“I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” he said.
Her lips parted, and she moved half an inch back. His hand pressed against her skin, his eyes were locked on hers. Fear sang through him that she would take another step back, that his fingers would only remember this moment, that this chance would pass. She saw it in his face, she must have, because she smiled, calm and knowing and sure of herself, like something from a dream.
“Do you care?” she asked.
“No,” he said, half-surprised at the answer. “No, I truly don’t.”
THE CARAVAN left the low town before dawn, cartwheels rattling on the old stone paving, oxen snorting white in the cold, and the voices of carters and merchants light with the anticipation of journey’s end. The weeks of travel were past. By midday, they would cross the bridge over the Tidat and enter Machi. The companionship of the road—already somewhat strained by differences in political opinions and some unfortunate words spoken by one of the carters early in the journey—would break apart, and each of them would be about his own business again. Otah walked with his hands in his sleeves and his heart divided between dread and anticipation. Itani Noygu was going to Machi on the business of his house—the satchel of letters at his side proved that. There was nothing he carried with him that would suggest anything else. He had come away from this city as a child so long ago he had only shreds of memory left of it. A scent of musk, a stone corridor, bathing in a copper tub when he was small enough to be lifted with a single hand, a view from the top of one of the towers. Other things as fragmentary, as fleeting. He could not say which memories were real and which only parts of dreams.
It was enough, he supposed, to be here now, walking in the darkness. He would go and see it with a man’s eyes. He would see this place that had sent him forth and, despite all his struggles, still had the power to poison the life he’d built for himself. Itani Noygu had made his way as an indentured laborer at the seafronts of Saraykeht, as a translator and fisherman and midwife’s assistant in the east islands, as a sailor on a merchant ship, and as a courier in House Siyanti and all through the cities. He could write and speak in three tongues, play the flute badly, tell jokes well, cook his own meals over a half-dead fire, and comport himself well in any company from the ranks of the utkhaiem to the denizens of the crudest dockhouse. This from a twelve-year-old boy who had named himself, been his own father and mother, formed a life out of little more than the will to do so. Itani Noygu was by any sane standard a success.
It was Otah Machi who had lost Kiyan’s love.
The sky in the east lightened to indigo and then royal blue, and Otah could see the road out farther ahead. Between one breath and the next, the oxen came clearer. And the plains before them opened like a vast scroll. Far to the north, mountains towered, looking as flat as a painting and blued by the distance. Smoke rose from low towns and mines on the plain, the greener pathway of trees marked the river, and on the horizon, as small as fingers, rose the dark towers of Machi, unnatural in the landscape.
Otah stopped as sunlight lit the distant peaks like a fire. The brilliance crept down and then the distant towers blazed suddenly, and a moment later, the plain flooded with light. Otah caught his breath.
This is where I started, he thought. I come from here.
He had to trot to catch back up with the caravan, but the questioning looks were all answered with a grin and a gesture. The enthusiastic courier still naïve enough to be amazed by a sunrise. There was nothing more to it than that.
House Siyanti kept no quarters in Machi, but the gentleman’s trade had its provisions for this. Other Houses would extend courtesy even to rivals so long as it was understood that the intrigues and prying were kept to decorous levels. If a courier were to act against a rival House or carried information that would too deeply tempt his hosts, it was better form to pay for a room elsewhere. Nothing Otah carried was so specific or so valuable, and once the caravan had made its trek across the plain and passed over the wide, sinuous bridge into Machi, Otah made his way to the compound of House Nan.
The structure itself was a gray block three stories high that faced a wide square and shared walls with the buildings on either side. Otah stopped by a street cart and bought a bowl of hot noodles in a smoky black sauce for two lengths of copper and watched the people passing by with a kind of doubled impression. He saw them as the subjects of his training: people clumped at the firekeepers’ kilns and streetcarts meant a lively culture of gossip, women walking alone meant little fear of violence, and so on in the manner that was his profession. He also saw them as the inhabitants of his childhood. A statue of the first Khai Machi stood in the square, his noble expression undermined by the pigeon streaks. An old, rag-wrapped beggar sat on the street, a black lacquer box before her, and chanted songs. The forges were only a few streets away, and Otah could smell the sharp smoke; could even, he thought, hear the faint sound of metal on metal. He sucked down the last of the noodles and handed back the bowl to a man easily twice his age.
“You’re new to the north,” the man said, not unkindly.
“Does it show?” Otah asked.
“Thick robes. It’s spring, and this is warm. If you’d been here over winter, your blood would be able to stand a little cold.”
Otah laughed, but made note. If he were to fit in well, it would mean suffering the cold. He would have to sit with that. He did want to understand the place, to see it, if only for a time, through the eyes of a native, but he didn’t want to swim in ice water just because that was the local custom.
The door servant at the gray House Nan left him waiting in the street for a while, then returned to usher him to his quarters—a small, windowless room with four stacked cots that suggested he would be sharing the small iron brazier in the center of the room with seven other men, though he was the only one present just then. He thanked the servant, learned the protocols for entering and leaving the house, got directions to the nearest bathhouse, and after placing the oiled leather pouch that held his letters safely with the steward, went back out to wash off the journey.
The bathhouse smelled of iron pipes and sandalwood, but the air was warm and thick. A launderer had set up shop at the front, and Otah gave over his robes to be scrubbed and kiln-dried with the understanding that it doomed him to be in the baths for at least the time it took the sun to move the width of two hands. He walked naked to the public baths and eased himself into the warm water with a sigh.
“Hai!” a voice called, and Otah opened his eyes. Two older men and a young woman sat on the same submerged bench on which he rested. One of the older men spoke.
“You’ve just come in with the ‘van?”
“Indeed,” Otah said. “Though I hope you could tell by looking more than smell.”
“Where from?”
“Udun, most recently.”
The trio moved closer. The woman introduced them all—overseers for a metalworkers group. Silversmiths, mostly. Otah was gracious and ordered tea for them all and set about learning what they knew and thought, felt and feared and hoped for, and all of it with smiles and charm and just slightly less wit displayed than their own. It was his craft, and they knew it as well as he did, and would exchange their thoughts and speculations for his gossip. It was the way of traders and merchants the world over.
It was not long before the young woman mentioned the name of Otah Machi.
“If it is the upstart behind it all, it’s a poor thing for Machi,” the older man said. “None of the trading houses would know him or trust him. None of the families of the utkhaiem would have ties to him. Even if he’s simply never found, the new Khai will always be watching over his shoulder. It isn’t good to have an uncertain line in the Khai’s chair. The best thing that could happen for the city would be to find him and put a knife through his belly. Him, and any children he’s got meantime.”
Otah smiled because it was what a courier of House Siyanti would do. The younger man sniffed and sipped his bo
wl of tea. The woman shrugged, the motion setting small waves across the water.
“It might do us well to have someone new running the city,” she said. “It’s clear enough that nothing will change with either of the two choices we have now. Biitrah. He at least was interested in mechanism. The Galts have been doing more and more with their little devices, and we’d be fools to ignore what they’ve managed.”
“Children’s toys,” the older man said, waving the thought away.
“Toys that have made them the greatest threat Eddensea and the Westlands have seen,” the younger man said. “Their armies can move faster than anyone else’s. There isn’t a warden who hasn’t felt the bite of them. If they haven’t been invaded, they’ve had to offer tribute to the Lords Convocate, and that’s just as bad.”
“The ward being sacked might disagree,” Otah said, trying for a joke to lighten the mood.
“The problem with the Galts,” the woman said, “is they can’t hold what they take. Every year it’s another raid, another sack, another fleet carrying slaves and plunder back to Galt. But they never keep the land. They’d have much more money if they stayed and ruled the Westlands. Or Eymond. Or Eddensea.”
“Then we’d have only them to trade with,” the younger man said. “That’d be ugly.”
“The Galts don’t have the andat,” the older man said, and his tone carried the rest: they don’t have the andat, so they are not worth considering.
“But if they did,” Otah said, hoping to keep the subject away from himself and his family. “Or if we did not—”
“If the sky dives into the sea, we’ll be fishing for birds,” the older man said. “It’s this Otah Machi who’s uneasing things. I have it on good authority that Danat and Kaiin have actually called a truce between them until they can rout out the traitor.”
“Traitor?” Otah asked. “I hadn’t heard that of him.”
“There are stories,” the younger man said. “Nothing anyone has proved. Six years ago, the Khai fell ill, and for a few days, they thought he might die. Some people suspected poison.”
“And hasn’t he turned to poison again? Look at Biitrah’s death,” the younger man said. “And I tell you the Khai Machi hasn’t been himself since then, not truly. Even if Otah were to claim the chair, it’d be better to punish him for his crimes and raise up one of the high families.”
“It could have been bad fish,” the woman said. “There was a lot of bad fish that year.”
“No one believes that,” the older man said.
“Which of the others would be best for the city now that Biitrah is gone?” Otah asked.
The older man named Kaiin, and the younger man and woman Danat, in the same moment, the syllables grinding against each other in the warm, damp air, and they immediately fell to debate. Kaiin was a master negotiator; Danat was better thought of by the utkhaiem. Kaiin was prone to fits of temper, Danat to weeks of sloth. Each man, to hear it, was a paragon of virtue and little better than a street thug. Otah listened, interjected comments, asked questions crafted to keep the conversation alive and on its course. His mind was hardly there.
When at last he made his excuses, the three debaters hardly paused in their wrangle. Otah dried himself by a brazier and collected his robes—laundered now, smelling of cedar oil and warm from the kiln. The streets were fuller than when he had gone into the bathhouse. The sun would fall early, disappearing behind the peaks to the west long before the sky grew dark, but it still hovered two hands above the mountainous horizon.
Otah walked without knowing where he was walking to. The black cobbles and tall houses seemed familiar and exotic at the same time. The towers rose into the sky, glowing in the sunlight. At the intersection of three large streets, Otah found a courtyard with a great stone archway inlaid with wood and metal sigils of chaos and order. Harsh forge smoke from the east mixed with the greasy scent of a cart seller’s roasting duck and, for a moment, Otah was possessed by the memory of being a child no more than four summers old. The smoke scent wove with the taste of honeybread nearly too hot to eat, the clear open view of the valley and mountains from the top of the towers, and a woman’s skin—mother or sister or servant. There was no way to know.
It was a ghost memory, as strong and certain as stone, but without a place in his life. Something had happened, once, that tied all these senses together, but it was gone and he would never have it. He was upstart and traitor. Poisoner and villain. None of it was true, but it made for an interesting story to tell in the teahouses and meeting rooms—a variation on the theme of fratricide that the Khaiem replayed in every generation. A deep fatigue pressed into him. He had been an innocent to think that he might be forgotten, that Otah Machi might escape the venomous speculation of the traders and merchants, high families and low townsmen. There was no use for truth when spectacle was at issue. And there was nothing in the city that could matter less than the half-recalled memories of a courier’s abandoned childhood. The life he’d built mattered less than ashes to these people. His death would be a relief to them.
He returned to House Nan just as the stars began to glimmer in the deep northern sky. There was fresh bread and pepper-baked lamb, distilled rice wine and cold water. The other men who were to share his room joined him at the table, and they laughed and joked, traded information and gossip from across the world. Otah slid back comfortably into Itani Noygu, and his smiles came more easily as the night wore on, though a cold core remained in his breast. It was only just before he went to crawl into his cot that he found the steward, recovered his pouch of letters, and prepared himself.
All the letters were, of course, still sewn shut, but Otah checked the knots. None had been undone so far as he could tell. It would have been a breach of the gentleman’s trade to open letters held in trust, and it would have been foolishness to trust to honor. Had House Nan been willing to break trust, that would have been interesting to know as well. He laid them out on his cot, considering.
Letters to the merchant houses and lower families among the utkhaiem were the most common. He didn’t carry a letter for the Khai himself—he would have balked at so high a risk—but his work would take him to the palaces. And there were audiences, no doubt, to which he could get an invitation. If he chose, he could go to the Master of Tides and claim business with members of the court. It wouldn’t even require stretching the truth very far. He sat in silence, feeling as if there were two men within him.
One wanted nothing more than to embrace the fear and flee to some distant island and be pleased to live wondering whether his brothers would still be searching him out. The other was consumed by an anger that drove him forward, deeper into the city of his birth and the family that had first discarded him and then fashioned a murderer from his memory.
Fear and anger. He waited for the calm third voice of wisdom, but it didn’t come. He was left with no better plan than to act as Itani Noygu would have, had he been nothing other than he appeared. When at last he repacked his charges and lay on his cot, he expected that sleep would not come, but it did, and he woke in the morning forgetful of where he was and surprised to find that Kiyan was not in the bed beside him.
The palaces of the Khai were deep within the city, and the gardens around them made it seem more like a walk into some glorious low town than movement into the center of a great city. Trees arched over the walkways, branches bright with new leaves. Birds fluttered past him, reminding him of Udun and the wayhouse he had almost made his home. The greatest tower loomed overhead, dark stone rising up like twenty palaces, one above the other. Otah stopped in a courtyard before the lesser palace of the Master of Tides and squinted up at the great tower, wondering whether he had ever been to the top of it. Wondering whether being here, now, was valor, cowardice, foolishness, or wisdom; the product of anger or fear or the childish drive to show that he could defy them all if he chose.
He gave his name to the servants at the door and was led to an antechamber larger than his apartments b
ack in Udun. A slave girl plucked a lap harp, filling the high air with a sweet, slow tune. He smiled at her and took a pose of appreciation. She returned his smile and nodded, but her fingers never left the strings. The servant, when he came, wore robes of deep red shot with yellow and a silver armband. He took a pose of greeting so brief it almost hadn’t happened.
“Itani Noygu. You’re Itani Noygu, then? Ah, good. I am Piyun See, the Master of Tides’ assistant. He’s too busy to see you himself. So House Siyanti has taken an interest in Machi, then?” he said. Otah smiled, though he meant it less this time.
“I couldn’t say. I only go where they send me, Piyun-cha.”
The assistant took a pose of agreement.
“I had hoped to know the court’s schedule in the next week,” Otah said. “I have business—”
“With the poet. Yes, I know. He left your name with us. He said we should keep a watch out for you. You’re wise to come to us first. You wouldn’t imagine the people who simply drift through on the breeze as if the poets weren’t members of the court.”
Otah smiled, his mouth tasting of fear, his heart suddenly racing. The poet of Machi—Cehmai Tyan, his name was—had no reason to know Itani Noygu or expect him. This was a mistake or a trap. If it was a trap, it was sloppy, and if a mistake, dangerous. The lie came to his lips as gracefully as a rehearsed speech.
“I’m honored to have been mentioned. I hadn’t expected that he would remember me. But I’m afraid the business I’ve come on may not be what he had foreseen.”
“I wouldn’t know,” the assistant said as he shifted. “Visiting dignitaries might confide in the Master of Tides, but I’m like you. I follow orders. Now. Let me see. I can send a runner to the library, and if he’s there …”
“Perhaps it would be best if I went to the poet’s house,” Otah said. “He can find me there when he isn’t—”
“Oh, we haven’t put him there. Gods! He has his own rooms.”
A Betrayal in Winter (The Long Price Quartet Book 2) Page 10