A Betrayal in Winter (The Long Price Quartet Book 2)

by Daniel Abraham

  The celebrations in the halls and galleries of the Khai’s palace were the nearest to exhaustion—everyone from the highest family of the utkhaiem to the lowest firekeeper had dressed in their finest robes and set out to stain them with something. The days of revelry had taken their toll, and with the night half-passed, the wildest celebrations were over. Music and song still played, people still danced and talked, drew one another away into alcoves and corners. Old men talked gravely of who would benefit from Danat’s survival and promotion. But the sense was growing that the time was drawing near when the city would catch its breath and rest a while.

  She and Adrah made their way through to the private wings of the palace, where only servants and slaves and the wives of the Khai moved freely. They made no secret of their presence. There was no need. Idaan led the way up a series of wide, sweeping staircases to apartments on the south side of the palace. A servant—an old man with gray hair, a limp, and a rosy smile—greeted them, and Idaan instructed him that they were not to be disturbed for any reason. The old man took a solemn expression and a pose of acknowledgment, but there was merriment in his eyes. Idaan let him believe what she, after all, intended him to. Adrah opened the great wooden doors, and he also closed them behind her.

  “They aren’t the best rooms, are they?” Adrah said.

  “They’ll do,” Idaan said, and went to the windows. She pulled open the shutters. The great tower, Otah Machi’s prison, stood like a dark line inked in the air. Adrah moved to stand beside her.

  “One of us should have gone with them,” she said. “If the upstart’s found safely in his cell come morning …”

  “He won’t be,” Adrah said. “Father’s mercenaries are competent men. He wouldn’t have hired them for this if he hadn’t been sure of them.”

  “I don’t like using hired men,” Idaan said. “If we can buy them, so can anyone.”

  “They’re armsmen, not whores,” Adrah said. “They’ve taken a contract, and they’ll see it through. It’s how they survive.”

  There were five lanterns, from small glass candleboxes to an oil lamp with a wick as wide as her thumb and heavy enough to require both of them to move it. They pulled them all as near the open window as they could, and Adrah lit them while Idaan pulled the thin silks from under her robes. The richest dyes in the world had given these their color—one blue, the other red. Idaan hung the blue over the window’s frame, and then peered out, squinting into the night for the signal. And there, perhaps half a hand from the top of the tower, shone the answering light. Idaan turned away.

  With all the light gathered at the window, the rooms were cast into darkness. Adrah had pulled a hooded cloak over his robes. Idaan remembered again the feeling of hanging over the void, feeling the wind tugging at her. This wasn’t so different, except that the prospect of her own death had seemed somehow cleaner.

  “He would want it,” Idaan said. “If he knew that we’d planned this, he would allow it. You know that.”

  “Yes, Idaan-kya. I know.”

  “To live so weak. It disgraces him. It makes him seem less before the court. It’s not a fit ending for a Khai.”

  Adrah drew a thin, blackened blade. It looked no wider than a finger, and not much longer. Adrah sighed and squared his shoulders. Idaan felt her stomach rise to her throat.

  “I want to go with you,” she said.

  “We discussed this, Idaan-kya. You stay in case someone comes. You have to convince them that I’m still in here with you.”

  “They won’t come. They’ve no reason to. And he’s my father.”

  “More reason that you should stay.”

  Idaan moved to him, touching his arm like a beggar asking alms. She felt herself shaking and loathed the weakness, but she could not stop it. Adrah’s eyes were as still and empty as pebbles. She remembered Danat, how he had looked when he arrived from the south. She had thought he was ill, but it had been this. He had become a killer, a murderer of the people he had once respected and loved. That he still respected and loved. Adrah had those eyes now, the look of near-nausea. He smiled, and she saw the determination. There were no words that would stop him now. The stone had been dropped, and not all the wishing in the world could call it back into her hand.

  “I love you, Idaan-kya,” Adrah said, his voice as cool as a gravestone. “I have always loved you. From the first time I kissed you. Even when you have hurt me, and you have hurt me worse than anyone alive, I have only ever loved you.”

  He was lying. He was saying it as she’d said that her father would welcome death, because he needed it to be true. And she found that she needed that as well. She stepped back and took a pose of gratitude. Adrah walked to the door, turned, nodded to her, and was gone. Idaan sat in the darkness and looked at nothing, her arms wrapped around herself. The night seemed unreal: absurd and undeniable at the same time, a terrible dream from which she might wake to find herself whole again. The weight of it was like a hand pressing down on her head.

  There was time. She could call for armsmen. She could call for Danat. She could go and stop the blade with her own body. She sat silent, trying not to breathe. She remembered the ceremony of her tenth summer, the year after her mother’s death. Her father had taken her to sit at his side during all that day’s ritual. She had hated it, bored by the petitions and formality until tears ran down her cheeks. She remembered a meal with a representative from some Westlands warden where her father had forced her to sit on a hard wooden chair and swallow a cold bean soup that made her gag rather than seem ungracious to the Westlander for his food.

  She fought to remember a smile, an embrace. She wanted a moment in the long years of her childhood to which she could point and say here is how I know he loved me. The blue silk stirred in the breeze. The lantern flames flickered, dimmed, and rose again. It must have happened. For him to be so desperate for her happiness now, there must have been some sign, some indication.

  She found herself rocking rapidly back and forth. When a sound came from the door, she jumped up, panicked, looking around for some excuse to explain Adrah’s absence. When he himself came in, she could see in his eyes that it was over.

  Adrah pulled off the cloak, letting it pool around his ankles. His bright robes seemed as incongruous as a butterfly in a butcher’s shop. His face was stone.

  “You’ve done it,” Idaan said, and two full breaths later, he nodded. Something as much release as despair sank into her. She could feel her body made heavy by it.

  She walked to him, pulled the blade and its soft black leather sheath from his belt, and let them drop to the floor. Adrah didn’t try to stop her.

  “Nothing we ever do will be so bad as this,” she said. “This now is the worst it will ever be. Everything will be better than this.”

  “He never woke,” Adrah said. “The drugs that let him sleep … He never woke.”

  “That’s good.”

  A slow, mad grin bloomed on his face, stretching until the blood left his lips. There was a hardness in his eyes and a heat. It looked like fury or possession. He took her shoulders in his hands and pulled her near him. Their kiss was a gentle violence. For a moment, she thought he meant to open her robes, to drag her back to the bed in a sad parody of what they were expected to be doing. She pressed a palm to his sex and was surprised to find that he was not aroused. Slowly, with perfect control and a grip that bruised her, Adrah brought her away from him.

  “I did this thing for you,” he said. “I did this for you. Do you understand that?”

  “I do.”

  “Never ask me for anything again,” he said and released her, turning away. “From now until you die, you are in debt to me, and I owe you nothing.”

  “For the favor of killing my father?” she asked, unable to keep the edge from her voice.

  “For what I have sacrificed to you,” he said without looking back. Idaan felt her face flush, her hands ball into fists. She heard him groan from the next room, heard his robes shushing against
the stone floor. The bed creaked.

  A lifetime, married to him. There wouldn’t be a moment in the years that followed that would not be poisoned. He would never forgive her, and she would never fail to hate him. They would go to their graves, each with teeth sunk in the other’s neck.

  They were perfect for each other.

  Idaan walked silently to the window, took down the blue silk and put up the red.

  THE ARMSMEN gave him enough water to live, though not so much as to slake his thirst. Almost enough food to live as well, though not quite. He had no clothing but the rags he’d worn when he’d come back to Machi and the cloak that Maati had brought. When dawn was coming near and the previous day’s heat had gone from the tower, he would be huddling in that cloth. Through the day, sun heated the great tower, and that heat rose. And as it rose, it grew. In his stone cage, Otah lay sweating as if he’d been working at hard labor, his throat dry and his head pounding.

  The towers of Machi, Otah had decided, were the stupidest buildings in the world. Too cold in winter, too hot in summer, unpleasant to use, exhausting to climb. They existed only to show that they could exist.

  More and more of the time, his mind was in disarray: hunger and boredom, the stifling heat and the growing presentiment of his own death conspired to change the nature of time. Otah felt outside it all, apart from the world and adrift. He had always been in this room; the memories from before were like stories he’d heard told. He would always be in this room unless he wriggled out the window and into the cool, open air. Twice already he had dreamed that he’d leapt from the tower. Both times, he woke in a panic. It was that as much as anything that kept him from taking the one control left to him. When despair washed through him, he remembered the dream of falling, with its shrill regret. He didn’t want to die. His ribs were showing, he was almost nauseated with thirst, his mind would not slow down or be quiet. He was going to be put to death, and he did not want to die.

  The thought that his suffering saved Kiyan had ceased to comfort him. Part of him was glad that he had not known how wretched his father’s treatment of him would be. He might have faltered. At least now he could not run. He would lose—he had lost, and badly—but he could not run. Maj sat on her chair—the tall, thin one with legs of woven cane that she’d had in their island hut. When she spoke, it was in the soft liquid sounds of her native language and too fast for Otah to follow. He struggled, but when he croaked out that he couldn’t understand her, his own voice woke him until he drifted away again into nothing, troubled only by the conviction that he could hear rats chewing through the stone.

  The shriek woke him completely. He sat upright, his arms trembling. The room was real again, unoccupied by visions. Outside the great door, he heard someone shout, and then something heavy pounded once against the door, shaking it visibly. Otah rose. There were voices—new ones. After so many days, he knew the armsmen by their rhythms and the timbre of their murmurs. The throats that made the sounds he heard now were unfamiliar. He walked to the door and leaned against it, pressing his ear to the hairline crack between the wood and its stone frame. One voice rose above the others, its tone commanding. Otah made out the word “chains.”

  The voices went away again for so long Otah began to suspect he’d imagined it all. The scrape of the bar being lifted from the door startled him. He stepped back, fear and relief coming together in his heart. This might be the end. He knew his brother had returned; this could be his death come for him. But at least it was an end to his time in this cell. He tried to hold himself with some dignity as the door swung open. The torches were so bright that Otah could hardly see.

  “Good evening, Otah-cha,” a man’s voice said. “I hope you’re well enough to move. I’m afraid we’re in a bit of a hurry.”

  “Who are you?” Otah asked. His own voice sounded rough. Squinting, he could make out perhaps ten men in black leather armor. They had blades drawn. The armsmen lay in a pile against the far wall, stacked like goods in a warehouse, a black pool of blood surrounding them. The smell of them wasn’t rotten, not yet, but it was disturbing—coppery and intimate. They had only been dead for minutes. If all of them were dead.

  “We’re the men who’ve come to take you out of here,” the commander said. He was the one actually standing in the doorway. He had the long face of a man of the winter cities, but a westlander’s flowing hair. Otah moved forward and took a pose of gratitude that seemed to amuse him.

  “Can you walk?” he asked as Otah came out into the larger room. The signs of struggle were everywhere—spilled wine, overturned chairs, blood on the walls. The armsmen had been taken by surprise. Otah put a hand against the wall to steady himself. The stone felt as warm as flesh.

  “I’ll do what I have to,” Otah said.

  “That’s admirable,” the commander said, “but I’m more curious about what you can do. I’ve suffered long confinement myself a time or two, and I know what it does. We can’t take the easy way down. We’ve got to walk. If you can do this, that’s all to the good. If you can’t, we’re prepared to carry you, but I need to have you out of the city quickly.”

  “I don’t understand. Did Maati send you?”

  “There’s better places to discuss this, Otah-cha. We can’t go down by the chains. Even if there weren’t more armsmen waiting there, we’ve just broken them. Can you walk down the tower?”

  A memory of the endlessly turning stairs and the ghost of pain in his knees and legs. Otah felt a stab of shame, but pulled himself up and shook his head.

  “I don’t believe I can,” he said. The commander nodded and two of his men pulled lengths of wood from their backs and fitted them together in a cripple’s litter. There was a small seat for Otah, canted against the slope of the stairway, and the poles were set one longer than the other to fit the tight curve. It would have been useless in any other situation, but for this task it was perfect. As one of the men helped Otah take his place on it, he wondered if the device had been built for this moment, or if things like it existed in service of these towers. The largest of the men spat on his hands and gripped the carrying poles that would start down the stairs and bear most of Otah’s weight. One of his fellows took the other end, and Otah lurched up.

  They began their descent, Otah with his back to the center of the spiral staircase. He watched the stone of the wall curl up from below. The men grunted and cursed, but they moved quickly. The man on the higher poles stumbled once, and the one below shouted angrily back at him.

  The journey seemed to last forever—stone and darkness, the smell of sweat and lantern oil. Otah’s knees bumped against the wall before him, his head against the wall behind. When they reached the halfway point, another huge man was waiting to take over the worst of the carrying. Otah felt his shame return. He tried to protest, but the commander put a strong, hard hand on his shoulder and kept him in the chair.

  “You chose right the first time,” the commander said.

  The second half of the journey down was less terrible. Otah’s mind was beginning to clear, and a savage hope was lifting him. He was being saved. He couldn’t think who or why, but he was delivered from his cell. He thought of the armsmen new-slaughtered at the tower’s height, and recalled Kiyan’s words. How do you expect to protect me and my house? They could all be killed, his jailers and his rescuers alike. All in the name of tradition.

  He could tell when they reached the level of the street—the walls had grown so thick there was almost no room for them to walk, but thin windows showed glimmers of light, and drunken, disjointed music filled the air. At the base of the stair, his carriers lowered Otah to the ground and took his arms over their shoulders as if he were drunk or sick. The commander squeezed to the front of the party. Despite his frown, Otah sensed the man was enjoying himself immensely.

  They moved quickly and quietly through maze-like passages and out at last into an alley at the foot of the tower. A covered cart was waiting, two horses whickering restlessly. The commander mad
e a sign, and the two bearers lifted Otah into the back of the cart. The commander and two of the men climbed in after, and the driver started the horses. Shod hooves rapped the stone, and the cart lurched and bumped. The commander pulled the back cloth closed and tied it, but loose enough he could peer out the seam. The lantern was extinguished, and the scent of its dying smoke filled the cart for a moment and was gone.

  “What’s happening out there?” Otah asked.

  “Nothing,” the commander said. “And best we keep it that way. No talking.”

  In silence and darkness, they continued. Otah felt lightheaded. The cart turned twice to the left and then again to the right. The driver was hailed and replied, but they never stopped. A breeze fluttered the thick cloth of the cover, and when it paused, Otah heard the sound of water; they were on the bridge heading south. He was free. He grinned, and then as the implications of his freedom unfolded themselves in his mind, his relief faltered.

  “Forgive me. I don’t know your name. I’m sorry. I can’t do this.”

  The commander shifted. It was nearly black in the cart, so Otah couldn’t see the man’s face, but he imagined incredulity on the long features.

  “I went to Machi to protect someone—a woman. If I vanish, they’ll still have reason to suspect her. My brother might kill her on the chance that she’s involved with this. I can’t let that happen. I’m sorry, but we have to turn back.”

  “You love her that much?” the commander asked.

  “This isn’t her fault. It’s mine.”

  “All this is your fault, eh? You have a lot to answer for.” There was amusement in the man’s voice. Otah felt himself smile.

  “Well, perhaps not all my fault. But I can’t let her be hurt. This is the price of it, and I’ll pay it if I have to.”

  They were all silent for a long moment, then the commander sighed.

  “You’re an honorable man, Otah Machi. I want you to know I respect that. Boys. Chain him and gag him. I don’t want him calling out.”