‘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 was 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 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, 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.
13
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.
O
tah 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—’
‘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. Maati had gone from their first meeting, and 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.’
‘That was easier. Then at least I knew what was going to happen. I wish I could go out. If I could be up there listening to the people themselves . . . If I spent half an evening in the right teahouse, I’d know more than I’ll learn skulking down here for days. Yes, I know. You’ve the best minds of the house out watching for us. But listening to reports isn’t the same as putting my hands to something.’
‘I know it. More than half my work has been trying to guess the truth out of a dozen different reports of a thing. There’s a knack to it. You’ll have your practice with it.’
‘If this ends well,’ Otah said.
‘Yes,’ Amiit agreed. ‘If that.’
Otah filled a tin cup with water from a stone jar and sat back down. It was warm, and a thin grit swam at the cup’s bottom. He wished it were wine and pushed the thought away. If there was any time in his life to be sober as stone, this was it, but his unease shifted and tightened. He looked up from his water to see Amiit’s gaze on him, his expression quizzical.
‘We have to make a plan for if we lose,’ Otah said. ‘If the Vaunyogi are to blame and the council gives them power, they’ll be able to wash away any number of crimes. And all those families that supported them will be invested in keeping things quiet. If it comes out that Daaya Vaunyogi killed the Khai in order to raise up his son and half the families of the utkhaiem took money to support it, they’ll all share in the guilt. Being in the right won’t mean much then.’
‘There’s time yet,’ Amiit said, but he was looking away when he said it.
‘And what happens if we fail?’
‘That all depends on how we fail. If we’re discovered before we’re ready to move, we’ll all be killed. If Adrah is named Khai, we’ll at least have a chance to slip away quietly.’
‘You’ll take care of Kiyan?’
Amiit smiled. ‘I hope to see to it that you can perform that duty.’
‘But if not?’
‘Then of course,’ Amiit said. ‘Provided I live.’
The rapping came again, and the door opened on a young man. Otah recognized him from the meetings in House Siyanti, but he couldn’t recall his name.
‘The poet’s come,’ the young man said.
Amiit rose, took a pose appropriate to the parting of friends, and left. The young man went with him, and for a moment the door swung free, half closing. Otah drank the last of his water, the grit rough in his throat. Maati came in slowly, a diffidence in his body and his face, like a man called in to hear news that might bring him good or ill or some unimagined change that folded both inextricably together. Otah gestured to the door, and Maati closed it.
‘You sent for me?’ Maati asked. ‘That’s a dangerous habit, Otah-kvo. ’
‘I know it, but . . . Please. Sit. I’ve been thinking. About what we do if things go poorly.’
‘If we fail?’
‘I want to be ready for it, and when Kiyan and I were talking last night, something occurred to me. Nayiit? That’s his name, isn’t it? The child that you and Liat had?’
Maati’s expression was cool and distant and misleading. Otah could see the pain in it, however still the eyes.
‘What of him?’
‘He mustn’t be my son. Whatever happens, he has to be yours.’
‘If you fail, you don’t take your father’s title—’
‘If I don’t take his title, and someone besides you decides he’s mine, they’ll kill him to remove all doubt of the succession. And if I succeed, Kiyan may have a son,’ Otah said. ‘And then they would someday have to kill each other. Nayiit is your son. He has to be.’
‘I see,’ Maati said.
‘I’ve written a letter. It looks like something I’d have sent Kiyan before, when I was in Chaburi-Tan. It talks about the night I left Saraykeht. It says that on the night I came back to the city, I found the two of you together. That I walked into her cell, and you and she were in her cot. It makes it clear that I didn’t touch her, that I couldn’t have fathered a child on her. Kiyan’s put it in her things. If we have to flee, we’ll take it with us and find a way for it to come to light - we can hide it at her wayhouse, perhaps. If we’re found and killed here, it will be found with us. You have to back that story.’
Maati steepled his fingers and leaned back in the chair.
‘You’ve put it with Kiyan-cha’s things to be found in case she’s slaughtered?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Otah said. ‘I don’t think abo
ut it when I can help it, but I know she could die here. There’s no reason that your son should die with us.’
Maati nodded slowly. He was struggling with something, Otah could see that much, but whether it was sorrow or anger or joy, he had no way to know. When the question came, though, it was the one he had been dreading for years.
‘What did happen?’ Maati asked at last, his voice low and hushed. ‘The night Heshai-kvo died. What happened? Did you just leave? Did you take Maj with you? Did . . . did you kill him?’
Otah remembered the cord cutting into his hands, remembered the way Maj had balked and he had taken the task himself. For years, those few minutes had haunted him.
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