A Betrayal in Winter (lpq-2) (27 page)

poet. He would have to be possessed by some greater passion. And it

would help if he were drunk, but I don't know that we can arrange that."

"So if not the Maati Vaupathai ... ," she began, and her throat closed.

Cehmai, she thought. He means to kill Cehmai and free the andat. Her

hands balled into fists, her heart thudded as if she'd been sprinting.

Adrah turned to face her, his arms folded, his expression calm as a

butcher in the slaughterhouse.

"You said there were three breaths blocking us. There's a fourth. Your

father."

No one spoke. When Idaan laughed, it sounded shrill and panicked in her

own cars. She took a pose that rejected the suggestion.

"You've gone mad, Adrah-kya. You've lost all sense. My father is dying.

He's dying, there's no call to ..."

"What else would enrage Danat enough to let his caution slip? The

upstart escapes. Your father is murdered. In the confusion, we come to

him, a hunting party in hand, ready to ride with him. We can put it out

today that we're planning to ride out before the end of the week. Fresh

meat for the wedding feast, we'll say."

"It won't work," Idaan said, raising her chin.

"And why not?" Adrah replied.

"Because I won't let you!"

She spun and grabbed for the door. As she hauled it open, Adrah was

around her, his arms pressing it shut again. Daaya was there too, his

wide hands patting at her in placating gestures that filled her with

rage. Her mind left her, and she shrieked and howled and wept. She

clawed at them both and kicked and tried to bite her way free, but

Adrah's arms locked around her, lifted her, tightened until she lost her

breath and the room spun and grew darker.

She found herself sitting again without knowing when she'd been set

down. Adrah was raising a cup to her lips. Strong, unwatered wine. She

sipped it, then pushed it away.

"Have you calmed yourself yet?" Adrah asked. There was warmth in his

voice again, as if she'd been sick and was only just recovering.

"You can't do it, Adrah-kya. He's an old man, and ..."

Adrah let the silence stretch before he leaned toward her and wiped her

lips with a soft cloth. She was trembling, and it annoyed her. Her body

was supposed to be stronger than that.

"It will cost him a few days," Adrah said. "A few weeks at most.

Idaan-kya, his murder is the thing that will draw your brother out if

anything will. You said it to me, love. If we falter, we fail."

He smiled and caressed her cheek with back of his hand. Daaya was at the

table, drinking wine of his own. Idaan looked into Adrah's dark eyes,

and despite the smiles, despite the caresses, she saw the hardness

there. I should have said no, she thought. When he asked if I had taken

another lover, I shouldn't have danced around it. I should have said no.

She nodded.

"We can make it quick. Painless," Adrah said. "It will be a mercy,

really. His life as it is now can hardly be worth living. Sick, weak.

That's no way for a proud man to live."

She nodded again. Her father. The simple pleasure in his eyes.

"He wanted so much to see us wed," she murmured. "He wanted so much for

me to be happy."

Adrah took a pose that offered sympathy, but she wasn't such a fool as

to believe it. She rose shakily to her feet. They did not stop her.

"I should go," she said. "I'll be expected at the palaces. I expect

there will be food and song until the sun comes up."

Daaya looked up. His smile was sickly, but Adrah took a pose of

reassurance and the old man looked away again.

"I'm trusting you, Idaan-kya," Adrah said. "To let you go. It's because

I trust you."

"It's because you can't lock me away without attracting attention. If I

vanish, people will wonder why, and my brother not the least. We can't

have that, can we? Everything must seem perfectly normal."

"It still might be wise, locking you away," Adrah said. He pretended to

be joking, but she could see the debate going on behind his eyes. For a

moment, her life spread out before her. The first wife of the Khai

Machi, looking into these eyes. She had loved him once. She had to

remember that. Idaan smiled, leaned forward, kissed his lips.

"I'm only sad," she said. "It will pass. I'll come and meet you

tomorrow. We can plan what needs to be done."

Outside, the revelry had spread. Garlands arched above the streets.

Choirs had assembled and their voices made the city chime like a struck

bell. Joy and relief were everywhere, except in her. For most of the

afternoon, she moved from feast to feast, celebration to

celebration-always careful not to be touched or bumped, afraid she might

break like a girl made from spun sugar. As the sun hovered three hands'

widths above the mountains to the west, she found the face she had been

longing for.

Cehmai and Stone-Made-Soft were in a glade, sitting with a dozen

children of the utkhaiem. The little boys and girls were sitting on the

grass, grinding green into their silk robes with knees and elbows, while

three slaves performed with puppets and dolls. The players squealed and

whistled and sang, the puppets hopped and tumbled, beat one another, and

fled. The children laughed. Cehmai himself was stretched out like a

child, and two adventurous girls were sitting in Stone-MadeSoft's wide

lap, their arms around each other. The andat seemed mildly amused.

When Cehmai caught sight of her, he came over immediately. She smiled as

she had been doing all day, took a greeting pose that her hands had

shaped a hundred times since morning. He was the first one, she thought,

to see through pose and smile both.

"What's happened?" he asked, stepping close. His eyes were as dark as

Adrah's, but they were soft. They were young. There wasn't any hatred

there yet, or any pain. Or perhaps she only wished that was true. Her

smile faltered.

"Nothing," she said, and he took her hand. Here where they might be

seen-where the children at least were sure to see them-he took her hand

and she let him.

"What's happened?" he repeated, his voice lower and closer. She shook

her head.

"My father is going to die," she said, her voice breaking on the words,

her lips growing weak. "My father's going to die, and there's nothing I

can do to help it. No way for me to stop it. And the only time crying

makes me feel better is when I can do it with you. Isn't that strange?"

Cchmai rode tip the wide track, switchbacking up the side of the

mountain. The ore chute ran straight from the mine halfway up the

mountain's face to the carter's base at its foot. When the path turned

toward it, Cchmai considered the broad beams and pillars that held the

chute smooth and even down the rough mountainside. When they turned

away, he looked south to where the towers of Machi stood like reeds in

the noonday sun. His head ached.

"We do appreciate your coming, Cehmai-cha," the mine's engineer said

again. "With the new Khai come home, we thought everyone would put

business off for a few days."

Cchmai didn't bother taking a pose accepting the thanks as he had the

first few times. Repetition had made it clear that the gratitude was

less than wholly sincere. He only nodded and angled his horse around the

next bend, swinging around to a view of the ore chute.

There were six of them; Cchmai and Stone-blade-Soft, the mine's

engineer, the overseer with the diagrams and contracts in a leather

satchel on his hip, and two servants to carry the water and food.

Normally there would have been twice as many people. Cehmai wondered how

many miners would he in the tunnels, then found he didn't particularly

care, and returned to contemplating the ore chute and his headache.

They had left before dawn, trekking to the Raadani mines. It had been

arranged weeks before, and business and money carried a momentum that

even stone didn't. A landslide might overrun a city, but it only went

down. Something had to have tremendous power to propel something as

tired and heavy as he felt up the mountainside. Something in the back of

his mind twitched at the thought-attention shifting of its own accord

like an extra limb moving without his willing it.

"Stop," Cehmai snapped.

The overseer and engineer hesitated for a moment before Cehmai

understood their confusion.

"Not you," he said and gestured to Stone-Made-Soft. "Him. He was judging

what it would take to start a landslide."

"Only as an exercise," the andat said, its low voice sounding both hurt

and insincere. "I wasn't going to do it."

The engineer looked up the slope with an expression that suggested

Cehmai might not hear any more false thanks. Cehmai felt a spark of

vindictive pleasure at the man's unease and saw Stone-Made-Soft's lips

thin so slightly that no other man alive would have recognized the smile.

Idaan had spent the first night of the festival with him, weeping and

laughing, taking comfort and coupling until they had both fallen asleep

in the middle of their pillow talk. The night candle had hardly burned

down a full quarter mark when the servant had come, tapping on his door

to wake him. He'd risen for the trek to the mines, and Idaan- alone in

his bed-had turned, wrapping his bedclothes about her naked body, and

watched him as if afraid he would tell her to leave. By the time he had

found fresh robes, her eyelids had closed again and her breath was deep

and slow. He'd paused for a moment, considering her sleeping face. With

the paint worn off and the calm of sleep, she looked younger. Her lips,

barely parted, looked too soft to bruise his own, and her skin glowed

like honey in sunlight.

But instead of slipping back into bed and sending out a servant for new

apples, old cheese, and sugared almonds, he'd strapped on his boots and

gone out to meet his obligations. His horse plodded along, flies buzzed

about his face, and the path turned away from the ore chute and looked

back toward the city.

There would be celebrations from now until Idaan's wedding to Adrah

Vaunyogi. Between those two joys-the finished succession and the

marriage of the high families-there would also be the preparations for

the Khai Machi's final ceremony. And, despite everything Maati-kvo had

done, likely the execution of Otah Machi in there as well. With as many

rituals and ceremonies as the city faced, they'd be lucky to get any

real work done before winter.

The yipping of the mine dogs brought him back to himself, and he

realized he'd been half-dozing for the last few switchbacks. He rubbed

his eyes with the heel of his palm. He would have to pull himself

together when they began working in earnest. It would help, he told

himself, to have some particular problem to set his mind to instead of

the tedium of travel. Thankfully, Stone-Made-Soft wasn't resisting him

today. The effort it would have taken to force the unwilling andat to do

as it was told could have pushed the day from merely unpleasant to awful.

They reached the mouth of the mine and were greeted by several workers

and minor functionaries. Cehmai dismounted and walked Unsteadily to the

wide table that had been set up for their consultations. His legs and

back and head ached. When the drawings and notes were laid out before

him, it took effort to turn his attention to them. His mind wandered off

to Idaan or his own discomfort or the mental windstorm that was the andat.

"We would like to join these two passages," the overseer was saying, his

fingers tracing lines on the maps. Cehmai had seen hundreds of sets of

plans like this, and his mind picked up the markings and translated them

into holes dug through the living rock of the mountain only slightly

less easily than usual. "The vein seems richest here and then here. Our

concern is-"

"My concern," the engineer broke in, "is not bringing half the mountain

down on us while we do it."

The structure of tunnels that honeycombed the mountain wasn't the most

complicated Cehmai had ever seen, but neither was it simple. The mines

around Machi were capable of a complexity difficult in the rest of the

world, mostly because he himself was not in the rest of the world, and

mines in the Westlands and Galt weren't interested in paying the Khai

Mach] for his services. The engineer made his casewhere the stone would

support the tunnels and where it would not. The overseer made his

counter-case-pointing out where the ores seemed richest. The decision