IN HER dream, Idaan was at a celebration. Fire burned in a ring all around the pavilion, and she knew with the logic of dreams that the flames were going to close, that the circle was growing smaller. They were all going to burn. She tried to shout, tried to warn the dancers, but she could only croak; no one heard her. There was someone there who could stop the thing from happening—a single man who was Cehmai and Otah and her father all at once. She beat her way through the bodies, trying to find him, but there were dogs in with the people. The flames were too close already, and to keep themselves alive, the women were throwing the animals into the fire. She woke to the screams and howls in her mind and the silence in her chamber.
The night candle had failed. The chamber was dim, silvered by moonlight beyond the dark web of the netting. The shutters along the wall were all open, but no breath of air stirred. Idaan swallowed and shook her head, willing the last wisps of nightmare into forgetfulness. She waited, listening to her breath, until her mind was her own again. Even then she was reluctant to sleep for fear of falling into the same dream. She turned to Adrah, but the bed at her side was empty. He was gone.
“Adrah?”
There was no answer.
Idaan wrapped herself with a thin blanket, pushed aside the netting and stepped out of her bed—her new bed. Her marriage bed. The smooth stone of the floor was cool against her bare feet. She walked through the chambers of their apartments—hers and her husband’s—silently. She found him sitting on a low couch, a bottle beside him. A thick earthenware bowl on the floor stank of distilled wine. Or perhaps it was his breath.
“You aren’t sleeping?” she asked.
“Neither are you,” he said. The slurred words were half accusation.
“I had a dream,” she said. “It woke me.”
Adrah lifted the bottle, drinking from its neck. She watched the delicate shifting mechanism of his throat, the planes of his cheeks, his eyes closed and as smooth as a man asleep. Her fingers twitched toward him, moving to caress that familiar skin without consulting him on her wishes. Coughing, he put down the wine, and the eyes opened. Whatever beauty had been in him, however briefly, was gone now.
“You should go to him,” Adrah said. Perversely, he sounded less drunk now. Idaan took a pose of query. Adrah waved it away with the sloshing bottle. “The poet boy. Cehmai. You should go to him. See if you can get more information.”
“You don’t want me here?”
“No,” Adrah said, pressing the bottle into her hand. As he rose and staggered past her, Idaan felt the insult and the rejection and a certain relief that she hadn’t had to find an excuse to slip away.
The palaces were deserted, the empty paths dreamlike in their own way. Idaan let herself imagine that she had woken into a new, different world. As she slept, everyone had vanished, and she was walking now alone through an empty city. Or she had died in her sleep and the gods had put her here, into a world with nothing but herself and darkness. If they had meant it for punishment, they had misjudged.
The bottle was below a quarter when she stepped under the canopy of sculpted oaks. She had expected the poet’s house to be dark as well, but as she advanced, she caught glimpses of candle glow, more light than a single night candle could account for. Something like hope surged in her, and she slowly walked forward. The shutters and door were open, the lanterns within all lit. But the wide, still figure on the steps wasn’t him. Idaan hesitated. The andat raised its hand in greeting and motioned her closer.
“I was starting to think you wouldn’t come,” Stone-Made-Soft said in its distant, rumbling voice.
“I hadn’t intended to,” Idaan said. “You had no call to expect me.”
“If you say so,” it agreed, amiably. “Come inside. He’s been waiting to see you for days.”
Going up the steps felt like walking downhill, the pull to be there and see him was more powerful than weight. The andat stood and followed her in, closing the door behind her and then proceeding around the room, fastening the shutters and snuffing the flames. Idaan looked around the room, but there were only the two of them.
“It’s late. He’s in the back,” the andat said and pinched out another small light. “You should go to him.”
“I don’t want to disturb him.”
“He’d want you to.”
She didn’t move. The spirit tilted its broad head and smiled.
“He said he loves me,” Idaan said. “When I saw him last, he said that he loved me.”
“I know.”
“Is it true?”
The smile broadened. Its teeth were as white as marble and perfectly regular. She noticed for the first time that it had no canines—every tooth was as even and square as the one beside it. For a moment, the inhuman mouth disturbed her.
“Why are you asking me?”
“You know him,” she said. “You are him.”
“True on both counts,” Stone-Made-Soft said. “But I’m not credited as being the most honest source. I’m his creature, after all. And all dogs hate the leash, however well they pretend otherwise.”
“You’ve never lied to me.”
The andat looked startled, then chuckled with a sound like a boulder rolling downhill.
“No,” it said. “I haven’t, have I? And I won’t start now. Yes, Cehmai-kya has fallen in love with you. He’s young. His passions are still a large part of what he is. In forty years, he won’t burn so hot. It’s the way it’s been with all of them.”
“I don’t want him hurt,” she said.
“Then stay.”
“I’m not sure that would save him pain. Not in the long term.”
The andat was still a moment, then shrugged.
“Then go,” it said. “But when he finds you’ve gone, he’ll chew his own guts out over it. There’s been nothing he’s wanted more than for you to come here, to him. Coming this close, talking to me, and leaving? It’d hardly make him feel better about things.”
Idaan looked at her feet. The sandals weren’t laced well. She’d done the thing in darkness, and the wine had, perhaps, had more effect on her than she’d thought. She shook her head as she had when shaking off the dreams.
“He doesn’t have to know I came.”
“Late for that,” the andat said and put out another candle. “He woke up as soon as we started talking.”
“Idaan-kya?” his voice came from behind her.
Cehmai stood in the corridor that led back to his bedchamber. His hair was tousled by sleep. His feet were bare. Idaan caught her breath, seeing him here in the dim light of candles. He was beautiful. He was innocent and powerful, and she loved him more than anyone in the world.
“Cehmai.”
“Only Cehmai?” he asked, stepping into the room. He looked hurt and hopeful both. She had no right to feel this young. She had no right to feel afraid or thrilled.
“Cehmai-kya,” she whispered. “I had to see you.”
“I’m glad of it. But … but you aren’t, are you? Glad to see me, I mean.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” she said, and the sorrow rose up in her like a flood. “It’s my wedding night, Cehmai-kya. I was married today, and I couldn’t go a whole night in that bed.”
Her voice broke. She closed her eyes against the tears, but they simply came, rolling down her cheeks as fast as raindrops. She heard him move toward her, and between wanting to step into his arms and wanting to run, she stood unmoving, feeling herself tremble.
He didn’t speak. She was standing alone and apart, the sorrow and guilt beating her like storm waves, and then his arms folded her into him. His skin smelled dark and musky and male. He didn’t kiss her, he didn’t try to open her robes. He only held her there as if he had never wanted anything more. She put her arms around him and held on as though he were a branch hanging over a precipice. She heard herself sob, and it sounded like violence.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I want it back. I want it all
back. I’m so sorry.”
“What, love? What do you want back?”
“All of it,” she wailed, and the blackness and despair and rage and sorrow rose up, taking her in its teeth and shaking her. Cehmai held her close, murmured soft words to her, stroked her hair and her face. When she sank to the ground, he sank with her.
She couldn’t say how long it was before the crying passed. She only knew that the night around them was perfectly dark, that she was curled in on herself with her head in his lap, and that her body was tired to the bone. She felt as if she’d swum for a day. She found Cehmai’s hand and laced her fingers with his, wondering where dawn was. It seemed the night had already lasted for years. Surely there would be light soon.
“You feel better?” he asked, and she nodded her reply, trusting him to feel the movement against his flesh.
“Do you want to tell me what it is?” he asked.
Idaan felt her throat go tighter for a moment. He must have felt some change in her body, because he raised her hand to his lips. His mouth was so soft and so warm.
“I do,” she said. “I want to. But I’m afraid.”
“Of me?”
“Of what I would say.”
There was something in his expression. Not a hardening, not a pulling away, but a change. It was as if she’d confirmed something.
“There’s nothing you can say that will hurt me,” Cehmai said. “Not if it’s true. It’s the Vaunyogi, isn’t it? It’s Adrah.”
“I can’t, love. Please don’t talk about it.”
But he only ran his free hand over her arm, the sound of skin against skin loud in the night’s silence. When he spoke again, Cehmai’s voice was gentle, but urgent.
“It’s about your father and your brothers, isn’t it?”
Idaan swallowed, trying to loosen her throat. She didn’t answer, not even with a movement, but Cehmai’s soft, beautiful voice pressed on.
“Otah Machi didn’t kill them, did he?”
The air went as thin as a mountaintop’s. Idaan couldn’t catch her breath. Cehmai’s fingers pressed hers gently. He leaned forward and kissed her temple.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Tell me.”
“I can’t,” she said.
“I love you, Idaan-kya. And I will protect you, whatever happens.”
Idaan closed her eyes, even in the darkness. Her heart seemed on the edge of bursting she wanted it so badly to be true. She wanted so badly to lay her sins before him and be forgiven. And he knew already. He knew the truth or else guessed it, and he hadn’t denounced her.
“I love you,” he repeated, his voice softer than the sound of his hand stroking her skin. “How did it start?”
“I don’t know,” she said. And then, a moment later, “When I was young, I think.”
Quietly, she told him everything, even the things she had never told Adrah. Seeing her brothers sent to the school and being told that she could not go herself because of her sex. Watching her mother brood and suffer and know that one day she would be sent away or else die there, in the women’s quarters and be remembered only as something that had borne a Khai’s babies.
She told him about listening to songs about the sons of the Khaiem battling for the succession and how, as a girl, she’d pretend to be one of them and force her playmates to take on the roles of her rivals. And the sense of injustice that her older brothers would pick their own wives and command their own fates, while she would be sold at convenience.
At some point, Cehmai stopped stroking her, and only listened, but that open, receptive silence was all she needed of him. She poured out everything. The wild, impossible plans she’d woven with Adrah. The intimation, one night when a Galtic dignitary had come to Machi, that the schemes might not be impossible after all. The bargain they had struck—access to a library’s depth of old books and scrolls traded for power and freedom. And from there, the progression, as inevitable as water flowing toward the sea, that led Adrah to her father’s sleeping chambers and her to the still moment by the lake, the terrible sound of the arrow striking home.
With every phrase, she felt the horror of it ease. It lost none of the sorrow, none of the regret, but the bleak, soul-eating despair began to fade from black to merely the darkest gray. By the time she came to the end of one sentence and found nothing following it, the birds outside had begun to trill and sing. It would be light soon. Dawn would come after all. She sighed.
“That was a longer answer than you hoped for, maybe,” she said.
“It was enough,” he said.
Idaan shifted and sat up, pulling her hair back from her face. Cehmai didn’t move.
“Hiami told me once,” she said, “just before she left, that to become Khai you had to forget how to love. I see why she believed that. But it isn’t what’s happened. Not to me. Thank you, Cehmai-kya.”
“For what?”
“For loving me. For protecting me,” she said. “I didn’t guess how much I needed to tell you all that. It was … it was too much. You see that.”
“I do,” Cehmai said.
“Are you angry with me now?”
“Of course not,” he said.
“Are you horrified by me?”
She heard him shift his weight. The pause stretched, her heart sickening with every beat.
“I love you, Idaan,” he said at last, and she felt the tears come again, but this time with a very different pressure behind them. It wasn’t joy, but it was perhaps relief.
She shifted forward in the darkness, found his body there waiting, and held him for a time. She was the one who kissed him this time. She was the one who moved their conversation from the intimacy of confession to the intimacy of sex. Cehmai seemed almost reluctant, as if afraid that taking her body now would betray some deeper moment that they had shared. But Idaan led him to his bed in the darkness, opened her own robes and his, and coaxed his flesh until whatever objection he’d fostered was forgotten. She found herself at ease, lighter, almost as if she was half in dream.
Afterwards, she lay nestled in his arms, warm, safe, and calm as she had never been in years. Sunlight pressed at the closed shutters as she drifted down to sleep.
The tunnels beneath Machi were a city unto themselves. Otah found himself drawn out into them more and more often as the days crept forward. Sinja and Amiit had tried to keep him from leaving the storehouse beneath the underground palaces of the Saya, but Otah had overruled them. The risk of a few quiet hours walking abandoned corridors was less, he judged, than the risk of going quietly mad waiting in the same sunless room day after day. Sinja had convinced him to take an armsman as guard when he went.
Otah had expected the darkness and the quiet—wide halls empty, water troughs dry—but the beauty he stumbled on took him by surprise. Here a wide square of stone smooth as beach sand, delicate pillars spiraling up from it like bolts of twisting silk made from stone. And down another corridor, a bathhouse left dry for the winter but rich with the scent of cedar and pine resin.
Even when he returned to the storehouse and the voices and faces he knew, he found his mind lingering in the dark corridors and galleries, unsure whether the images of the spaces lit with the white shadowless light of a thousand candles were imagination or memory.
A sharp rapping brought him back to himself, and the door of his private office swung open. Amiit and Sinja walked in, already half into a conversation. Sinja’s expression was mildly annoyed. Amiit, Otah thought, seemed worried.
“It would only make things worse,” Amiit said.
“We’d earn more time. And it isn’t as if they’d accuse Otah-cha here of it. They think he’s dead.”
“Then they’ll accuse him of it once they find he’s alive,” Amiit said and turned to Otah. “Sinja wants to assassinate the head of a high family in order to slow the work of the council.”
“We won’t do that,” Otah said. “My hands aren’t particularly bloodied yet, and I’d like to keep it that way—”
&
nbsp; “It isn’t as though people are going to believe it,” Sinja said. “If you’re going to carry the blame you may as well get the advantages from doing the thing.”
“It’ll be easier to convince them of my innocence later if I’m actually innocent of something,” Otah said, “but there may be other roads that come to the same place. Is there something else that would slow the council and doesn’t involve putting holes in someone?”
Sinja frowned, his eyes shifting as if he were reading text written in the air. He half-smiled.
“Perhaps. Let me look into that.”
With a pose that ended his conversation, Sinja left. Amiit sighed and lowered himself into one of the chairs.
“What news?” Amiit asked.
“Kamau and Vaunani are talking about merging their forces,” Otah said. “Most of the talks seem to involve someone hitting someone or throwing a knife. The Loiya, Bentani, and Coirah have all been quietly, and so far as I can tell, independently, backing the Vaunyogi.”
“And they all have contracts with Galt,” Amiit said. “What about the others?”
“Of the families we know? None have come out against them. And none for, or at least not openly.”
“There should be more fighting,” Amiit said. “There should be struggles and coalitions. Alliances should be forming and breaking by the moment. It’s too steady.”
“Only if there was a real struggle going on. If the decision was already made, it would look exactly like this.”
“Yes. There are times I hate being right. Any word from the poet?”
Otah shook his head and sat, then stood again. When Maati had gone from their first meeting, he’d seemed convinced. Otah had been sure at the time that he wouldn’t betray them. He was sure in his bones. He only wished he’d had his thoughts more in order at the time. He’d been swept up in the moment, more concerned with his lies about Liat’s son than anything else. He’d had time since to reflect, and the other worries had swarmed out. Otah had sat up until the night candle was at its halfway mark, listing the things he needed to consider. It hadn’t lent him peace.
“It’s hard, waiting,” Amiit said. “You must feel like you’re back up in that tower.”
A Betrayal in Winter (The Long Price Quartet Book 2) Page 31