The Price of Spring

by Daniel Abraham

  "Yes," he said. "You are. And with my sister, my wife, my daughter ... of all the men in the world, I should have known what that meant, and I forgot. I was in such a hurry to fix all the things I've done poorly that I did this poorly too."

  She was frowning at him again as she had once before, on the journey to Saraykeht. He might have begun speaking in the language of birds or belching stones, to judge by her expression. He chuckled.

  "It was not my intention to treat you with disrespect, Ana-cha. That I did so shames me. I accept your apology, and I hope that you will accept mine.

  "I won't marry him," she said.

  Otah drank the rest of his tea and set the empty bowl mouth-down on the lacquer tray.

  "My son, you mean," Otah said. "You'll stay with this other man. Hanchat? No matter what the price or who's called on to pay it, no man deserves even your consideration? If it destroys your country and mine both, it would still be just."

  "I ... I don't ..." the girl said. "That isn't. .

  "I know. I understand. I'll say this. Danat is a good man. Better than I was at his age. But what you choose is entirely yours," Otah said. "If we've established anything, you and I, it's that."

  "Not his?"

  "Danat's decision is whether he'll marry you," Otah said with a smile. "Not the same thing at all."

  He meant to leave her there. It seemed the right moment, and there was nothing more he could think to say. As he bent forward, preparing to rise, Ana spoke again.

  "Your wife was a wayhouse keeper. You didn't put her aside. You never took a second wife. It was an insult to the whole body of the utkhaiem."

  "It was," Otah said and stood with a grunt. There had been a time he could sit or stand in silence. "But I didn't marry her for the effect it had on other people. I did it because she was Kiyan, and there wasn't anyone else like her in the world."

  "How can you ask Danat to obey tradition when you've broken it?" she demanded.

  Otah considered her. She seemed angry again, but it seemed as much on Danat's behalf as her own.

  "By asking," Otah said. "It's the best I can manage. I've damaged the world badly. The reasons I had for doing it seemed good at the time. I would like to be part of putting it back together again. With his help. With yours."

  "I didn't break all this," Ana said, her chin stubborn. "Danat didn't either, for that matter. It's not fair that we should have to sacrifice whatever we want to unmake your mistakes."

  "It isn't. But I can't repair this."

  "Why do you think I can?"

  "I have some faith in you both," he said.

  By the time he made his way back to his rooms, Idaan had departed, leaving only a brief note saying that she intended to return in the morning and had some questions for him. Otah sat on a low couch by the fire grate, his eyes focused on nothing. He wondered what Eiah would have made of his conversation with the Galtic girl, and of whom he was truly asking forgiveness. His mind wandered, and he did not realize he had lain back until he woke to the cool light of dawn.

  He was sitting in his private bath, the hot water easing the knots that sleeping away from his bed had tied in his back, when the servant announced Sinja's arrival. Otah considered the effort that rising, drying himself, and being dressed would require and had the man brought to him. Sinja, dressed in the simple canvas and leather of a soldier, looked more like a mercenary captain than the nearest advisor to an emperor. He squatted at the edge of the bath, looking down at Otah. The servant poured tea for the newcomer, took a ritual pose appropriate to a withdrawal from which he would have to be specifically summoned to return, and left. The door slid closed behind him, the waxed wooden runners as silent as breath.

  "What's happened?" Otah asked, dreading the answer.

  "I was going to ask the same thing. You spoke to Ana Dasin last night?"

  "I did," Otah said.

  Sinja sipped his tea before he spoke again.

  "Well, I don't know what you said to her, but this morning, I had a runner from Farrer Dasin offering his ships and his men for Balasar's fleet. The general's meeting with him now to arrange the details."

  Otah sat forward, the water swirling around him.

  "Farrer-cha ..."

  Sinja put down the bowl of tea.

  "The man himself. Not Issandra, not one of his servants. The handwriting was his own. There weren't details, only the offer. And since he's been reticent and dismissive every time Balasar asked, it seemed that something had changed. If it's what it looks like, it will mean putting off departure for a few days, but when we get there, it will be a real fighting force."

  "That's. . ." Otah began. "I don't know how that happened."

  "I've been swimming through palace gossip ever since, trying to find what made the change, and the only thing half-plausible I've heard is that Ana Dasin met with Danat-cha, after which she went to a secondrate teahouse, drank more than was considered healthy, and came here. After talking with you, she went back to the old poet's house; the lanterns were all lit and they didn't stop burning until the sun rose."

  "We didn't talk about the fleet," Otah said. "The subject never came up.

  Sinja unstrung his sandals and slid his feet into the warm water of the bath.

  "Why don't you tell me what was said," Sinja asked. "Because somehow, in the middle of it, you seem to have done something right."

  Otah recounted the meeting, rising from his bath and drying himself as he did. Sinja listened for the most part, interrupting only to laugh when Otah told of apologizing to the girl.

  "That likely had as much to do with it as anything," Sinja said. "A high councillor's daughter with the Emperor of the Khaiem calling himself down for disrespecting her. Gods, Otah-kya, with that low an opinion of your own dignity, I don't know how you managed to hold power all these years."

  Otah paused, his hands shifting to a pose of query.

  "You apologized to a Galtic girl."

  "I'd treated her poorly," Otah said.

  Sinja raised his hands. It wasn't a formal pose, but it carried the sense of surrender. Whatever it was Sinja didn't understand about the act, he clearly despaired of ever learning.

  "Tell me the rest," Sinja said.

  There wasn't a great deal more, but Otah told it. He pulled on his robes by himself. The servants could adjust them when the meeting ended. Sinja drank another bowl of tea. The water in the bath grew still and as clear as air.

  "Well," Sinja said when he had finished, "that's unexpected all around."

  "You think Ana-cha interceded for us."

  "I can't think anything else," Sinja said. "She's an interesting girl, that one. Quick to anger and about as tough as boiled leather if confronted, but I think you made her feel for you. It was clever."

  "I didn't mean it as a ploy," Otah said.

  "That's likely what made the ploy work," Sinja said. "Issandra and Danat should hear more of it. You know that little conspiracy is beginning to slip its stitches?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Danat's false lover. Shija Radaani? It seems your boy is starting to fall in love with her. Or if not love, at least bed. That was the other gossip this morning. Shija went to Danat's rooms last night and hasn't yet come out."

  Otah tugged at the sleeves, his eyebrows trying to crawl up his forehead. Sinja nodded.

  "Perhaps it's part of Issandra's plan?" Otah said.

  "If it is, she's more of a gambler than I am."

  "I'll look into it," Otah said.

  "Don't bother. I've already sent word to all the parties who need to know."

  "Meaning Issandra."

  "And nobody else," Sinja said. "You worry about finding Maati and his poet girls. And your sister. Whatever you're doing, keep one eye toward her."

  Otah was halfway to objecting, but Sinja only tilted his head. Idaan had killed Otah's brothers. His father. She was capable of casual slaughter, and everyone knew it. There was no point in pretending the world was something it wasn't. Otah took
a pose that accepted the advice and promised his best effort.

  In point of fact, Idaan was waiting in his rooms when he returned from his breakfast and the morning of audiences that he could not postpone. She wore a borrowed robe of blue silk as dark as a twilight sky. Her arms and shoulders were thicker than the robe allowed, the fabric straining. Her hair was pulled back in a gray tail as thick as a mane. She did not smile.

  "Idaan-cha," he said.

  "Brother," she replied.

  He sat across from her. Her long face was cool and unreadable. She touched the papers and scrolls on the low table between them. The scents of cedar and apples should have made the room more comfortable.

  "I'm not done," she said. "But I doubt a year and ten clerks would be enough to do a truly thorough job. With just the pair of us, and you off half the time at court, we can't really hope for more than a weighted guess."

  "Then we should get to work," he said. "I'll have them bring us food and-"

  "Before that," Idaan said. "Before that, there's something we should discuss. Alone."

  Otah considered her eyes. They were the same black-brown as his own. Her jaw was softer, her mouth pale and lined. He could still see the girl she had been, whom he had drawn up from the deepest cells beneath Machi and given freedom where she'd expected slavery or death.

  "I'll send the servants away," he said. She took a pose that offered thanks.

  When he returned, she was pacing before the windows, her hands clasped behind her. The soft leather soles of her boots whispered against the wood. The city spread below them, and then the sea.

  "I never thought about them," she said. "The andat? I never gave them half a thought when I was young. Stone-Made-Soft was something halfway between a trained hunting cat and another courtier in a world full of them. But they could destroy everything, couldn't they? If a poet bound something like Steam or Fog, all that ocean could vanish in a moment, couldn't it?"

  "I suppose," Otah agreed.

  "I would have controlled it. Stone-Made-Soft, I mean. And Cehmai. If all the things I'd planned had happened as I planned them, I would have had the command of that power."

  "Your husband would have," he said. Otah had ordered her husband executed. Adrah Vaunyogi's body had hung from the ruins of his family's palace, food for the crows. Idaan smiled.

  "My husband," she said, her voice warm and amused. "Even worse."

  She shook herself and turned back to the table. Her thick fingers plucked out a clerk's writing tablet. Otah could see letters carved into the wax.

  "I've made a list of those people who seem most likely," she said. "I have a dozen, and I could give you a dozen more if you'd like it. They've all traveled extensively in the past four years. They've all had expenditures that look suspicious to one degree or another. And as far as I can see, all of them oppose your treaty with the Galts or are closely related to someone who does. And they all have the close connections to the palace that Maati boasted of."

  Otah held out his hand. Idaan didn't pass the tablet to him.

  "I think about what would have happened if I had been given that kind of power," she said. "I think of the girl I was back then. And the things I did. Can you imagine what I might have done?"

  "It wouldn't have happened," Otah said. "Cehmai only answered to you so long as the Dai-kvo told him to. If you had started draining oceans or melting cities, he would have forbidden it."

  "The Dai-kvo is dead, though. Years dead, and almost forgotten."

  "What are you saying, Idaan-cha?"

  She smiled, but her eyes made it sorrow.

  "All the restraints we had to keep the poets from doing as they saw fit? They're gone now. I'm saying you should remember that when you see this list. Remember the stakes we're playing for."

  The tablet was heavy in his hand, the dark wax scored with white where she had written on it. He frowned as his finger traced down the names. Then he stopped, and the blood left his face. He understood what Idaan had been saying. She was telling him to be ruthless, to be cold. She meant to steel him against the pain of what he might have to sacrifice.

  "My daughter's name is on this list," he said, keeping his voice low and matter-of-fact.

  His sister replied with silence.

  12

  "There," Vanjit said, her finger pointing up into a featureless blue sky. "Right there."

  On her hip, the andat squirmed and waved its tiny hands. She shifted her weight, drawing the small body closer to her own, her outstretched finger still indicating nothing.

  "I don't see it," Maati said.

  Vanjit smiled, her attention focusing on the babe. Clarity-of-Sight mewled, shook its head weakly, and then stilled. Vanjit's lips pressed thin, and the sky above Maati seemed to sharpen. Even where there was nothing to see, the blue itself seemed legible. And then he caught sight of it. Little more than a dot at first, and then a moment later, he made out the shape of the outstretched wings. A hawk, soaring high above the ground. Its beak was hooked and sharp as a knife. Its feathers, brown and gold, trembled in the high air. A smear of old blood darkened its talons. There were mites in its feathers.

  Maati closed his eyes and looked away, shaken by vertigo.

  "Gods!" he said. He heard Vanjit's delighted chuckle.

  The spirit of elation filled the stone halls, the ruined gardens, the spare meadows. All the days since the binding, it had felt to Maati as if the world itself had taken a deep breath and then laughed aloud. Whenever the chores and classes had allowed it, the girls had crowded around Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight, and himself along with them.

  The andat itself was beautiful and fascinating. Its form was identical to a true human child, but small things in its behavior showed Vanjit's inexperience. She had not held a babe or seen one since she herself had been no more than a child. The strength of its neck and the sureness of its gaze were subtly wrong. Its cry, while wordless, expressed a richness and variety of emotion that in Maati's experience children rarely developed before they could walk. Small errors of imagination that affected only the form that the andat took. Its function, as Vanjit delighting in showing, was perfect and precise.

  "I've seen other things too," Vanjit said. "The greater the change, the more difficult it is at first."

  Maati nodded. He could see the individual hairs on her head. The crags where tiny flakes of dead skin peeled from the living tissue beneath. An insect the shape of a tick but a thousand times smaller clung to the root of her eyelash. He closed his eyes.

  "Forgive me," he said. "Could I put upon you to undo some part of that? It's distracting...."

  He heard her robe rustle and go silent. When he opened his eyes again, his vision was clear but no longer inhumanly so. He smiled.

  "Once I've made the change, I forget that it doesn't fall back on its own," she said.

  "Stone-Made-Soft was much the same," Maati said. "Once it had changed the nature of a rock, it remained weakened until Cehmai-kvo put an effort into changing it back. Then there was Water-Moving-Down, who might stop a river only so long as its poet gave the matter strict attention. The question rests on the innate capacity for change within the object affected. Stone by nature resists change, water embraces it. I suspect that whatever eyes you improve will still suffer the normal effects of age."

  "The change may be permanent, but we aren't," she said.

  "Well put," Maati said.

  The courtyard in which they sat showed only small signs of the decade of ruin it had suffered. The weeds had all been pulled or cut, the broken stones reset. Songbirds flitted between the trees, lizards scurried through the low grass, and far above, invisible to him now, a hawk circled in the high, distant air.

  Maati could imagine that it wasn't the school that he had suffered in his boyhood: it had so little in common with the half-prison he recalled. A handful of women instead of a shifting cadre of boys. A cooperative struggle to achieve the impossible instead of cruelty and judgment. Joy instead of fear. The space itself s
eemed remade, and perhaps the whole of the world along with it. Vanjit seemed to guess his thoughts. She smiled. The thing at her hip grumbled, fixing its black eyes on Maati, but did not cry.

  "It's unlike anything I expected," Vanjit said. "I can feel him. All the time, he's in the back of my mind."

  "How burdensome is it?" Maati asked, sitting forward.

  Vanjit shook her head.

  "No worse than any baby, I'd imagine," she said. "He tires me sometimes, but not so much I lose myself. And the others have all been kind. I don't think I've cooked a meal for myself since the binding."

  "That's good," Maati said. "That's excellent."

  "And you? Your eyes?"

  "Perfect. I've been able to write every evening. I may actually manage to complete this before I die."

  He'd meant it as a joke, but Vanjit's reply was grim, almost scolding.

  "Don't say that. Don't talk about death lightly. It isn't something to laugh at."

  Maati took an apologetic pose, and a moment later the darkness seemed to leave the girl's eyes. She shifted the andat again, freeing one hand to take an apologetic pose.

  "No," Maati said. "You're right. You're quite right."

  He steered the conversation to safer waters-meals, weather, reconstructing the finer points of Vanjit's successful binding. Contentment seemed to come from the girl like heat from a fire. He regretted leaving her there, and yet, walking down the wide stone corridors, he was also pleased.

  The years he had spent scrabbling in the shadows like a rat had been so long and so thick with anger and despair, Maati had forgotten what it was to feel simple happiness. Now, with the women's grammar proved and the andat returned to the world, his flesh itself felt different. His shoulders had grown straighter, his heart lighter, his joints looser and stronger and sure. He had managed to ignore his burden so long he had mistaken it for normalcy. The lifting of it felt like youth.

  Eiah sat cross-legged on the floor of one of the old lecture halls, untied codices, opened books, unfurled scrolls laid out around her like ripples on the surface of a pond. He glanced at the pages-diagrams of flayed arms, the muscles and joints laid bare as if by the most meticulous butcher in history; Westlands script with its whorls and dots like a child's angry scribble; notations in Eiah's own hand, outlining the definitions and limitations and structure of violence done upon flesh. Wounded. The andat at its origin. And all of it, he could make out from where he stood without squinting or bending close.