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

  They put in at a riverfront town half a hand after sundown. A small, rotting peer. A pack of half-feral dogs baying at the boatman’s second as he made the boat fast and stretched a wide, arching bridge between the deck and the land. A handful of lights in the darkness that showed where lanterns burned like fireflies in the night.

  While the armsmen unloaded their crates and skipped stones at the dogs’ feet, Otah led Ashti Beg across to solid land, Idaan and Ana close behind. In the night, the moon and stars obscured by almost-bare branches, Otah felt hardly more sure of himself than did Ashti Beg. But then a local boy appeared with a lantern dancing at the end of a pole to lead them to the wayhouse. They walked slowly despite the cold, as if sitting on the deck all day had been the most wearying work imaginable. Otah found himself walking to one side of the group, hanging back with Danat at his side. It wasn’t until his son spoke that Otah noticed that he’d been herded there like an errant sheep.

  “I’m sorry, Papa-kya,” Danat said, softly. “I need to speak with you.”

  Otah took a pose that granted his permission.

  “You spoke with Ana earlier,” Danat said. “I saw she took your hand. It looked…it looked like she was crying.”

  “Yes,” Otah said.

  “Was it about me?” Danat asked. “Was it something I’ve done wrong?”

  Otah’s expression alone must have been enough to answer the question. Danat looked around, shame in his face.

  “She’s avoiding me,” Danat said.

  “She’s blind, and we’ve been sunrise to sunset on a boat smaller than my bedchamber,” Otah said. “How could she possibly avoid you?”

  “It wasn’t today. It’s been…it’s been weeks. I thought at first it was only that Idaan and Ashti Beg joined us. There were women here, and Ana-cha felt more comfortable in their company. But it’s more than that, and…”

  Danat ran a hand through his hair. In the dim light of the lantern, Otah could see the single crease in his brow, like a paint mark.

  “I don’t know what to say. She’s done nothing in my presence to make me suspect she’s anything but fond of you. If anything, she seems stronger for having come with us.”

  Danat raised his hands toward some formal pose, but skidded in the mud. When he regained his balance, whatever he’d intended to express was forgotten. Otah put a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  The wayhouse was a series of low buildings built of fired brick. The stable squatted across a thin, stone-paved road, a single light burning at its side where, Otah assumed, a guard slept. The wayhouse keeper stood outside, her hands on her hips and a dusting of flour streaking her robe. The captain of the guard stood before her, his arms crossed, while the keeper turned her head from side to side like a cat uncertain which window to flee through. When she saw Otah walking toward them, her face went pale and she took a pose of welcome and obeisance that bent her almost double.

  “There’s a problem?” Otah asked.

  “There aren’t rooms,” the captain said. “All filled up, she says.”

  “Ah,” Otah said, but before he could say more the captain turned on him. Even in the dim light, he could see a banked rage in the man’s eyes. The captain took a pose that requested an audience more formal than the occasion called for. Otah replied with one, equally formal, that granted it.

  “All respect, Most High, I have done my best all this campaign to respect your wishes. You want to dunk your head in river water, I haven’t objected. You run off into the wilderness for half an evening with no guard or escort, and I’ve accepted that. But if you are about to suggest that we put the Emperor of the Khaiem in a sleeping tent in a wayhouse courtyard because someone else got here first, I’m resigning my commission.”

  “Actually, I was going to suggest that we offer the present guests our tents and compensation for their rooms,” Otah said. “It seemed polite.”

  “Ah. Yes, Most High,” the captain said. It was hard to tell in the night whether the man was blushing.

  “There’s room in the stables,” the keeper said. She had an eastern accent.

  “Yalakeht?” Otah asked, and the woman blinked.

  “I grew up there,” she said, a note of awe in her voice. As if recognizing an accent were a sign of supernatural power.

  “It’s a good city,” Otah said. “Would there be room enough for your present guests if we put my guardsmen in the stables as well?”

  “We’ll find space, Most High,” the keeper said.

  “Then I’ll go negotiate rooms for us,” Otah said, and to the captain, “It might be more impressive if I went in with a guard. They’ll be less likely to mistake me for a fraud.”

  “I…yes, Most High,” the captain said.

  The air in the wayhouse was thickened by a chimney with a poor draw. Smoke haze gave the place a feeling of dread and poverty. The tables were dark wood, the floors packed earth. A dozen men and women sat in groups, a few in a smaller room to the side. All eyes were on the guard as they strode in and took formal stances. Otah stepped in.

  The movement that stopped him was so slight it might almost not have existed and familiar enough to disorient him. A woman by the fire grate with her back to him shifted her shoulders. In anyone else, it would have been beneath notice. Otah stood, stunned, his heart thudding like it was trying to break free of his ribs. Idaan appeared at his side, her hand on his arm. He motioned her back.

  “Eiah?” he said.

  The woman by the fire turned to him. Her face was thin and drawn, older than time alone could explain. Her eyes were the same milky gray as Ana’s.

  “Father,” she said.

  26

  The years had changed Otah Machi. The last time Maati had seen him, his hair had been black or near enough to pass. His shoulders had been broader, his eyebrows smooth. The man who stood before the smoking fire grate now was thinner, his skin loose against his face. His robes, though travel-stained, were of the finest cloth. They draped him like an altar; they made him more than a man. Or perhaps Otah Machi had always been something more than the usual and his robes only reminded them.

  Danat, at his father’s side, was unrecognizable. The ill, coughing boy confined to his bed had grown into a hale young man with intelligent eyes and his father’s distant, considering demeanor. The others Maati had either seen recently enough that they held no disturbing sense of change or were strangers to him.

  They had all come. Large Kae and Small Kae and Eiah, but to his discomfort also Idaan Machi, sitting on a bench with a bowl of wine in her hand and her face as expressionless as the dead. A Galtic girl sat apart, her head held high, sightless and proud to cover the disgust and horror she must feel at all Maati had done. Ashti Beg sat at her side, another victim of Vanjit’s malice. After all that had happened, after all his many failures of judgment, seeing her among his arrayed enemies was still wrenching.

  Otah’s armsmen cleared the wayhouse. The conversation that should have taken place in the finest of meeting rooms in the high palaces instead found its place in a third-rate wayhouse, free of ceremony or ritual or even well-brewed tea. Maati felt himself trembling. He had the powerful physical memory of being a boy at the school, holding himself still and waiting for Tahi-kvo’s lacquer rod to split his skin.

  “Maati Vaupathai,” the Emperor said.

  “Most High,” Maati replied, crossing his arms.

  “I suppose I should start by asking why I shouldn’t have you killed where you stand.”

  Eiah, beside him, twitched as if wasp-stung. Maati stared at his old friend, his old enemy, and all the conciliatory words that he had imagined in the last day vanished like a snuffed candle. There was rage in Otah’s stance, and Maati found himself more than matching it.

  “How dare you?” Maati said, his voice little more than a hiss. “How dare you? I thought, coming here, I would at least be treated with respect. I thought at the very least, that. And instead you stand me up like a common thief in a low-town courtroom and have me def
end my life? Justify my right to breathe to the man who killed my son?”

  “Nayiit has nothing to do with this,” Otah said. “Sinja Ajutani, to contrast, died because of you. Every Galt who has starved since you exacted this sick, petty revenge is dead because of you. Every—”

  “Nayiit has everything to do with this. Your sick love of all things Galtic has everything to do with it. Your disloyalty to the women you claim to rule. Your perfect calm in making me an outcast living in gutters for something you were just as guilty of. You are a hypocrite and a liar in everything you’ve done. I owe you nothing, Otah-kvo. Nothing!”

  Otah was shouting something, but Maati’s ears were rushing with blood and raw anger. He saw the armsmen shift forward, blades at the ready, but Maati was far past caring. Every injustice, every slight, every cupful of pent-up outrage spilled out, all made worse by the fact that Otah—self-righteous, entitled, and arrogant—was so busy shouting back that he wasn’t hearing a word of what Maati was saying.

  When he noticed through his rage that a third voice had entered the fray, he couldn’t say how long it had been going.

  “I said stop!” the Galt shouted again. “Stop it! Both of you!”

  Maati turned to the girl, a sneer on his lip, but he was having a hard time catching his breath. Otah also was now silent, his imperial face flushed bright red. Maati felt the urge to offer up an obscene gesture, but he restrained himself. The girl stood in the space between the two, her hands outstretched. Danat stepped to her side. If anything, her anger appeared as high as either of her elders’, but she was able to speak coherently.

  “Gods,” she said. “Is this really what we’ve been doing? Someone please tell me that the world is on its knees over something more than two old men chewing over quarrels from their boyhood.”

  “This is much, much more than that,” Otah said. His voice, though severe, had lost some of its certainty.

  “I wouldn’t know from listening to that display,” Idaan said. “Ana-cha has more sense than you on this, brother. Listen to her.”

  Otah had calmed down enough to look merely peeved. Maati held his fist to his chest, but his heart was slowing to its usual pace. Nothing had happened. He was fine. Otah, across from him, took a pose appropriate to the beginning of a short break in a negotiation. His jaw was tight and his stance only civil. Maati replied with one that accepted the proposal. He wanted to sit at Eiah’s side, to talk with her about what to do next and how to go about it. It would have been a provocation, though, so instead, Maati retreated to the door leading out into the cold, black courtyard and the clean night air.

  It had been a mistake. Otah was too proud and self-centered to help them. He was too wrapped up in anger that the world hadn’t followed his one and only holy and anointed plan. They should have gone on to Utani, found someone in the utkhaiem who would support them. Or they should have gone after Vanjit themselves.

  They should have done anything but this.

  Voices came from behind him. Danat’s, Otah’s, Eiah’s. They sounded tense, but they weren’t shouting. Maati pressed his hands into their opposite sleeves and watched his breath steam like a soup kettle. He wondered where Vanjit was and how she was keeping warm. It seemed the woman had become two different people in his mind—one, the girl who had come to him in despair and been given hope again, the other a half-mad poet he’d loosed on the world. The impulses to kill her and to see to her care shouldn’t have been able to exist in him at the same time, and yet there they were. He prayed she was dead, and he hoped she was well.

  Between that and seeing Otah again, his head was buzzing like a hive.

  “We’ve reached a conclusion,” Idaan said from behind him. He turned. She was standing in the doorway, blocking the light. His belly itched where her assassin had stabbed him all those years before.

  “Should I be grateful?” Maati asked. Idaan ignored the jab.

  “If you and Otah can’t play gently, and it’s clear as the moon that you can’t, we’re going to go through channels. Eiah’s talking with Danat. They sent me to speak with you.”

  “Ah, because we’re such excellent friends?”

  “Say it’s because our relationship is simpler,” Idaan said. Her voice took on the texture of cast iron. “Tell me what happened.”

  Maati leaned against the rough wall and shook his head. He’d become too excited, and now that he was calming, it was coming out in an urge to weep. He would not under any circumstances allow that in front of Idaan. Idaan, who’d tried to have Otah killed and had now become his traveling companion. What more did anyone need to know to understand how far Otah had fallen?

  “Maati,” Idaan said, her voice still hard. “Now.”

  He began with leaving the school, Eiah’s opinion of his health, Vanjit’s escalating unreliability. The story took on a rhythm as he told it, the words putting themselves in order as if he had practiced it all before. Idaan didn’t speak, but her listening was intense, drawing detail from him almost against his will.

  It was as if he were telling himself what had happened, offering a kind of confession to the empty night, Idaan Machi—of all people in the world, Idaan Machi—as his intercessor.

  He reached the end—Vanjit’s discovery of the poison, her escape, his decision to find help. Somewhere in the course of things, he’d let himself slip to the ground, sitting with his legs stuck out before him and the stone paving leaching the warmth from his body. Idaan squatted beside him. He imagined that the manner of her listening had softened, as if silences could differ like speech.

  “I see,” she said. “Well. Who’d have thought this would become worse?”

  “You led him to us,” Maati said.

  “I did my best,” Idaan agreed. “It’s been years since I put my hand to this kind of work. I’m out of practice, but I did what I could.”

  “All to regain his imperial favor,” Maati said. “I would never have guessed that you’d become his toady.”

  “Actually, I started it to protect Cehmai,” Idaan said as if he had offered her no insult. “With you stirring up the mud, I was afraid for him. I wanted Otah to know that he wasn’t part of it. And then, once I was at the court…well, I had amends to make to Danat.”

  “The boy?”

  “No. The one he’s named for,” Idaan said. She heaved a great sigh. “But back to the matter at hand, eh? I understand how hard and confusing it is to love someone you hate. I really do. And if you call me his toady again, I swear by all the gods there ever were, I’ll disjoint your fingers. Understood?”

  “I didn’t mean for it to happen like this,” Maati said. “I wanted to heal the world, not…not this.”

  “Plans go awry,” Idaan said. “It’s their nature. I’m going back in. Join us when you’re ready. I’ll get something warm for you to drink.”

  Maati sat alone, growing colder. Behind him, the wayhouse ticked as the day’s heat radiated away. An owl gave its low coo to the world, and the darkness around him seemed to lessen. He could make out the paving stones, the outline of the stable, the high branches rising toward the stars like thin fingers. Maati rested his head against the wall and let his eyes close.

  The trembling had stopped. The anger was less immediate, chagrin slowly taking its place. He heard Eiah’s calm voice, as solid as stone, from within. He should be with her. He should be at her side. She shouldn’t have to face them by herself. He rose, grunting, and lumbered inside, his knees aching.

  Otah was sitting in a low wooden chair, his fingers pressed to his lips in thought. He glanced up as Maati stepped into the room but made no other acknowledgment. Eiah, speaking, gestured to the space between Otah and Danat. Her voice had neither rancor nor apology, and Maati was reminded again why he admired her.

  “Yes,” she said, “the andat outplayed us. From the beginning with Ashti Beg to the end with me, we wanted to think of it as a baby. We all knew it wasn’t. We all understand perfectly well that it was some part of Vanjit’s mind made fles
h, but…”

  She raised her hands, palms out. Not a formal pose, but the gesture was eloquent enough.

  “So what does it want?” Danat said. “If it truly wants Vanjit killed, why didn’t it help you? That would have done all it wanted to do.”

  “It may want more than freedom,” Idaan said, speaking over her shoulder as she pressed a warm bowl into Maati’s hand. “There’s precedent. Seedless wanted his freedom, but he also wanted his poet to suffer. Clarity-of-Sight may want something for Vanjit besides death.”

  “Such as?” Large Kae asked.

  “Punishment,” Eiah suggested. “Or isolation. Or…”

  “Or a sense of family,” Ashti Beg said, her voice oddly contemplative. “If we think of the babe as having more than one agenda, this could be its way of making a world that was only mother and child. Alienating all the rest of us.”

  “But it also wants its freedom,” Maati said. Small Kae shifted on her bench at the sound of his voice, making room for him. He moved forward and sat. “Whatever else it wants, it must want that.”

  A puff of smoke escaped from the fire grate. Maati sipped the drink Idaan had given him—rum with honey and apple. It warmed his throat and made his chest glow.

  “Is this really what we should care about?” the Galtic girl—Ana—asked. “I don’t mean that as an attack, but it seems that we’ve established that the girl’s less than sane. Is there something we gain by trying to guess at the shape of her madness?”

  “We might have a better idea of where she’s gone,” Small Kae offered. “What she might do next?”

  “Ana’s right,” Danat said. “We could roll dice about it, but there are some things we know for certain. She set out half a day’s boat ride north of here a night ago. If she goes upriver, she’ll need to hire a boat. If she goes down, she could hire one or build a raft and rely on the current. Or she can go east over land. What about the low towns? Could she have found shelter in a low town?”