The Price of Spring (The Long Price Quartet Book 4) Read online

  THE PRICE OF SPRING

  Tor Books by Daniel Abraham

  The Long Price Quartet

  A Shadow in Summer

  A Betrayal in Winter

  An Autumn War

  The Price of Spring

  THE PRICE OF SPRING

  Book Four of the Long Price Quartet

  Daniel Abraham

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  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 Baror, 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

  CONTENTS

  PROLOG

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  EPILOG

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  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 tool-shed 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. Corrupting-the-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. Your history 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 measure of respect and protection. It was poor form to assault a healer, in part because of the very real chance of requiring her services one day. The toughs and beggars who haunted the alleys near the seafront might meet her eyes as she walked past, might even hail her with an obscenity or veiled threat, but they had never followed her. And so she didn’t see that she had any need of the palace guard. If her work protected her, there was no reason to call upon her blood.

  She stopped at the bronze statue of Shian Sho. The last emperor gazed out wistfully over the sea, or perhaps back through the ages to a time when his name had been important. Eiah pulled her robe tight around herself and squatted at his metalwork feet, waiting for the firekeeper and his steamcart. In daytime, she would have walked the streets north and uphill to the palaces, but the seafront wasn’t the worst part of Saraykeht. It was safer to wait.

  To the west, the soft quarter was lit in its nightly festival. To the east, the bathhouses, the great stone warehouses, rarely more than half-filled now. Beyond that, the cohort houses of the laborers were darker, but far from unpeopled. Eiah heard a man’s laugh from one direction, a woman’s voice lifted in drunken song from another. The ships that filled the seafront docks stood silent, their masts like winter trees, and the ocean beyond them gray with a low mist.

  There was a beauty in it, and a familiarity. Eiah had made her studies in places like this, whatever city she’d been in. She’d sewn closed the flesh of whores and thieves as often as soothed the coughs and pains of the utkhaiem in their perfumed palaces. It was a decision she’d made early in her career, not to be a court physician, not to care only for the powerful. Her father had approved, and even, she thought, been proud of the decision. For all their differences—and there were many—it was one reason she loved him.

  The steamcart appeared first as a sound: the rough clatter of iron-bound wheels against the bricks of the street, the chuff of the boiler, the low rumble of the kiln. And then, as Eiah stood and shook the dirt and grime from her robe, it turned into the wide street they called the
Nantan and came down toward the statue. In the light of the kiln, she saw seven or perhaps eight figures clinging to the cart’s side. The firekeeper himself sat on the top, guiding the cart with a series of levers and pedals that made the most ornate loom seem simple. Eiah stepped forward as the cart trundled past, took one of the leather grips, and hoisted herself up to the cart’s side runner along with the others.

  “Two coppers,” the firekeeper said without looking at her.

  Eiah dug in her sleeve with her free hand, came out with two lengths of copper, and tossed them into the lacquer box at the firekeeper’s feet. The man nodded rather than take any more-complex pose. His hands and eyes were occupied. The breeze shifted, a waft of smoke and thick steam washing her in its scent, and the cart lurched, shuddered, and turned again to the north along its constant route. Eiah sighed and made herself comfortable. It would take her almost the time for the moon to move the width of her hand before she stepped down at the pathway that led to the palaces. In the meantime, she watched the night city pass by her.

  The streets nearest the seafront alternated between the high roofs of warehouses and the low of the tradesmen’s shops. In the right season, the clack of looms would have filled the air, even this late at night. The streets converged on wide squares where the litter of the week’s market still fouled the street: cheeses dropped to the cobbles and trod into mush, soiled cabbages and yams, even a skinned rabbit too corrupt to sell and not worth hauling away. One of the men on the far side of the steamcart stepped down, shifting the balance slightly. Eiah watched as his red-brown cloak passed into darkness.