cradling arms. He could still see the shape of that young face in the

shape of her cheeks and the set of her jaw. He leaned over and kissed

her hair. She looked up at him, amused to see him so easily moved.

"I was only thinking," he said, "how many of us there are carrying this

whole burden alone."

"I know I'm not alone, Maati-kya. It only feels like it some nights."

"It does. It certainly does," he said. Then, "Do you think she'll manage

it?"

Eiah rose silently, took a pose that marked parting with nuances as

intimate as family, and walked back into the buildings of the school.

Maati sighed and lay back on the stone, looking up into the night sky. A

shooting star blazed from the eastern sky toward the north and vanished

like an ember gone cold.

He wondered if Otah-kvo still looked at the sky, or if he had grown too

busy being the Emperor. The days and nights of power and feasting and

admiration might rob him of simple beauties like a night sky or a fear

grown less by being shared. Might, in fact, cut Otah-kvo off from all

the things that gave meaning to people lower than himself. He was, after

all, planning his new empire by denying all the women injured by the

last war any hope of those simple, human pleasures. A babe. A family.

Tens of thousands of women, cut free from the lives they were entitled

to, now to be forgotten.

He wondered if a man who could do that still had enough humanity left to

enjoy a falling star or the song of a nightingale.

He hoped not.

Eiah left the next morning. The high road was still in good repair, and

travel along it was an order of magnitude faster than the tracking Maati

had done between the low towns. When Maati and the others saw her off,

she was wearing simple robes and the leather satchel hung at her side.

She could have been mistaken for any traveling physician. Maati might

have imagined it, but he thought that Vanjit held her parting stance

longer than the others, that her eyes followed Eiah more hungrily.

When the horse and cart had gone far enough that even the dust from the

hooves and wheels was invisible, they turned back to the business at

hand. Until midday, they scraped soot and a decade's fallen leaves out

from the shell of one of the gutted buildings. Irit found the bones of

some forgotten boy who had been caught in that long-cooled fire, and

they held a brief ceremony in remembrance of the slaughtered poets and

student boys in whose path they all traveled. Vanjit especially was

sober and pale as Maati finished his words and committed the bones to a

fresh-made, hotter blaze that would, he hoped, return the old bones to

their proper ash.

As they made their way back from the pyre, he made a point to walk at

her side. Her olive skin and well-deep eyes reminded him of his first

lover, Liat. The mother of the child who should have been his own. Even

before she spoke, his breast ached like a once-broken arm presaging a

shift of weather.

"I was thinking of my brother," Vanjit said. "He was near that boy's

age. Not highborn, of course. They didn't take normal people here then,

did they?"

"No," Maati said. "Nor women, for that."

"It's a strange thought. It already seems like home to me. Like I've

always been here," the girl said, then shifted her weight, her shoulders

turning a degree toward Maati even as they walked side by side. "You've

always known Eiah-cha, haven't you?"

"As long as she's known anything," Maati said with a chuckle. "Possibly

a bit longer. I was living in Machi for years and years before the war."

"She must be very important to you."

"She's been my salvation, in her way. Without her, none of us would be

here."

"You would have found a way," Vanjit said. Her voice was odd, a degree

harder than Maati had expected. Or perhaps he had imagined it, because

when she went on, there was no particular bite to the words. "You're

clever and wise enough, and I'm sure there are more people in places of

influence that would have given you aid, if you'd asked."

"Perhaps," Maati said. "But I knew from the first I could trust Eiah.

That carries quite a bit of weight. Without trust, I don't know if I

would have hit on the idea of coming here. Before, I always kept to

places I could leave easily."

"She said that you wouldn't let her bind the first andat," Vanjit said.

"One of us has to succeed before you'll let her make the attempt."

"That's so," Maati agreed, a moment's discomfort passing through him. He

didn't want to explain the thinking behind that decision. When Vanjit

went on, it was happily not in that direction.

"She's shown me some of the work she's done. She's working from the same

books that I am, you know."

"Yes," Maati said. "That was a good thought, using sources from the

Westlands. The more things we can use that weren't part of how the old

poets thought, the better off we are."

Maati described Cehmai's suggestion of making an andat and withdrawing

its influence as a strategy of Eiah, pleased to have steered the

conversation to safe waters. Vanjit listened, her full attention upon

him. Ashti Beg and Irit, walking before them, paused. If Vanjit hadn't

hesitated, Maati thought he might not have noticed until he bumped into

them.

"Small Kae is making soup for dinner," Irit said. "If you have time to

help her ..."

"Maati-kvo's much too busy for that," Vanjit said.

When Ashti Beg spoke, her voice was dry as sand.

"Irit-cha might not have been speaking to him."

Vanjit's spine stiffened, and then, with a laugh, relaxed. She smiled at

all of them as she took a contrite pose, accepting the correction. Irit

reached out and placed her hand on Vanjit's shoulder as a sister might.

"I'm so proud of you," Irit said, grinning. "I'm just so happy and proud."

"So are we all," Ashti Beg said. Maati smiled, but the sense that

something had happened sat at the back of his mind. As the four of them

walked to the kitchens-the air growing rich with the salt-and-fat scent

of pork and the dark, earthy scent of boiled lentils-Maati reviewed what

each of them had said, the tones of voice, the angles at which they had

held themselves. Small Kae assigned tasks to all of them except Maati,

and he waited for a time, listening to the simple banter and the crack

of knives against wood. When he took his leave, he was troubled.

He was not so far removed from his boyhood that he had forgotten what