sorrow rose tip, taking her in its teeth and shaking her. Cehmai held
her close, murmured soft words to her, stroked her hair and her face.
When she sank to the ground, he sank with her.
She couldn't say how long it was before the crying passed. She only knew
that the night around them was perfectly dark, that she was curled in on
herself with her head in his lap, and that her body was tired to the
bone. She felt as if she'd swum for a day. She found Cehmai's hand and
laced her fingers with his, wondering where dawn was. It seemed the
night had already lasted for years. Surely there would be light soon.
"You feel better?" he asked, and she nodded her reply, trusting him to
feel the movement against his flesh.
"Do you want to tell me what it is?" he asked.
Idaan felt her throat go tighter for a moment. He must have felt some
change in her body, because he raised her hand to his lips. His mouth
was so soft and so warm.
"I do," she said. "I want to. But I'm afraid."
"Of me?"
"Of what I would say."
There was something in his expression. Not a hardening, not a pulling
away, but a change. It was as if she'd confirmed something.
"There's nothing you can say that will hurt me," Cehmai said. "Not if
it's true. It's the Vaunyogi, isn't it? It's Adrah."
"I can't, love. Please don't talk about it."
But he only ran his free hand over her arm, the sound of skin against
skin loud in the night's silence. When he spoke again, Cehmai's voice
was gentle, but urgent.
"It's about your father and your brothers, isn't it?"
Idaan swallowed, trying to loosen her throat. She didn't answer, not
even with a movement, but Cehmai's soft, beautiful voice pressed on.
"Otah Machi didn't kill them, did he?"
The air went thin as a mountaintop's. Idaan couldn't catch her breath.
Cehmai's fingers pressed hers gently. He leaned forward and kissed her
temple.
"It's all right," he said. "Tell me."
"I can't," she said.
"I love you, Idaan-kya. And I will protect you, whatever happens."
Idaan closed her eyes, even in the darkness. Her heart seemed on the
edge of bursting she wanted it so badly to he true. She wanted so badly
to lay her sins before him and be forgiven. And he knew already. He knew
the truth or else guessed it, and he hadn't denounced her.
"I love you," he repeated, his voice softer than the sound of his hand
stroking her skin. "How did it start?"
"I don't know," she said. And then, a moment later, "When I was young, I
think."
Quietly, she told him everything, even the things she had never told
Adrah. Seeing her brothers sent to the school and being told that she
could not go herself because of her sex. Watching her mother brood and
suffer and know that one day she would be sent away or else die there,
in the women's quarters and be remembered only as something that had
borne a Khai's babies.
She told him about listening to songs about the sons of the Khaiem
battling for the succession and how, as a girl, she'd pretend to be one
of them and force her playmates to take on the roles of her rivals. And
the sense of injustice that her older brothers would pick their own
wives and command their own fates, while she would be sold at convenience.
At some point, Cchmai stopped stroking her, and only listened, but that
open, receptive silence was all she needed of him. She poured out
everything. The wild, impossible plans she'd woven with Adrah. The
intimation, one night when a Galtic dignitary had come to Nlaehi, that
the schemes might not be impossible after all. The bargain they had
struck-access to a library's depth of old books and scrolls traded for
power and freedom. And from there, the progression, inevitable as water
flowing toward the sea, that led Adrah to her father's sleeping chambers
and her to the still moment by the lake, the terrible sound of the arrow
striking home.
With every phrase, she felt the horror of it case. It lost none of the
sorrow, none of the regret, but the bleak, soul-eating despair began to
fade from black to merely the darkest gray. By the time she came to the
end of one sentence and found nothing following it, the birds outside
had begun to trill and sing. It would be light soon. Dawn would come
after all. She sighed.
"That was a longer answer than you hoped for, maybe," she said.
"It was enough," he said.
Idaan shifted and sat up, pulling her hair back from her face. Cehmai
didn't move.
"Hiami told me once," she said, "just before she left, that to become
Khai you had to forget how to love. I see why she believed that. But it
isn't what's happened. Not to me. "Thank You, Cchmai-kya."
"For what?"
"For loving me. For protecting me," she said. "I didn't guess how much I
needed to tell you all that. It was ... it was too much. You see that."
"I do," Cehmai said.
"Are you angry with me now?"
"Of course not," he said.
"Are you horrified by me?"
She heard him shift his weight. The pause stretched, her heart sickening
with every beat.
"I love you, Idaan," he said at last, and she felt the tears come again,
but this time with a very different pressure behind them. It wasn't joy,
but it was perhaps relief.
She shifted forward in the darkness, found his body there waiting, and
held him for a time. She was the one who kissed him this time. She was
the one who moved their conversation from the intimacy of confession to
the intimacy of sex. Cehmai seemed almost reluctant, as if afraid that
taking her body now would betray some deeper moment that they had
shared. But Idaan led him to his bed in the darkness, opened her own
robes and his, and coaxed his flesh until whatever objection he'd
fostered was forgotten. She found herself at ease, lighter, almost as if
she was half in dream.
Afterwards, she lay nestled in his arms, warm, safe, and calm as she had
never been in years. Sunlight pressed at the closed shutters as she
drifted down to sleep.
The tunnels beneath Machi were a city unto themselves. Otah found
himself drawn out into them more and more often as the days crept
forward. Sinja and Amiit had tried to keep him from leaving the
storehouse beneath the underground palaces of the Sava, but Otah had
overruled them. The risk of a few quiet hours walking abandoned
corridors was less, he judged, than the risk of going quietly mad
waiting in the same sunless room day after day. Sinja had convinced him
to take an armsman as guard when he went.
Otah had expected the darkness and the quiet-wide halls empty, water
troughs dry-hut the beauty he stumbled on took him by stirprise. Here a