“And you said I read too many political romances,” Twelve Azalea muttered.
“I’m not going to leaflet Palace-East to announce my endless love for the Third Judiciary Under-Minister,” Three Seagrass said, her eyes sparkling. “That would be a political romance. This is a known poet posting her newest work in response to current events. With an encoded statement in it.”
“Do you often post poems on open newsfeeds?” Mahit asked, fascinated.
“It’s a little gauche,” said Three Seagrass, “but these are difficult times, and that exquisitely boring Fourteen Spire won the imperial oration contest last week. Clearly anyone can be gauche, and be feted in public.”
“And you think that Nineteen Adze will, what, come get us, if we appeal to her in verse?” It was too clever to be practical; it was all Teixcalaanli symbolic logic and Mahit didn’t trust it.
“I don’t know what she’ll do,” said Three Seagrass. “But I know she’ll read it, and then she’ll know where we are, and what we need. You saw how her staff monitors the newsfeeds—Nineteen Adze pays attention, that’s the first thing in her Ministry briefing file.”
Mahit caught her eyes, shoving away an entirely inappropriate impulse to reach out for her. “Three Seagrass,” she said, knowing she needed to find out how far Three Seagrass was prepared to go for her, if they set out down this trajectory, “how wide is the Teixcalaanli definition of ‘we’? You don’t even know what I need to tell His Brilliance. Are we a ‘we,’ here?”
“I’m your liaison, Mahit,” Three Seagrass said. She almost sounded hurt. “Haven’t I made that clear enough?”
“This is more than you opening doors for me,” Mahit told her. “This is my goals in your words, on the public newsfeeds, in the public memory of Teixcalaan, forever.”
“Sometimes I swear you could be one of us,” Three Seagrass said, quite softly. She smiled a tremulous but creditable Stationer-smile, all her teeth visible. “Now, help me write this, won’t you? I know you have at least a rudimentary sense of scansion, and we need to get this done before Thirty Larkspur’s man-on-the-spot remembers we have cloudhooks.” Then she did reach out to touch Mahit, her fingertips like a ghost, brushing over her cheekbone. Mahit shivered helplessly, and went very stilclass="underline" like she was waiting for a blow.
“Reed,” Twelve Azalea said, theatrically scandalized, “flirt on your own time.”
Mahit wished she wasn’t pale enough that blushing was visible on her cheeks; telltale scarlet flushes, and the heat burning there. “We’re not,” she said. “Flirting. We’re discussing strategies—”
<You have been flirting with her since the morning you met,> Yskandr commented, and Mahit wished profoundly that she could get him to shut up. At least when he’d been defective he hadn’t been able to be so … revelatory, in his commentary.
“We’re writing poetry,” Three Seagrass said, and managed, by maintaining an expression of perfect serenity, to make the activity sound profoundly intimate.
<And she has been flirting back,> Yskandr went on. <When you’re not in the middle of a coup attempt, you might want to do something about that.>
Mahit had written poetry in Teixcalaanli before: she’d written it alone in her capsule room on Lsel, scribbling in notebooks at age seventeen, pretending she could imitate Pseudo-Thirteen River or One Skyhook or any of the other great poets; framing her own unformed ideas in language that didn’t belong to her twice over: she was too barbarian, and too young. Now, sitting with her head bent next to Three Seagrass’s, adjusting scansion and carefully selecting which classical allusions to foreground, she thought: Poetry is for the desperate, and for people who have grown old enough to have something to say.
Grown old enough, or lived through enough incomprehensible experiences. Perhaps she was old enough for poetry now: she had three lives inside her, and a death. When she wasn’t careful she remembered that death too much, her breath coming shorter and shorter until she reminded Yskandr that he was neither dying now nor in charge of her autonomic nervous system.
Three Seagrass, for her part, composed verse like putting on a tailored suit jacket—a process she knew how to make look good, that made her look good in return. Her mental library of glyphs and allusions was vast, and Mahit envied it viciously: if only she’d been raised here, had spent her whole life immersed, she could turn phrases from pedestrian to resonant in a minute’s work, too.
The poem they’d come up with was not long. It couldn’t be—it needed to move quickly through the open newsfeeds, be quotable and express itself clearly: clearly to the populace, and then in a more nuanced, layered fashion to Nineteen Adze and her staff. Mahit had begun it with an image she knew Five Agate would recognize: Five Agate had been there. And Five Agate, clever and loyal and trained in interpretation, would know how desperate Mahit truly was—and tell her ezuazuacat everything.
In the soft hands of a child
even a map of the stars can withstand
forces that pull and crack. Gravity persists.
Continuity persists: uncalloused fingers walk orbital paths, but I am drowning
in a sea of flowers; in violet foam, in the fog of war—
Two Cartograph, in the library at dawn with his mother, playing with a map of a star system. The first signaclass="underline" You know who I am, Five Agate: I am Mahit Dzmare, who understood your love for your son, and for your mistress. The second: I am under threat, and the threat is from Thirty Larkspur: flowers, violet foam.
“Fog of war” was hardly an allusion. That was more of an inevitable and presently occurring truth, and besides, it fit Three Seagrass’s scansion scheme.
The rest of it was brief: an ekphrasis of the Information Ministry building, all of its architecture described in detail, imagined with garlands of larkspurs thrown over it like a funeral—that was an allusion to a section of The Buildings—to tell Nineteen Adze where they were; and then a promise, in a single couplet:
Released, my tongue will speak visions.
Released, I am a spear in the hands of the sun.
Come rescue us, Nineteen Adze. Come rescue us, and help us preserve the sun-spear throne in its correct and proper orbit.
Mahit looked over the poem one last time. It wasn’t bad. To her eyes—and she knew she was untrained—it looked good, looked effective and elegant. “Send it,” she said to Three Seagrass. “I don’t think we’re going to do better in this limited amount of time.”
“I’d send it now,” Twelve Azalea added. “I’ve been watching the newsfeeds while you’ve been working. This is getting very bad, very quickly—One Lightning’s legions are shooting at the customs officials, claiming that the people need them in the City proper, to quell the rioting. I don’t know who is going to stop them—how do we stop a legion? Our legions are unstoppable.”