The Price of Spring (The Long Price Quartet Book 4)

  Otah took a slice of apple, chewing the soft flesh slowly to give himself time. Balasar was silent, his expression unreadable. It occurred to Otah that the man would have made a decent courier.

  “Give me the day,” he said. “I’ll have an answer for you tonight. Tomorrow at the latest.”

  “Thank you, Most High,” Balasar said.

  “I know how much I’ve asked of you,” Otah said.

  “It’s something I owe you. Or that we owe each other. Whatever I can do, I will.”

  Otah smiled and took a pose of gratitude, but he was wondering what limits that debt would find if Idaan spoke to the old general. He was dancing around too many blades. He couldn’t keep them all clear in his mind, and if he stumbled, there would be blood.

  Otah finished his meal, allowed the servants to change his outer robe to a formal black with threads of gold throughout, and led his ritual procession to the audience chamber. The members of his court flowed into their places in the appropriate order, with the custom-driven signs of loyalty and obeisance. Otah restrained himself from shouting at them all to hurry. The time he spent in empty form was time stolen. He didn’t have it to spare.

  The audiences began, each a balancing between the justice of the issue, the politics behind those involved, and the massive complex webwork that made up the relationships of the court, of the cities, of the world. When he’d been young, the Khai Saraykeht had held audiences for things as simple as land disputes and broken contracts. Those days were gone, and nothing reached so high as the Emperor of the Khaiem unless no one lower dared rule on the matter. Nothing was trivial, everything fraught with implication.

  Midday came and went, and the sun began its slow fall to the west. Storm clouds rose, white and soft and taller than mountains, but the rain stayed out over the sea. The daylight moon hung in the blue sky to the north. Otah didn’t think of Balasar or Idaan, Chaburi-Tan or the andat. When at last he paused to eat, he felt worn thin enough to see through. He tried to consider Balasar’s analysis, but ended by staring at the plate of lemon fish and rice as if it were enthralling.

  Because he had been hoping for a moment’s peace, he’d chosen to eat his little meal in one of the low halls at the back of the palace. The stone floor and simple, unadorned plaster walls made it seem more like the common room of a small wayhouse than the center of empire. That was part of its appeal. The shutters were open on the garden behind it: crawling lavender, starfall rose, mint, and, without warning, Danat, in a formally cut robe of deep blue hot with yellow, blood running from his nose to cover his mouth and chin. Otah put down the bowl.

  Danat stalked into the hall and halfway across it before he noticed that a table was occupied. He hesitated, then took a pose of greeting. The fingers of his right hand were scarlet where he had tried to stanch the flow and failed. Otah didn’t recall having stood. His expression must have been alarmed, because Danat smiled and shook his head.

  “It’s not bad,” he said. “Just messy. I didn’t want to come through the larger halls.”

  “What happened?”

  “I have met my rival,” Danat said. “Hanchat Dor.”

  “There’s blood? There’s blood between you?”

  “No,” Danat said. “Well, technically yes, I suppose. But no.”

  He lowered himself to sit at the table where Otah’s food lay abandoned. There was a carafe of water and a porcelain bowl. As Otah sat, his boy wet one of his sleeves and set about wiping the blood from around his grin. Otah’s first violent impulses to protect his son and punish his assailant were disarmed by that smile. Not conquered, but disarmed.

  “He and Ana-cha were haunting the path between the palaces and the poet’s house, just before the pond,” Danat said. “We had words. He took some exception to our demand that Ana-cha apologize. He suggested that I should feel honored to have breathed the same air as his darling chipmunk. Seriously, Papa. ‘Darling chipmunk.’”

  “It might be a Galtic endearment,” he said, trying to match his son’s light tone.

  Danat waved the thought away. It would be no more dignified, Otah admitted to himself, because a whole culture said it. Danat went on.

  “I said that my business wasn’t with him, but with Ana-cha. He began declaiming something in rhymed verse about him and his love being one flesh. Ana-cha told him to stop, but he only started bellowing it.”

  “How did Ana-cha react?”

  Danat’s grin widened. Blood had pinked his teeth.

  “She seemed a bit embarrassed. I began speaking to her as if he weren’t there. And…”

  Danat shrugged.

  “He hit you?”

  “I may have goaded him,” Danat said. “A little.”

  Otah sat back, stunned. Danat raised his hands to a pose appropriate to the announcement of victory in a game. Otah let himself smile too, but there was a touch of melancholy behind it. His son was no longer the ill, fragile child he’d known. That boy was gone. In his place was a young man with the same instinct to rough-and-tumble as any number of young men. The same as Otah had suffered once himself. It was so easy to forget.

  “I had the palace armsmen throw him in a cell,” Danat said. “I’ve set a guard on him in case anyone decides to defend my abused dignity by killing him.”

  “Yes, that would complicate things,” Otah agreed.

  “Ana followed the whole way shrieking, but she was as angry at Hanchat-cha as at me. Once I get to looking a bit less like an apprentice showfighter’s first night, I’m sending an invitation to Ana-cha for a formal dinner at which we can further discuss her poor treatment of our hospitality. And then I’m going to meet my new lover.”

  “Your new lover?”

  “Shija Radaani has offered to play the role. I think she was flattered to be asked. Issandra-cha is adamant that nothing makes a man worth having like another woman smiling at him.”

  “Issandra-cha is a dangerous woman,” Otah said.

  “She is,” Danat agreed.

  They laughed together for a moment. Otah was the first to sober.

  “Will it work, do you think?” he asked. “Can it be done?”

  “Can I win Ana’s heart and make her want what she’s professed before everyone of power in two empires that she hates?” Danat said. Saying it that way, he sounded like his mother. “I don’t know. And I can’t say what I feel about the way it’s happening. I’m plotting against her. Her own mother is plotting against her. I feel that I ought to disapprove. That it isn’t honest. And yet…”

  Danat shook his head. Otah took a querying pose.

  “I’m enjoying myself,” Danat said. “Whatever it says of me, I’ve been struck bloody by a Galt boy, and I feel I’ve scored a point in some game.”

  “It’s an important game.”

  Danat rose. He took a pose that promised his best effort, appropriate to a junior competitor to his teacher, and left.

  There had to be some way that he could aid in Danat’s task, but for the moment, he couldn’t think what it might be. Perhaps if there was a way to arrange some sort of isolation for the two. A journey, perhaps, to Yalakeht. Or, no, there was the conspiracy with Obar State there that still hadn’t been rooted out. Well, Cetani, then. Something long and arduous and cold by the time they got there. And without the bastard who’d struck his son…

  Otah finished his fish and rice, lingering over a last bowl of wine and looking out at the small garden. It was, he thought, the size of the walled yard at the wayhouse Kiyan had owned before she became his first and only wife and he became the Khai Machi. That little space of green and white, of finches in the branches and voles scuttling in the low grass, might have been the size of his life.

  Until the Galts came and slaughtered them all with the rest of Udun.

  And instead, he had the world, or most of it. And a son. And, however little she liked it, a daughter. And Kiyan’s ashes and his memory of her. But it had been a pretty little garden.

  Otah returned to the waiting su
pplicants with his mind moving in ten different directions at once. He did his best to focus on the work before him, but everything seemed trivial. No matter that men’s fortunes lay in his decision. No matter that he was the final appeal for justice, or if not that, at least peace. Or mercy. Justice and peace and mercy all seemed insignificant when held next to duty. His duty to Chaburi-Tan and all the other cities, to Danat and Eiah and the shape of the future. By the time the sun sank in the western hills, he had almost forgotten Idaan.

  His sister waited for him in the apartments Sinja had found for her. She looked out of place among the sweeping arches and intricately carved stonework. Her hands were thick and calloused, her face roughened by sun. Some servant had arranged a robe for her, well-cut silk of green and cream. He considered her dark eyes and calm, weighing expression. He could not forget that she had killed men coldly, with calculation. But then so had he.

  “Idaan-cha,” he said as she rose. Her hands took a pose of greeting formal as court, but made awkward by decades without practice. Otah returned it.

  “You’ve made a decision,” she said.

  “Actually, no. I haven’t. I hope to by this time tomorrow. I’d like you to stay until then.”

  Idaan’s eyes narrowed, her lips pressed thin. Otah fought the urge to step back.

  “Forgive me if it isn’t my place to ask, Most High. But is there something more important going on than Maati bringing back the andat?”

  “There are a hundred things that are more certain,” Otah said. “He may manage it, but the chances are that he won’t. Meantime, I know for certain of three…four other things that are happening that could unmake the cities of the Khaiem. I don’t have time to play in might be.”

  He’d meant to turn at the end of his pronouncement and walk from the rooms. Her voice was cutting.

  “So instead, you’ll wait until is?” Idaan said. “Or is it only that you have too many apples in the air, and you’re only a middling juggler?”

  “I’m not in the mood to be—”

  “Dressed down by a woman who’s only breathing because you’ve chosen to let her? Listen to yourself. You sound like the villain from some children’s bedtime story.”

  “Idaan-cha,” he said, and then found that he had nothing to follow it.

  “I’ve come to tell you that your old friend and enemy is harnessing gods, and not for your benefit. It’s the most threatening thing I can imagine happening. And what’s your response? You knew. You’ve known for years. What’s more, knowing now that he’s redoubling his efforts, you can’t be bothered even to consider the question until you’ve cleared your sheet of audiences? I’ve held a thousand opinions of you over the years, brother, but I never thought you were stupid.”

  Otah felt rage bloom in his chest, rising like a fiery wave, only to die with the woman’s next words.

  “It’s the guilt, isn’t it?” she said. When he didn’t answer at once, she nodded to herself. “You aren’t the only one that’s done this, you know.”

  “Been Emperor? Are there others?”

  “Betrayed the people you loved,” she said. “Come. Sit down. I still have a little tea.”

  Almost to his surprise, Otah walked forward, sitting on a divan while the former exile poured pale green tea into two carved bone bowls.

  “After you set me free, I spent years without sleeping through a full night. I’d dream of the people I’d…the people I was responsible for. Our father. Adrah. Danat. You never knew Danat, did you?”

  “I named my son for him,” Otah said. Idaan smiled, but there was a sorrow in her eyes.

  “He’d have liked that, I think. Here. Choose a bowl. I’ll drink first if you’d like. I don’t mind.”

  Otah drank. It was overbrewed and sweetened with honey; sweet and bitter. Idaan sipped at hers.

  “After you sent me away, there was a time I went about the business of living with what I’d done by working myself like a war slave,” she said. “Sunrise to dark, I did whatever it was I was doing until I could fall down at the end half-dead and too tired to dream.”

  “It doesn’t sound pleasant,” Otah said.

  “I did a lot of good,” Idaan said. “You wouldn’t guess it, but I organized a constabulary through half of the low towns in the north. I was actually a judge for a few years, if you’ll picture that. I found that meting out justice wasn’t something I felt suited for, but I kept a few murderers and rapists from making a habit of it. I made a few places safer. I wasn’t utterly ineffective, even though half the time I was too tired to focus my eyes.”

  “And you think I’m doing the same thing?” Otah said. “You don’t understand what it is to be an emperor. All respect for whatever you did after Machi, but I have hundreds of thousands of people relying upon me. The politics of empire aren’t like a few low towns organizing to keep the local thugs in line.”

  “You also have a thousand servants,” she said. “Dozens of high families who would do your bidding just for the status that comes from being asked. Tell me, why did you go to Galt yourself? You have men and women who’d have been ambassador for you.”

  “It needed me,” Otah said. “If it had been someone lower, it wouldn’t have carried the weight.”

  “Ah, I see,” she said. She sounded less than persuaded.

  “Besides which, I don’t have anything to feel guilt over.”

  “You broke the world,” she said. “You ordered Maati and Cehmai to bind that andat, and when it went feral on them and shredded every womb in the cities, my own included, you threw your poets into the wind. Men who trusted you and sacrificed for you. You became the heroic figure that bound the cities together, and they became outcasts.”

  “Is that how you see it?”

  Idaan put her bowl down softly on the stone table. Her black eyes held his. She had a long face. Northern, like his own. He remembered that of all the children of the old Khai Machi, he and Idaan had shared a mother.

  “It doesn’t matter how I see it,” she said. “My opinion doesn’t make the world. Or unmake it. All that matters is what it actually is. So, tell me, Most High, am I right?”

  Otah shook his head and rose, leaving his tea bowl beside hers.

  “You don’t know me, Idaan-cha. We’ve spoken to each other fewer times than I have fingers. I don’t think you’re in a position to judge my motives.”

  “Yours, no,” she said. “But I’ve made the mistakes you’re making now. And I know why I did.”

  “We aren’t the same person.”

  She smiled now, her gaze cast down and her hands in a pose that accepted correction and apologized for her transgression without making it clear what transgression she meant.

  “Of course not,” she said. “I’ll stay through tomorrow, Most High. In case you come to a decision that I might be able to aid you with.”

  Otah left with the uncomfortable impression that his sister pitied him. He made his way back to his apartments, ate half of the meal the servants brought him, and refused the singers and musicians whose only function in the world was to wait upon his whim. Instead, he took a chair out to his balcony and sat in the starlight, looking south to the sea.

  Thin clouds streaked the high air, and the ocean was a vast darkness. The city that spilled down the hills before him glittered brighter than the stars; torches and lanterns, candles and firekeepers’ kilns. The breeze smelled of smoke and salt and the lush flowers of early autumn. He closed his eyes.

  He could feel the palaces behind him, looming like a weight he’d shifted off his back for a moment and would need to shoulder again. His mind ran free without him, bouncing from one crisis to another without ever pausing long enough to make sense of any one of them. And, intruding upon all of it, he found himself replaying his conversation with Idaan, searching for the cutting replies that hadn’t occurred to him at the time.

  Who was she to pity him? She’d made a low-town judge of herself, and now a farmer. It was an improvement from traitor and murderer
, but it didn’t give her moral authority over him. And to instruct him on the nature of his feelings about Maati and Cehmai was ridiculous. She hardly knew him. Coming to court in the first place had been a kind of madness on her part. He could have had her killed outright rather than sit like a dog while she heaped her abuse on him.

  She thought he’d broken the world, did she? Well, what about the old way had been worth saving? It hadn’t brought justice. The peace it offered had been purchased at the cost of lives of misery and struggle. And from that first moment, more than forty summers earlier, when the Dai-kvo had told him that they could not offer Saraykeht a replacement should Seedless slip its leash, Otah had known it was doomed.

  The genius of the Galts—of all the rest of the world, for that—was that they had built their power on ideas that could grow one on another. A better forge led to better metalwork led to stronger tools and so on to the end of their abilities. By contrast, the Empire, the Second Empire, the cities of the Khaiem: all of them had wielded unthinkable power and fashioned wonders. And when the first poet had bound the first andat, anything had been possible. Anything a mind could fathom could be harnessed; anything that could be thought could be done.

  But when the first andat had escaped and been harder to recapture, that potential had dropped a degree. Once a binding failed, each one that followed had to be different, and there were only so many ways to describe a thing fully enough to hold it as a slave. It was the central truth of the long, slow, dwindling of power that had brought them all here.

  It was like a man’s life. For a time in his youth, Otah had been capable of anything. His body had been strong, his judgment so certain he’d been willing to kill a man. And every day and every decision had narrowed him. Every year had weakened his back and his knees, eaten at his sight and wrinkled his skin. Time had taken Kiyan from him. His judgment had lost him his daughter.

  He could have done anything, and he had chosen this. Or had it chosen for him.

  And he wasn’t yet dead, so there were other choices still to be made. Other days and years to live through. Other duties and failures and disappointments he would be responsible for not making right. His anger with Idaan was perfectly comprehensible. He was enraged by her because she had seen to the heart of something he hadn’t wanted to understand.