A Betrayal in Winter (The Long Price Quartet Book 2) Read online

  Otah Machi at a Crossroads

  Biitrah, eldest son of the Khai Machi, was dead, murdered. The two surviving sons of Machi had vanished. The best estimates were that the old Khai wouldn’t see another winter. 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.

  “The second volume in Daniel Abraham’s Long Price Quartet delivers a mix of subtle intrigue, illicit murder, and ill-fated romance, and further explores one of the most unique and engaging systems of magic in contemporary fantasy.”

  —Jacqueline Carey, bestselling author of Kushiel’s Justice

  “Compellingly plotted and elegantly written.”

  —SciFi.com, on A Betrayal in Winter

  “A Betrayal in Winter features Daniel Abraham’s gift for complex, realistic characters in a setting that has none of the tinsel or derivative, second-hand feel of so much fantasy. This series is a major accomplishment; A Betrayal in Winter more than fulfills the promise of A Shadow in Summer and I look forward eagerly to reading the next.”

  —S. M. Stirling, author of The Sky People

  Turn the page for more praise for Daniel Abraham

  More Praise for A Betrayal in Winter

  “A Betrayal in Winter is a novel to inhabit, full of multifaceted characters whose public poses often belie their inner motivations, and full also of hope that men and women can be equal and that systems which degrade us can be changed.”

  —BookPage.com

  Praise for A Shadow in Summer, Book One of the Long Price Quartet

  “Most ‘otherworldly’ fantasy is anything but, yet here Abraham has created an evocative world and culture that seems very strange and alien, yet still somehow feels real. The plot … pays off for the patient reader and should leave fans eager for the next installment. An impressive start.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A Shadow in Summer is a thoroughly engrossing debut novel from a major new fantasist. The world of the Khaiem, the andat, and the poets makes a fresh and original setting for a poignant human tale of power, heartbreak, and betrayal that kept me reading from first page to last. Abraham’s varied cast of characters are a lively and interesting bunch, and he tells their stories in an elegant style that reminded me by turns of Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance, and M. John Harrison, while still remaining very much his own. So when is the next volume coming out?”

  —George R. R. Martin, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  “There’s something genuinely new here, and it will be fascinating to see how the Quartet develops.”

  —Locus

  “From the opening lines, A Shadow in Summer carries us into an exotic, fantastic, yet utterly convincing world. Bravo! The writing is extremely visual. Drawing heavily on Eastern cultures, the author has created a mannered society in which every tone and gesture possesses special meaning. The setting is neither Japan nor China, however. Together with the multidimensional characters and wealth of fascinating detail, this place exists only in the extraordinary imagination of Daniel Abraham. I look forward to the next book in the series.”

  —Morgan Llywelyn, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  “Abraham has an interesting set of distinctive characters, a good sense of plot, and a fresh take on several of the usual fantasy tropes. He’s also willing to examine real-world issues a lot of popular fantasy doesn’t look at—abortion and violence against women, for example. It’ll be interesting to see where subsequent volumes of this series take us.”

  —Asimov’s Science Fiction

  “A Shadow in Summer is an ambitious, intelligent, and assured debut that should satisfy both readers hungry for the satisfactions of traditional fantasy and readers hungry for something more.”

  —SciFi.com

  “Reader, be warned: If you open Daniel Abraham’s A Shadow in Summer, he will lead you into a strange, seductive world of beatings and poets and betrayals, intrigues you do not fully understand and wars you cannot stop and places you are not sure you want to go. Intricate, elegant, and almost hypnotically told, this tale of gods held captive will hold you captive, too.”

  —Connie Willis, multiple Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author

  “Abraham’s debut is impressive. The world-building is solid and internally consistent, and it’s incredibly interesting. The varied characters—from the malicious andat to the ambitious Liat and secretive Itani—are fascinating and original. Readers looking for something new and a little offbeat will enjoy this book.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews

  “A very nice debut, and an enjoyable read that has me very keen on reading [A Betrayal in Winter]; as for A Shadow in Summer, I take a pose of admiration.”

  —FantasyBookSpot.com

  “In a word: Brilliant!”

  —BarnesandNoble.com (Editor’s Choice: Top Ten Novels of 2006)

  Books by Daniel Abraham

  THE LONG PRICE QUARTET

  A Shadow in Summer*

  A Betrayal in Winter*

  An Autumn War*

  The Price of Spring* (2009)

  Hunter’s Run

  (with Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin)

  *A Tor book

  Daniel Abraham

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A BETRAYAL IN WINTER: BOOK TWO OF THE LONG PRICE QUARTET

  Copyright © 2007 by Daniel Abraham

  Mistborn excerpt copyright © 2006 by Brandon Sanderson

  All rights reserved.

  Edited by James Frenkel

  Maps by Jackie Aher

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-5188-3

  ISBN-10: 0-7653-5188-9

  First Edition: August 2007

  First Mass Market Edition: July 2008

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Kat and Scarlet

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book and this series would not be as good if I hadn’t had the help of Walter Jon Williams, Melinda Snodgrass, Yvonne Coates, Sally Gwylan, Emily Mah, S. M. Stirling, Terry England,
Ian Tregillis, Sage Walker, and the other members of the New Mexico Critical Mass Workshop.

  I also owe debts of gratitude to Shawna McCarthy and Danny Baror for their enthusiasm and faith in the project, to James Frenkel for his unstinting support and uncanny ability to take a decent manuscript and make it better, and to Tom Doherty and the staff at Tor for their kindness and support of a new author.

  And I am especially indebted to Paul Park, who told me to write what I fear.

  “There’s a problem at the mines,” his wife said. “One of your treadmill pumps.”

  Biitrah Machi, the eldest son of the Khai Machi and a man of forty-five summers, groaned and opened his eyes. The sun, new-risen, set the paper-thin stone of the bedchamber windows glowing. Hiami sat beside him.

  “I’ve had the boy set out a good thick robe and your seal boots,” she said, carrying on her thought, “and sent him for tea and bread.”

  Biitrah sat up, pulling the blankets off and rising naked with a grunt. A hundred things came to his half-sleeping mind. It’s a pump—the engineers can fix it or Bread and tea? Am I a prisoner? or Take that robe off, love—let’s have the mines care for themselves for a morning. But he said what he always did, what he knew she expected of him.

  “No time. I’ll eat once I’m there.”

  “Take care,” she said. “I don’t want to hear that one of your brothers has finally killed you.”

  “When the time comes, I don’t think they’ll come after me with a treadmill pump.”

  Still, he made a point to kiss her before he walked to his dressing chamber, allowed the servants to array him in a robe of gray and violet, stepped into the sealskin boots, and went out to meet the bearer of the bad tidings.

  “It’s the Daikani mine, most high,” the man said, taking a pose of apology formal enough for a temple. “It failed in the night. They say the lower passages are already half a man high with water.”

  Biitrah cursed, but took a pose of thanks all the same. Together, they walked through the wide main hall of the Second Palace. The caves shouldn’t have been filling so quickly, even with a failed pump. Something else had gone wrong. He tried to picture the shape of the Daikani mines, but the excavations in the mountains and plains around Machi were numbered in the dozens, and the details blurred. Perhaps four ventilation shafts. Perhaps six. He would have to go and see.

  His private guard stood ready, bent in poses of obeisance, as he came out into the street. Ten men in ceremonial mail that for all its glitter would turn a knife. Ceremonial swords and daggers honed sharp enough to shave with. Each of his two brothers had a similar company, with a similar purpose. And the time would come, he supposed, that it would descend to that. But not today. Not yet. He had a pump to fix.

  He stepped into the waiting chair, and four porters came out. As they lifted him to their shoulders, he called out to the messenger.

  “Follow close,” he said, his hands flowing into a pose of command with the ease of long practice. “I want to hear everything you know before we get there.”

  They moved quickly through the grounds of the palaces—the famed towers rising above them like forest trees above rabbits—and into the black-cobbled streets of Machi. Servants and slaves took abject poses as Biitrah passed. The few members of the utkhaiem awake and in the city streets took less extreme stances, each appropriate to the difference in rank between themselves and the man who might one day renounce his name and become the Khai Machi.

  Biitrah hardly noticed. His mind turned instead upon his passion—the machinery of mining: water pumps and ore graves and hauling winches. He guessed that they would reach the low town at the mouth of the mine before the fast sun of early spring had moved the width of two hands.

  They took the south road, the mountains behind them. They crossed the sinuous stone bridge over the Tidat, the water below them still smelling of its mother glacier. The plain spread before them, farmsteads and low towns and meadows green with new wheat. Trees were already pushing forth new growth. It wouldn’t be many weeks before the lush spring took root, grabbing at the daylight that the winter stole away. The messenger told him what he could, but it was little enough, and before they had reached the halfway point, a wind rose whuffling in Biitrah’s ears and making conversation impossible. The closer they came, the better he recalled these particular mines. They weren’t the first that House Daikani had leased from the Khai—those had been the ones with six ventilation shafts. These had four. And slowly—more slowly than it once had—his mind recalled the details, spreading the problem before him like something written on slate or carved from stone.

  By the time they reached the first outbuildings of the low town, his fingers had grown numb, his nose had started to run from the cold, he had four different guesses as to what might have gone wrong, and ten questions in mind whose answers would determine whether he was correct. He went directly to the mouth of the mine, forgetting to stop for even bread and tea.

  HIAMI SAT by the brazier, knotting a scarf from silk thread and listening to a slave boy sing old tunes of the Empire. Almost-forgotten emperors loved and fought, lost, won, and died in the high, rich voice. Poets and their slave spirits, the andat, waged their private battles sometimes with deep sincerity and beauty, sometimes with bedroom humor and bawdy rhymes—but all of them ancient. She couldn’t stand to hear anything written after the great war that had destroyed those faraway palaces and broken those song-recalled lands. The new songs were all about the battles of the Khaiem—three brothers who held claim to the name of Khai. Two would die, one would forget his name and doom his own sons to another cycle of blood. Whether they were laments for the fallen or celebrations of the victors, she hated them. They weren’t songs that comforted her, and she didn’t knot scarves unless she needed comfort.

  A servant came in, a young girl in austere robes almost the pale of mourning, and took a ritual pose announcing a guest of status equal to Hiami’s.

  “Idaan,” the servant girl said, “Daughter to the Khai Machi.”

  “I know my husband’s sister,” Hiami snapped, not pausing in her handwork. “You needn’t tell me the sky is blue.”

  The servant girl flushed, her hands fluttering toward three different poses at once and achieving none of them. Hiami regretted her words and put down the knotting, taking a gentle pose of command.

  “Bring her here. And something comfortable for her to sit on.”

  The servant took a pose of acknowledgment, grateful, it seemed, to know what response to make, and scampered off. And then Idaan was there.

  Hardly twenty, she could have been one of Hiami’s own daughters. Not a beauty, but it took a practiced eye to know that. Her hair, pitch dark, was pleated with strands of silver and gold. Her eyes were touched with paints, her skin made finer and paler than it really was by powder. Her robes, blue silk embroidered with gold, flattered her hips and the swell of her breasts. To a man or a younger woman, Idaan might have seemed the loveliest woman in the city. Hiami knew the difference between talent and skill, but of the pair, she had greater respect for skill, so the effect was much the same.

  They each took poses of greeting, subtly different to mark Idaan’s blood relation to the Khai and Hiami’s greater age and her potential to become someday the first wife of the Khai Machi. The servant girl trotted in with a good chair, placed it silently, and retreated. Hiami halted her with a gesture and motioned to the singing slave. The servant girl took a pose of obedience and led him off with her.

  Hiami smiled and gestured toward the seat. Idaan took a pose of thanks much less formal than her greeting had been and sat.

  “Is my brother here?” she asked.

  “No. There was a problem at one of the mines. I imagine he’ll be there for the day.”

  Idaan frowned, but stopped short of showing any real disapproval. All she said was, “It must seem odd for one of the Khaiem to be slogging through tunnels like a common miner.”

  “Men have their enthusiasms,” Hiami s
aid, smiling slightly. Then she sobered. “Is there news of your father?”

  Idaan took a pose that was both an affirmation and a denial.

  “Nothing new, I suppose,” the dark-haired girl said. “The physicians are watching him. He kept his soup down again last night. That makes almost ten days in a row. And his color is better.”

  “But?”

  “But he’s still dying,” Idaan said. Her tone was plain and calm as if she’d been talking about a horse or a stranger. Hiami put down her thread, the half-finished scarf in a puddle by her ankles. The knot she felt in the back of her throat was dread. The old man was dying, and the thought carried its implications with it—the time was growing short. Biitrah, Danat, and Kaiin Machi—the three eldest sons of the Khai—had lived their lives in something as close to peace as the sons of the Khaiem ever could. Otah, the Khai’s sixth son, had created a small storm all those years ago by refusing to take the brand and renounce his claim to his father’s chair, but he had never appeared. It was assumed that he had forged his path elsewhere or died unknown. Certainly he had never caused trouble here. And now every time their father missed his bowl of soup, every night his sleep was troubled and restless, the hour drew nearer when the peace would have to break.

  “How are his wives?” Hiami asked.

  “Well enough,” Idaan said. “Or some of them are. The two new ones from Nantani and Pathai are relieved, I think. They’re younger than I am, you know.”

  “Yes. They’ll be pleased to go back to their families. It’s harder for the older women, you know. Decades they’ve spent here. Going back to cities they hardly remember …”