The Price of Spring Read online

Idaan's smile was crooked with meanings he couldn't quite follow. Otah felt anger growing in his spine, only it wasn't rage so much as dread. "I'll do as you say, Most High," Idaan said. "I'll go at first light."

  "Thank you," he said.

  Idaan rose and walked back toward the arches. He heard her pause for a moment and then go on. The stars had come out, glimmering in the darkness like gems thrown on black stone. Otah sat in silence until he was sure he could walk, and then went down to his rooms. The servants had left him a bowl of candied fruit, but he couldn't stand the prospect.

  A fire burned in the grate, protecting the air from even the slightest chill and tainting it with tendrils of pine smoke. The summer cities had always been overly vigilant of cold. Thin blood. Everything south of Udun was plagued by thinness of the blood. Otah came from the winter cities, and he threw open the shutters, letting in what cold there was. He didn't notice that Danat was there until the boy spoke.

  "Father."

  Otah turned. Danat stood in the doorway that led to the inner chambers. He wore the same robe that he had before, but the cloth sagged like an unmade bed. Danat's eyes were rimmed with red.

  "Danat-kya," Otah said. "What's happened?"

  "I've done as you said. Shija and I went to the rose pavilion. Just the two of us. I ... spoke with her. I broke things off."

  "Ah," Otah said. He walked back from the open windows and sat on a couch before the fire. Danat came forward, his eyes glittering with unfallen tears.

  "This is my fault, Papa-kya. In a different world, I might have ... I have been careless with her. I've hurt her."

  Was I ever as young as this? Otah thought, and immediately pressed it away. Even if the question was fair, it was unkind. He held out his hand, and his son-his tall, thick-shouldered son-sat beside him, curled into Otah's shoulder the way he had as a boy. Danat sobbed once.

  "I only ... I know you and Issandra-cha were relying on me and . .

  Otah hushed the boy.

  "You've taken a willing girl to bed," Otah said. "You aren't who she hoped you might be, and so she's disappointed. Yes?"

  Danat nodded.

  "There are worse things." Otah saw again the darkness of Idaan's eyes. He was sending the woman behind those eyes after his Eiah, his little girl. The ghost of nausea touched him and he stroked Danat's hair. "People have done worse."

  14

  Maati frowned at the papers before him. A small fire crackled in the brazier on his desk, and he was more than half-tempted to drop the pages onto the flames. Eiah, sitting across from him, looked no more pleased.

  "You're right," he said. "We're moving backward."

  "What's happened?" Eiah asked, though she knew as well as he did.

  The few weeks that had passed since Vanjit's successful binding had only grown more difficult. To start, the other students excepting Eiah were more distracted. The mewling and cries of the andat disrupted any conversation. Its awkward crawling seemed capable of entrancing them for a full morning. Perhaps he had known too much of the andat, but he held the growing impression that it was perfectly aware of the effect its toothless smile could have. And that it was especially cultivating the admiration of Ashti Beg.

  Added to that, Vanjit herself had come almost disconnected from the rest. She would sit for whole days, the andat in her lap or at her breast, staring at water or empty air. Maati had some sympathy for that. She had shown him the most compelling of the wonders her new powers had uncovered, and he had been as delighted as she was. But her little raptures meant that she wasn't engaged in the work at hand: Eiah, and the binding of Wounded.

  "There is something we can do," Eiah said. "If we set the classes in the mornings, just after the first meal, we won't have had a full day behind us. We could come at it fresh each time."

  Maati nodded more to show he'd heard her than from any real agreement. His fingertips traced the lines of the binding again, tapping the page each time some little infelicity struck him. He had seen bindings falter this way before. In those first years when Maati had been a new poet, the Dai-kvo had spoken of the dangers of muddying thoughts by too much work. One sure way to fail was to build something sufficient and then not stop. With every small improvement, the larger structure became less tenable, until eventually the thing collapsed under the weight of too much history.

  He wondered if they had gone too far, corrected one too many things which were not truly problems so much as differences of taste.

  Eiah took a pose that challenged him. He looked at her directly for perhaps the first time since she'd come to his study.

  "You think I'm wrong," she said. "You can say it. I've heard worse."

  It took Maati the space of several heartbeats to recall what her proposal had been.

  "I think it can't hurt. But I also think it isn't our essential problem. We were all quite capable of designing Clarity-of-Sight with meetings in the evening. This"-he rattled the papers in his hand-"is something different. Half-measures won't suffice."

  "What then?" she said.

  He put the papers down.

  "We stop," he said. "For a few days, we don't touch it at all. Instead we can send someone to a low town for meat and candles, or clear the gardens. Anything."

  "Do we have time for that?" Eiah asked. "Anything could have happened. My brother may be married. His wife may be carrying a child. All of Galt may be loading their daughters in ships, and the men of the cities may be scuttling off to Kirinton and Acton and Marsh. We are out here where there's no one to talk to, no couriers on the roads, and I know it feels that time has stopped. It hasn't. We've been weeks at this. Months. We can't spend time we don't have."

  "You'd recommend what, then? Move faster than we can move? Think more clearly than we can think? It isn't as if we can sit down with a serious expression and demand that the work be better than it is. Have you never seen a man ill with something that needed quiet and time? This is no different."

  "I've also watched ill men die," Eiah said. "Time passes, and once you've waited too long for something, there's no getting it back."

  Her mouth bent in a deep frown. There were dark circles under her eyes. She bit her lower lip and shook her head as if conducting some conversation within her mind and disagreeing with herself. The coal burning in the brazier settled and gave off a dozen small sparks as bright as fireflies. One landed on the paper, already cold and gray. Ash.

  "You're reconsidering," Maati said.

  "No. I'm not. We can't tell my father," she said. "Not yet."

  "We could send to others, then," Maati said. "There are high families in every city that would rise up against Otah's every plan if they knew the andat were back in the world. You've lived your whole life in the courts. Two or three people whose discretion you trust would be all it took. A rumor spoken in the right ears. We needn't even say where we are or what's been bound."

  Eiah combed her fingers through her hair. Every breath that she didn't answer, Maati felt his hopes rise. She would, if he only gave her a little more time and silence to convince herself. She would announce their success, and everyone in the cities of the Khaiem would know that Maati Vaupathai had remained true to them. He had never given up, never turned away.

  "It would mean going to a city," Eiah said. "I can't send half-a-dozen ciphered letters under my own seal out from a low town without every courier in the south finding out where we are."

  "Then Pathai," Maati said, his hands opening. "We need to step back from the binding. The letters will win us time to make things right."

  Eiah turned, looking out the window. In the courtyard, the maple trees were losing their leaves. A storm, a strong wind, and the branches would be bare. A sparrow, brown and gray, hopped from one twig to another. Maati could see the fine markings on its wings, the blackness of its eyes. It had been years since sparrows had been more than dull smears. He glanced at Eiah, surprised to see the tears on her cheek.

  His hand touched her shoulder. She didn't look back, but he fel
t her lean into him a degree.

  "I don't know," she said as if to the sparrow, the trees, the thousand fallen leaves. "I don't know why it should matter. It's no secret what he's done or what I think of it. I don't have any doubts that what we're doing is the right choice."

  "And yet," Maati said.

  "And yet," she agreed. "My father will be disappointed in me. I would have thought I was old enough that his opinion wouldn't matter."

  He searched for a response-something gentle and kind and that would strengthen her resolve. Before he found the words, he felt her tense. He took back his hand, adopting a querying pose.

  "I thought I heard something," she said. "Someone was yelling."

  A long, high shriek rang in the air. It was a woman's voice, but he couldn't guess whose. Eiah leaped from her stool and vanished into the dark hallways before Maati recovered himself. He followed, his heart pounding, his breath short. The shrieking didn't stop, and as he came nearer the kitchen, he heard other sounds-clattering, banging, high voices urging calm or making demands that he couldn't decipher, the andat's infantile wail. And then Eiah's commanding voice, with the single word stop.

  He rounded the last corner, his fist pressed to his chest, his heart hammering. The cooking areas were raw chaos come to earth. An earthenware jar of wheat flour had been overturned and cracked. The thin stone block Irit used for chopping plants lay in shards on the floor. Ashti Beg stood in the middle of the room, a knife in her hand, her chin held high like a statue of abstract vengeance. In the corner, Vanjit held the stillmewling andat close to her breast. Large Kae, Small Kae, and Irit were all cowering against the walls, their eyes wide and mouths hanging open. Eiah's expression was calm and commanding at the same time, like a mother calling back her children from a cliff edge.

  "It's done, Ashti-cha," Eiah said, walking slowly toward the woman. "I'll have the knife."

  "Not until I find that bitch and put it in her heart," Ashti Beg spat, turning toward Eiah's voice. Maati saw for the first time that the woman's eyes were as gray as storm clouds.

  "I'll have the knife," Eiah said again. "Or I will beat you down and take it. You know you're more likely to hurt the others than Vanjit."

  The andat whimpered and Ashti Beg whirled toward it. Eiah stepped forward smoothly, took Ashti Beg's elbow and wrist in her hands, and twisted. Ashti Beg yelped, the blade clattering to the floor.

  "What. . ." Maati gasped. "What is happening?"

  Four voices answered at once, words tripping over each other. Only Eiah and Vanjit remained silent, the two poets considering each other silently in the center of the storm. Maati raised his hands in a pose that commanded silence, and all of them stopped except Ashti Beg.

  ". . . power over us. It isn't right, it isn't fair, and I will not simper and smile and lick her ass because she happened to be the one to go first!"

  "Enough!" Maati said. "Enough, all of you. Gods. Gods. Vanjit. Come with me."

  The girl looked over as if noticing him for the first time. The rage in her expression faltered. Her hands were shaking. Eiah stepped forward, keeping herself between Ashti Beg and her prey as Vanjit walked across the room.

  "Eiah, see to Ashti-cha," Maati said, taking Vanjit's wrist. "The rest of you, clean this mess. I'd rather not eat food prepared in a child's playpen."

  He turned away, pulling Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight after him. The andat was silent now. Maati crossed the hallway and started down a flight of stone stairs that led to the sleeping rooms for the younger cohorts. The voices of the others rose behind them and faded. He wasn't certain where he was taking her until he reached the branching hall that led to the slate-paved rooms where the teachers had once disciplined boys with the cutting slash of a lacquered rod. He stopped in the hallway instead, putting the reflexive impulse to violence aside. Vanjit bowed her head.

  "I would like an explanation of that," he said, his voice shaking with anger.

  "It was Ashti Beg," Vanjit said. "She can't contain her jealousy any longer, Maati-kvo. I have tried to give her the time and consideration, but she won't understand. I am a poet now. I have an andat to care for. I can't be expected to work and toil like a servant."

  The andat twisted in her grasp, looking up at Maati with tears in its black eyes. The tiny, toothless mouth gaped in what would have been distress if it had been a baby.

  "Tell me," Maati said. "Tell me what happened."

  "Ashti Beg said that I had to clean the pots from breakfast. Irit offered to, but Ashti wouldn't even let her finish her sentences. I explained that I couldn't. I was very calm. I am patient with her, Maati-kvo. I'm always very patient."

  "What happened?" Maati insisted.

  "She tried to take him," Vanjit said. Her voice had changed. The pleading tone was gone. Her words could have been shaved from ice. "She said that she could look after him as well as anyone, and that I was more than welcome to have him back once the kitchen had been cleaned."

  Maati closed his eyes.

  "She put her hands on him," Vanjit said. In her voice, it sounded like a violation. Perhaps it was.

  "And what did you do," Maati asked, though he knew the answer.

  "What you told me," Vanjit said. "What you said about Wounded."

  "Which was?" he said. Clarity-of-Sight gurgled and swung its thick arms at Vanjit's ears, its dumb show of fear and distress forgotten.

  "You said that Eiah-cha couldn't make an andat based on things being as they're meant to, because the andat aren't meant to be bound. It's not their nature. You said she had to bind Wounded and then withdraw it from all the women who still can't bear babes. And so we withdrew from Ashti Beg."

  The andat cooed. It might have been Maati's imagination, but the thing seemed proud. Clarity-of-Sight. And so also Blindness.

  The warmth that bloomed in his breast, the tightening of his jaw, the near-unconscious shaking of his head. They were not anger so much as a bone-deep impatience.

  "It is manipulating you," he said. "We've talked about this from the beginning. The andat wants its freedom. Whatever else it is, it will always struggle to be free. It has been courting Ashti Beg and the others for days to precipitate exactly this. You have to know yourself better than it does. You have to behave like a grown woman, not a selfrighteous child."

  "But she-"

  Maati put two fingers against the girl's lips. The andat was silent now, staring at him with silent anger.

  "You have been entrusted with a power beyond any living person," Maati said, his tone harsher than he'd intended. "You are responsible for that power. You understand me? Responsible. I have tried to make you see that, but now I think I've failed. Poets aren't simply men ... or women ... who have a particular profession. We aren't like sailors or cabinetmakers or armsmen. Holding the andat is like holding small gods, and there is a price you pay for that. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

  "Yes, Maati-kvo," Vanjit whispered.

  "I doubt that," he said. "After what I've seen today, I very much doubt it.

  She was weeping silently. Maati opened his mouth, some cutting comment ready to humiliate her further, and stopped. For a moment, he was a boy again, in this same hallway. He could feel the thin robes and the winter cold, and the tears on his own cheeks as the older boys mocked him or Tahi-kvo-bald, cruel Tahi-kvo, who had later become the Dai- kvo-beat him. He wondered if this fear and rage had been what drove his teachers back then, or if it had been something colder.

  "Fix it," Maati said. "Put Ashti Beg back as she was, and never, never use the andat for petty infighting again."

  "No, Maati-kvo."

  "And wash the pots when your turn comes."

  Vanjit took a pose that was a promise and an expression of gratitude. The quiet sobs as she walked away made Maati feel smaller. If they had been in a city, he would have gone to a bathhouse or some public square, listened to beggars singing on the corners and bought food from the carts. He would have tried to lose himself for a while, perhaps in wine, perhaps in m
usic, rarely in gambling, and never in sex. At the school, there was no escape. He walked out, leaving the stone walls and memories behind him. Then the gardens. The low hills that haunted the land west of the buildings.

  He sat on the wind-paved hillside, marking the passage of the sun across the afternoon sky, his mind tugged a hundred different ways. He had been too harsh with Vanjit, or not harsh enough. The binding of Wounded was overworked or not deeply enough considered, doomed or on the edge of being perfected. Ashti Beg had been in the wrong or justified or both. He closed his eyes and let the sunlight beat down on them, turning the world to red.

  In time, the turmoil in his heart calmed. A small, blue-tailed lizard scrambled past him. He had chased lizards like it when he'd been a boy. He hadn't recalled that in years.

  It was folly to think of poets as different from other men. Other women, now that Vanjit had proved their grammar effective. It was that mistake which had made the school what it was, which had deformed the lives of so many people, his own included. Of course Vanjit was still subject to petty jealousy and pride. Of course she would need to learn wisdom, just the same as anyone else. The andat had never changed who someone was, only what they could do.

  He should have taught them that along with all the rest. Every now and again, he could have spent an evening talking about what power was, and what responsibility it carried. He'd never thought to do it, he now realized, because when he imagined a woman wielding the power of the andat, that woman was always Eiah.

  Maati made his way back as the cold afternoon breeze set the trees and bushes rustling. He found the kitchen empty but immaculate. The broken cutting stone had been replaced with a length of polished wood, but otherwise everything was as it had been. His students, he found under Eiah's command in the courtyard. They were raking the fallen leaves into a pit for burning and resetting a half-dozen flagstones that had broken from years of frost, tree roots, and neglect. Vanjit knelt with Large Kae, lifting the stones from the ground. Clarity-of-Sight nestled in Irit's lap, its eyes closed and its mouth a perfect O. Ashti Beg, her vision clearly restored, was by Small Kae's side, a deep pile of russet leaves before them.