half the time at court, we can't really hope for more than a weighted

guess."

"Then we should get to work," he said. "I'll have them bring us food and-"

"Before that," Idaan said. "Before that, there's something we should

discuss. Alone."

Otah considered her eyes. They were the same black-brown as his own. Her

jaw was softer, her mouth pale and lined. He could still see the girl

she had been, whom he had drawn up from the deepest cells beneath Machi

and given freedom where she'd expected slavery or death.

"I'll send the servants away," he said. She took a pose that offered thanks.

When he returned, she was pacing before the windows, her hands clasped

behind her. The soft leather soles of her boots whispered against the

wood. The city spread below them, and then the sea.

"I never thought about them," she said. "The andat? I never gave them

half a thought when I was young. Stone-Made-Soft was something halfway

between a trained hunting cat and another courtier in a world full of

them. But they could destroy everything, couldn't they? If a poet bound

something like Steam or Fog, all that ocean could vanish in a moment,

couldn't it?"

"I suppose," Otah agreed.

"I would have controlled it. Stone-Made-Soft, I mean. And Cehmai. If all

the things I'd planned had happened as I planned them, I would have had

the command of that power."

"Your husband would have," he said. Otah had ordered her husband

executed. Adrah Vaunyogi's body had hung from the ruins of his family's

palace, food for the crows. Idaan smiled.

"My husband," she said, her voice warm and amused. "Even worse."

She shook herself and turned back to the table. Her thick fingers

plucked out a clerk's writing tablet. Otah could see letters carved into

the wax.

"I've made a list of those people who seem most likely," she said. "I

have a dozen, and I could give you a dozen more if you'd like it.

They've all traveled extensively in the past four years. They've all had

expenditures that look suspicious to one degree or another. And as far

as I can see, all of them oppose your treaty with the Galts or are

closely related to someone who does. And they all have the close

connections to the palace that Maati boasted of."

Otah held out his hand. Idaan didn't pass the tablet to him.

"I think about what would have happened if I had been given that kind of

power," she said. "I think of the girl I was back then. And the things I

did. Can you imagine what I might have done?"

"It wouldn't have happened," Otah said. "Cehmai only answered to you so

long as the Dai-kvo told him to. If you had started draining oceans or

melting cities, he would have forbidden it."

"The Dai-kvo is dead, though. Years dead, and almost forgotten."

"What are you saying, Idaan-cha?"

She smiled, but her eyes made it sorrow.

"All the restraints we had to keep the poets from doing as they saw fit?

They're gone now. I'm saying you should remember that when you see this

list. Remember the stakes we're playing for."

The tablet was heavy in his hand, the dark wax scored with white where

she had written on it. He frowned as his finger traced down the names.

Then he stopped, and the blood left his face. He understood what Idaan

had been saying. She was telling him to be ruthless, to be cold. She

meant to steel him against the pain of what he might have to sacrifice.

"My daughter's name is on this list," he said, keeping his voice low and

matter-of-fact.

His sister replied with silence.

12

"There," Vanjit said, her finger pointing up into a featureless blue

sky. "Right there."

On her hip, the andat squirmed and waved its tiny hands. She shifted her

weight, drawing the small body closer to her own, her outstretched

finger still indicating nothing.

"I don't see it," Maati said.

Vanjit smiled, her attention focusing on the babe. Clarity-of-Sight

mewled, shook its head weakly, and then stilled. Vanjit's lips pressed

thin, and the sky above Maati seemed to sharpen. Even where there was

nothing to see, the blue itself seemed legible. And then he caught sight

of it. Little more than a dot at first, and then a moment later, he made

out the shape of the outstretched wings. A hawk, soaring high above the

ground. Its beak was hooked and sharp as a knife. Its feathers, brown

and gold, trembled in the high air. A smear of old blood darkened its

talons. There were mites in its feathers.

Maati closed his eyes and looked away, shaken by vertigo.

"Gods!" he said. He heard Vanjit's delighted chuckle.

The spirit of elation filled the stone halls, the ruined gardens, the

spare meadows. All the days since the binding, it had felt to Maati as

if the world itself had taken a deep breath and then laughed aloud.

Whenever the chores and classes had allowed it, the girls had crowded

around Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight, and himself along with them.

The andat itself was beautiful and fascinating. Its form was identical

to a true human child, but small things in its behavior showed Vanjit's

inexperience. She had not held a babe or seen one since she herself had

been no more than a child. The strength of its neck and the sureness of

its gaze were subtly wrong. Its cry, while wordless, expressed a

richness and variety of emotion that in Maati's experience children

rarely developed before they could walk. Small errors of imagination

that affected only the form that the andat took. Its function, as Vanjit

delighting in showing, was perfect and precise.

"I've seen other things too," Vanjit said. "The greater the change, the

more difficult it is at first."

Maati nodded. He could see the individual hairs on her head. The crags

where tiny flakes of dead skin peeled from the living tissue beneath. An

insect the shape of a tick but a thousand times smaller clung to the

root of her eyelash. He closed his eyes.

"Forgive me," he said. "Could I put upon you to undo some part of that?

It's distracting...."

He heard her robe rustle and go silent. When he opened his eyes again,

his vision was clear but no longer inhumanly so. He smiled.

"Once I've made the change, I forget that it doesn't fall back on its

own," she said.

"Stone-Made-Soft was much the same," Maati said. "Once it had changed