat considered each other for a breathless moment, and then turned and walked together down the path. Maati watched them go—the small, awkward shape of the master; the slim, elegant shadow of the slave. They walked, Maati noticed, with the same pace, the same length of stride. They might almost have been old friends, but for the careful way they never brushed each other, even walking abreast.
As they topped the rise of the bridge, Seedless looked back, and raised a perfect, pale hand to him in farewell.
“SHE DOESN’T KNOW.”
Marchat Wilsin half-rose from the bath, cool water streaming off his body. His expression was strange—anger, relief, something else more obscure than these. The young man he had been meeting with stared at Amat, open-mouthed with shock at seeing a clothed woman in the bathhouse. Amat restrained herself from making an obscene gesture at him.
“Tsani-cha,” Wilsin said, addressing the young man though his gaze was locked on Amat. “Forgive me. My overseer and I have pressing business. I will send a runner with the full proposal.”
“But Wilsin-cha,” the young man began, his voice trailing off when the old Galt turned to him. Amat saw something in Wilsin’s face that would have made her blanch too, had she been less fueled by her rage. The young man took a pose of thanks appropriate to closing an audience, hopped noisily out of the bath and strode out.
“Have you seen her?” Amat demanded, leaning on her cane. “Have you spoken with her?”
“No, I haven’t. Close the door, Amat.”
“She thinks—”
“I said close the door; I meant close the door.”
Amat paused, then limped over and slammed the wooden door shut. The sounds of the bathhouse faded. When she turned back, Wilsin was sitting on the edge of the recessed bath, his head in his hands. The bald spot at the top of his head was flushed pink. Amat moved forward.
“What were you thinking, Amat?”
“That this can’t be right,” she said. “I met with the girl. She doesn’t know about the sad trade. She’s an innocent.”
“She’s the only one in this whole damned city, then. Did you tell her? Did you warn her?”
“Without knowing what this is? Of course not. When was the last time you knew me to act without understanding the situation?”
“This morning,” he snapped. “Now. Just now. Gods. And where did you learn to speak Nippu anyway?”
Amat stood beside him and then slowly lowered herself to the blue-green tiles. Her hip flared painfully, but she pushed it out of her mind.
“What is this?” she asked. “You’re hiring the Khai to end a pregnancy, and the mother doesn’t know that’s what you’re doing? You’re killing a wanted child? It doesn’t make sense.”
“I can’t tell you. I can’t explain. I’m . . . I’m not allowed.”
“At least promise me that the child is going to live. Can you promise me that?”
He looked over at her, his pale eyes empty as a corpse.
“Gods,” Amat breathed.
“I never wanted to come here,” he said. “This city. That was my uncle’s idea. I wanted to run the tripled trade. Silver and iron from Eddensea south to Bakta for sugar and rum, then to Far Galt for cedar and spicewood and back to Eddensea. I wanted to fight pirates. Isn’t that ridiculous? Me. Fighting pirates.”
“You will not make me feel sorry for you. Not now. You are Marchat Wilsin, and the voice of your house in Saraykeht. I have seen you stand strong before a mob of Westermen screaming for blood. You faced down a high judge when you thought he was wrong and called him fool to his face. Stop acting like a sick girl. We don’t have to do this. Refuse the contract.”
Wilsin looked up, his chin raised, his shoulders squared. For a moment, she thought he might do as she asked. But when he spoke, his voice was defeated.
“I can’t. The stakes are too high. I’ve already petitioned the Khai for an audience. It’s in motion, and I can’t stop it any more than I can make the tide come early.”
Amat kicked off her sandals, raised the hem of her robes, and let her aching feet sink into the cool water. Light played on the surface, patterns of brightness and shadow flickering across Marcha
t’s chest and face. He was weeping. That more than anything else turned her rage to fear.
“Then help me make sense of it. What is this child?” Amat said. “Who is the father?”
“No one. The child is no one. The father is no one. The girl is no one.”
“Then why, Marchat? Why . . .”
“I can’t tell you! Why won’t you hear me when I say that? Ah? I don’t get to tell you. Gods. Amat. Amat, why did you have to go out there?”
“You wanted me to. Why else ask me to arrange a bodyguard? You told me of a meeting I wasn’t welcome to. You said there was house business, and then you said that you trusted me. How could you think I wouldn’t look?”
He laughed with a sound like choking—mirthless and painful. His thick fingers grasped his knees, fingertips digging into pink flesh. Amat laid her cane aside and pressed her palm to his bent shoulder. Through the carved cedar blinds she heard someone on the street shriek and go silent.
“The round-faced one—Oshai. He came, didn’t he? He told you I went there.”
“Of course he did. He wanted to know if I’d sent you.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That I hadn’t.”
“I see.”
The silence stretched. She waited, willing him to speak, willing some words that would put it in some perspective less awful than it seemed. But Wilsin said nothing.
“I’ll go back to my apartments,” Amat said. “We can talk about this later.”
She reached for her cane, but Wilsin’s hand trapped hers. There was something in his eyes now, an emotion. Fear. It was as if they’d been soaking in it instead of water. She could feel her own heart trip faster as his eyes searched hers.
“Don’t. Don’t go home. He’ll be waiting for you.”
For the space of four breaths together, they were silent. Amat had to swallow to loosen her throat.
“Hide, Amat. Don’t tell me where you’ve gone. Keep your head low for . . . four weeks. Five. It’ll be over by then. And once it’s finished with, you’ll be safe. I can protect you then. You’re only in danger if they think you might stop it from happening. Once it’s done . . .”