A Betrayal in Winter

Chapter Nineteen

He didn't speak. She was standing alone and apart, the sorrow and guilt heating her like storm waves, and then his arms folded her into him. His skin smelled dark and musky and male. He didn't kiss her, he didn't try to open her robes. He only held her there as if he had never wanted anything more. She put her arms around him and held on as though he was a branch hanging over a precipice. She heard herself sob, and it sounded like violence.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I want it back. I want it all back. I'm so sorry."
"What, love? What do you want back?"
"All of it," she wailed, and the blackness and despair and rage and 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 wide square of stone smooth as beach sand, delicate pillars spiraling tip from it like bolts of twisting silk made from stone. And down another corridor, a bathhouse left dry for the winter but rich with the scent of cedar and pine resin.
Even when lie returned to the storehouse and the voices and faces he knew, lie found his mind lingering in the dark corridors and galleries, unsure whether the images of the spaces lit with the white shadowless light of a thousand candles were imagination or memory.
A sharp rapping brought him back to himself, and the door of his private office swung open. Amiit and Sinja walked in, already half into a conversation. Sinja's expression was mildly annoyed. Amiit, Otah thought, seemed worried.
"It would only make things worse," Amiit said.
"We'd earn more time. And it isn't as if they'd accuse Otah-cha here of it. They think he's dead."
"'T'hen they'll accuse him of it once they find he's alive," Amiit said and turned to Otah. "Sinja wants to assassinate the head of a high family in order to slow the work of the council."
"We won't do that," Otah said. "My hands aren't particularly bloodied yet, and I'd like to keep it that way-"
"It isn't as though people are going to believe it," Sinja said. "If you're going to carry the blame you may as well get the advantages from doing the thing."
"It'll be easier to convince them of my innocence later if I'm actually innocent of something," Otah said, "hut there may be other roads that come to the same place. Is there something else that would slow the council and doesn't involve putting holes in someone?"
Sinja frowned, his eyes shifting as if he were reading text written in the air. He half-smiled.
"Perhaps. Let me look into that."
With a pose that ended his conversation, Sinja left. Amiit sighed and lowered himself into one of the chairs.
"What news?" Amiit asked.
"Kamau and Vaunani are talking about merging their forces," Otah said. "Most of the talks seem to involve someone hitting someone or throwing a knife. The Loiya, Bentani, and (:oirah have all been quietly, and so far as I can tell, independently, backing the Vaunyogi."
"And they all have contracts with Galt," Amiit said. "What about the others?"
"Of the families we know? None have come out against them. And none for, or at least not openly."
"There should be more fighting," Amiit said. "There should be struggles and coalitions. Alliances should be forming and breaking by the moment. It's too steady."
"Only if there was a real struggle going on. If the decision was already made, it would look exactly like this."
"Yes. There are times I hate being right. Any word from the poet?"
Otah shook his head and sat, then stood again. Maati had gone from their first meeting, and he'd seemed convinced. Otah had been sure at the time that he wouldn't betray them. He was sure in his bones. He only wished he'd had his thoughts more in order at the time. He'd been swept up in the moment, more concerned with his lies about Liat's son than anything else. He'd had time since to reflect, and the other worries had swarmed out. Otah had sat up until the night candle was at its halfway mark, listing the things he needed to consider. It hadn't lent him peace.
"It's hard, waiting," Amiit said. "You must feel like you're back up in that tower."
"That was easier. Then at least I knew what was going to happen. I wish I could go out. If I could be up there listening to the people themselves ... If I spent half an evening in the right teahouse, I'd know more than I'll learn skulking down here for days. Yes, I know. You've the best minds of the house out watching for us. But listening to reports isn't the same as putting my hands to something."
"I know it. More than half my work has been trying to guess the truth out of a dozen different reports of a thing. There's a knack to it. You'll have your practice with it."
"If this ends well," Otah said.
"Yes," Amiit agreed. "If that."
Otah filled a tin cup with water from a stone jar and sat back down. It was warm, and a thin grit swam at the cup's bottom. He wished it were wine and pushed the thought away. If there was any time in his life to be sober as stone, this was it, but his unease shifted and tightened. He looked up from his water to sec Amiit's gaze on him, his expression quizzical.
"We have to make a plan for if we lose," Otah said. "If the Vaunyogi are to blame and the council gives them power, they'll be able to wash away any number of crimes. And all those families that supported them will be invested in keeping things quiet. If it comes out that Daaya Vaunyogi killed the Khai in order to raise up his son and half the families of the utkhaiem took money to support it, they'll all share in the guilt. Being in the right won't mean much then."
"There's time yet," Amiit said, but he was looking away when he said it.
"And what happens if we fail?"
"That all depends on how we fail. If we're discovered before we're ready to move, we'll all be killed. If Adrah is named Khai, we'll at least have a chance to slip away quietly."
"You'll take care of Kiyan?"
Amiit smiled. "I hope to see to it that you can perform that duty."
"But if not?"
"Then of course," Amiit said. "Provided I live."
The rapping came again, and the door opened on a young man. Otah recognized him from the meetings in House Siyanti, but he couldn't recall his name.
"The poet's come," the young man said.
Amiit rose, took a pose appropriate to the parting of friends, and left. The young man went with him, and for a moment the door swung free, half closing. Otah drank the last of his water, the grit rough in his throat. Maati came in slowly, a diffidence in his body and his face, like a man called in to hear news that might bring him good or ill or some unimagined change that folded both inextricably together. Otah gestured to the door, and Maati closed it.
"You sent for me?" Maati asked. "That's a dangerous habit, Otah-kvo."
"I know it, but ... Please. Sit. I've been thinking. About what we do if things go poorly."
"If we fail?"
"I want to be ready for it, and when Kiyan and I were talking last night, something occurred to me. Nayiit? That's his name, isn't it? The child that you and Liat had?"
Maati's expression was cool and distant and misleading. Otah could see the pain in it, however still the eyes.
"What of him?"
"He mustn't be my son. Whatever happens, he has to be yours."
"If you fail, you don't take your father's title-"
"If I don't take his title, and someone besides you decides he's mine, they'll kill him to remove all doubt of the succession. And if I succeed, Kiyan may have a son," Otah said. "And then they would someday have to kill each other. Nayiit is your son. He has to be."
"I see," Maati said.
"I've written a letter. It looks like something I'd have sent Kiyan before, when I was in Chaburi-Tan. It talks about the night I left Saraykeht. It says that on the night I came back to the city, I found the two of you together. That I walked into her cell, and you and she were in her cot. It makes it clear that I didn't touch her, that I couldn't have fathered a child on her. Kiyan's put it in her things. If we have to flee, we'll take it with us and find a way for it to come to light-we can hide it at her wayhouse, perhaps. If we're found and killed here, it will be found with us. You have to back that story."
Maati steepled his fingers and leaned back in the chair.
"You've put it with Kiyan-cha's things to be found in case she's slaughtered?" he asked.
"Yes," Otah said. "I don't think about it when I can help it, but I know she could die here. There's no reason that your son should die with us."
Maati nodded slowly. He was struggling with something, Otah could see that much, but whether it was sorrow or anger or joy, he had no way to know. When the question came, though, it was the one he had been dreading for years.
"What did happen?" Maati asked at last, his voice low and hushed. "The night Heshai-kvo died. What happened? Did you just leave? Did you take Mai with you? Did . . . did you kill him?"
Otah remembered the cord cutting into his hands, remembered the way Mai had balked and he had taken the task himself. For years, those few minutes had haunted him.
"He knew what was coming," Otah said. "He knew it was necessary. The consequences if he had lived would have been worse. Heshai was right when he warned you to let the thing drop. The Khai Saraykeht would have turned the andat against Galt. There would have been thousands of innocent lives ruined. And when it was over, you would still have been yoked to Seedless. Trapped in the torture box just the way Heshai had been all those years. Heshai knew that, and he waited for me to do the thing."
"And you did it."
"I did."
Maati was silent. Otah sat. His knees seemed less solid than he would have liked, but he didn't let the weakness stop him.
"It was the worst thing I have ever done," Otah said. "I never stopped dreaming about it. Even now, I see it sometimes. Heshai was a good man, but what he'd created in Seedless...."
"Seedless was only part of him. They all are. They couldn't be anything else. Heshai-kvo hated himself, and Seedless was that."
"Everyone hates themselves sometimes. There isn't often a price in blood," Otah said. "You know what would happen if that were proven. Killing a Khai would pale beside murdering a poet."
Maati nodded slowly, and still nodding, spoke.
"I didn't ask on the Dai-kvo's behalf. I asked for myself. When Heshai-kvo died, Seedless ... vanished. I was with him. I was there. He was asking me whether I would have forgiven you. If you'd committed some terrible crime, like what he had done to Maj, if I would forgive you. And I told him I would. I would forgive you, and not him. Because ..."
They were silent. Maati's eyes were dark as coal.
"Because?" Otah asked.
"Because I loved you, and I didn't love him. He said it was a pity to think that love and justice weren't the same. The last thing he said was that you had forgiven me."
"Forgiven you?"
"For Liat. For taking your lover."
"I suppose it's true," Otah said. "I was angry with you. But there was a part of me that was ... relieved, I suppose."
"Why?"
"Because I didn't love her. I thought I did. I wanted to, and I enjoyed her company and her bed. I liked her and respected her. Sometimes, I wanted her as badly as I've ever wanted anyone. And that was enough to let me mistake it for love. But I don't remember it hurting that deeply or for that long. Sometimes I was even glad. You had each other to take care of, and so it wasn't mine to do."
"You said, that last time we spoke before you left ... before Heshaikvo died, that you didn't trust me."
"That's true," Otah said. "I do remember that."
"But you've come to me now, and you've told me this. You've told me all of it. Even after I gave you over to the Khai. You've brought me in here, shown me where you've hidden. You know there are half a hundred people I could say a word to, and you and all these other people would be dead before the sun set. So it seems you trust me now."
"I do," Otah said without hesitating.
"Why?"
Otah sat with the question. His mind had been consumed for days with a thousand different things that all nipped and shrieked and robbed him of his rest. To reach out to Maati had seemed natural and obvious, and even though when he looked at it coldly it was true that each had in some way betrayed the other, his heart had never been in doubt. He could feel the heaviness in the air, and he knew that I don't know wouldn't be answer enough. He looked for words to give his feelings shape.
"Because," he said at last, "in all the time I knew you, you never once did the wrong thing. Even when what you did hurt inc, it was never wrong."
To his surprise, there were tears on Maati's cheeks.
"Thank you, Otah-kvo," he said.
A shout went up in the tunnels outside the storehouse and the sound of running feet. Maati wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his robes, and Otah stood, his heart beating fast. The murmur of voices grew, but there were no sounds of blade against blade. It sounded like a busy corner more than a battle. Otah walked to the door and, Maati close behind him, stepped out into the main space. A knot of men were talking and gesturing one to the other by the mouth of the stairs. Otah caught a glimpse of Kiyan in their midst, frowning deeply and speaking fast. Amiit detached himself from the throng and strode to Otah.
"What's happened?"
"Bad news, Otah-cha. Daaya Vaunyogi has called for a decision, and enough of the families have hacked the call to push it through."
Otah felt his heart sink.
"They're hound to decide by morning," Amilt went on, "and if all the houses that hacked him for the call side with him in the decision, Adrah Vaunyogi will be the Khai Machi by the time the sun comes up."
"And then what?" NIaati asked.
"And then we run," Otah said, "as far and fast and quiet as we can, and we hope he never finds us."
THE SUN HAD PASSED ITS HIGHEST POINT AND STARTED THE LONG, SLOW slide toward darkness. Idaan had chosen robes the blue-gray of twilight and bound her hair hack with clasps of silver and moonstone. Around her, the gallery was nearly full, the air thick with heat and the mingled scents of bodies and perfumes. She stood at the rail, looking down into the press of bodies below her. The parquet of the floor was scuffed with the marks of hoots. There were no empty places at the tables or against the stone walls, no quiet negotiations going on in hallways or teahouses. That time had passed, and in its wake, they were all brought here. Voices washed together like the hushing of wind, and she could feel the weight of the eyes upon her-the men below her sneaking glances up, the representatives of the merchant houses at her side considering her, and the lower orders in the gallery above staring down at her and the men over whom she loomed. She was a woman, and not welcome to speak or sit at the tables below. But still, she would make her presence felt.
"How is it that we accept the word of these men that they are the wisest?" Ghiah Vaunani pounded the speaker's pulpit before him with each word, a dry, shallow sound. Idaan almost thought she could see flecks of foam at the corners of his mouth. "How is it that the houses of the utkhaiem are so much like sheep that they would consent to be led by this shepherd boy of Vaunyogi?"
It was meant, Idaan knew, to be a speech to sway the others from their confidence, but all she heard in the words was the confusion and pain of a boy whose plans have fallen through. He could pound and rail and screech his questions as long as his voice held out. Idaan, standing above the proceedings like a protective ghost, knew the answers to every one, and she would never tell them to him.
Below her, Adrah Vaunyogi looked up, his expression calm and certain. It had been late in the morning that she'd woken in the poet's house, later still when she'd returned to the rooms she shared now with her husband. He had been there, waiting for her. The night's excesses had weighed heavy on him. They hadn't spoken-she had only called for a bath and clean robes. When she'd cleaned herself and washed her hair, she sat at her mirror and painted her face with all her old skill and delicacy. The woman who looked out at her when she put down her brushes might have been the loveliest in Machi.
Adrah had left without a word. It had been almost half a hand before she learned that her new father, Daaya Vaunyogi, had called for the decision, and that the houses had agreed. No one had told her to come here, no one had asked her to lend the sight of her silent presence to the cause. She had done it, perhaps, because Adrah had not demanded it of her.
"We must not hurry! We must not allow sentiment to push us into a decision that will change our city forever!"
Idaan allowed herself a smile. It would seem to most people that the force of the story had won the day. The last daughter of the old line would be the first mother of the new, and if a quiet structure of money and obligation supported it, if she were really the lover of the poet a hundred times more than the Khai, it hardly mattered. It was what the city would see, and that was enough.
Ghiah's energy was beginning to flag. She heard his words lose their crispness and the pounding on his table fall out of rhythm. The anger in his voice became merely petulance, and the objections to Adrah in particular and the Vaunyogi in general lost their force. It would have been better, she thought, if he'd ended half a hand earlier. Still insufficient, but less so.
The Master of "fides stood when Ghiah at last surrendered the floor. He was an old man with a long, northern face and a deep, sonorous voice. Idaan saw his eyes flicker up to her and then away.
"Adaut Kamau has also asked to address the council," he said, "before the houses speak on the decision to accept Adrah Vaunyogi as the Khai Machi......
A chorus of jeers rose from the galleries and even the council tables. Idaan held herself still and quiet. Her feet were starting to ache, but she didn't shift her weight. The effect she desired wouldn't be served by showing her pleasure. Adaut Kamau rose, his face gray and pinched. He opened his arms, but before he could speak, a bundle of rough cloth arced from the highest gallery. A long tail of brown fluttered behind it like a banner as it fell, and in the instant that it struck the floor, the screaming began.
Idaan's composure broke, and she leaned forward. The men at the tables nearest the thing waved their arms and fled, shrieking and pounding at the air. Voices buzzed and a cloud of pale, moving smoke rose toward the galleries.
No. The buzzing was not voices, the cloud was not smoke. These were wasps. The bundle on the council floor had been a nest wrapped in cloth and wax. The first of the insects buzzed past her, a glimpse of black and yellow. She turned and ran.
Bodies filled the corridors, panic pressing them together until there was no air, no space. People screamed and cursed-men, women, children. "Their shrill voices mixed with the angry buzz. She was pushed from all sides. An elbow dug into her back. The surge of the crowd pressed the breath from her. She was suffocating, and insects filled the air above her. Idaan felt something bite the flesh at the back of her neck like a hot iron burning her. She screamed and tried to reach back to hat the thing away, but there was no room to move her arm, no air. She lashed out at whoever, whatever was near. The crowd was a single, huge, biting beast and Idaan flailed and shrieked, her mind lost to fear and pain and confusion.
Stepping into the open air of the street was like waking from a nightmare. The bodies around her thinned, becoming only themselves again. The fierce buzz of tiny wings was gone, the cries of pain and terror replaced by the groans of the stung. People were still streaming out of the palace, arms flapping, but others were sitting on benches or else the ground. Servants and slaves were rushing about, tending to the hurt and the humiliated. Idaan felt the back of her neck-three angry humps were already forming.
"It's a poor omen," a man in the red robes of the needle wrights said. "Something more's going on than meets the eye if someone's willing to attack the council to keep old Kamau from talking."
"What could he have said?" the man's companion asked.
"I don't know, but you can be sure whatever it was, he'll be saying something else tomorrow. Someone wanted him stopped. Unless this is about Adrah Vaunyogi. It could be that someone wants him closed down."
"Then why loose the things when his critics were about to speak?"
"Good point. Perhaps ..."