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

  “It isn’t as easy as living in the courts, that’s truth,” Cehmai said. His smile was the same as ever, even set in this worn face. “There are nights it would be good to leave the washing to a servant.”

  “It won’t get easier,” Maati said. “You’ll get older. Both of you. The work will stay just as difficult, and you’ll get tired faster. When you take sick, you’ll recover slowly. One or the other of you will strain something or break an old bone or catch fever, and your children won’t be there to care for you. The next farm over? His children won’t be there for you either. Or the next. Or the next.”

  “He’s not wrong, love,” Idaan said. Maati blinked. Of all the people in the world, Idaan was the last he’d expected support from.

  “I know all that,” Cehmai said. “It doesn’t mean that I should go back to being a poet.”

  “What else would you do?” Maati said. “Sell the land rights? Who is there to buy them? Take up some new trade? Who will there be to teach you? Binding the andat is the thing you’ve trained for. Your mind is built for the work. These girls…you should see them. The dedication, the engagement, the drive. If this thing can be done, they will do it. We can remake the world.”

  “We’ve done that once already,” Cehmai said. “It didn’t go well.”

  “We didn’t have time. The Galts were at our door. We did what we had to do. And now we can correct our errors.”

  “Does my brother know about this?” Idaan asked.

  “He refused me,” Maati said.

  “Is that why you hate him?”

  The air around the table seemed to clench. Maati stared at the woman. Idaan met his gaze with a level calm.

  “He is selling us,” Maati said. “He is turning away from a generation of women whose injuries are as much his fault as ours.”

  “And is that why you hate him?” Idaan asked again. “You can’t tell me that you don’t, Maati-cha. I know quite a lot about hatred.”

  He let my son die to save his, Maati thought but did not say. There were a thousand arguments against the statement: Otah hadn’t been there when Nayiit died; it wasn’t Danat’s fault that his protector failed to fend off the soldiers; Nayiit wasn’t truly his son. He knew them all, and that none of them mattered. Nayiit had died, Maati had been sent into the wilderness, and Otah had risen like a star in the sky.

  “What I feel toward your brother doesn’t change what needs to be done,” Maati said, “or the help I’ll need to do it.”

  “Who’s backing you?” Idaan said.

  Maati felt a flash of surprise and even fear. An image of Eiah flickered in his mind and was banished.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Someone’s feeding you,” she said. “Someone’s hiding you and your students. If the word got out that you’d been found, half the world would send armsmen to cut you down for fear you’d do exactly what you’re doing now. And half of the rest would kick you to death for petty vengeance. If it’s not Otah protecting you, who is it? One of the high families of the utkhaiem? A trading house? Who?”

  “I have strong backing,” Maati said. “But I won’t tell you more than that.”

  “Every danger you face, my husband faces too,” Idaan said. “If you want him to take your risks, you have to tell him what protection you can offer.”

  “I have an ear in the palaces anytime I need it. Otah won’t be able to mount any kind of action against me without warning finding me. You can trust to that.”

  “You have to tell us more,” Idaan said.

  “He doesn’t,” Cehmai said, sharply. “He doesn’t have to offer me protection because I’m not going to do the work. I’m done, love. I’m finished. I want a few more years with you and a quiet death, and I’ll be quite pleased with that.”

  “The world needs you,” Maati said.

  “It doesn’t,” Cehmai said. “You’ve come a long way, Maati-kvo, and I’ve disappointed you. I’m sorry for that, but you have my answer. I used to be a poet, but I’m not anymore. I can reconsider as long as we both keep breathing, and we’ll come to the same place.”

  “We can’t stay on here,” Idaan said. Her voice was soft. “I’ve loved it here too. This place, these years…we’ve been lucky to have them. But Maati-cha’s right. This season, and perhaps five or ten after it, we’ll make do. But eventually the work will pass us. We’re not getting younger, and we can’t hire on hands to help us. There aren’t any.”

  “Then we’ll leave,” Cehmai said. “We’ll do something else, only not that.”

  “Why not?” Maati asked.

  “Because I don’t want to kill any more people,” Cehmai said. “Not the girls you’re encouraging to try this, not the foreigners who would try to stop us, not whatever army came in the next autumn’s war.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like that,” Maati said.

  “It does,” Cehmai said. “We held the power of gods, and the world envied us and turned against us, and they always will again. I can’t say I think much of where we stand now, but I remember what happened to bring us here, and I don’t see how making poets of women instead of men will make a world any different or better than the one we had then.”

  “It may not,” Maati said, “but it will be better than the one we have now. If you won’t help me, then I’ll do without you, but I’d thought better of you, Cehmai. I’d thought you had more spine.”

  “Rice is getting cold,” Idaan said. Her voice was controlled rage. “Perhaps we should eat it before it goes bad.”

  They finished the meal alternating between artificially polite conversation and strained silence. After, Cehmai took the bowls away to clean and didn’t return. Idaan led Maati to a small room near the back with a straw pallet and a night candle already burning. Maati slept poorly and found himself still upset when he woke. He left in the dark of the morning without speaking again to either of his hosts, one from disappointment and shame and the other, though he would never have said it, from fear.

  5

  Nantani was the nearest port to the lands of Galt, but the scars of war were too fresh there and too deep. Instead, the gods had conspired to return Otah to the city of his childhood: Saraykeht.

  The fastest ships arrived several days before the great mass of the fleet. They stood out half a hand’s travel from the seafront, and Otah took in the whole city. He could see the masts at the farthest end of the seafront, berthed in order to leave the greatest space for the incoming traffic. Bright cloth hung from every window Otah could see, starting with the dock master’s offices nearest the water to the towers of the palaces, high and to the north where the vibrant colors were grayed by humidity.

  Crowds filled the docks, and he heard a roar of voices and snatches of drum and flute carried by the breeze. The air itself smelled different: rank and green and familiar in a way he hadn’t expected.

  The Emperor of the Khaiem had been away from his cities for eight months, almost nine, and his return with the high families of Galt in tow was the kind of event seen once in history and never again. This was the day that every man and woman at the seafront or watching from the windows above the streets would recall until death’s long fingers touched them. The day that the new empress, the Galtic empress, arrived for the first time.

  There were stories Otah had read in books that had been ashes for almost as long as this new Empress had been alive, about an emperor’s life mirroring the state of his empire. An emperor with many children meant rich, fertile land; one without heir spoke of poor crops and thin cattle. An emperor who drank himself to sleep meant an empire of libertines; one who studied and prayed, a somber land of great wisdom. He had half-believed the stories then. He had no faith in them now.

  “You would think they would have made some allowance for our arrival,” a man’s peevish voice said from behind him. Otah looked back at Balasar Gice, dressed in formal brocade armor and shining with sweat. Otah took a pose of powerlessness before the gods.

  “The win
d does what the wind does,” he said. “We’ll be on land by nightfall.”

  “We will,” Balasar said. “But the others will be docking and unloading all night.”

  It was true. Saraykeht would likely add something near a tenth of its population in the next day, Galts filling the guest quarters and wayhouses and likely half the beds in the soft quarter. It was the second time in Otah’s life that a pale-skinned, round-eyed neighborhood without buildings had appeared in his city. Only now, it would happen without drawn blades and blood.

  “They’re sending tow galleys out for us,” Otah said. “It will all be fine.”

  The galleys, with their flashing banks of white oars and ornamental ironwork rails, reached the great ship just after midday. With a great clamor of voices—protests, laughter, orders, counterorders—thick cables of hemp were made fast to the ship’s deck. The sails were already down, and with the sound of a bell clanging like an alarm, Otah’s ship lurched, shifted directly into the wind, and began the last, shortest leg of his journey home.

  A welcoming platform had been erected especially for the occasion. The broad beams were white as snow, and a ceremonial guard waited by a litter while a somewhat less ceremonial one kept the press of the crowds at a distance. Balasar and six of the Galtic High Council had made their way to Otah’s ship in order to disembark with him. The Avenger with Ana and her parents would likely come next, after which the roar of competing etiquette masters would likely drown out the ocean. Otah was more than willing to leave the fighting for position and status for the dock master to settle out.

  The crowd’s voice rose when the ship pulled in, and again when the walk bridged the shifting gap between ship and land. His servants preceded him in the proper array and sequence, and then Otah left the sea. The noise was something physical, a wind built of sound. The ceremonial guard adopted poses of obeisance, and Otah took his ritual reply. The first of the guard to stand, grinning, was Sinja.

  “You’ve shaved your whiskers,” Otah shouted.

  “I was starting to look like an otter,” Sinja agreed. His expression became opaque and he bowed to Otah’s right. “Balasar-cha.”

  “Sinja,” Balasar said.

  The past intruded. Once Sinja had played the part of Balasar’s man, expert on the cities of the Khaiem and mercenary leader of war. He had spied on the Galts, betrayed Balasar, and killed the man Balasar held dearest to his heart. It thickened the air between them, even now. Balasar’s eyes shifted to the middle distance, a frown on his lips as if he were counting how many of his dead might have lived, had Sinja remained true. And then the moment was gone. Or if not gone, covered over for the sake of etiquette.

  The others of the Galtic party lurched in from the ship, unsteady on planks that didn’t move, and the assembled masses cheered each of them like a hero returned from war. Servants dressed in light cotton robes led each sweating Galt to a waiting litter, Otah’s station of honor making him the last to leave.

  “I suspect they’ll be changing to local clothes before long,” Sinja said. “They all look half-dead with the heat.”

  “I’m feeling it myself,” Otah said.

  “Should I interrupt protocol?” Sinja asked. “I could have you loaded and on your way up the hills in the time it takes to kill a chicken.”

  “No,” Otah said with a sigh. “If we’re doing this, let’s do it well. But ride with me, eh? I want to hear what’s going on.”

  “Yes,” Sinja said. “Well. You’ve missed some dramatics, but I don’t think there’s anything particularly ominous waiting. Except the pirates. And the conspiracy. You did get the report about the conspiracy in Yalakeht? It’s apparently got ties to Obar State.”

  “Well, that’s just lovely,” Otah said.

  “No more plague than usual,” Sinja offered gamely, and then it was time and servants stepped forward to escort Otah to his litter. The shifting gait of his bearers was similar to being aboard ship, but also wrong. Between that and the heat, Otah was beginning to feel nauseated, but the buildings that passed by his beaded window were comforting. Great blue and white walls topped with roof tiles of gray and red; banners hanging in the slow, thick air; men and women in poses of welcome or else waving small lengths of brightly colored cloth. If it had been autumn or winter, the old firekeepers’ kilns would have been lit and strange flames would have accompanied him up the wide streets to the palaces.

  “Any problems with the arrival?” he asked Sinja.

  “A few. Angry women throwing stones, mostly. We’ve locked them away until the last ship comes in. Danat and I decided to put the girl and her family in the poet’s house. It isn’t the most impressive location, but it’s comfortable, and it’s far enough back from the other buildings that they might have some privacy. The gods all know they’ll be gawked at like a three-headed calf the rest of the time.”

  “I think Ana has a lover,” Otah said. “One of the sailors was built rather like a courtier.”

  “Ah,” Sinja said. “I’ll tell the guard to keep eyes out. I assume we’d rather he didn’t come calling?”

  “No, better that he not,” Otah said.

  “I don’t suppose there’s a chance the girl’s still a virgin?”

  Otah took a pose that dismissed the concern. Even if she weren’t—and of course she wasn’t—she wouldn’t be bearing another man’s child. Not if the boy he had glimpsed in the hold of the Avenger was a Galt. Otah felt a moment’s unease.

  “If the guard do find a boy sneaking in, have him held until I can speak with him. I’d rather that this whole situation not get more complex than it already is.”

  “Your word is law, Most High,” Sinja said, his tone light. Otah chuckled.

  He had missed the man’s company. There were few people in the world who could see Otah beneath his titles, fewer still who dared mock him. It was a familiarity that had been forged by years. Together, they had acted against the plot which had first changed Otah from outcast to Khai Machi. They had loved the same woman and come near violence over it. Sinja had trained Otah’s son in the arts of combat and strategy, had gotten drunk with the Emperor after Kiyan’s funeral, had spoken his mind whether invited to or not. Otah had no other advisor or friend like him.

  As they moved north, the crowd that lined the street changed its nature. Once they had passed out of the throng at the seafront, the robes and faces had been those of laborers and artisans. As they passed the compounds of the merchant houses, the robes and banners became more ornate. Rich and saturated colors were edged with embroidery of gold and worked in the symbols of the various houses. And then almost without a pause, the symbols and colors were not of merchants, but of the families of the utkhaiem, and the high walls and ornate shutters were not mercantile compounds, but palaces. Men and women in fine robes took poses of welcome and obeisance as servants and slaves fanned them. A hidden choir burst into song somewhere to his left, the voices in complex harmony. The litter stopped before the grand palace, the first palace, the Emperor’s palace. Otah stepped out, sweeping his gaze over the ordered rows of servants and high officials until he saw the one man he’d longed for.

  Danat was in his twentieth summer, his face a mixture of Otah’s long, northern features and Kiyan’s, thin and foxlike. The planes of his cheeks had sharpened since Otah had gone. He looked older, more handsome. He wore a robe of deep gray set off with a rich, red sash that suited him. And still, Otah could see all the boys that had made this man: the babe, the bumbling child new to his own feet, the long-ill boy kept in his bed, the awkward and sorrowful youth, and the young heir to the Empire. All of them stood before him, hands in a pose of formal welcome, a smile glittering in his eyes. Otah broke protocol, embracing his son. The boy’s arms were strong.

  “You’ve done well,” Otah murmured.

  “None of the cities actually burned down while you were gone,” Danat replied softly. There was pride in his voice, pleasure at the compliment.

  “But you sound too much like Sinja
.”

  “You knew that was a risk.”

  Otah laughed and let the swarm of servants precede him to his chambers. There would be no end of ceremonies later. Welcomes would drag on for weeks, audiences, special pleadings, feasts, dances, negotiations, councils. It all lay before him like a life’s work started late. But now, sitting in the cool breeze of his private apartments with Sinja across from him and Danat pouring chilled water into stone bowls, the world was perfect.

  Except, of course, that it wasn’t.

  “Perhaps we can mend both breaks with the same nail,” Sinja said. “A strong showing against the pirates protects Chaburi-Tan and warns Obar State to keep to its own house.”

  “And a weak showing against them?” Otah asked.

  “Shows we’re weak, after which things go poorly,” Sinja said. “But if we’re going to assume failure from the start, there’s not going to be anything of use that I can offer.”

  Otah propped up his feet. The palaces still felt as if they were swaying: the ghost motion of weeks aboard ship. The feeling was oddly pleasant.

  “On the other hand,” he said, “if we plan to decimate the enemy with a flower and a pillow, it’s not going to help us. How strong is our fleet? Do we have enough men to take the pirates in a fair fight?”

  “If we don’t have them now, we certainly won’t next year when all the sailors are a year older,” Sinja said. “Even if you magically transport every fertile girl in Galt straight to some poor bastard’s bed, it will be ten years before they can deliver us anyone strong enough to coil rope, much less fight. If we’re going to do anything, it has to be now. We’re going to grow weaker before we’re strong.”

  “If we manage to get strong,” Otah said. “And I don’t know that we can spare the ships. We have eleven cities and the gods alone know how many low towns. We’re talking about moving half a million of our men to Galt and bringing back as many of their women.”