Daniel Abraham
THE
PRICE OF
SPRING
Books by Abraham
(The Long Price Quartet):
A Shadow in Summer
A Betrayal in Winter
An Autumn War
The Price of Spring
THE PRICE OF SPRING
Daniel Abraham
To Scarlet Abraham
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For the last time on this project, I reflect on the people who have
helped me get to the end of it. I owe debts of service and gratitude to
Walter Jon Williams, Melinda Snodgrass, Emily Mah, S. M. Stirling, Ian
Tregillis, Ty Franck, George R. R. Martin, Terry England, and all the
members of the New Mexico Critical Mass Workshop. I owe thanks to Connie
Willis and the Clarion West '98 class for starting the story off a
decade ago. Also to my agents Shawna McCarthy, who kept me on the
project, and Danny Bator, who has sold these books in foreign lands and
beyond my wildest dreams; to James Frenkel for his patience, faith, and
uncanny ability to improve a manuscript; to Tom Doherty and the staff at
Tor, who have made these into books with which I am deeply pleased.
Thank you all.
THE
PRICE OF
SPRING
PROLOG
Eiah Machi, physician and daughter of the Emperor, pressed her fingers
gently on the woman's belly. The swollen flesh was tight, veins marbling
the skin blue within brown. The woman appeared for all the world to be
in the seventh month of a pregnancy. She was not.
"It's because my mother's father was a Westlander," the woman on the
table said. "I'm a quarter Westlander, so when it came, it didn't affect
me like it did other girls. Even at the time, I wasn't as sick as
everyone else. You can't tell because I have my father's eyes, but my
mother's were paler and almost round."
Eiah nodded, running practiced fingertips across the flesh, feeling
where the skin was hot and where it was cool. She took the woman's hand,
bending it gently at the wrist to see how tight her tendons were. She
reached inside the woman's sex, probing where only lovers had gone
before. The man who stood at his wife's side looked uncomfortable, but
Eiah ignored him. He was likely the least important person in the room.
"Eiah-cha," Parit, the regular physician, said, "if there is anything I
can do..."
Eiah took a pose that both thanked and refused. Parit bowed slightly.
"I was very young, too," the woman said. "When it happened. Just six
summers old."
"I was fourteen," Eiah said. "How many months has it been since you bled?"
"Six," the woman said as if it were a badge of honor. Eiah forced
herself to smile.
"Is the baby well?" the man asked. Eiah considered how his hand wrapped
his wife's. How his gaze bored into her own. Desperation was as thick a
scent in the room as the vinegar and herb smoke.
"It's hard to say," Eiah said. "I haven't had the luck to see very many
pregnancies. Few of us have these days. But even if things are well so
far, birthing is a tricky business. Many things can go wrong."
"He'll be fine," the woman on the table asserted; the hand not being
squeezed bloodless by her man caressed the slight pooch of her belly.
"It's a boy," she went on. "We're going to name him Loniit."
Eiah placed a hand on the woman's arm. The woman's eyes burned with
something like joy, something like fever. The smile faltered for less
than a heartbeat, less than the time it took to blink. So at least some
part of the woman knew the truth.
"Thank you for letting me make the examination," Eiah said. "You're very
kind. And I wish the best of luck to you both."
"All three," the woman corrected.
"All three," Eiah said.
She walked from the room while Parit arranged his patient. The
antechamber glowed by the light of a small lantern. Worked stone and
carved wood made the room seem more spacious than it was. Two bowls, one
of old wine and another of fresh water, stood waiting. Eiah washed her
hands in the wine first. The chill against her fingers helped wash away
the warmth of the woman's flesh. The sooner she could forget that, the
better.
Voices came from the examining room like echoes. Eiah didn't listen.
When she put her hands into the water, the wine turned it pink. She
dried herself with a cloth laid by for the purpose, moving slowly to be
sure both the husband and wife were gone before she returned.
Parit was washing down the slate table with vinegar and a stiff brush.
It was something Eiah had done often when she'd first apprenticed to the
physicians, all those years ago. There were fewer apprentices now, and
Parit didn't complain.
"Well?" he asked.
"There's no child in her," Eiah said.
"Of course not," he said. "But the signs she does show. The pooled
blood, the swelling. The loss of her monthly flow. And yet there's no
slackening in her joints, no shielding in her sex. It's a strange mix."
"I've seen it before," Eiah said.
Parit stopped. His hands took a pose of query. Eiah sighed and leaned
against one of the high stools.
"Desire," Eiah said. "That's all. Want something that you can't have
badly enough, and the longing becomes a disease."
Her fellow physician and onetime lover paused for a moment, considering
Eiah's words, then looked down and continued his cleaning.
"I suppose we should have said something," he said.
"There's nothing to say," Eiah said. "They're happy now, and they'll be
sad later. What good would it do us to hurry that?"
Parit gave the half-smile she'd known on him years before, but didn't
look up to meet her gaze.
"There is something to be said in favor of truth," he said.
"And there's something to be said for letting her keep her husband for
another few weeks," Eiah said.
"You don't know that he'll turn her out," he said.
Eiah took a pose that accepted correction. They both knew it was a
gentle sarcasm. Parit chuckled and poured a last rinse over the slate
table: the rush of the water like a fountain trailed off to small, sharp
drips that reminded Eiah of wet leaves at the end of a storm. Parit
pulled out a stool and sat, his hands clasped in his lap. Eiah felt a
sudden awkwardness that hadn't been there before. She was always better
when she could inhabit her role. If Parit had been bleeding from the
neck, she would have been sure of herself. That he was only looking at
her made her aware of the sharpness of her face, the gray in her hair
that she'd had since her eighteenth summer, and the emptiness of the
house. She took a formal pose that offered gratitude. Perhaps a degree
more formal than was needed.
"Thank you for sending for me," Eiah said. "It's late, and I should be
getting back."
"To the palaces," he said. There was warmth and humor in his voice.
There always had been. "You could also stay here."
Eiah knew she should have been tempted at least. The glow of old love
and half-recalled sex should have wafted in her nostrils like mulled
wine. He was still lovely. She was still alone.
"I don't think I could, Parit-kya," she said, switching from the formal
to the intimate to pull the sting from it.
"Why not?" he asked, making it sound as if he was playing.
"There are a hundred reasons," Eiah said, keeping her tone as light as
his. "Don't make me list them."
He chuckled and took a pose that surrendered the game. Eiah felt herself
relax a degree, and smiled. She found her bag by the door and slung its
strap over her shoulder.
"You still hide behind that," Parit said.
Eiah looked down at the battered leather satchel, and then up at him,
the question in her eyes.
"There's too much to fit in my sleeves," she said. "I'd clank like a
toolshed every time I waved."
"That's not why you carry it," he said. "It's so that people see a
physician and not your father's daughter. You've always been like that."
It was his little punishment for her return to her own rooms. There had
been a time when she'd have resented the criticism. That time had passed.
"Good night, Parit-kya," she said. "It was good to see you again."
He took a pose of farewell, and then walked with her to the door. In the
courtyard of his house, the autumn moon was full and bright and heavy.
The air smelled of wood smoke and the ocean. Warmth so late in the
season still surprised her. In the north, where she'd spent her
girlhood, the chill would have been deadly by now. Here, she hardly
needed a heavy robe.
Parit stopped in the shadows beneath a wide shade tree, its golden
leaves lined with silver by the moonlight. Eiah had her hand on the gate
before he spoke.
"Was that what you were looking for?" he asked.
She looked back, paused, and took a pose that asked for clarification.
There were too many things he might have meant.
"When you wrote, you said to watch for unusual cases," Parit said. "Was
she what you had in mind?"
"No," Eiah said. "That wasn't it." She passed from the garden to the street.
A decade and a half had passed since the power of the andat had left the
world. For generations before that, the cities of the Khaiem had been
protected by the poets-men who had dedicated their lives to binding one
of the spirits, the thoughts made flesh. Stone-Made-Soft, whom Eiah had
known as a child with its wide shoulders and amiable smile, was one of
them. It had made the mines around the northern city of Machi the
greatest in the world. Water-Moving-Down, who generations ago had
commanded the rains to come or else to cease, the rivers to flow or else
run dry. Removing-the-Part-That-Continues, called Seedless, who had
plucked the seeds from the cotton harvests of Saraykeht and discreetly
ended pregnancies.
Each of the cities had had one, and each city had shaped its trade and
commerce to exploit the power of its particular andat to the advantage
of its citizens. War had never come to the cities of the Khaiem. No one
dared to face an enemy who might make the mountains flow like rivers,
who might flood your cities or cause your crops to fail or your women to
miscarry. For almost ten generations, the cities of the Khaiem had stood
above the world like adults over children.
And then the Galtic general Balasar Gice had made his terrible wager and
won. The andat left the world, and left it in ruins. For a blood-soaked
spring, summer, and autumn, the armies of Galt had washed over the
cities like a wave over sandcastles. Nantani, Udun, Yalakeht,
Chaburi-Tan. The great cities fell to the foreign swords. The Khaiem
died. The Dai-kvo and his poets were put to the sword and their
libraries burned. Eiah still remembered being fourteen summers old and
waiting for death to come. She had been only the daughter of the Khai
Machi then, but that had been enough. The Galts, who had taken every
other city, were advancing on them. And their only hope had been Uncle
Maati, the disgraced poet, and his bid to bind one last andat.
She had been present in the warehouse when he'd attempted the binding.
She'd seen it go wrong. She had felt it in her body. She and every other
woman in the cities of the Khaiem. And every man of Galt.
Corruptingthe-Generative, the last andat had been named.
Sterile.
Since that day, no woman of the cities of the Khaiem had borne a child.
No man of Galt had fathered one. It was a dark joke. Enemy nations
locked in war afflicted with complementary curses. Yourhistory will be
written by half-breeds, Sterile had said, or it won't be written. Eiah
knew the words because she had been in the room when the world had been
broken. Her own father had taken the name Emperor when he sued for
peace, and Emperor he had become. Emperor of a fallen world.
Perhaps Parit was right. Perhaps she had taken to her vocation as
single-mindedly as she had because she wanted to be something else.
Something besides her father's daughter. As the princess of the new
empire, she would have been a marriage to some foreign ward or king or
lord incapable of bearing children. The degraded currency of her body
would have been her definition.
Physician and healer were better roles to play. Walking through the
darkened streets of Saraykeht, her robes and her satchel afforded her a