ended.
Her servant girl was waiting for her at the entrance of the palace's
great hall. She held a pose of welcome that suggested there was some
news waiting for her. Hiami was tempted to ignore the nuance, to walk
through to her chambers and her fire and bed and the knotwork scarf that
was now nearly finished. But there were tear-streaks on the girl's
cheeks, and who was Hiami, after all, to treat a suffering child
unkindly? She stopped and took a pose that accepted the welcome before
shifting to one of query.
"Idaan Machi," the servant girl said. "She is waiting for you in the
summer garden."
Hiami shifted to a pose of thanks, straightened her sleeves, and walked
quietly down the palace halls. The sliding stone doors to the garden
were open, a breeze too cold to be comfortable moving through the hall.
And there, by an empty fountain surrounded by bare-limbed cherry trees,
sat her once-sister. If her formal robes were not the pale of mourning,
her countenance contradicted them: reddened eyes, paint and powder
washed away. She was a plain enough woman without them, and Hiami felt
sorry for her. It was one thing to expect the violence. It was another
to see it done.
She stepped forward, her hands in a pose of greeting. Idaan started to
her feet as if she'd been caught doing something illicit, but then she
took an answering pose. Hiami sat on the fountain's stone lip, and Idaan
lowered herself, sitting on the ground at her feet as a child might.
"Your things are packed," Idaan said.
"Yes. I'll leave tomorrow. It's weeks to "Ian-Sadar. It won't be so
hard, I think. One of my daughters is married there, and my brother is a
decent man. They'll treat me well while I make arrangements for my own
apartments."
"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 horn 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 had," 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 had. 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 Maehi."
"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 Nlachi, 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 hack.
Hiam] 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 'Fidat, slaves and servants to carry her things, and leave behind