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

  There’s still a price, he thought, as clear as a voice speaking in his head. You could still pay it.

  Machi was ten days’ walk, perhaps as little as four and a half days’ ride. If he could turn all eyes back to Machi, Kiyan might have at least the chance to escape his idiocy. And what would she matter, if no one need search for him. He could take a horse from the stables now. After all, if he was an upstart and a poisoner and a man turned evil by love, it hardly mattered being a horse thief as well. He closed his eyes, an angry bark of a laugh forcing its way from his throat.

  Everything you have won, you’ve won by leaving, he thought, remembering a woman whom he had known almost well enough to join his life with though he had never loved her, nor she him. Well, Maj, perhaps this time I’ll lose.

  THE NIGHT candle was past its middle mark; the air was filled with the songs of crickets. Somewhere in the course of things, the pale mist of netting had been pulled from the bed, and the room looked exposed without it. Cehmai could feel Stone-Made-Soft in the back of his mind, but the effort of being truly aware of the andat was too much; his body was thick and heavy and content. Focus and rigor would have their place another time.

  Idaan traced her fingertips across his chest, raising gooseflesh. He shivered, took her hand and folded it in his own. She sighed and lay against him. Her hair smelled of roses.

  “Why do they call you poets?” she asked.

  “It’s an old Empire term,” Cehmai said. “It’s from the binding.”

  “The andat are poems?” she said. She had the darkest eyes. Like an animal’s. He looked at her mouth. The lips were too full to be fashionable. With the paint worn off, he could see how she narrowed them. He raised his head and kissed them again, gently this time. His own mouth felt bruised from their coupling. And then his head grew too heavy, and he let it rest again.

  “They’re … like that. Binding one is like describing something perfectly. Understanding it, and expanding it … I’m not saying this well. Have you ever translated a letter? Taken something in the Khaiate tongues and tried to say the same thing in Westland or an east island tongue?”

  “No,” she said. “I had to take something from the Empire and rewrite it for a tutor once.”

  Cehmai closed his eyes. He could feel sleep pulling at him, but he fought against it a bit. He wasn’t ready to let the moment pass.

  “That’s near enough. You had to make choices when you did that. Tilfa could mean take or it could mean give or it could mean exchange—it’s yours to choose, depending on how it’s used in the original document. And so a letter or a poem doesn’t have a set translation. You could have any number of ways that you say the same thing. Binding the andat means describing them—what the thought of them is—so well that you can translate it perfectly into a form that includes will and volition. Like translating a Galtic contract so that all the nuances of the trade are preserved perfectly.”

  “But there’s any number of ways to do that,” she said.

  “There are very few ways to do it perfectly. And if a binding goes wrong … Existing isn’t normal for them. If you leave an imprecision or an inaccuracy, they escape through it, and the poet pays a price for that. Usually it comes as some particularly gruesome death. And knowing what an andat is can be subtle. Stone-Made-Soft. What do you mean by stone? Iron comes from stone, so is it stone? Sand is made of tiny stones. Is it stone? Bones are like stone. But are they like enough to be called the same name? All those nuances have to be balanced or the binding fails. Happily, the Empire produced some formal grammars that were very precise.”

  “And you describe this thing….”

  “And then you hold that in your mind until you die. Only it’s the kind of thought that can think back, so it’s wearing sometimes.”

  “Do you resent it?” Idaan asked, and something in her voice had changed. Cehmai opened his eyes. Idaan was looking past him. Her expression was unfathomable.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  “You have to carry this thing all your life. Do you ever wish that you hadn’t been called to do it?”

  “No,” he said. “Not really. It’s work, but it’s work that I like. And I get to meet the most interesting women.”

  Her gaze cooled, flickered over him, and then away.

  “Lucky to be you,” she said as she sat up. He watched her as she pulled her robes from the puddle of cloth on the floor. Cehmai sat up. “I have meetings in the morning. I’ll need to be in my own rooms to be ready anyway. I might as well go now.”

  “I might say fewer things that angered you if you talked to me,” Cehmai said, gently.

  Idaan’s head snapped around to him like a hunting cat’s, but then her expression softened to chagrin, and she took an apologetic pose.

  “I’m overtired,” she said. “There are things that I’m carrying, and I don’t do it as gracefully as you. I don’t mean to take them out on you.”

  “Why do you do this, Idaan-kya? Why do you come here? I don’t think it’s that you love me.”

  “Do you want me to stop?”

  “No,” Cehmai said. “I don’t. But if you choose to, that will be fine as well.”

  “That’s flattering,” she said, sarcasm thick in her voice.

  “Are you doing this to be flattered?”

  He was awake again now. He could see something in her expression—pain, anger, something else. She didn’t answer him now, only knelt by the bed and felt beneath it for her boots. He put his hand on her arm and drew her up. He could sense that she was close to speaking, that the words were already there, just below the surface.

  “I don’t mind only being your bed mate,” he said. “I’ve known from the start that Adrah is the man you plan to be with, and that I couldn’t be that for you even if you wanted it. I assume that’s part of why you’ve chosen me. But I am fond of you, and I would like to be your friend.”

  “You’d be my friend?” she said. “That’s nice to hear. You’ve bedded me and now you’ll condescend to be a friend?”

  “I think it’s more accurate to say you bedded me,” Cehmai said. “And it seems to me that people do what we’ve done quite often without caring about the other person. Or even while wishing them ill. I’ll grant that we haven’t followed the usual order—I understand people usually know each other first and then fall into bed afterwards—but in a way that means you should take me more seriously.”

  She pulled back and took a pose of query.

  “You know I’m not just saying it to get your robes open,” he said. “When I say I want to be someone you can speak with, it’s truth. I’ve nothing to gain by it but the thing itself.”

  She sighed and sat on the bed. The light of the single candle painted her in shades of orange.

  “Do you love me, Cehmai-kya?” she asked.

  Cehmai took a deep breath and then slowly let it out. He had reached the gate. Her thoughts, her fears. Everything that had driven this girl into his bed was waiting to be loosed. All he would have to do was tell one, simple, banal lie. A lie thousands of men had told for less reason. He was badly tempted.

  “Idaan-kya,” he said, “I don’t know you.”

  To his surprise, she smiled. She pulled on her boots, not bothering to lace the bindings, leaned over and kissed him again. Her hand caressed his cheeks.

  “Lucky to be you,” she said softly.

  Neither spoke as they walked down the corridor to the main rooms. The shutters were closed against the night, and the air felt stuffy and thick. He walked with her to the door, then through it, and sat on the steps, watching her vanish among the trees. The crickets still sang. The moon still hung overhead, bathing the night in blue. He heard the high squeak of bats as they skimmed the ponds and pools, the flutter of an owl’s wings.

  “You should be sleeping,” the low, gravel voice said from behind him.

  “Yes, I imagine so.”

  “First light, there’s a meeting with the stone potters.” />
  “Yes, there is.”

  Stone-Made-Soft stepped forward and lowered itself to sit on the step beside him. The familiar bulk of its body rose and fell in a sigh that could only be a comment.

  “She’s up to something,” Cehmai said.

  “She might only find herself drawn to two different men,” the andat said. “It happens. And you’re the one she couldn’t build a life with. The other boy …”

  “No,” Cehmai said, speaking slowly, letting the thoughts form as he gave them voice. “She isn’t drawn to me. Not me.”

  “She could be flattered that you want her. I’ve heard that’s endearing.”

  “She’s drawn to you.”

  The andat shifted to look at him. Its wide mouth was smiling.

  “That would be a first,” it said. “I’d never thought of taking a lover. I don’t think I’d know what to do with her.”

  “Not like that,” Cehmai said. “She wants me because of you. Because I’m a poet. If I weren’t, she wouldn’t be here.”

  “Does that offend you?”

  A gnat landed on the back of Cehmai’s hand. The tiny wings tickled, but he looked at it carefully. A small gray insect unaware of its danger. With a puff of breath, he blew it into the darkness. The andat waited silently for an answer.

  “It should,” Cehmai said at last.

  “Perhaps you can work on that.”

  “Being offended?”

  “If you think you should be.”

  The storm in the back of his mind shifted. The constant thought that was this thing at his side moved, kicking like a babe in the womb or a prisoner testing the walls of its cell. Cehmai chuckled.

  “You aren’t trying to help,” he said.

  “No,” the andat agreed. “Not particularly.”

  “Did the others understand their lovers? The poets before me?”

  “How can I say? They loved women, and were loved by them. They used women and were used by them. You may have found a way to put me on a leash, but you’re only men.”

  THE IRONY was that, his wound not fully healed, Maati spent more time in the library than he had when he had been playing at scholarship. Only now, instead of spending his mornings there, he found it a calm place to retire when the day’s work had exhausted him; when the hunt had worn him thin. It had been fifteen days now since Itani Noygu had walked away from the palaces and vanished. Fourteen days since the assassin had put a dagger in Maati’s own guts. Thirteen days since the fire in the cages.

  He knew now as much as he was likely to know of Itani Noygu, the courier for House Siyanti, and almost nothing of Otah-kvo. Itani had worked in the gentleman’s trade for nearly eight years. He had lived in the eastern islands; he was a charming man, decent at his craft if not expert. He’d had lovers in Tan-Sadar and Utani, but had broken things off with both after he started keeping company with a wayhouse keeper in Udun. His fellows were frankly disbelieving that this could be the rogue Otah Machi, night-gaunt that haunted the dreams of Machi. But where he probed and demanded, where he dug and pried, pleaded and coddled and threatened, there was no sign of Otah-kvo. Where there should have been secrecy, there was nothing. Where there should have been meetings with high men in his house, or another house, or somebody, there was nothing. There should have been conspiracy against his father, his brothers, the city of his birth. There was nothing.

  All of which went to confirm the conclusion that Maati had reached, bleeding on the paving stones. Otah was not scheming for his father’s chair, had not killed Biitrah, had not hired the assassin to attack him.

  And yet Otah was here, or had been. Maati had written to the Dai-kvo, outlining what he knew and guessed and only wondered, but he had received no word back as yet and might not for several weeks. By which time, he suspected, the old Khai would be dead. That thought alone tired him, and it was the library that he turned to for distraction.

  He sat back now on one of the thick chairs, slowly unfurling a scroll with his left hand and furling it again with his right. In the space between, ancient words stirred. The pale ink formed the letters of the Empire, and the scroll purported to be an essay by Jaiet Khai—a man named the Servant of Memory from the great years when the word Khai had still meant servant. The grammar was formal and antiquated, the tongue was nothing spoken now. It was unlikely than anyone but a poet would be able to make sense of it.

  There are two types of impossibility in the andat, the man long since dust had written. The first of these are those thoughts which cannot be understood. Time and Mind are examples of this type; mysteries so profound that even the wise cannot do more than guess at their deepest structure. These bindings may someday become possible with greater understanding of the world and our place within it. For this reason they are of no interest to me. The second type is made up of those thoughts by their nature impossible to bind, and no greater knowledge shall ever permit them. Examples of this are Imprecision and Freedom-From-Bondage. Holding Time or Mind would be like holding a mountain in your hands. Holding Imprecision would be like holding the backs of your hands in your palms. One of these images may inspire awe, it is true, but the other is interesting.

  “Is there anything I can do for you, Maati-cha?” the librarian asked again.

  “Thank you, Baarath-cha, but no. I’m quite well.”

  The librarian took a step forward all the same. His hands seemed to twitch towards the books and scrolls that Maati had gathered to look over. The man’s smile was fixed, his eyes glassy. In his worst moments, Maati had considered pretending to catch one of the ancient scrolls on fire, if only to see whether Baarath’s knees would buckle.

  “Because, if there was anything …”

  “Maati-cha?” The familiar voice of the young poet rang from the front of the library. Maati turned to see Cehmai stride into the chamber with a casual pose of welcome to Baarath. He dropped into a chair across from Maati’s own. The librarian was trapped for a moment between the careful formality he had with Maati and the easy companionship he appeared to enjoy with Cehmai. He hesitated for a moment, then, frowning, retreated.

  “I’m sorry about him,” Cehmai said. “He’s an ass sometimes, but he is good at heart.”

  “If you say so. And what brings you? I thought there was another celebration of the Khai’s daughter making a match.”

  “A messenger’s come from the Dai-kvo,” Cehmai said, lowering his voice so that Baarath, no doubt just behind the corner and listening, might not make out the words. “He says it’s important.”

  Maati sat up, his belly twingeing a bit. His messages couldn’t have reached the Dai-kvo’s village and returned so soon. This had to be something that had been sent before word of his injury had gone out, which meant the Dai-kvo had found something, or wished something done, or … He noticed Cehmai’s expression and paused.

  “Is the seal not right?”

  “There is no seal,” Cehmai said. “There is no letter. The messenger says he was instructed to only speak the message to you, in private. It was too important, he said, to be written.”

  “That seems unlikely,” Maati said.

  “Doesn’t it?”

  “Where is he now?”

  “They brought him to the poet’s house when they heard who had sent him. I’ve had him put in a courtyard in the Fourth Palace. A walled one, with armsmen to keep him there. If this is a fresh assassin …”

  “Then he’ll answer more questions than the last one can,” Maati said. “Take me there.”

  As they left, Maati saw Baarath swoop down on the books and scrolls like a mother reunited with her babe. Maati knew that they would all be hidden in obscure drawers and shelves by the time he came back. Some, he would likely never see again.

  The sun was moving toward the mountain peaks in the west, early evening descending on the valley. They walked together down the white gravel path that led to the Fourth Palace, looking, Maati was sure, like nothing so much as a teacher and his student in their matching brown poet�
�s robes. Except that Cehmai was the man who held the andat, and Maati was only a scholar. They didn’t speak, but Maati felt a knot of excitement and apprehension tightening in him.

  At the palace’s great hall, a servant met them with a pose of formal welcome that couldn’t hide the brightness in her eyes. At a gesture, she led them down a wide corridor and then up a flight of stairs to a gallery that looked down into the courtyard. Maati forced himself to breathe deeply as he stepped to the edge and looked down, Cehmai at his side.

  The space was modest, but lush. Thin vines rose along one wall and part of another. Two small, sculpted maple trees stood, one at either end of a long, low stone bench. It looked like a painting—the perfectly balanced garden, with the laborer in his ill-cut robes the only thing out of place. A breeze stirred the branches of the trees with a sound equal parts flowing water and dry pages turning. Maati stepped back. His throat was tight, but his head felt perfectly clear. So this was how it would happen. Very well.

  Cehmai was frowning down warily at Otah-kvo. Maati put his hand on the young man’s shoulder.

  “I have to speak with him,” Maati said. “Alone.”

  “You don’t think he’s a threat?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I still need to speak with him.”

  “Maati-kvo, please take one of the armsmen. Even if you keep him at the far end of the yard, you can …”

  Maati took a pose that refused this, and saw something shift in the young man’s eyes. Respect, Maati thought. He thinks I’m being brave. How odd that I was that young once.

  “Take me there,” Maati said.

  OTAH SAT in the garden, his back and neck tight from riding and from fear, and remembered being young in the summer cities. In one of the low towns outside Saraykeht, there had been a rock at the edge of a cliff that jutted out over the water so that, when the tide was just right, a boy of thirteen summers might step out to its edge and peer past his toes at the ocean below him and feel like a bird. There had been a band of them—the homeless young scraping by on pity and small labor—who had dared each other to dive from that cliff. The first time he had made the leap himself, he had been sure the moment his feet left the rough, hot stone that he would die. That pause, divorced from earth and water, willing himself back up, trying to force himself to fly and take back that one irrevocable moment, had felt very much like sitting quiet and alone in this garden. The trees shifted like slow dancers, the flowers trembled, the stone glowed where the sun struck it and faded to gray where it did not. He rubbed his fingers against the gritty bench to remind himself where he was, and to keep the panic in his breast from possessing him.