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

  “It isn’t fair,” Idaan said. “They shouldn’t force you out like this. You belong here.”

  “It’s tradition,” Hiami said with a pose of surrender. “Fairness has nothing to do with it. My husband is dead. I will return to my father’s house, whoever’s actually sitting in his chair these days.”

  “If you were a merchant, no one would require anything like that of you. You could go where you pleased, and do what you wanted.”

  “True, but I’m not, am I? I was born to the utkhaiem. You were born to a Khai.”

  “And women,” Idaan said. Hiami was surprised by the venom in the word. “We were born women, so we’ll never even have the freedoms our brothers do.”

  Hiami laughed. She couldn’t help herself, it was all so ridiculous. She took her once-sister’s hand and leaned forward until their foreheads almost touched. Idaan’s tear-red eyes shifted to meet her gaze.

  “I don’t think the men in our families consider themselves unconstrained by history,” she said, and Idaan’s expression twisted with chagrin.

  “I wasn’t thinking,” she said. “I didn’t mean that … Gods … I’m sorry, Hiami-kya. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry …”

  Hiami opened her arms, and the girl fell into them, weeping. Hiami rocked her slowly, cooing into her ear and stroking her hair as if she were comforting a babe. And as she did, she looked around the gardens. This would be the last time she saw them. Thin tendrils of green were rising from the soil. The trees were bare, but their bark had an undertone of green. Soon it would be warm enough to turn on the fountains.

  She felt her sorrow settle deep, an almost physical sensation. She understood the tears of the young that were even now soaking her robes at the shoulder. She would come to understand the tears of age in time. They would be keeping her company. There was no need to hurry.

  At length, Idaan’s sobs grew shallower and less frequent. The girl pulled back, smiling sheepishly and wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

  “I hadn’t thought it would be this bad,” Idaan said softly. “I knew it would be hard, but this is … How did they do it?”

  “Who, dear?”

  “All of them. All through the generations. How did they bring themselves to kill each other?”

  “I think,” Hiami said, her words seeming to come from the new sorrow within her and not from the self she had known, “that in order to become one of the Khaiem, you have to stop being able to love. So perhaps Biitrah’s tragedy isn’t the worst that could have happened.”

  Idaan hadn’t followed the thought. She took a pose of query.

  “Winning this game may be worse than losing it, at least for the sort of man he was. He loved the world too much. Seeing that love taken from him would have been bad. Seeing him carry the deaths of his brothers with him … and he wouldn’t have been able to go slogging through the mines. He would have hated that. He would have been a very poor Khai Machi.”

  “I don’t think I love the world that way,” Idaan said.

  “You don’t, Idaan-kya,” Hiami said. “And just now I don’t either. But I will try to. I will try to love things the way he did.”

  They sat a while longer, speaking of things less treacherous. In the end, they parted as if it were just another absence before them, as if there would be another meeting on another day. A more appropriate farewell would have ended with them both in tears again.

  The leave-taking ceremony before the Khai was more formal, but the emptiness of it kept it from unbalancing her composure. He sent her back to her family with gifts and letters of gratitude, and assured her that she would always have a place in his heart so long as it beat. Only when he enjoined her not to think ill of her fallen husband for his weakness did her sorrow threaten to shift to rage, but she held it down. They were only words, spoken at all such events. They were no more about Biitrah than the protestations of loyalty she now recited were about this hollow-hearted man in his black lacquer seat.

  After the ceremony, she went around the palaces, conducting more personal farewells with the people whom she’d come to know and care for in Machi, and just as dark fell, she even slipped out into the streets of the city to press a few lengths of silver or small jewelry into the hands of a select few friends who were not of the utkhaiem. There were tears and insincere promises to follow her or to one day bring her back. Hiami accepted all these little sorrows with perfect grace. Little sorrows were, after all, only little.

  She lay sleepless that last night in the bed that had seen all her nights since she had first come to the north, that had borne the doubled weight of her and her husband, witnessed the birth of their children and her present mourning, and she tried to think kindly of the bed, the palace, the city and its people. She set her teeth against her tears and tried to love the world. In the morning, she would take a flatboat down the Tidat, slaves and servants to carry her things, and leave behind forever the bed of the Second Palace where people did everything but die gently and old in their sleep.

  Maati took a pose that requested clarification. In another context, it would have risked annoying the messenger, but this time the servant of the Dai-kvo seemed to be expecting a certain level of disbelief. Without hesitation, he repeated his words.

  “The Dai-kvo requests Maati Vaupathai come immediately to his private chambers.”

  It was widely understood in the shining village of the Dai-kvo that Maati Vaupathai was, if not a failure, certainly an embarrassment. Over the years he had spent in the writing rooms and lecture halls, walking the broad, clean streets, and huddled with others around the kilns of the firekeepers, Maati had grown used to the fact that he would never be entirely accepted by those who surrounded him; it had been eight years since the Dai-kvo had deigned to speak to him directly. Maati closed the brown leather book he had been studying and slipped it into his sleeve. He took a pose that accepted the message and announced his readiness. The white-robed messenger turned smartly and led the way.

  The village that was home to the Dai-kvo and the poets was always beautiful. Now in the middle spring, flowers and ivies scented the air and threatened to overflow the well-tended gardens and planters, but no stray grass rose between the paving stones. The gentle choir of wind chimes filled the air. The high, thin waterfall that fell beside the palaces shone silver, and the towers and garrets—carved from the mountain face itself—were unstained even by the birds that roosted in the eaves. Men spent lifetimes, Maati knew, keeping the village immaculate and as impressive as a Khai on his seat. The village and palaces seemed as grand as the great bowl of sky above them. His years living among the men of the village—only men, no women were permitted—had never entirely robbed Maati of his awe at the place. He struggled now to hold himself tall, to appear as calm and self-possessed as a man summoned to the Dai-kvo regularly. As he passed through the archways that led to the palace, he saw several messengers and more than a few of the brown-robed poets pause to look at him.

  He was not the only one who found his presence there strange.

  The servant led him through the private gardens to the modest apartments of the most powerful man in the world. Maati recalled the last time he had been there—the insults and recriminations, the Dai-kvo’s scorching sarcasm, and his own certainty and pride crumbling around him like sugar castles left out in the rain. Maati shook himself. There was no reason for the Dai-kvo to have called him back to repeat the indignities of the past.

  There are always the indignities of the future, the soft voice that had become Maati’s muse said from a corner of his mind. Never assume you can survive the future because you’ve survived the past. Everyone thinks that, and they’ve all been wrong eventually.

  The servant stopped before the elm-and-oak-inlaid door that led, Maati remembered, to a meeting chamber. He scratched it twice to announce them, then opened the door and motioned Maati in. Maati breathed deeply as a man preparing to dive from a cliff into shallow water and entered.

  The Dai-kvo was sitti
ng at his table. He had not had hair since Maati had met him twenty-three summers before when the Dai-kvo had only been Tahi-kvo, the crueler of the two teachers set to sift through the discarded sons of the Khaiem and utkhaiem for likely candidates to send on to the village. His brows had gone pure white since he’d become the Dai-kvo, and the lines around his mouth had deepened. His black eyes were just as alive.

  The other two men in the room were strangers to Maati. The thinner one sat at the table across from the Dai-kvo, his robes deep blue and gold, his hair pulled back to show graying temples and a thin white-flecked beard. The thicker—with both fat and muscle, Maati thought—stood at a window, one foot up on the thick ledge, looking into the gardens, and Maati could see where his clean-shaven jaw sagged at the jowl. His robes were the light brown color of sand, his boots hard leather and travel worn. He turned to look at Maati as the door closed, and there was something familiar about him—about both these new men—that he could not describe. He fell into the old pose, the first one he had learned at the school.

  “I am honored by your presence, most high Dai-kvo.”

  The Dai-kvo grunted and gestured to him for the benefit of the two strangers.

  “This is the one,” the Dai-kvo said. The men shifted to look at him, as graceful and sure of themselves as merchants considering a pig. Maati imagined what they saw him for—a man of thirty summers, his forehead already pushing back his hairline, the smallest of pot bellies. A soft man in a poet’s robes, ill-considered and little spoken of. He felt himself start to blush, clenched his teeth, and forced himself to show neither his anger nor his shame as he took a pose of greeting to the two men.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “I don’t believe we have met before, or if we have, I apologize that I don’t recall it.”

  “We haven’t met,” the thicker one said.

  “He isn’t much to look at,” the thin one said, pointedly speaking to the Dai-kvo. The thicker scowled and sketched the briefest of apologetic poses. It was a thread thrown to a drowning man, but Maati found himself appreciating even the empty form of courtesy.

  “Sit down, Maati-cha,” the Dai-kvo said, gesturing to a chair. “Have a bowl of tea. There’s something we have to discuss. Tell me what you’ve heard of events in the winter cities.”

  Maati sat and spoke while the Dai-kvo poured the tea.

  “I only know what I hear at the teahouses and around the kilns, most high. There’s trouble with the glassblowers in Cetani; something about the Khai Cetani raising taxes on exporting fishing bulbs. But I haven’t heard anyone taking it very seriously. Amnat-Tan is holding a summer fair, hoping, they say, to take trade from Yalakeht. And the Khai Machi …”

  Maati stopped. He realized now why the two strangers seemed familiar; who they reminded him of. The Dai-kvo pushed a fine ceramic bowl across the smooth-sanded grain of the table. Maati fell into a pose of thanks without being aware of it, but did not take the bowl.

  “The Khai Machi is dying,” the Dai-kvo said. “His belly’s gone rotten. It’s a sad thing. Not a good end. And his eldest son is murdered. Poisoned. What do the teahouses and kilns say of that?”

  “That it was poor form,” Maati said. “That no one has seen the Khaiem resort to poison since Udun, thirteen summers ago. But neither of the brothers has appeared to accuse the other, so no one … Gods! You two are …”

  “You see?” the Dai-kvo said to the thin man, smiling as he spoke. “No, not much to look at, but a decent stew between his ears. Yes, Maati-cha. The man scraping my windowsill with his boots there is Danat Machi. This is his eldest surviving brother, Kaiin. And they have come here to speak with me instead of waging war against each other because neither of them killed their elder brother Biitrah.”

  “So they … you think it was Otah-kvo?”

  “The Dai-kvo says you know my younger brother,” the thickset man—Danat—said, taking his own seat at the only unoccupied side of the table. “Tell me what you know of Otah.”

  “I haven’t seen him in years, Danat-cha,” Maati said. “He was in Saraykeht when … when the old poet there died. He was working as a laborer. But I haven’t seen him since.”

  “Do you think he was satisfied by that life?” the thin one—Kaiin—asked. “A laborer at the docks of Saraykeht hardly seems like the fate a son of the Khaiem would embrace. Especially one who refused the brand.”

  Maati picked up the bowl of tea, sipping it too quickly as he tried to gain himself a moment to think. The tea scalded his tongue.

  “I never heard Otah speak of any ambitions for his father’s chair,” Maati said.

  “And is there any reason to think he would have spoken of it to you?” Kaiin said, the faintest sneer in his voice. Maati felt the blush creeping into his cheeks again, but it was the Dai-kvo who answered.

  “There is. Otah Machi and Maati here were close for a time. They fell out eventually over a woman, I believe. Still, I hold that if Otah had been bent on taking part in the struggle for Machi at that time, he would have taken Maati into his confidence. But that is hardly our concern. As Maati here points out, it was years ago. Otah may have become ambitious. Or resentful. There’s no way for us to know that—”

  “But he refused the brand—” Danat began, and the Dai-kvo cut him off with a gesture.

  “There were other reasons for that,” the Dai-kvo said sharply. “They aren’t your concern.”

  Danat Machi took a pose of apology and the Dai-kvo waved it away. Maati sipped his tea again. This time it didn’t burn. To his right, Kaiin Machi took a pose of query, looking directly at Maati for what seemed the first time.

  “Would you know him again if you saw him?”

  “Yes,” Maati said. “I would.”

  “You sound certain of it.”

  “I am, Kaiin-cha.”

  The thin man smiled. All around the table a sense of satisfaction seemed to come from his answer. Maati found it unnerving. The Dai-kvo poured himself more tea, the liquid clicking into his bowl like a stream over stones.

  “There is a very good library in Machi,” the Dai-kvo said. “One of the finest in the fourteen cities. I understand there are records there from the time of the Empire. One of the high lords was thinking to go there, perhaps, to ride out the war, and sent his books ahead. I’m sure there are treasures hidden among those shelves that would be of use in binding the andat.”

  “Really?” Maati asked.

  “No, not really,” the Dai-kvo said. “I expect it’s a mess of poorly documented scraps overseen by a librarian who spends his copper on wine and whores, but I don’t care. For our purposes, there are secrets hidden in those records important enough to send a low-ranking poet like yourself to sift though. I have a letter to the Khai Machi that will explain why you are truly there. He will explain your presence to the utkhaiem and Cehmai Tyan, the poet who holds Stone-Made-Soft. Let them think you’ve come on my errand. What you will be doing instead is discovering whether Otah killed Biitrah Machi. If so, who is backing him. If not, who did, and why.”

  “Most high—” Maati began.

  “Wait for me in the gardens,” the Dai-kvo said. “I have a few more things to discuss with the sons of Machi.”

  The gardens, like the apartments, were small, well kept, beautiful, and simple. A fountain murmured among carefully shaped, deeply fragrant pine trees. Maati sat, looking out. From the side of mountain, the world spread out before him like a map. He waited, his head buzzing, his heart in turmoil. Before long he heard the steady grinding sound of footsteps on gravel, and he turned to see the Dai-kvo making his way down the path toward him. Maati stood. He had not known the Dai-kvo had started walking with a cane. A servant followed at a distance, carrying a chair, and did not approach until the Dai-kvo signaled. Once the chair was in place, looking out over the same span that Maati had been considering, the servant retreated.

  “Interesting, isn’t it?” the Dai-kvo said.

  Maati, unsure whether he meant the view or the business wi
th the sons of Machi, didn’t reply. The Dai-kvo looked at him, something part smile, part something less congenial on his lips. He drew forth two packets—letters sealed in wax and sewn shut. Maati took them and tucked them in his sleeve.

  “Gods. I’m getting old. You see that tree?” the Dai-kvo asked, pointing at one of the shaped pines with his cane.

  “Yes, most high.”

  “There’s a family of robins that lives in it. They wake me up every morning. I always mean to have someone break the nest, but I’ve never quite given the order.”

  “You are merciful, most high.”

  The old man looked up at him, squinting. His lips were pressed thin, and the lines in his face were black as charcoal. Maati stood waiting. At length, the Dai-kvo turned away again with a sigh.

  “Will you be able to do it?” he asked.

  “I will do as the Dai-kvo commands,” Maati said.

  “Yes, I know you’ll go there. But will you be able to tell me that he’s there? You know if he is behind this, they’ll kill him before they go on to each other. Are you able to bear that responsibility? Tell me now if you aren’t, and I’ll find some other way. You don’t have to fail again.”

  “I won’t fail again, most high.”

  “Good. That’s good,” the Dai-kvo said and went silent. Maati waited so long for the pose that would dismiss him that he wondered whether the Dai-kvo had forgotten he was there, or had chosen to ignore him as an insult. But the old man spoke, his voice low.

  “How old is your son, Maati-cha?”

  “Twelve, most high. But I haven’t seen him in some years.”

  “You’re angry with me for that.” Maati began to take a pose of denial, but checked himself and lowered his arms. This wasn’t the time for court politics. The Dai-kvo saw this and smiled. “You’re getting wiser, my boy. You were a fool when you were young. In itself, that’s not such a bad thing. Many men are. But you embraced your mistakes. You defended them against all correction. That was the wrong path, and don’t think I’m unaware of how you’ve paid for it.”