"Ashti Beg," Maati said. "Tell me more about her. Did she say why she left?"

Eiah frowned. Color was coming back to her cheeks, but her lips were

still pale, her hair clinging to her neck like ivy.

"It was me," Vanjit said, the andat squirming in her lap. "It's my doing."

"Perhaps, but it wasn't what she said," Eiah replied. "She said she was

tired, and that she felt we'd all gone past her. She didn't see that she

would ever complete a binding of her own, or that her insights were

particularly helping us. I tried to tell her otherwise, give her some

perspective. If she'd stayed on until the morning, perhaps I could have."

Maati sipped his wine, wondering how much of what Eiah said was true,

how much of it was being softened because Vanjit and Clarity-ofSight

were in the room. It seemed more likely to him that Ashti Beg had taken

offense at Vanjit's misstep and been unable to forgive it. He recalled

the woman's dry tone, her cutting humor. She had not been an easy woman

or a particularly apt pupil, but he believed he would miss her.

"Was there other news? Anything of the Galts?" Vanjit asked. There was

something odd about her voice, but it might only have been that

Clarity-of-Sight had started its wordless, wailing complaint. Eiah

appeared to notice nothing strange in the question.

"There would have been if I'd reached Pathai, I'd expect," she said.

"But since there would have been nothing to do about it and our business

was done early, I wanted to come back quickly."

"Ah," Vanjit said. "Of course."

Maati tugged at his fingers. There was something near disappointment in

the girl's tone. As if she had expected someone that had not arrived.

"You're ready to work again?" Small Kae said. Irit flapped a cloth at

her, and Small Kae took a pose that unasked the question. Eiah smiled.

"I've had a few thoughts," she said. "Let me look them over tonight

after we unload the cart, and we can talk in the morning."

"Oh, there's no more work for you tonight," Irit said. "You've been on

the road all this time. We can hand a few things down from a cart."

"Of course," Vanjit said. "You should rest, Eiah-kya. We'll be happy to

help."

Eiah put down her soup and took a pose that offered gratitude. Something

in the cant of her wrists caught Maati's attention, but the pose was

gone as quickly as it had come and Eiah was sitting back, drinking wine

and leaning her still-wet hair toward the fire. Large Kae rejoined them,

smelling of wet horse, and Eiah told the whole story again for her

benefit and then left for her rooms. Maati felt the impulse to follow

her, to speak in private, but Vanjit took him by the hand and led him

out to the cart with the others.

The supplies were something less than Maati had expected. Two chests of

salted pork, a few jars of lard and flour and sweet oil. Bags of rice.

It wasn't inconsiderable-certainly there was enough to keep them all

well-fed for weeks, but likely not months. There were few spices, and no

wine. Large Kae made a few small remarks about the failures of low-town

trade fairs, and the others chuckled their agreement. The rain

slackened, and then, as Vanjit balanced the last bag of rice on one hip

and Clarity-of-Sight on the other, snow began to fall. Maati went back

to his rooms, heated a kettle over his fire, and debated whether to try

to boil enough water for a bath. Immersion was the one way he was sure

he could chase the cold from his joints, but the effort required seemed

worse than enduring the chill. And there was an errand he preferred to

complete.

Light glowed through the cracks around Eiah's door. Dim and flickering,

it was still more than a single night candle would have made. Maati

scratched at the door. For a moment, nothing happened. Perhaps Eiah had

taken to her cot. Perhaps she was elsewhere in the school. A soft sound,

no more than a whisper, drew him back to the door.

"Eiah-kya?" he said, his voice low. "It's me."

Her door opened. Eiah had changed into a simple robe of thick wool, her

hair tied back with a length of twine. She looked powerfully like her

mother. The room she brought Maati into had once been a storage pantry.

Her cot and brazier and a low table were all the furnishings. There was

no window, and the air was thick with the heat and smoke from the coals.

Papers and scrolls lay on the table beside a wax tablet half-whitened by

fresh notes. Medical texts in the languages of the Westlands, Eiah's own

earlier drafts of the binding of Wounded. And also, he saw, the

completed binding they had all devised for Clarity-of-Sight. Eiah sat on

the cot, the frail structure creaking under her. She didn't look up at him.

"Why did she leave?" Maati asked. "Truth, now"

"I told her to," Eiah said. "She was frightened to come back. I told her

that I understood. What happens if two poets come into conflict? If one

poet has something like Floats-in-Air and the other has something like

Sinking?"

"Or one poet can blind, and the other heal injury?"

"As an example," Eiah said.

Maati sighed and lowered himself to sit beside her. The cot complained.

He laced his fingers together, looking at the words and diagrams without

seeing them.

"I don't entirely know. It hasn't happened in my lifetime. It hasn't

happened in generations."

"But it has happened," Eiah said.

"There was the war. The one that ended the Second Empire. That was ...

what, ten generations ago? The andat are flesh because we've translated

them into flesh, but they are also concepts. Abstractions. It might

simply be that the poets' wills are set against each other's. A kind of

wrestling match mediated through the andat. Whoever has the greater

strength of mind and the andat more suited to the struggle gains the

upper hand. Or it could be that the concepts of the two andat don't

coincide, and any struggle would have to be expressed physically. In the

world we inhabit. Or ..."

"Or?"

"Or something else could happen. The grammar and meaning in one binding

could relate to some structure or nuance in another. Imagine two singers

in competition. What if they chose songs that harmonized? What if the

words of one song blended with the words of the other, and something new

came from it? Songs are a poor metaphor. What are the odds that the

words of any two given songs would speak to each other? If the bindings

are related in concept, if the ideas are near, it's much more likely

that sort of resonance could happen. By chance."