“The Khai left orders as well,” Maati said.
“Ah, well. Nothing to be done about that, then. I trust everything is acceptable with your apartments?”
“I … I really don’t know. I haven’t really looked around yet. Too busy sitting on something that doesn’t move, I suppose. I close my eyes, and I feel like I’m still jouncing around on the back of a cart.”
The young poet laughed, a warm sound that seemed full of self-confidence and summer light. Maati felt himself smiling thinly and mentally reproved himself for being ungracious. Cehmai dropped onto a cushion beside the fire, legs crossed under him.
“I wanted to speak with you before we started working in the morning,” Cehmai said. “The man who guards the library is … he’s a good man, but he’s protective of the place. I think he looks on it as his trust to the ages.”
“Like a poet,” Maati said.
Cehmai grinned. “I suppose so. Only he’d have made a terrible poet. He’s puffed himself three times larger than anyone else just by having the keys to a building full of papers in languages only half a dozen people in the city can read. If he’d ever been given something important to do, he’d have popped like a tick. Anyway, I thought it might ease things if I came along with you for the first few days. Once Baarath is used to you, I expect he’ll be fine. It’s that first negotiation that’s tricky.”
Maati took a pose that offered gratitude, but was also a refusal.
“There’s no call to take you from your duties,” he said. “I expect the order of the Khai will suffice.”
“I wouldn’t only be doing it as a favor to you, Maatikvo,” Cehmai said. The honorific took Maati by surprise, but the young poet didn’t seem to notice his reaction. “Baarath is a friend of mine, and sometimes you have to protect your friends from themselves. You know?”
Maati took a pose that was an agreement and looked into the flames. Sometimes men could be their own worst enemies. That was truth. He remembered the last time he had seen Otah-kvo. It had been the night Maati had admitted what Liat had become to him and what he himself was to her. His old friend’s eyes had gone hard as glass. Heshaikvo, the poet of Saraykeht, had died just after that, and Maati and Liat had left the city together without seeing Otah-kvo again.
The betrayal in those dark eyes haunted him. He wondered how much the anger had festered in his old teacher over the years. It might have grown to hatred by now, and Maati had come to hunt him down. The fire danced over the coal, flames turning the black to gray, the stone to powder. He realized that the boy poet had been speaking, and that the words had escaped him entirely. Maati took a pose of apology.
“My mind wandered. You were saying?”
“I offered to come by at first light,” Cehmai said. “I can show you where the good teahouses are, and there’s a streetcart that sells the best hot eggs and rice in the city. Then, perhaps, we can brave the library?”
“That sounds fine. Thank you. But now I think I’d best unpack my things and get some rest. You’ll excuse me.”
Cehmai bounced up in a pose of apology, realizing for the first time that his presence might not be totally welcome, and Maati waved it away. They made the ritual farewells, and when the door closed, Maati sighed and rose. He had few things: thick robes he had bought for the journey north, a few books including the small leatherbound volume of his dead master’s that he had taken from Saraykeht, a packet of letters from Liat, the most recent of them years old now. The accumulated memories of a lifetime in two bags small enough to carry on his back if needed. It seemed thin. It seemed not enough.
He finished the tea and almond cakes, then went to the window, slid the paper-thin stone shutter aside, and looked out into the darkness. Sunset still breathed indigo into the western skyline. The city glittered with torches and lanterns, and to the south the glow of the forges of the smith’s quarter looked like a brush fire. The towers rose black against the stars, windows lit high above him where some business took place in the dark, thin air. Maati sighed, the night cold in his face and lungs. All these unknown streets, these towers, and the lacework of tunnels that ran beneath the city: midwinter roads, he’d heard them called. And somewhere in the labyrinth, his old friend and teacher lurked, planning murder.
Maati let his imagination play a scene: Otah-kvo appearing before him in the darkness, blade in hand. In Maati’s imagination, his eyes were hard, his voice hoarse with anger. And there he faltered. He might call for help and see Otah captured. He might fight him and end the thing in blood. He might accept the knife as his due. For a dream with so vivid a beginning, Maati could not envision the end.
He closed the shutter and went to throw another black stone onto the fire. His indulgence had turned the room chilly, and he sat on the cushion near the fire as the air warmed again. His legs didn’t fold as easily as Cehmai’s had, but if he shifted now and again, his feet didn’t go numb. He found himself thinking fondly of Cehmai—the boy was easy to befriend. Otah-kvo had been like that, too.
Maati stretched and wondered again whether, if all this had been a song, he would have sung the hero’s part or the villain’s.
NO ONE had ever seen Idaan’s rebellions as hunger. That had been their fault. If her friends or her brothers transgressed against the etiquette of the court, consequences came upon them, shame or censure. But Idaan was the favored daughter. She might steal a rival girl’s gown or arrive late to the temple and interrupt the priest. She could evade her chaperones or steal wine from the kitchens or dance with inappropriate men. She was Idaan Machi, and she could do as she saw fit, because she didn’t matter. She was a woman. And if she’d never screamed at her father in the middle of his court that she was as much his child as Biitrah or Danat or Kaiin, it was because she feared in her bones that he would only agree, make some airy comment to dismiss the matter, and leave her more desperate than before.
Perhaps if once someone had taken her to task, had treated her as if her actions had the same weight as other people’s, things would have ended differently.
Or perhaps folly is folly because you can’t see where it moves from ambition into evil. Arguments that seem solid and powerful prove hollow once it’s too late to turn back. Arguments like Why should it be right for them but wrong for me?
She haunted the Second Palace now, breathing in the emptiness that her eldest brother had left. The vaulted arches of stone and wood echoed her soft footsteps, and the sunlight that filtered though the stone shutters thickened the air to a golden twilight. Here was the bedchamber, bare even of the mattress he and his wife had slept upon. There, the workshop where he had labored on his enthusiasms, keeping engineers by his side sometimes late into the night or on into morning. The tables were empty now. Dust lay thick on them, ignored even by the servants until the time came for some new child of the Khaiem to take residence … to live in this opulence and keep his ear pricked for the sound of his brother’s hunting dogs.
She heard Adrah coming long before he stepped into the room. She recognized his gait by the sound of it, and didn’t call. He was clever, she thought bitterly; if he wanted to find her, he could puzzle it out. Adrah Vaunyogi, bright-eyed and broad-shouldered, father of her children if all went well. Whatever well meant anymore.
“There you are,” Adrah said. She could see his anger in the way he held his body.
“What have I done this time?” she demanded, her tone carrying a sarcasm that dismissed his concerns even before he spoke them. “Did your patrons want me to wear red on a day I chose yellow?”
The mention of his backers, even as obliquely as that, made him stiffen and peer around, looking for slaves or servants who might overhear. Idaan laughed—a cruel, short sound.
“You look like a kitten with a bell on its tail,” she said. “There’s no one here but us. You needn’t worry that someone will roll the rock off our little conspiracy. We’re as safe here as anywhere.”
Adrah strode over and crouched beside her all the same. He smelled
of crushed violets and sage, and it struck Idaan that it had not been so long ago that the scent would have warmed her heart and brought a flush to her cheeks. His face was long and pretty—almost too pretty to be a man’s. She had kissed those lips a thousand times, but now it seemed like the act of another woman—some entirely different Idaan Machi whose body and memory she had inherited when the first girl died. She smiled and raised her hands in a pose of formal query.
“Are you mad?” Adrah demanded. “Don’t speak about them. Not ever. If we’re found out …”
“Yes. You’re right. I’m sorry,” Idaan said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“There are rumors you spent a day with Cehmai and the andat. You were seen.”
“The rumors are true, and I meant to be seen. I can’t see how my having a close relationship to the poet would hurt the cause, and in fact I think it will help, don’t you? When the time comes that half the houses of the utkhaiem are vying for my father’s chair, an upstart house like yours would do well to boast a friendship with Cehmai.”
“I think being married to a daughter of the Khai will be quite enough, thank you,” Adrah said, “and your brothers aren’t dead yet, in case you’d forgotten.”
“No. I remember.”
“I don’t want you acting strangely. Things are too delicate just now for you to start attracting attention. You are my lover, and if you are off half the time drinking rice wine with the poet, people won’t be saying that I have strong friendship with him. They’ll be saying that he’s cuckolding me, and that Vaunyogi is the wrong house to draw a new Khai from.”
“So you don’t want me seeing him, or you just want more discretion when I do?” Idaan asked.
That stopped him. His eyes, deep brown with flecks of red and green, peered into hers. A sudden memory as powerful as illness, swept over her of a winter night when they had met in the tunnels. He had gazed at her then by firelight, had been no further from her than he was now. She wondered how these could be those same eyes. Her hand rose as if by itself and stroked his cheek. He folded his hands around hers.
“I’m sorry,” she said, ashamed of the catch in her voice. “I don’t want to quarrel with you.”
“What are you doing, little one?” he asked. “Don’t you see how dangerous this is that we’re doing? Everything rests on it.”
“I know. I remember the stories. It’s strange, don’t you think, that my brothers can slaughter each other and all the people do is applaud, but if I take a hand, it’s a crime worse than anything.”
“You’re a woman,” he said, as if that explained everything.
“And you,” she said calmly, almost lovingly, “are a schemer and an agent of the Galts. So perhaps we deserve each other.”
She felt him stiffen and then force the tension away. His smile was crooked. She felt something warm in her breast—painful and sad and as warm as the first sip of rum on a midwinter night. She wondered if it might be hatred, and if it were, whether it was for herself or this man before her.
“It’s going to be fine,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “I knew it would be hard. It’s the ways it’s hard that surprise me. I don’t know how I should act or who I should be. I don’t know where the normal grief that anyone would feel stops or turns into something else.” She shook her head. “This seemed simpler when we were only talking about it.”
“I know, love. It will be simple again, I promise you. It’s only this in the middle that feels complicated.”
“I don’t know how they do it,” she said. “I don’t know how they kill one another. I dream about him, you know. I dream that I am walking through the gardens or the palaces and I see him in among a crowd of people.” Tears came to her eyes unbidden, flowing warm and thick down her cheeks, but her voice, when she continued, was as steady and calm as that of a woman predicting the weather. “He’s always happy in the dreams. He’s always forgiven me.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you loved him.”
Idaan nodded, but didn’t speak.
“Be strong, love. It will be over soon. It will all be finished very soon.”
She wiped the tears away with the back of her hand, her knuckles darkened where her paints were running, and pulled him close. He seemed to hold back for a moment, then folded against her, his arms around her trembling shoulders. He was warm and the smell of sage and violet was mixed now with his skin—the particular musk of his body that she had treasured once above all other scents. He murmured small comforts into her ears and stroked her hair as she wept.
“Is it too late?” she asked. “Can we stop it, Adrah? Can we take it all back?”
He kissed her eyes, his lips soft as a girl’s. His voice was calm and as implacable and hard as stone. When she heard it, she knew he had been thinking himself down the same pathways and had come to the same place.
“No, love. It’s too late. It was too late as soon as your brother died. We have started, and there’s no ending it now except to win through or die.”
They stayed still in each other’s embrace. If all went well, she would die an old woman in this man’s arms, or he would die in hers. While their sons killed one another. And there had been a time not half a year ago she’d thought the prize worth winning.
“I should go,” she murmured. “I have to attend to my father. There’s some dignitary just come to the city that I’m to smile at.”
“Have you heard of the others? Kaiin and Danat?”
“Nothing,” Idaan said. “They’ve vanished. Gone to ground.”
“And the other one? Otah?”
Idaan pulled back, straightening the sleeves of her robes as she spoke.
“Otah’s a story that the utkhaiem tell to make the song more interesting. He’s likely not even alive any longer. Or if he is, he’s wise enough to have no part of this.”
“Are you certain of that?”
“Of course not,” she said. “But what else can I give you?”
They spoke little after that. Adrah walked with her through the gardens of the Second Palace and then out to the street. Idaan made her way to her rooms and sent for the slave boy who repainted her face. The sun hadn’t moved the width of two hands together before she strode again through the high palaces, her face as cool and perfect as a player’s mask. The formal poses of respect and deference greeted and steadied her. She was Idaan Machi, daughter of the Khai and wife, though none knew it yet, of the man who would take his place. She forced confidence into her spine, and the men and women around her reacted as if it were real. Which, she supposed, meant that it was. And that the sorrow and darkness they could not see were false.
When she entered the council chambers, her father greeted her with a silent pose of welcome. He looked ill, his skin gray and his mouth pinched by the pain in his belly. The delicate lanterns of worked iron and silver made the wood-sheathed walls glow, and the cushions that lined the floor were as thick and soft as pillows. The men who sat on them—yes, men, all of them—made their obeisances to her, but her father motioned her closer. She walked to his side and knelt.
“There is someone I wish you to meet,” her father said, gesturing to an awkward man in the brown robes of a poet. “The Dai-kvo has sent him. Maati Vaupathai has come to study in our library.”
Fear flushed her mouth with the taste of metal, but she simpered and took a pose of welcome as if the words had meant nothing. Her mind raced, ticking through ways that the Dai-kvo could have discovered her, or Adrah, or the Galts. The poet replied to her gesture with a formal pose of gratitude, and she took the opportunity to look at him more closely. The body was as soft as a scholar’s, the lines of his face as round as dough, but there was a darkness to his eyes that had nothing to do with color or light. She felt certain he was someone worth fearing.
“The library?” she said. “That’s dull. Surely there are more interesting things in the city than room after room of old scrolls.”
“Scholars have strange enthusia
sms,” the poet said. “But it’s true, I’ve never been to any of the winter cities before. I’m hoping that not all my time will be taken in study.”
There had to be a reason that the Dai-kvo and the Galts wanted the same thing. There had to be a reason that they each wanted to plumb the depths of the library of Machi.
“And how have you found the city, Maati-cha?” she asked. “When you haven’t been studying.”
“It is as beautiful as I had been told,” the poet said.
“He has been here only a few days,” her father said. “Had he come earlier, I would have had your brothers here to guide him, but perhaps you might introduce him to your friends.”
“I would be honored,” Idaan said, her mind considering the thousand ways that this might be a trap. “Perhaps tomorrow evening you would join me for tea in the winter gardens. I have no doubt there are many people who would be pleased to join us.”
“Not too many, I hope,” he said. He had an odd voice, she thought. As if he was amused at something. As if he knew how badly he had shaken her. Her fear shifted slightly, and she raised her chin. “I already find myself forgetting names I should remember,” the poet continued. “It’s most embarrassing.”
“I will be pleased to remind you of my own, should it be required,” she said. Her father’s movement was almost too slight to see, but she caught it and cast her gaze down. Perhaps she had gone too far. But when the poet spoke, he seemed to have taken no offense.
“I expect I will remember yours, Idaan-cha. It would be very rude not to. I look forward to meeting your friends and seeing your city. Perhaps even more than closeting myself in your library.”
He had to know. He had to. Except that she was not being led away under guard. She was not being taken to the quiet chambers and questioned. If he did not know, he must only suspect.
A Betrayal in Winter (The Long Price Quartet Book 2) Page 6