‘Liat?’
‘In the workrooms, I think,’ Epani said. ‘The utkhaiem didn’t ask to speak with her.’
Amat didn’t reply. The workrooms of the compound were a bad place for someone of Liat’s rank to be. Preparing packets for the archives, copying documents, checking numbers - all the work done at the low slate tables was better suited for a new clerk, someone who had recently come to the house. Amat walked back to the stifling, still air and the smell of cheap lamp oil.
Liat sat at a table by herself, hunched over. Amat paused, considering the girl. The too-round face had misplaced its youth; Amat could see in that moment what Liat would be when her beauty failed her. A woman, then, and not a lovely one. A dreadful weight of sympathy descended on Amat Kyaan, and she stepped forward.
‘Amat-cha,’ Liat said when she looked up. She took a pose of apology. ‘I didn’t know you had need of me. I would have—’
‘I didn’t know it either,’ Amat said. ‘No fault of yours. Now, what are you working on?’
‘Shipments from the Westlands. I was just copying the records for the archive.’
Amat considered the pages. Liat’s handwriting was clean, legible. Amat remembered days in close heat looking over numbers much like these. She felt her smile tighten.
‘Wilsin-cha set you to this?’ Amat asked.
‘No. No one did. Only I ran out of work, and I wanted to be useful. I’m . . . I don’t like being idle these days. It just feels . . .’
‘Don’t carry it,’ Amat said, still pretending to look at the written numbers. ‘It isn’t yours.’
Liat took a questioning pose. Amat handed her back the pages.
‘It’s nothing you did wrong,’ Amat said.
‘You’re kind.’
‘No. Not really. There was nothing you could have done to prevent this, Liat. You were tricked. The girl was tricked. The poet and the Khai.’
‘Wilsin-cha was tricked,’ Liat said, adding to the list.
Or trapped
, Amat thought, but said nothing. Liat rallied herself to smile and took a pose of gratitude.
‘It helps to hear someone say it,’ the girl said. ‘Itani does when he’s here, but I can’t always believe him. But with him going . . .’
‘Going?’
‘North,’ Liat said, startling as if she’d said more than she’d meant. ‘He’s going north to see his sister. And . . . and I already miss him.’
‘Of course you do. He’s your heartmate, after all,’ Amat said, teasing gently, but the weariness and dread in Liat’s gaze deepened. Amat took a deep breath and put a hand on Liat’s shoulder.
‘Come with me,’ Amat said. ‘I have some things I need of you. But someplace cooler, eh?’
Amat led her to a meeting room on the north side of the compound where the windows were in shade and laid the tasks before her. She’d meant to give Liat as little as she could, but seeing her now, she added three or four small things that she’d intended to let rest. Liat needed something now. Work was thin comfort, but it was what she had to offer. Liat listened closely, ferociously.
Amat reluctantly ended her list.
‘And before that, I need you to take me to the woman,’ she said.
Liat froze, then took a pose of acknowledgment.
‘I need to speak with her,’ Amat said, knowing as she said the words precisely how inadequate they were. For a moment, she was tempted to tell the full story, to lighten Liat’s burden by whatever measure the truth could manage. But she swallowed it. She put compassion aside for the moment. Along with fear and anger and sorrow.
Liat led her to a private room in the back, not far from Marchat Wilsin’s own. Amat knew the place. The delicate inlaid wood of the floor, the Galtic tapestries, the window lattices of carved bone. It was where House Wilsin kept its most honored guests. Amat didn’t believe it was where the girl had slept before the crime. That she was here now was a sign of Marchat’s pricked conscience.
Maj lay curled on the ledge before the window. Her pale fingers rested on the lattice; the strange dirty gold of her hair spilled down across her shoulders and halfway to the floor. She looked softer. Amat stood behind her and watched the rise and fall of her breath, slow but not so slow as sleep.
‘I could stay, if you like,’ Liat said. ‘She can . . . I think she is better when there are people around who she knows. Familiar faces.’
‘No,’ Amat said, and the island girl shifted at the sound of her voice. The pale eyes looked over her with nothing like real interest. ‘No, Liat-kya, I think I’ve put enough on you for today. I can manage from here.’
Liat took a pose of acceptance and left, closing the door behind her. Amat pulled a chair of woven cane near the island girl and lowered herself into it. Maj watched her. When Amat was settled, the chair creaking under even her slight weight, Maj spoke.
‘You hurt her feelings,’ she said in the sibilant words of Nippu. ‘You sent her away, didn’t you?’
‘I did,’ Amat said. ‘I came to speak with you. Not her.’
‘I’ve told everything I know. I’ve told it to a hundred people. I won’t do it again.’
‘I haven’t come to ask you anything. I’ve come to tell.’
A slow, mocking smile touched the wide, pale lips. The fair eyebrows rose.
‘Have you come to tell me how to save my child?’
‘No.’
Maj shrugged, asking with motion what else could be worth hearing.
‘Wilsin-cha is going to arrange your travel back to Nippu,’ Amat said. ‘I think it will happen within the week.’
Maj nodded. Her eyes softened, and Amat knew she was seeing herself at home, imagining the things that had happened somehow undone. It seemed almost cruel to go on.
‘I don’t want you to go,’ Amat said. ‘I want you to stay here. In Saraykeht.’
The pale eyes narrowed, and Maj lifted herself on one elbow, shifting to face Amat directly. Amat could see the distrust in her face and felt she understood it.
‘What happened to you goes deeper than it appears,’ Amat said. ‘It was an attack on my city and its trade, and not only by the andat and Oshai. It won’t be easy to show this for what it was, and if you leave . . . if you leave, I don’t think I can.’
‘What can’t you do?’
‘Prove to the Khai that there were more people involved than he knows of now.’
‘Are you being paid to do this?’
‘No.’
‘Then why?’
Amat drew in a breath, steadied herself, and met the girl’s eyes.
‘Because it’s the right thing,’ Amat said. It was the first time she’d said the words aloud, and something in her released with them. Since the day she’d left Ovi Niit, she had been two women - the overseer of House Wilsin and also the woman who knew that she would have to have this conversation. Have this conversation and then follow it with all the actions it implied. She laced her fingers around one knee and smiled, a little sadly, at the relief she felt in being only one woman again. ‘What happened was wrong. They struck at my city.
Mine.
And my house was part of it. Because of that, I was part of it. Doing this will gain me nothing, Maj. I will lose a great deal that I hold dear. And I will do it with you or without you.’
‘It won’t bring me back my child.’
‘No.’
‘Will it avenge him?’
‘Yes. If I succeed.’
‘What would he do, your Khai? If you won.’
‘I don’t know,’ Amat said. ‘Whatever he deems right. He might fine House Wilsin. Or he might burn it. He might exile Wilsin-cha.’
‘Or kill him?’
‘Or kill him. He might turn Seedless against House Wilsin, or the Galtic Council. Or all of Galt. I don’t know. But that’s not for me to choose. All I can do is ask for his justice, and trust that the Khai will follow the right road afterward.’
Maj turned back to the window, away from Amat. The pale fingers touched the latticework, traced the lines of it as if they were the curves of a beloved face. Amat swallowed to loosen the knot in her throat. Outside, a songbird called twice, then paused, and sang again.
‘I should go,’ Amat said.
Maj didn’t turn. Amat rose, the chair creaking and groaning. She took her cane.
‘When I call for you, will you come?’
The silence was thick. Amat’s impulse was to speak again, to make her case. To beg if she needed to, but her training from years of negotiations was to wait. The silence demanded an answer more eloquently than words could. When Maj spoke, her voice was hard.
‘I’ll come.’
Saraykeht receded. The wide mouth of the seafront thinned; wharves wide enough to hold ten men standing abreast narrowed to twigs. Otah sat at the back rail of the ship, aware of the swell and drop of the water, the rich scent of the spray, but concentrating upon the city falling away behind him. He could take it all in at once: the palaces of the Khai on the top of the northern slope grayed by distance; the tall, white warehouses with their heavy red and gray tiles near the seafront; the calm, respectable morning face of the soft quarter. Coast fishermen resting atop poles outside the city, lines cast into the surf. They passed east. The rivermouth, wide and muddy, and the cane fields. And then over the course of half a hand, the wind pressing the wide, low ship’s sails took them around a bend in the land, and Saraykeht was gone. Otah rested his chin on the oily wood of the railing.
They were all back there - Liat and Maati and Kirath and Tuui and Epani who everyone called the cicada behind his back. The streets he’d carted bales of cotton and cloth and barrels of dye through and the teahouses he’d sung and drunk in. The garden where he’d first kissed Liat and been surprised and pleased to find her kissing him back. The firekeeper, least of the utkhaiem, who’d taken copper lengths to let him and his cohort roast pigeons over his kiln. He remembered when he’d first come to it, how foreign and frightening it had been. It seemed a lifetime ago.
And before him was a deeper past. He had never been to the village of the Dai-kvo, never seen the libraries or heard the songs that were only ever sung there. It was what he might have been, what he had refused. It was what his father had hoped he would be, perhaps. How he might have returned to Machi one day and seen which of his memories were true. He hadn’t known, that day marching away from the school, that the price he’d chosen was so dear.
‘I hate this part,’ an unfamiliar voice said.
Otah looked up. The man standing beside him wore robes of deep green. A beard shot with white belied an unlined, youthful face, and the bright, black eyes seemed amused but not unfriendly.
‘What do you mean?’ Otah asked.
‘The first three or four days on shipboard,’ the man said. ‘Before your stomach gets the rhythm of it. I have these drops of sugared tar that are supposed to help, but they never seem to. It doesn’t seem to bother you, though, eh?’
‘Not particularly,’ Otah said, adopting one of his charming smiles.
‘You’re lucky. My name’s Orai Vaukheter,’ the man said. ‘Courier of House Siyanti bound at present from Chaburi-tan to Machi - longest damn trip in the cities, and timed to put me on muleback in the north just in time for the first snows. And you? I don’t think I’ve met you, and I’d have guessed I knew everyone.’
‘Itani Noyga,’ Otah said, the lie still coming naturally to his lips. ‘Going to Yalakeht to visit my sister.’
‘Ah. But from Saraykeht?’
Otah took a pose of acknowledgment.
‘Rumor has it’s difficult times there. Probably a good time to get out.’
‘Oh, I’ll be going back. It’s just to see the new baby, and then I’ll be going back to finish my indenture.’
‘And the girl?’
‘What girl?’
‘The one you were thinking about just now, before I interrupted you.’
Otah laughed and took a pose of query.
‘And how are you sure I was thinking about a girl?’
The man leaned against the railing and looked out. His smile was quick enough, but his complexion was a little green.
‘There’s a certain kind of melancholy a man gets the first time he chooses a ship over a woman. It fades with time. It never passes, but it fades.’
‘Very poetic,’ Otah said, and changed the subject. ‘You’re going to Machi?’
‘Yes. The winter cities. Funny, too. I’m looking forward to it now, because it’s all stone and doesn’t bob around like a cork in a bath. When I get there, I’ll wish I were back here where my piss won’t freeze before it hits the ground. Have you been to the north?’
‘No,’ Otah said. ‘I’ve spent most of my life in Saraykeht. What’s it like there?’
‘Cold,’ the man said. ‘Blasted cold. But it’s lovely in a stern way. The mines are how they make their trade. The mines and the metalworkers. And the stonemasons who built the place - gods, there’s not another city like Machi in the world. The towers . . . you’ve heard about the towers?’