A Betrayal in Winter

"They tell me you knew my son," the Khai Machi said. The grayness of his skin and yellow in his long, hound hair were signs of something more than the ravages of age. The Dai-kvo was of the same generation, but Maati saw none of his vigor and strength here. The sick man took a pose of command. "Tell me of him."

Maati stared down at the woven reed mat on which he knelt and fought to push away the weariness of his travels. It had been days since he had bathed, his robes were not fresh, and his mind was uneasy. But he was here, called to this meeting or possibly this confrontation, even before his bags had been unpacked. He could feel the attention of the servants of the Khai-there were perhaps a dozen in the room. Some slaves, others attendants from among the highest ranks of the utkhaiem. The audience might be called private, but it was too well attended for Maati's comfort. The choice was not his. He took the bowl of heated wine he had been given, sipped it, and spoke.

"Otah-kvo and I met at the school, most high. He already wore the black robes awarded to those who had passed the first test when I met him. I ... I was the occasion of his passing the second."

The Khai Machi nodded. It was an almost inhumanly graceful movement, like a bird or some finely wrought mechanism. Maati took it as a sign that he should continue.

"He came to me after that. He ... he taught me things about the school and about myself. He was, I think, the best teacher I have known. I doubt I would have been chosen to study with the Dai-kvo if it hadn't been for him. But then he refused the chance to become a poet."

"And the brand," the Khai said. "He refused the brand. Perhaps he had ambitions even then."

He was a boy, and angry, Maati thought. He had beaten Tahi-kvo and Milah-kvo on his own terms. He'd refused their honors. Of course he didn't accept disgrace.

The utkhaiem high enough to express an opinion nodded among themselves as if a decision made in heat by a boy not yet twelve might explain a murder two decades later. Maati let it pass.

"I met him again in Saraykeht," Maati said. "I had gone there to study under Heshai-kvo and the andat Removing-the-Part-ThatContinues. Otah-kvo was living under an assumed name at the time, working as a laborer on the docks."

"And you recognized him?"

"I did," Maati said.

"And yet you did not denounce him?" The old man's voice wasn't angry. Maati had expected anger. Outrage, perhaps. What he heard instead was gentler and more penetrating. When he looked up, the redrimmed eyes were very much like Otah-kvo's. Even if he had not known before, those eyes would have told him that this man was Otah's father. He wondered briefly what his own father's eyes had looked like and whether his resembled them, then forced his mind back to the matter at hand.

"I did not, most high. I regarded him as my teacher, and ... and I wished to understand the choices he had made. We became friends for a time. Before the death of the poet took me from the city."

"And do you call him your teacher still? You call him Otah-kvo. That is a title for a teacher, is it not?"

Maati blushed. He hadn't realized until then that he was doing it.

"An old habit, most high. I was sixteen when I last saw Otah-cha. I'm thirty now. It has been almost half my life since I have spoken with him. I think of him as a person I once knew who told me some things I found of use at the time," Maati said, and sensing that the falsehood of those words might be clear, he continued with some that were more nearly true. "My loyalty is to the Dai-kvo."

"That is good," the Khai Machi said. "Tell me, then. How will you conduct this examination of my city?"

"I am here to study the library of Machi," Maati said. "I will spend my mornings there, most high. After midday and in the evenings I will move through the city. I think ... I think that if Otah-kvo is here it will not be difficult to find him."

The gray, thin lips smiled. Maati thought there was condescension in them. Perhaps even pity. He felt a blush rise in his cheeks, but kept his face still. He knew how he must appear to the Khai's weary eyes, but he would not flinch and confirm the man's worst suspicions. He swallowed once to loosen his throat.

"You have great faith in yourself," the Khai Machi said. "You come to my city for the first time. You know nothing of its streets and tunnels, little of its history, and you say that finding my missing son will be easy for you."

"Rather, most high, I will make it easy for him to find me."

It might have been his imagination-he knew from experience that he was prone to see his own fears and hopes in other people instead of what was truly there-but Maati thought there might have been a flicker of approval on the old man's face.

"You will report to me," the Khai said. "When you find him, you will come to me before anyone else, and I will send word to the Dai-kvo."

"As you command, most high," Maati lied. He had said that his loyalty lay with the Dal-hvo, but there was no advantage he could see to explaining all that meant here and now.

The meeting continued for a short time. The Khai seemed as exhausted by it as Maati himself was. Afterward, a servant girl led him to his apartments within the palaces. Night was already falling as he closed the door, truly alone for the first time in weeks. The journey from his home in the Dai-kvo's village wasn't the half-season's trek he would have had from Saraykeht, but it was enough, and Maati didn't enjoy the constant companionship of strangers on the road.

A fire had been lit in the grate, and warm tea and cakes of honeyed almonds waited for him at a lacquered table. He lowered himself into the chair, rested his feet, and closed his eyes. Being here, in this place, had a sense of unreality to it. To have been entrusted with anything of importance was a surprise after his loss of status. The thought stung, but he forced himself to turn in toward it. He had lost a great deal of the Dai-kvo's trust between his failure in Saraykeht and his refusal to disavow Liat, the girl who had once loved Otah-kvo but left both him and the fallen city to be with Maati, when it became clear she was bearing his child. If there had been time between the two, perhaps it might have been different. One scandal on the heels of the other, though, had been too much. Or so he told himself. It was what he wanted to believe.

A scratch at the door roused him from his bitter reminiscences. He straightened his robes and ran a hand through his hair before he spoke.

"Come in."

The door slid open and a young man of perhaps twenty summers wearing the brown robes of a poet stepped in and took a pose of greeting. Maati returned it as he considered Cehmai Tyan, poet of Mach]. The broad shoulders, the open face. Here, Maati thought, is what I should have been. A talented boy poet who studied under a master while young enough to have his mind molded to the right shape. And when the time came, he had taken that burden on himself for the sake of his city. As I should have done.

"I only just heard you'd arrived," Cehmai Tyan said. "I left orders at the main road, but apparently they don't think as much of me as they pretend."

There was a light humor in his voice and manner. As if this were a game, as if he were a person whom anyone in Machi-or in the worldcould truly treat with less than total respect. He held the power to soften stone-it was the concept, the essential idea, that Manat I)oru had translated into a human form all those generations ago. This widefaced, handsome boy could collapse every bridge, level every mountain. The great towers of Machi could turn to a river of stone, fast-flowing and dense as quicksilver, which would lay the city to ruin at his order. And he made light of being ignored as if he were junior clerk in some harbormaster's house. Maati couldn't tell if it was an affectation or if the poet was really so utterly naive.

"The Khai left orders as well," Maati said.

"Ah, well. Nothing to be done about that, then. I trust everything is acceptable with your apartments?"

"I ... I really don't know. I haven't really looked around yet. 'Ibo busy sitting on something that doesn't move, I suppose. I close my eyes, and I feel like I'm still jouncing around on the back of a cart."

The young poet laughed, a warm sound that seemed full of selfconfidence and summer light. Maati felt himself smiling thinly and mentally reproved himself for being ungracious. Cehmai dropped onto a cushion beside the fire, legs crossed under him.

"I wanted to speak with you before we started working in the morning," Cehmai said. "The man who guards the library is ... he's a good man, but he's protective of the place. I think he looks on it as his trust to the ages."

"Like a poet," Maati said.

Cehmai grinned. "I suppose so. Only he'd have made a terrible poet. He's puffed himself three times larger than anyone else just by having the keys to a building full of papers in languages only half a dozen people in the city can read. If he'd ever been given something important to do, he'd have popped like a tick. Anyway, I thought it might ease things if I came along with you for the first few days. Once Baarath is used to you, I expect he'll be fine. It's that first negotiation that's tricky."

Maati took a pose that offered gratitude, but was also a refusal.

"There's no call to take you from your duties," he said. "I expect the order of the Khai will suffice."

"I wouldn't only be doing it as a favor to you, Maati-kvo," Cehmai said. The honorific took Maati by surprise, but the young poet didn't seem to notice his reaction. "Baarath is a friend of mine, and sometimes you have to protect your friends from themselves. You know?"

Maati took a pose that was an agreement and looked into the flames. Sometimes men could be their own worst enemies. That was truth. He remembered the last time he had seen Otah-kvo. It had been the night Maati had admitted what Liat had become to him and what he himself was to her. His old friend's eyes had gone hard as glass. Heshai-kvo, the poet of Saraykeht, had died just after that, and Maati and Liat had left the city together without seeing Otah-kvo again.

The betrayal in those dark eyes haunted him. He wondered how much the anger had festered in his old teacher over the years. It might have grown to hatred by now, and Maati had come to hunt him down. The fire danced over the coal, flames turning the black to gray, the stone to powder. He realized that the boy poet had been speaking, and that the words had escaped him entirely. Maati took a pose of apology.

"My mind wandered. You were saying?"

"I offered to come by at first light," Cehmai said. "I can show you where the good teahouses are, and there's a streetcart that sells the best hot eggs and rice in the city. Then, perhaps, we can brave the library?"

"That sounds fine. Thank you. But now I think I'd best unpack my things and get some rest. You'll excuse me."

Cehmai bounced up in a pose of apology, realizing for the first time that his presence might not be totally welcome, and Maati waved it away. They made the ritual farewells, and when the door closed, Maati sighed and rose. He had few things: thick robes he had bought for the journey north, a few hooks including the small leatherbound volume of his dead master's that he had taken from Saraykeht, a packet of letters from Liat, the most recent of them years old now. The accumulated memories of a lifetime in two bags small enough to carry on his hack if needed. It seemed thin. It seemed not enough.

He finished the tea and almond cakes, then went to the window, slid the paper-thin stone shutter aside, and looked out into the darkness. Sunset still breathed indigo into the western skyline. The city glittered with torches and lanterns, and to the south the glow of the forges of the smith's quarter looked like a brush fire. The towers rose black against the stars, windows lit high above him where some business took place in the dark, thin air. Maati sighed, the night cold in his face and lungs. All these unknown streets, these towers, and the lacework of tunnels that ran beneath the city: midwinter roads, he'd heard them called. And somewhere in the labyrinth, his old friend and teacher lurked, planning murder.

Maati let his imagination play a scene: Otah-kvo appearing before him in the darkness, blade in hand. In Maati's imagination, his eyes were hard, his voice hoarse with anger. And there he faltered. He might call for help and see Otah captured. He might fight him and end the thing in blood. He might accept the knife as his due. For a dream with so vivid a beginning, Maati could not envision the end.

He closed the shutter and went to throw another black stone onto the fire. His indulgence had turned the room chilly, and he sat on the cushion near the fire as the air warmed again. His legs didn't fold as easily as Cehmai's had, but if he shifted now and again, his feet didn't go numb. He found himself thinking fondly of Cehmai-the boy was easy to befriend. Otah-kvo had been like that, too.

Maati stretched and wondered again whether, if all this had been a song, he would have sung the hero's part or the villain's.

No ONE HAD EVER SEEN IDAAN'S REBELLIONS AS HUNGER. THA'1' HAD BEEN their fault. If her friends or her brothers transgressed against the etiquette of the court, consequences came upon them, shame or censure. But Idaan was the favored daughter. She might steal a rival girl's gown or arrive late to the temple and interrupt the priest. She could evade her chaperones or steal wine from the kitchens or dance with inappropriate men. She was Idaan Machi, and she could do as she saw fit, because she didn't matter. She was a woman. And if she'd never screamed at her father in the middle of his court that she was as much his child as Biitrah or Danat or Kaiin, it was because she feared in her bones that he would only agree, make some airy comment to dismiss the matter, and leave her more desperate than before.

Perhaps if once someone had taken her to task, had treated her as if her actions had the same weight as other people's, things would have ended differently.

Or perhaps folly is folly because you can't see where it moves from ambition into evil. Arguments that seem solid and powerful prove hollow once it's too late to turn back. Arguments like Why should it be right for them but wrong for me?

She haunted the Second Palace now, breathing in the emptiness that her eldest brother had left. The vaulted arches of stone and wood echoed her soft footsteps, and the sunlight that filtered though the stone shutters thickened the air to a golden twilight. Here was the bedchamber, bare even of the mattress he and his wife had slept upon. There, the workshop where he had labored on his enthusiasms, keeping engineers by his side sometimes late into the night or on into morning. The tables were empty now. Dust lay thick on them, ignored even by the servants until the time came for some new child of the Khaiem to take residence ... to live in this opulence and keep his ear pricked for the sound of his brother's hunting dogs.

She heard Adrah coming long before he stepped into the room. She recognized his gait by the sound of it, and didn't call. He was clever, she thought bitterly; if he wanted to find her, he could puzzle it out. Adrah Vaunyogi, bright-eyed and broad-shouldered, father of her children if all went well. Whatever well meant anymore.

"There you are," Adrah said. She could see his anger in the way he held his body.

"What have I done this time?" she demanded, her tone carrying a sarcasm that dismissed his concerns even before he spoke them. "Did your patrons want me to wear red on a day I chose yellow?"

The mention of his hackers, even as obliquely as that, made him stiffen and peer around, looking for slaves or servants who might overhear. Idaan laughed-a cruel, short sound.

"You look like a kitten with a bell on its tail," she said. "There's no one here but us. You needn't worry that someone will roll the rock off our little conspiracy. We're as safe here as anywhere."

Adrah strode over and crouched beside her all the same. He smelled of crushed violets and sage, and it struck Idaan that it had not been so long ago that the scent would have warmed her heart and brought a flush to her cheeks. His face was long and pretty-almost too pretty to be a man's. She had kissed those lips a thousand times, but now it seemed like the act of another woman-some entirely different Idaan Machi whose body and memory she had inherited when the first girl died. She smiled and raised her hands in a pose of formal query.

"Arc you mad?" Adrah demanded. "Don't speak about them. Not ever. If we're found out ..."

"Yes. You're right. I'm sorry," Idaan said. "I wasn't thinking."

""There are rumors you spent a day with Cchmai and the andat. You were seen.

"The rumors are true, and I meant to be seen. I can't see how my having a close relationship to the poet would hurt the cause, and in fact I think it will help, don't you? When the time comes that half the houses of the utkhaiem arc vying for my father's chair, an upstart house like yours would do well to boast a friendship with Cehmai."

"I think being married to a daughter of the Khai will be quite enough, thank you," Adrah said, "and your brothers aren't dead yet, in case you'd forgotten."

"No. I remember."

"I don't want you acting strangely. Things are too delicate just now for you to start attracting attention. You are my lover, and if you are off half the time drinking rice wine with the poet, people won't be saying that I have strong friendship with him. They'll be saying that he's cuckolding me, and that Vaunyogi is the wrong house to draw a new Khai from."

"So you don't want me seeing him, or you just want more discretion when I do?" Idaan asked.

That stopped him. His eyes, deep brown with flecks of red and green, peered into hers. A sudden memory, powerful as illness, swept over her of a winter night when they had met in the tunnels. He had gazed at her then by firelight, had been no further from her than he was now. She wondered how these could be those same eyes. Her hand rose as if by itself and stroked his cheek. He folded his hands around hers.

"I'm sorry," she said, ashamed of the catch in her voice. "I don't want to quarrel with you."

"What are you doing, little one?" he asked. "Don't you see how dangerous this is that we're doing? Everything rests on it."

"I know. I remember the stories. It's strange, don't you think, that my brothers can slaughter each other and all the people do is applaud, but if I take a hand, it's a crime worse than anything."

"You're a woman," he said, as if that explained everything.

"And you," she said calmly, almost lovingly, "are a schemer and an agent of the Galts. So perhaps we deserve each other."

She felt him stiffen and then force the tension away. His smile was crooked. She felt something warm in her breast-painful and sad and warm as the first sip of rum on a midwinter night. She wondered if it might be hatred, and if it were, whether it was for herself or this man before her.

"It's going to be fine," he said.

"I know," she said. "I knew it would be hard. It's the ways it's hard that surprise me. I don't know how I should act or who I should be. I don't know where the normal grief that anyone would feel stops or turns into something else." She shook her head. "This seemed simpler when we were only talking about it."

"I know, love. It will be simple again, I promise you. It's only this in the middle that feels complicated."

"I don't know how they do it," she said. "I don't know how they kill one another. I dream about him, you know. I dream that I am walking through the gardens or the palaces and I see him in among a crowd of people." Tears came to her eyes unbidden, flowing warm and thick down her cheeks, but her voice, when she continued, was steady and calm as a woman predicting the weather. "He's always happy in the dreams. He's always forgiven me."

"I'm sorry," he said. "I know you loved him."

Idaan nodded, but didn't speak.

"Be strong, love. It will be over soon. It will all be finished very soon.

She wiped the tears away with the hack of her hand, her knuckles darkened where her paints were running, and pulled him close. He seemed to hold back for a moment, then folded against her, his arms around her trembling shoulders. He was warm and the smell of sage and violet was mixed now with his skin-the particular musk of his body that she had treasured once above all other scents. He murmured small comforts into her ears and stroked her hair as she wept.

"Is it too late?" she asked. "Can we stop it, Adrah? Can we take it all hack?"

He kissed her eyes, his lips soft as a girl's. His voice was calm and implacable and hard as stone. When she heard it, she knew he had been thinking himself down the same pathways and had come to the same place.

"No, love. It's too late. It was too late as soon as your brother died. We have started, and there's no ending it now except to win through or die."

They stayed still in each others' embrace. If all went well, she would die an old woman in this man's arms, or he would die in hers. While their sons killed one another. And there had been a time not half a year ago she'd thought the prize worth winning.

"I should go," she murmured. "I have to attend to my father. There's some dignitary just come to the city that I'm to smile at."

"Have you heard of the others? Kaiin and Danat?"

"Nothing," Idaan said. "They've vanished. Gone to ground."

"And the other one? Otah?"

Idaan pulled back, straightening the sleeves of her robes as she spoke.

"Otah's a story that the utkhaiem tell to make the song more interesting. He's likely not even alive any longer. Or if he is, he's wise enough to have no part of this."

"Are you certain of that?"

"Of course not," she said. "But what else can I give you?"

They spoke little after that. Adrah walked with her through the gardens of the Second Palace and then out to the street. Idaan made her way to her rooms and sent for the slave boy who repainted her face. The sun hadn't moved the width of two hands together before she strode again though the high palaces, her face cool and perfect as a player's mask. The formal poses of respect and deference greeted and steadied her. She was Idaan Machi, daughter of the Khai and wife, though none knew it yet, of the man who would take his place. She forced confidence into her spine, and the men and women around her reacted as if it were real. Which, she supposed, meant that it was. And that the sorrow and darkness they could not see were false.

When she entered the council chambers, her father greeted her with a silent pose of welcome. He looked ill, his skin gray and his mouth pinched by the pain in his belly. The delicate lanterns of worked iron and silver made the wood-sheathed walls glow, and the cushions that lined the floor were thick and soft as pillows. The men who sat on them-yes, men, all of them-made their obeisances to her, but her father motioned her closer. She walked to his side and knelt.

"There is someone I wish you to meet," her father said, gesturing to an awkward man in the brown robes of a poet. "The I)ai-kvo has sent him. Maati Vaupathai has come to study in our library."

Fear flushed her mouth with the taste of metal, but she simpered and took a pose of welcome as if the words had meant nothing. Her mind raced, ticking through ways that the Dal-kvo could have discovered her, or Adrah, or the Galts. The poet replied to her gesture with a formal pose of gratitude, and she took the opportunity to look at him more closely. The body was soft as a scholar's, the lines of his face round as dough, but there was a darkness to his eyes that had nothing to do with color or light. She felt certain he was someone worth fearing.

"The library?" she said. "That's dull. Surely there are more interesting things in the city than room after room of old scrolls."

"Scholars have strange enthusiasms," the poet said. "But it's true, I've never been to any of the winter cities before. I'm hoping that not all my time will be taken in study."

'T'here had to be a reason that the Dai-kvo and the Galts wanted the same thing. There had to be a reason that they each wanted to plumb the depths of the library of Machi.

"And how have you found the city, Maati-cha?" she asked. "When you haven't been studying."

"It is as beautiful as I had been told," the poet said.

"He has been here only a few days," her father said. "Had he come earlier, I would have had your brothers here to guide him, but perhaps you might introduce him to your friends."

"I would be honored," Idaan said, her mind considering the thou sand ways that this might be a trap. "Perhaps tomorrow evening you would join me for tea in the winter gardens. I have no doubt there are many people who would be pleased to join us."

"Not too many, I hope," he said. He had an odd voice, she thought. As if he was amused at something. As if he knew how badly he had shaken her. Her fear shifted slightly, and she raised her chin. "I already find myself forgetting names I should remember," the poet continued. "It's most embarrassing."

"I will he pleased to remind you of my own, should it be required," she said. Her father's movement was almost too slight to see, but she caught it and cast her gaze down. Perhaps she had gone too far. But when the poet spoke, he seemed to have taken no offense.

"I expect I will remember yours, Idaan-cha. It would be very rude not to. I look forward to meeting your friends and seeing your city. Perhaps even more than closeting myself in your library."

He had to know. He had to. Except that she was not being led away under guard. She was not being taken to the quiet chambers and questioned. If he did not know, he must only suspect.

Let him suspect, then. She would get word to Adrah and the Galts. They would know better than she what to do with this NIaati Vaupathai. If he was a threat, he would be added to the list. I3iitrah, Danat, Kaiin, Otah, Maati. The men she would have to kill or have killed. She smiled at him gently, and he nodded to her. One more name could make little difference now, and he, at least, was no one she loved.

"WHEN ARE THEY SENDING YOU?" KIYAN ASKED AS SIZE POURED OUT THE bucket. Gray water flowed over the bricks that paved the small garden at the hack of the wayhouse. Otah took the longhandled brush and swept the water off to the sides, leaving the walkway deep red and glistening in the sunlight. He felt Kiyan's gaze on him, felt the question in the air. The gardens smelled of fresh turned earth. Spices for the kitchen grew here. In a few weeks, the place would be thick with growing things: basil and mint and thyme. He imagined scrubbing these bricks week after week over the span of years until they wore smooth or he died, and felt an irrational surge of fondness for the walkway. He smiled to himself.

"Itani?"

"I don't know. That is, I know they want me to go to Machi in two weeks time. Amiit Foss is sending half the couriers he has up there, it seems.

"Of course he is. It's where everything's happening."

"But I haven't decided to go."

The silence bore down on him now, and he turned. Kiyan stood in the doorway-in her doorway. Her crossed arms, her narrowed eyes, and the single frown-line drawn vertically between her brows, made Otah smile. He leaned on his brush.

"We need to talk, sweet," he said. "There are some things ... we have some business, I think, to attend to."

Kiyan answered by taking the brush from him, leaning it against the wall, and marching to a meeting room at the back of the house. It was small but formal, with a thick wooden door and a window that looked out on the corner of the interior courtyard. The sort of place she might give to a diplomat or a courier for an extra length of copper. The sort of place it would be difficult to be overheard. That was as it should be.

Kiyan sat carefully, her face as blank as that of a man playing tiles. Otah sat across from her, careful not to touch her hand. She was holding herself back, he knew. She was restraining herself from hoping until she knew, so that if what he said did not match what she longed to hear, the disappointment would not he so heavy. For a moment, his mind flickered back to a bathhouse in Saraykeht and another woman's eyes. He had had this conversation once before, and he doubted he would ever have it again.

"I don't want to go to the north," Otah said. "For more reasons than one.

"Why not?" Kiyan asked.

"Sweet, there are some things I haven't told you. Things about my family. About myself...."

And so he began, slowly, carefully, to tell the story. He was the son of the Khai Machi, but his sixth son. One of those cast out by his family and sent to the school where the sons of the Khaiem and utkhaiem struggled in hope of one day being selected to be poets and wield the power of the andat. He had been chosen once, and had walked away. Itani Noygu was the name he had chosen for himself, the man he had made of himself. But he was also Otah Machi.

He was careful to tell the story well. He more than half expected her to laugh at him. Or to accuse him of a self-aggrandizing madness. Or to sweep him into her arms and say that she'd known, she'd always known he was something more than a courier. Kiyan defeated all the stories he had spun in his dreams of this moment. She merely listened, arms crossed, eyes turned toward the window. The vertical line between her brows deepened slightly, and that was all. She did not move or ask questions until he had nearly reached the end. All that was left was to tell her he'd chosen to take her offer to work with her here at the wayhouse, but she knew that already and lifted her hands before he could say the words.

"Irani ... lover, if this isn't true ... if this is a joke, please tell me. Now."

"It isn't a joke," he said.

She took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. When she spoke, she seemed calm in a way that he knew meant rage beyond expression. At the first tone of it, his heart went tight.

"You have to leave. Now. Tonight. You have to leave and never come hack."

"Kiyan-kya..."

"No. No kya. No sweet. No my lone. None of that. You have to leave my house and you can't ever come back or tell anyone who you are or who I am or that we knew each other once. Igo you understand that?"

"I understand that you're angry with me," Otah said, leaning toward her. "You have a right to be. But you don't know how carefully I have had to guard this."

Kiyan tilted her head, like a fox that's heard a strange noise, then laughed once.

"You think I'm upset you didn't tell me? You think I'm upset because you had a secret and you didn't spill it the first time we shared a bed? Irani, this may surprise you, but I have secrets a thousand times less important than that, and I've kept them a hundred times better."

`But you want me to leave?

"Of course I want you to leave. Are you dim? Do you know what happened to the men who guarded your eldest brother? They're dead. Do you recall what happened when the Khai Yalakeht's sons turned on each other six years back? 't'here were a dozen corpses before that was through, and only two of them were related to the Khai. Now look around you. How do you expect me to protect my house? How can I protect Old Mani? And think before you speak, because if you tell me that you'll be strong and manly and protect me, I swear by all the gods I'll turn you in myself."

"No one will find out," Otah said.

She closed her eyes. A tear broke free, tracing a bright line down her cheek. When he leaned close, reaching out to wipe it away, she slapped his hand before it touched her.

"I would almost be willing to take that chance, if it were only me. Not quite, but nearly. It isn't, though. It's everyone and everything I've worked for."

"Kiyan-kya, together we could ..."

"Do nothing. Together we could do nothing, because you are leaving now. And odd as it sounds, I do understand. Why you concealed what you did, why you told inc now. And I hope ghosts haunt you and chew out your eyes at night. I hope all the gods there are damn you for making me love you and then doing this to me. Now get out. If you're here in half a hand's time, I will call for the guard."

Outside the window, a flutter of wings and then the fluting melody of a songbird. The constant distant sound of the river. The scent of pine.

"Do you believe me?" she asked. "That I'll call the guard on you if you stay?"

"I do," he said.

"Then go."

"I love you."

"I know you do, 'Tani-kya. Go."

House Siyanti had quarters in the city for its people-small rooms hardly large enough for a cot and a brazier, but the blankets were thick and soft, and the kitchens sold meals at half the price a cart on the street would. When the rain came that night, Otah lay in the glow of the coals and listened to patter of water against leaves mix with the voices from the covered courtyard. Someone was playing a nomad's harp, and the music was lively and sorrowful at the same time. Sometimes voices would rise up together in song or laughter. He turned Kiyan's words over in his mind and noticed how empty they made him feel.

He'd been a fool to tell her, a fool to say anything. If he had only kept his secrets secret, he could have made a life for himself based on lies, and if the brothers he only knew as shadows and moments from a halfrecalled childhood had ever discovered him, Kiyan and Old Mani and anyone else unfortunate enough to know him might have been killed without even knowing why.

Kiyan had not been wrong.

A gentle murmur of thunder came and went. Otah rose from his cot and walked out. Amiit Foss kept late hours, and Otah found him sitting at a fire grate, poking the crackling flames with a length of iron while he joked over his shoulder with the five men and four women who lounged on cushions and low chairs. He smiled when he saw Otah and called for a howl of wine for him. The gathering looked so calm and felt so relaxed that only someone in the gentleman's trade would have recognized it for the business meeting that it was.

"Itani-cha is one of the couriers I mean to send north, if I can pry him away from his love of sloth and comfort," Amiit said with a smile. The others greeted him and made him welcome. Otah sat by the fire and listened. There would be nothing said here that he was not permitted to know. Amiit's introduction had established with the subtlety of a master Otah's rank and the level of trust to be afforded him, and no one in the room was so thick as to misunderstand him.

The news from the north was confusing. The two surviving sons of Machi had vanished. Neither had appeared in the other cities of the Khaiem, going to courts and looking for support as tradition would have them do. Nor had the streets of Machi erupted in bloodshed as their bases of power within the city vied for advantage. The best estimates were that the old Khai wouldn't see another winter, and even some of the houses of the utkhaiem seemed to be preparing to offer up their sons as the new Khai should the succession fail to deliver a single living heir. Something very quiet was happening, and House Siyanti-like everyone else in the world-was aching with curiosity. Otah could hear it in their voices, could see it in the way they held their wine. Even when the conversation shifted to the glassblowers of Cetani and the collapse of the planned summer fair in Amnat-Tan, all minds were drawn toward Machi. He sipped his wine.

Going north was dangerous. He knew that, and still it didn't escape him that the Khai Machi dying by inches was his father, that these men were the brothers he knew only as vague memories. And because of these men, he had lost everything again. If he was going to be haunted his whole life by the city, perhaps he should at least see it. The only thing he risked was his life.

At length, the conversation turned to less weighty matters andwithout a word or shift in voice or manner-the meeting was ended. Otah spoke as much as any, laughed as much, and sang as loudly when the pipe players joined them. But when he stretched and turned to leave, Amiit Foss was at his side. Otah and the overseer left together, as if they had only happened to rise at the same time, and Otah knew that no one in the drunken, boisterous room they left had failed to notice it.

"So, it sounds as if all the interesting things in the world were happening in Machi," Otah said as they strode back through the hallways of the house compound. "You are still hoping to send me there?"

"I've been hoping," Amiit Foss agreed. "But I have other plans if you have some of your own."

"I don't," Otah said, and Amiit paused. In the dim lantern light, Otah let the old man search his face. Something passed over Amiit, the ghost of some old sorrow, and then he took a pose of condolence.

"I thought you had come to quit the house," Amiit said.

"I'd meant to," Otah said, surprised at himself for admitting it.

Amiit gestured Otah to follow him, and together they retired to Amiit's apartments. The rooms were large and warm, hung with tapestries and lit by a dozen candles. Utah sat on a low seat by a table, and Amiit took a box from his shelf. Inside were two small porcelain bowls and a white stoppered bottle that matched them. When Amiit poured, the scent of rice wine filled the room.

"We drink to the gods," Amiit said, raising his bowl. "May they never drink to us."

Otah drank the wine at a gulp. It was excellent, and he felt his throat grow warmer. He looked at the empty bowl in his fingers and nodded. Amiit grinned.

"It was a gift from an old friend," Amiit said. "I love to drink it, but I hate to drink alone."

"I'm pleased to be of service," Otah said as Amiit filled the bowl again.

"So things with the woman didn't work out?"

"No," Utah said.

"I'm sorry."

"It was entirely my fault."

"If it's true, you're a wise man to know it, and if not, you're a good man for saying it. Either way."

"I think it would he ... that is, if there are any letters to be carried, I think travel might be the best thing just now. I don't really care to stay in Udun."

Amiit sighed and nodded.

"Tomorrow," he said. "Come to my offices in the morning. We'll arrange something."

Afterwards, they finished the rice wine and talked of nothing important-of old stories and old travels, the women they had known and loved or else hated. Or both. Otah said nothing of Kiyan or the north, and Amiit didn't press him. When Otah rose to leave, he was surprised to find how drunk he had become. He navigated his way to his room and lay on the couch, mustering the resolve to pull off his robes. Morning found him still dressed. He changed robes and went down to the bathhouse, forcing his mind back over his conversations of the night before. He was fairly certain he had said nothing to implicate himself or make Amiit suspect the nature of his falling out with Kiyan. He wondered what the old man would have made of the truth, had he known it.

The packet of letters waited for him, each sewn and sealed, in a leather bag on Amiit Foss' desk. Most were for trading houses in Machi, though there were four that were to go to members of the utkhaiem. Otah turned the packet in his hands. Behind him, one of the apprentices said something softly and another giggled.

"You have time to reconsider," Amiit said. "You could go back to her on your knees. If the letters wait another day, there's little lost. And she might relent."

Otah tucked the letters into their pouch and slipped it into his sleeve.

"An old lover of mine once told me that everything I'd ever won, I won by leaving," Otah said.

"The island girl?"

"Did I mention her last night?"

"At length," Amiit said, chuckling. "That particular quotation came up twice, as I recall. There might have been a third time too. I couldn't really say."

"I'm sorry to hear that. I hope I didn't tell you all my secrets," Otah said, making a joke of his sudden unease. He didn't recall saying anything about Maj, and it occurred to him exactly how dangerous that night had been.

"If you had, I'd make it a point to forget them," Amiit said. "Nothing a drunk man says on the day his woman leaves him should be held against him. It's poor form. And this is, after all, a gentleman's trade, ne?"

Otah took a pose of agreement.

"I'll report what I find when I get back," he said, unnecessarily. "Assuming I haven't frozen to death on the roads."

"Be careful up there, Itani. Things are uncertain when there's the scent of a new Khai in the wind. It's interesting, and it's important, but it's not always safe."

Otah shifted to a pose of thanks, to which his supervisor replied in kind, his face so pleasantly unreadable that Otah genuinely didn't know how deep the warning ran.