half of the problems between Galt and the Khaiem came from ignorance.
Ignorance and power are a poor combination."
"Tell me ..." Ana said, and then stopped. Her brow furrowed, and in the
dim light he thought she was blushing. Otah put his hand over hers. She
shook her head, and then turned her milky eyes to him. "You've forgiven
me in advance if this is too much to ask. Tell me about Danat's mother."
"Kiyan?" Otah said. "Well. What do you want to know about her?"
"Anything. Just tell me," the girl said.
Otah collected himself, and then began to pluck stories. The night
they'd met. The night he'd told her that he was more than a simple
courier and she'd thrown him out of her wayhouse. The ways she had
helped to smooth things as he learned how to become first Khai Machi and
then Emperor. He didn't tell the hard stories. The conflict over Sinja's
feelings for her, and Otah's poor response to them. The long fears they
suffered together when Danat was young and weak in the lungs. Her death.
Still, he didn't think he kept all the sorrow from his voice.
Idaan returned halfway through one story, four bowls in her hands like a
teahouse servant juggling food for a full table. Otah took one without
pausing, and Idaan squatted on the boards at Ana's feet and pressed
another into the girl's hands. Otah went on with other little stories-
Kiyan's balancing the combined populations of Machi and Cetani with
Balasar Gice's crippled army in the wake of the war. Her refusal to
allow servants to bathe her. The story of when the representative of
Eddensea had mistaken something she'd said and thought she'd invited him
to bed with her.
Danat arrived out of the darkness, drawn by their voices. Idaan gave him
the last bowl, and he sat at Otah's side, then shifted, then shifted
again until his back rested against Ana's shin. He added stories of his
own. His mother's sharp tongue and wayhouse keeper's vocabulary, the
songs she'd sung, all the scraps and moments that built up a boy's
memory of his mother. It was beautiful to listen to. It wasn't something
Otah himself had ever had.
In the end, Ana let Danat lead her back to her shelter, leaving Otah and
his sister alone by the black and cooling kiln. The armsmen had prepared
sleeping tents for them, but Idaan seemed content to sit up drinking
watered wine in the cold night air, and Otah found himself pleased
enough to join her.
"I don't suppose you'd care to explain to your poor idiot brother what
happened today?" he said at length.
"You haven't put it together?" Idaan said. "This Vanjit creature has
destroyed the only home Ana-cha had to go to. She's had to look long and
hard at what her life could be in the place she's found herself,
crippled in a foreign land, and it shook her."
"She's in love with Danat?"
"Of course she is," Idaan said. "It would have happened in half the time
if you and her mother hadn't insisted on it. I think that's more
frightening for her than the poet killing her nation."
"I don't know what you mean," he said.
"She's spent her life watching her mother linked with her father," Idaan
said. "There are only so many years you can soak in the regrets of
others before you start to think that all the world's that way."
"I had the impression that Farrer-cha loved his wife deeply," Otah said.
"And I had it that there's more than a husband to make a marriage,"
Idaan said. "It isn't her mother she fears being, it's Farrer-cha. She's
afraid of having her love merely tolerated. I spent most of the day
talking about Cehmai. I told her that if she really wanted to know what
spending a life with Danat would be like, she should see what sort of
man you were. If she wanted to know how Danat would see her, to find how
you saw your wife."
Otah laughed, and he thought he saw the darkness around Idaan shift as
if she had smiled.
"I'm sorry I didn't have the chance to know her," Idaan said. "She
sounds like a good woman."
"She was," Otah said. "I miss her."
"I know you do," Idaan said. "And now Ana-cha knows it too."
"Does it matter?" Otah said. "All the hopes I had for building Galt and
the Khaiem together are in rags around my knees. We're on a hunt for a
girl who can ruin the world. What she's done to Galt, she could do to
us. Or to all the world, if she wanted it. How do we plan for a marriage
between Danat and Ana when it's just as likely that we'll all be
starving and blind by Candles Night?"
"We're all born to die, Most High," Idaan said, the title sounding like
an endearment in her voice. "Every love ends in parting or death. Every
nation ends and every empire. Every baby born was going to die, given
enough time. If being fated for destruction were enough to take the joy
out of things, we'd slaughter children fresh from the womb. But we
don't. We wrap them in warm cloth and we sing to them and feed them milk
as if it might all go on forever."
"You make it sound like something you've done," Otah said.
Idaan made a sound he couldn't interpret, part grunt, part whimper.
"What is it?" he asked the darkness.
The silence lasted for the length of five long breaths together. When
she spoke, her voice was low and rich with embarrassment.
"Lambs," she said.
"Lambs?"
"I used to wrap up the newborn lambs and keep them in the house. I even
had Cehmai build them a crib that I could rock them in. After a few
years, we had to switch to goats. I couldn't slaughter the lambs after
all that, could I? By the end, I think we had sixty."
Otah didn't know whether to laugh or put his arms around the woman. The
thought of the hard-hearted killer of his own father, his own brothers,
cuddling a baby lamb was as absurd as it was sorrowful.
"Is it like this for everyone?" he asked softly. "Does every woman
suffer this? Is the need to care for something that strong?"
"Strong? When it strikes, yes. But everyone? No," Idaan said. "Of course
not. As it happened, it struck me. I assume Maati's students all feel
strongly enough about it to risk their lives. But not every woman needs
a child, and, thank the gods, the madness sometimes passes. It did for me."
"You wouldn't be a mother now? If it were possible, you wouldn't choose to?"
"Gods, no. I'd have been terrible at it. But I miss them," Idaan said.
"I miss my little lambs. And that brings us back to Ana-cha, doesn't it?"
Otah took a pose that asked clarification.
"Who am I," Idaan asked, "to say that falling in love is ridiculous just
because it's doomed?"
22
The weeks spent at the school had let Maati forget the ways in which the